of education for labor and inspection laws throughout the Union. The
American Federation of Labor, founded in 1881 and reorganized in 1886,
aided in this general work, and with the Knights helped to reconcile the
public to the principle of unionism.

State bureaus of labor appeared in many States as the result of the
general agitation. An eight-hour law, for federal employees, had been
gained in 1868, while in 1884 a Commissioner of Labor was created in
the Department of the Interior. Arthur was urged to give the post to
Powderly, but selected instead an economist less actively identified
with the propaganda, Carroll D. Wright, under whose direction the Bureau
grew steadily in importance. Its reports became quarries for statistical
information on the labor problem, and its success justified its
incorporation in the new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903.

The "Army of the Discontented," as Powderly called the workers, demanded
education and protective laws, and turned their attention to competition
about 1882. The cutting of wages by peasant laborers, newly arrived in
America, was a grievance as soon as labor became class-conscious.
Opposition to this became virulent in the Far West, where the foreigner
was also a Mongolian. The Chinese of the Pacific Slope, more frugal and
industrious than Americans, were harried in the early eighties, and
violence was done them in many quarters. Garfield had been weakened in
1880 by a forged letter seeming to show that he favored the introduction
of more Chinese. So numerous were the persecutors that Congress
responded to the demand for a Chinese Exclusion Bill, in spite of the
Treaty of 1880, which guaranteed fair treatment. Arthur vetoed the first
bill, but accepted a second, less stringent in its terms. After this
victory, the labor forces turned upon immigration in general.

No idea had been fixed more firmly in the American mind than that the
oppressed of Europe were here to find opportunity. Immigrants had
always been welcomed and assimilated, while Congress had, in 1864,
organized a bureau to encourage and safeguard immigration. The influx
always increased in prosperous, and declined in adverse, years. After
1878 the annual number broke all records. Western railway corporations
were inviting immigrants to use their lands, manufacturers called them
to the mills, and the total rose from 177,000 in 1879 to 788,000 in
1882. This latter year was the greatest of the century,