undoubtedly continued to
offset for a time the unfavorable effects as the richer resources
began to show signs of exhaustion. Since the end of the last century,
however, the net trend upward seems to be checked, and "the rising
cost of living" (real cost) has come to be a serious actuality for
larger sections of the population.[14]

Yet so long as wages are enough higher in America to pay the passage
of the low-paid workers of the industrially backward nations, they
will continue to come. The ease and cheapness of migration in these
days of steamships, the encouragement of immigration by the agencies
and advertisements of the steamship lines, and the increasing
readiness of the peasantry to migrate, have become well known through
recent discussions. Unless immigration is limited, it must continue to
depress the wages of American workingmen, through both its immediate
and its ultimate effects.

Sec. 13. #Laissez-faire policy of immigration.# There are those who take
a fatalistic, or a _laissez-faire_, view of the subject, and declare
that the problem will solve itself as the level of American wages
comes to be nearly the same as that of the countries of Europe from
which our immigration is coming. True enough, if this can be called a
"solution." There are many who cherish the commercial ideal according
to which cheap labor is absolutely desirable and needful to produce
cheaper products. This ideal has spread to wider circles. Here, for
example, are the words of a man who combines wide knowledge of the
facts of immigration with keen sympathy for the working classes:[15]
"The past industrial development of America points unerringly to
Europe as the source whence our unskilled labor supply is to be drawn
. . . America is in the race for the markets of the world; its call
for workers will not cease." Yet a little further on he must say: "All
wage-earners in America agree that it is not as easy to make a living
to-day as it was twenty years ago, and the dollar does not go so far
now as it did then. The conflict for subsistence on the part of
the wage-earner is growing more stern as we increase in numbers and
industrial life becomes more complicated, and the fact must be faced
that the vast army of workers must live more economically if peace and
well-being are to prevail."

Sec. 14. #Social-protective policy of immigration.# A different kind of
solution is offered by those who favor the strict limitation, if not
the comp