ably set forth, house service would open a fascinating vista of relief from hard work to easy hours, lighter tasks, and well-fed prosperity.

With a little aid from a well-equipped training-school, many of those whose lives are now one constant and unceasing struggle with poverty could enter the ranks of this calling, which, if not among the highest ideals of American life, will still give employment at once easy, healthful, and well paid, and in which there are thousands of unfilled positions at all times, owing to the impossibility of getting applicants for them.

If the limits of space permitted, it would be easy to go on and point out other occupations, in addition to the two cited above, in which with a little judicious aid many of our starving millions might find employment; but enough has been said, I think, to prove that these are directions in which our charities might be far more wisely expended than in the indiscriminate giving which is so largely a feature of our present system. The fact is that the great and increasing complexities of our modern social and industrial life seem to require a new addition or department to our city governments-a bureau of employment and information in which can be brought together those needing employment and opportunity and those having occasion for such services.

Such a bureau, however, will have to be managed on different lines from some similar enterprises which are already a feature of our so-called charitable work, in an employment agency of one of which you may obtain, with great promptness, assistants whose character and honesty have never been inquired into, and whose services are of no value and would be dear at any price; or where, in another, you may have your laundry work done, to be returned full of holes from the acids employed in their cleansing, and display what thankfulness you may if they are not, in addition, contaminated by dirt and vermin.

Let us take, then, a few thousands of dollars out of the many thousands that are given away each year in indiscriminate and pauperizing charity, and found a school and bureau for the training of outdoor workers and farm-hands, and for getting or making places for these when trained. More such vacancies exist at all times than we could supply trained hands for after years of work, to say nothing of the small farms so necessary to be

made and tilled out of the idle lands lying all about us. A similar training-bureau (attention being paid to character and responsibility in both institutions), for female servants and which could be established and maintained at comparatively small cost, would become in turn a priceless boon to employer and employed, and do much to bring about the only millennium possible for this world, when every man would have his appointed work— the reverse of which is the rule to-day, when the poor and dispirited seekers for work, to the number of thousands daily, ablebodied and willing, but without special training, may travel many miles and suffer all hardships without finding work for willing hands to do.

G. P. BRETT.

WORLD-POLITICS.

LONDON: ST. PETERSBURG: PARIS: WASHINGTON.

LONDON, January, 1905.

THE Alien question in England, as elsewhere, is mainly the Jewish question. In its acute phase, it is confined to London. There are Jewish colonies of alien and unskilled laborers in Manchester, Liverpool, Hull and Leeds; four or five per cent. of the miners in the Lanarkshire coal-mines are aliens; and Italians have recently been imported to work certain Northumberland mines. But, when the Alien Immigration question is spoken of in England, what is meant is the question of the settlement of Russian and Polish Jews in various districts in the East End of London. Americans, as they have had to face this problem on a tremendous and unprecedented scale, will probably make light of England's difficulties when they hear that the number of aliens in the East End, including the children of foreign-born parents, does not exceed 80,000. But these 80,000 have succeeded in raising the issue in a form that is, perhaps, more aggravated than anything that is known in New York. I speak with diffidence on the subject—it is well-nigh impossible to compare and estimate degrees of poverty and wretchedness and to trace their effects below a certain level. But I should be surprised if it could be proved that there is anything in the circumstances of the festering East Side of New York more disastrous and depressing than in Stepney or Spitalfields. Into the least prosperous and most congested districts of the East End there has been this constant influx of aliens from the poorest and most backward regions of Eastern Europe. They come bringing with them a lower standard of living than obtains among the native population; they congregate, by instinct and unbroken racial tendency, en bloc; and they neither assimilate their new neighbors nor are assimilated by

them, preserving in all countries and under every variety of fortune their traditional and impregnable aloofness. The broad results of such an influx may be easily summarized. In the first place, congestion becomes worse congested, rents rise with abnormal rapidity, and the quality of the accommodation declines in proportion. Secondly, the native is expropriated, displaced and forced to move elsewhere, if he is to maintain his British standards of decent living and not fall to the level that prevails in the Russian Pale. Thirdly, an intense and inhuman competition arises, with the inevitable result of lowering wages and degrading industrial conditions. I hesitate to quote statistics; but I believe it to be a well-established fact that the alien population of London furnishes more than its due proportion of crime and vice and destitution. What cannot be measured in statistics is the enmity that yearly increases between the native and the foreign elements. Anti-Semitism has rarely any religious basis whatever. Almost without exception, it is the economic protest of men who find themselves undersold and driven to the wall, by competitors who belong to a lower material plane. Such is its origin in the East End, and witness after witness testified before the Royal Commission that Anti-Semitic outbreaks were among the probabilities of the near future.

I need not go into the familiar results that flow from the settlement of alien immigrants within English-speaking districts, They may all be seen in the East End-the native turned out of his lodgings by an alien landlord to make room for alien tenants, and forced to live at a distance from his work; dwellings turned into workshops and factories where "sweating" is securely practised; the terrible overcrowding, the incredible wages. In Stepney alone, within the last six years, more than one hundred streets have passed entirely into alien occupation. In one of the públic schools of that district, there were in 1895 two hundred and six English pupils and seventy-three foreigners; to-day, there are nearly three hundred alien pupils and less than twenty English. Over fifty thousand English have left or been turned out of Stepney in the past decade and their places have been taken by aliens; the old parish church stands in the midst of a foreign population; and off the main thoroughfares it is the exception to hear the English language spoken. The revelations of the Royal Commission of 1902-03 disclosed such abominations as aliens

working fifteen hours a day on trouser-pressing for a wage of $1 50 a week; tailors "finishing" 300 pairs of trousers at three cents a pair; shoemakers working sixteen and seventeen hours a day, in underground cellars, for $3 a week; men engaged to soften inferior skins for furriers by treading them out, barefooted, in vats, at from 75 cents to $2 a week, working from twelve to sixteen hours a day and taking their meals standing in the vats; twenty-one women sewing in a kitchen sixteen feet by twelve feet, and seven feet high, for sixteen and eighteen cents a week-all aliens and all Jews.

Many influences have restrained England from dealing with the Alien problem by legislation. For one thing, the English people have in the past enormously benefited by welcoming and assimilating immigrants and refugees from all countries. But for the Huguenots, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the religious persecutions that lasted on the Continent till the middle of the eighteenth century, English industry would not now be what it is. What one may call the Huguenot tradition, the tradition that England shall always be the asylum of the oppressed of other nations, still survives and is proudly cherished. Moreover, the Alien question, whatever it may become in the far future, is at present not a national but a local question. Besides, the influence of the Jewish community in England has always and naturally set itself athwart any and every proposal for restricting or controlling Alien Immigration; and, though the number of Jews in England is small-probably under 150,000,-their political, journalistic, and especially their financial, influence is immense. Consequently, immigration into England is absolutely unrestricted and unchallenged. Such unfettered entry is, I believe, absolutely unique; and it is worth noting that it goes far beyond the example set by the Jews themselves. In Baron Hirsch's Jewish colony in Argentina, as well as in similar establishments elsewhere, Jewish immigrants are carefully inspected, and such as are mentally physically or morally unfit, are unhesitatingly rejected. England alone receives all who come to her-the pauper, the criminal, the vicious and the inefficient, as well as the industrious, the cleanliving and the capable.

That this is carrying generosity too far is, I think, admitted by all moderate Englishmen; but no attempt to say where the line is to be drawn has yet succeeded. Success, indeed, seems farther