Omaha daily bee., 1883-08-30
IMMIGRATION.
The Tremendous Influx of Euro
peans to the United States
A New Nation Every
Ten Years.

Ten Years.
The London Times, in discussing the
emigration problem, says: Extraordinary
as has been the American power Of assim-
Hating European elements, they exert an
influence in turn. Whatever the fabric
of American society and character is, it
would have been something very dissimi-
of the past fifty years. Within the fifty
years from 1880 to 1880, nearly ten mil
lions of Europeans have swelled the pop
ulation of the United States. Immigrants
multiply faster than native Americans.
Much more than their apparent proper
ton of the increase of the American
population from the seventeen mil
lions to which it had risen in 1910
to the fifty millions of 1880 may be set
down to them. Each successive decade
a whole nation in numbers is transplant
ed across the Atlantic. To this tremend-
Gus influx is to be traced the difficulty of
fixing the qualities of American nation
atty. The characteristics would be still
less stable if particular ingredients did
not regularly predominant in the human
imports. Germany and the United
Kingdom furnish the bulk, and the rest
arequietly absorbed. BY the United States
statistics England is deprived of its prior
ity in favor of Germany. But when, in
conformity with ordinary rules, British
immigrants are reckoned together, they
are seen to outnumber those from any
other state. They naturally amalgamate
more readily with the native population
Of the same extraction, and help to keep
the general current of national life in its
existing channel.
The United States suffer dangers and
Inconvenience from the heterogeneous
ness of their population. They have,
however, grown to their actual grandeur
in virtue of accepting that condition of
national development. They would be
committing ar injustice to the world
were they to close their territory to i'm
migration. They are its trustees for the
benefit of redundant humanity elsewhere.
In fairness to them it must be admitted
that they have shown no reluctance to
comply with the terms on which they
hold their vast possessions. For the late
outcries against a few poor passengers the
American people must not be held ac-
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ious right to pick and choose. Provided
the immigrants reasonably represent the
reperabundant population of their native
country, America is content to give
them hospitality, and finds it's ad-
vantage in them according
to their various degrees of strength and
capacity. Europe materially is almost as
intimately concerned as America in the
constant flow of American immigration.
A complete appropriation of fertile Amer
lean soil by human labor is as important
to the world at large as to the owners Of
the domain. The American people can
make nc loss or gain in the application of
its enormous natural resources in which
Europe will not rateably share. From a
point of view higher though less abstract,
the. huge dimensions of North American
immigration regard Europe as closely as
the United States. Much as the Euro
pean emigant carries with him he sur
renders indefinitely more. The old emf
grants shuddered at emigration as a tear
ing asunder of body and soul. Knowl-
edge that hundreds of thousands and
millions of their relatives have borne
the operation and survived mitigates the
personal horror rather than lessons the
extent of the personal revolution. For
an English or Irish laborer of German
peasant to be %uprooted from the soil of
which he forms y portion, and to be
transferred to circumstances utterly diff
erent morally and physically, remains as
it was, something between a new birth
and death. The experiment is so violent
that the enhancement of the earth's stock
of available riches by ~emigation would
hardly justify it were not the benefit to
its individual subjects manifest and in
dis, utable. By the great mass of emf
grants their gain is confessed and Wanted
with absolute conviction. A voluntary
return to their previous state is
inconceivable to them. Their life
is not generally easy. Toll in a
new country is heavy and long. Had
they been disposed to work as s%trenuously
and intelligently in their old country as
in the new, they often need never have
moved from their quarters. But it is to
be reckoned among the foremost advan-
tages of emigration that it both produces
exertion and supplies opportunities for
using it. A farmer or plowman whose
soul has been %stagnating in Brandenburg
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distinct being in Minnesota, or Texas, or
Manitoba. Active spirits resolute to
create a career need not quit Europe for
the purpose. Europe in it's most dense
ly occupied districts, keeps a place for
anyone determined not to be left un.
provided. A new country like America
possesses means which Europe has
no longer of stimulating men endowed
with the power to work and not the
energy or will to seek it. Human
nature is of three sorts in respect of its
capacity for the full application of its fac
ulties. Besides the few who can be pre-
vented from their fruitful exercise, there
are many who wait to have the work
brought to them. America suits them as
it and Europe equally suit the former.
For the third class, the men who neither
look forward nor accept it, Europe and
America are equally barren. They are
as much paupers and c%asuals, with the
choice millions OF square miles of virgin
soil, as in til Seven Dials.
Various Oaths.
| Glayeland Harald