Evening star., 1927-09-25
BY THOMAS NIXON CARVER


Professor of Political Economy at Harvard
University.
IN the first place: Are we prosper
Gus? There are still business fail
ures, there are considerable in
i dustries like the New England
cotton industry, which are de-
pressed there is some unemployment,
and the farmers are feeling poor. The
peSsimiSt may brood on these things
until he convinces himself that we
are very unprosperous.
Prosperity is a relative term. In
comparison with our ideals and desires
we shall always be poor. In compari-
son with previous decades in the
United States this is a prosperous
decade. In comparison with the masses
of other countries. the masses of our
people enjoy incomes and a scale of
consumption which seem like aff1u-
ence.
Were it not for our immigration
laws, millions of laborers would be
coming here from Europe and Asia to
snare in our prosperity. and to de-
Stroy ii by depressing the wage scale.
Even now they are coming by the
hundreds of thousands from Mexico
and Canada-countries with vast un-
developed reSOurceS-and the numbers
are likely TO increase.
Why do laborers from other coun
tries want to come here? The answer
to that question viii furnish the correct
answer to the other question-Why
are we prosperous? If the immigrants
who were attracted to this country
were the idle rich instead of the work
ers, it would he a different story. 1t
would mean that this was good coun-
Try for the idle rich and not a good
country for workers.
AS ii is, our own idle rich are rather
Few in number, but such as they are.
they are inclined, many of them to
20 to what they are pleased to call the
more civilized" countries, where they
can enjoy cheap servants, elegant lei
sure and the means of indulging them
selves in the kinds of culture which
were developed by and for leisure
class. There is really no place for
them here. Those who remain are
likely to remain active. even though
they retire from business. The best
OF them give their attention to social,
cultural and educational enterprises.
The next best work pretty hard trying
10 spend their money in foolish and
spectacular ways. The worst of them.
especially those who have inherited
wealth, not being able to gain prestige
IN any other way, try to attract atten-
tlon as leaders of anarchism, commun-
ism. free love or something else.
Many of our immigrants. even. who
came here as workers because this was
good country for workers, go back
later to their old homes as small capi-
talists, because their own countries
are better than ours for small capital
lists. There they find less competition
and have an easier time. They can
hire cheaper laborers and servants and
their. wealth gives them more power
and prestige than it would here.
TT is sometimes said that the chief
- factor in our present prosperity is
the restriction of immigration. That
is not a complete answer. If this had
not been a good country for workers
we should have, had no immigration
to restrict. Why do immigrants de-
sire to come here? In an earlier day
they came largely to get land, but the
period from the Civil War down to
$50, when we were giving land away
and attracting millions of immigrant
farmers, was not a very prosperous
period. Agriculture was vastly over
done. Farmers We're generally in pow
erty, the poorer farms were aban-
ADReu anu we Itdu ID SERIES ~ agra
rian movements beginning with the
Granger movement of the '70s
and sos.
1mmigratio did not slow down but
speeded up after the free public land
was exhausted. Immigrants came to
get jobs in the shops and factories.
Then we had labor problems. slums
and all the>evils that go with an over
supplied labor market Nevertheless,
we did manage to take twenty-odd mil
lions of poor people and start them on
the way to relative prosperity. This
was no mean achievement, even
though the mass of poverty and the
horrible slums remained. Pessimists
could point to those apparently perma-
nent centers of misery as evidences of
the failure of our industrial system.
They did not see that the permanence
was like the permanence of a reser-
voir, fed by one stream and drained
by another. The reservoir remains,
hut the water changes; the slums re-
NAMED but the people changed.
AS newly arrived immigrants, they