While a
considerable number of them are Germans, French, and Italians, attracted
here by better industrial conditions in trades for which they have some
special aptitude, a greatly increasing proportion are Russian and Polish
Jews, driven to immigrate partly by political and religious persecution,
partly for industrial ends, and feeding the unskilled labour-market in
certain manufactures of our great cities.
Sec. 8. The Jew as an Industrial Competitor.--Looking at these foreigners
as individuals, there is much to be said in their favour. They do not
introduce a lower morality into the quarters where they settle, as the
Chinese are said to do; nor are they quarrelsome and law-breaking, like
the low-class Italians who swarm into America. Their habits, so far as
cleanliness is concerned, are perhaps not desirable, but the standard of
the native population of Whitechapel is not sensitively high. For the
most part, and this is true especially of the Jews, they are steady,
industrious, quiet, sober, thrifty, quick to learn, and tolerably
honest. From the point of view of the old Political Economy, they are
the very people to be encouraged, for they turn out the largest quantity
of wealth at the lowest cost of production. If it is the chief end for a
nation to accumulate the largest possible stock of material wealth, it
is evident that these are the very people we require to enable us to
achieve our object.
But if we consider it is sound national policy to pay regard to the
welfare of all classes engaged in producing this wealth, we may regard
this foreign immigration in quite another light.
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