iness to see that every
apprentice learns every part of his trade, and they have prevented
employers from splitting up the trades and specializing machinery and
thereby transforming the mechanic into the "hand." Were it not for
immigration, American industries would ere now have been compelled to
give more attention to apprenticeship and the training of competent
mechanics. The need of apprenticeship and trade schools is being more
seriously felt every year, for, notwithstanding the progress of division
of labor and machinery, the all-round mechanic continues to play an
important part in the shop and factory. American trade-unions are
gaining strength, and one of their most insistent demands is the
protection of apprenticeship. The bricklayers' and carpenters' unions of
Chicago even secure from their employers instruction for apprentices in
school. Not much headway in this line, however, has yet been made, and
American industry has become abnormal, we might almost say suicidal, or
at any rate, non-self-supporting. By extreme division of labor and
marvellous application of machinery it makes possible the wholesale
employment in factories of the farm laborers of Europe and their
children, and then depends on Europe for the better-trained types of the
skilled mechanic, who, on account of the farm laborer, have not been
able to learn their trade in America.

Not only does immigration bring to America the strongest, healthiest,
and most energetic and adventurous of the work-people of Europe and
Asia, but those who come work much harder than they did at home.
Migration tears a man away from the traditions, the routine, the social
props on which he has learned to rely, and throws him among strangers
upon his own resources. He must swim or drown. At the same time he
earns higher wages and eats more nourishing food than he had ever
thought within reach of one in his station. His ambition is fired, he is
stirred by the new tonic of feeling himself actually rising in the
world. He pictures to himself a home of his own, he economizes and saves
money to send to his friends and family, or to return to his beloved
land a person of importance. Watch a gang of Italians shovelling dirt
under an Irish boss, or a sweat-shop of Jewish tailors under a small
contractor, and you shall see such feverish production of wealth as an
American-born citizen would scarcely endure. Partly fear, partly hope,
make the fresh immigrant the hardest, if not