e itself by servile labor. A moderate amount of
immigrant labor, assimilated and absorbed into the body politic,
stimulates industry and progress, but an excessive and indigestible
amount leads to the search for coercive remedies and ends in the
stagnation of industry. The protective tariff was supposed to build up
free American labor, but in Hawaii, with unrestricted immigration, it
has handed us American plutocracy.

CHAPTER IX

AMALGAMATION AND ASSIMILATION

A German statistician,[122] after studying population statistics of the
United States and observing the "race suicide" of the native American
stock, concludes: "The question of restriction on immigration is not a
matter of higher or lower wages, nor a matter of more or less criminals
and idiots, but the exclusion of a large part of the immigrants might
cost the United States their place among the world powers."

Exactly the opposite opinion was expressed in 1891 by Francis A.
Walker,[123] the leading American statistician of his time, and
superintendent of the censuses of 1870 and 1880. He said: "Foreign
immigration into this country has, from the time it first assumed large
proportions, amounted not to a reinforcement of our population, but a
replacement of native by foreign stock.... The American shrank from the
industrial competition thus thrust upon him. He was unwilling himself to
engage in the lowest kind of day labor with these new elements of
population; he was even more unwilling to bring sons and daughters into
the world to enter into that competition.... The more rapidly
foreigners came into the United States, the smaller was the rate of
increase, not merely among the native population separately, but
throughout the population of the country as a whole," including the
descendants of the earlier foreign immigrants.

Walker's statements of fact, whatever we may say of his explanations,
are easily substantiated. From earliest colonial times until the census
of 1840 the people of the United States multiplied more rapidly than the
people of any other modern nation, not excepting the prolific French
Canadians. The first six censuses, beginning in 1790, show that, without
appreciable immigration, the population doubled every twenty years, and
had this rate of increase continued until the present time, the
descendants of the colonial white and negro stock in the year 1900 would
have numbered 100,000,000 instead of the combined colonial, immigrant,