desperate straits the colonial leaders were put in
securing immigrants,--slavery, indentured servitude, and kidnapping
being the fruits of their necessities. The answer to the enigma is to be
found partly in European conditions and partly in the cheapness of
transportation after the opening of the era of steam navigation. Shrewd
observers of the course of events had long foreseen that a flood of
cheap labor was bound to come when the way was made easy. Some, among
them Chief Justice Ellsworth, went so far as to prophesy that white
labor would in time be so abundant that slavery would disappear as the
more costly of the two labor systems. The processes of nature were aided
by the policies of government in England and Germany.

_The Coming of the Irish._--The opposition of the Irish people to the
English government, ever furious and irrepressible, was increased in the
mid forties by an almost total failure of the potato crop, the main
support of the peasants. Catholic in religion, they had been compelled
to support a Protestant church. Tillers of the soil by necessity, they
were forced to pay enormous tributes to absentee landlords in England
whose claim to their estates rested upon the title of conquest and
confiscation. Intensely loyal to their race, the Irish were subjected in
all things to the Parliament at London, in which their small minority of
representatives had little influence save in holding a balance of power
between the two contending English parties. To the constant political
irritation, the potato famine added physical distress beyond
description. In cottages and fields and along the highways the victims
of starvation lay dead by the hundreds, the relief which charity
afforded only bringing misery more sharply to the foreground. Those who
were fortunate enough to secure passage money sought escape to America.
In 1844 the total immigration into the United States was less than
eighty thousand; in 1850 it had risen by leaps and bounds to more than
three hundred thousand. Between 1820 and 1860 the immigrants from the
United Kingdom numbered 2,750,000, of whom more than one-half were
Irish. It has been said with a touch of exaggeration that the American
canals and railways of those days were built by the labor of Irishmen.

_The German Migration._--To political discontent and economic distress,
such as was responsible for the coming of the Irish, may likewise be
traced the source of the Germanic migration. The