แ

A rather sorrowful light on the "labor question" -sorrowful, because it is the question, not the answer, that the light falls on-came to the OVERLAND'S notice the other day. A plan was under discussion for the putting together of a small capital from the savings of a knot of men-not laborers, but in no wise "men of means"-for the establishment of a very promising manufacturing industry among them. The capital could be raised; the knowledge and skill for overseeing the business could be had; a favorable location, with excellent local conditions, was at hand; the market for the product seemed almost a certainty. But, said one who knew the ground, it was very doubtful whether competent labor could be commanded. Now it chances that the very location proposed for this manufacture is a hamlet, composed almost exclusively of the families of railroad day-laborers, and these families abound in adolescent sons, about through with school, and more or less desirous of finding work"-young fellows of exactly the class for whose unemployed condition much commiseration is besought by the philanthropic. Here would appear to be all the conditions for a satisfactory arrangement-the new industry, with its excellent promise, seeking for labor, and labor seeking employment. But the trouble is no one feels disposed to trust these boys with any task requiring workmanship. Unless some rough and purely unskilled labor comes to their hand, they must loaf in idleness; and for every piece of rough and unskilled labor, there are many competitors. For this more careful work, they would be actually in demand— could they do it. Nor is their inability due to a want of necessary special training; for the work required of them would be simple, soon taught by a foreman to entirely green hands, if they were attentive, careful, exact, and reasonably intelligent. The projectors-with no capital to spare in risksdo not dare to trust these boys to be attentive, careful, exact, and reasonably intelligent. Their acquaintance with them leads them to expect shiftless work, with no mind put into it, a half-attention to instructions, and a feeling that it is all right if these are somewhere near correctly carried out. Nor are the youths of this hamlet exceptionally careless, inexact, and without pride or conscience in their work; on the contrary, by virtue of distance from the temptations of the city or of large country towns, they escape some of the demoralizations that their class is in such places liable to. They are

not intemperate or vicious; they are only of very little use to any one.

Now, if the problem of this hamlet is an epitome of the labor problem of the world at large here is a difficulty in it deeper than any nostrums seem likely to reach. The specific that so many trust to as infallible-"technical education"-does not reach it. For what these boys need is not knowledge of this or that handicraft, but a habit of care and conscience in any work, which seems wanting in their mental constitution. It might have been acquired in learning the multiplication table as easily as in learning to hammer or plane. Their teachers, five or six years ago, in the district school, found them slovenly students of books, and whoever tried to teach them a trade would find them slovenly students of work. If they were taught with genius and devotion, they would be somewhat bettered: but genius and devotion are to be counted upon in rare phenomena, not planning educational systems. Moreover, under any practicable conditions, the best teaching cannot except in rare cases outweigh the inwrought effect of home and inheritance. The parents of the boys are incapable of working with zeal, care, and conscience; it is for that very reason that they are still, as they have been all their lives, unskilled daylaborers, without hope of promotion, as their parents were before them. Mrs. Browning was a sound political economist when she insisted in "Aurora Leigh" that the only real "problem of poverty" was the problem of making men of more value in themselves.

SINCE the brief career of the "Know-Nothing" party, the question of restriction to foreign immigration has fallen completely out of sight as a practical political one-not so much because of any diminution of the forebodings and prejudices out of which the movement arose, as because its fate convinced politicians that the strength of the foreign vote was so great as absolutely to forbid any organized hostility to it. This might not have proved absolutely true at the time of the break-down of "Know-Nothingism"; for had not the slavery question at that time suppressed consideration of all others, the political fate of the party might have been different. It failed to command the support of many simply because they could not spare attention from the slavery conflict; and of many more because of excessive and unreasonable posi

tions, which it might have modified under different conditions. But by the time the war and reconstruction periods were past, and it became possible to think of any political needs but those forced upon the country's attention by these periods, the foreign element in the country had increased enormously in numbers and influence, and no politician would venture upon defying it. In the case of the one foreign element that did not vote, the Chinese, the anti-foreign sentiment proved to be intense and general. There were, of course, many elements besides the desire for a homogeneous population that entered into the opposition to Chinese immigration; but the underlying feeling was the same in nature as the hostility to all immigration, only differing in degree. To some extent, the conditions that so long peremptorily forbade an anti-immigration agitation, have now changed. For one thing, the people are not as afraid of antagonizing this or that voting element as the politicians are; and as both political parties pass out from the period of machine domination that followed upon the war, the politicians become less and less able to control the action of the people. Men who believe in legal prohibition of intoxicating liquors, or in the nationalization of land, or in a non-partisan civil service, or in a restriction of immigration, are no longer easily persuaded to waive their wishes about these issues, lest anything should "antagonize" this or that vote, and risk the most vital political necessity of all-the success at election of the candidates of the sacred Republican or Democratic party. Just as the threat, "You will alienate the liquor vote and lose The Party the next governor," has ceased to keep Prohibitionists in rank, it is conceivable that the threat, "You will alienate the foreign vote and bring The Party into a minority," may cease to hold "Americans."

ONLY enthusiasts in the cause of restricted immigration could, however, hope to really gain anything in antagonism to to the united foreign vote of the country. It is true that the citizens of this country born abroad, and those born here of foreign parents, do not together equal in number those who are of at least two generations of native stock; but if a square issue were to be made between the two classes, the foreign element would be united, and the native divided. The great hope-the only hope-of the agitators for the restriction of foreign immigration lies in enlisting the co-operation of foreign-born citizens; in being, in fact, an anti-immigration, not anti-foreigner, movement. And the anxiety already visible among our laboring classes which consist so largely of foreign-born citizens, over the rapid increase in the supply of unskilled labor from abroad, and the consequent lower

ing of wages, affords some promise of such cooperation. With it, the impracticability of the movement would disappear at once. It might be unsuccessful; it might be unjust and unreasonable; but it would be entitled to serious consideration in the political field.

THE emancipation of the more intelligent younger voters from the party superstition, the recent extension and increase of the precedent-supplying restriction of Chinese immigration, the approaching exhaustion of the public land, the general awakening to discussion of those economic questions that bear on the subject of wages and labor-troubles, - these things have occurred coincidently with each other, and, still more conspicuously, with the outbreak of an anarchism violent in something more than mere words, and, now, the beginning of an immigration unprecedented in volume and in the questionable character of the immigrants. It is said to be on the whole a more ignorant, more unskilled, more poor and helpless immigration, than that of any previous year, more alien in blood and in habits. Such an immigration, coming immediately upon the heels of the recent anarchist demonstration in Chicago, and the part played by foreigners in such outrages as the Landgraf boycott in New York, and in all the violent and unreasonable phases of labor troubles, has unquestionably created a profound impression upon the public mind, and has become a current subject of press comment. Whether the impression will be more than a passing one remains to be seen.

THAT anxiety and foreboding must be excited in every thoughtful mind by such an immigration as that of this year, would seem inevitable. Considering how far from homogeneity our population already is; considering that one can walk for miles through New York city without seeing an English sign, or hearing the English language; that San Francisco is by actual majority a foreign city; that even in rural districts,in many parts of the country, it is now common to have a colony of some foreign nationality existing alongside the American population, without mingling: considering these things, one can but feel that the foreign influx has already gone beyond our power to assimilate. During the trials of the Theiss and Landgraf cases, it was found that the boycotters knew not a word of English, had no idea they were violating any law, had never dreamed that any such protection to personal and property rights could exist in this country as to make their assaults unlawful. The court explained the matter to them as if they had been children. For them and for thousands like them, newspapers are printed in their own language; they read only

these, they speak only with those of their own nationality, they visit the American portion of New York as a foreign country, where people of alien aspect are talking around them in an unknown tongue. Nor has it for a long time been possible to use the old optimism, that the children of these aliens become fully assimilated and useful American citizens. It is perfectly true that the children of poor and plain foreigners have repeate lly risen to eminence in this country, and have been of great service; but it is altogether rash to draw from this a conclusion that such is the ordinary destiny of the second generation from foreign

sources.

The observation of any public schoolteacher, any charity visitor, shows the contrary; and such observation can back itself with abundance of statistics from jails and insane asylums and almshouses. In the foreign quarters of the great cities, or the foreign colonies in farming neighborhoods, there is scarcely any intermarriage of nationalities; caste lines are drawn by nationality as sharply as in other countries by difference of rank and against all this difference and nonassimilation, the public schools struggle almost single-handed, conferring in the end little beyond a common language for the purposes of ordinary business. Undoubtedly, a long enough time would produce homogeneity; but it seems evident that the influx of new alien elements has long been progressing at a faster rate than the assimilating forces.

IT should by all means be added to this that "assimilation" is by no means in itself and necessarily a desirable end. The assimilation of a higher stock with a lower one is not a thing to be sought by the higher one. It is disheartening to hear people saying cheerfully that a hundred thousand, or a million, admittedly ignorant and semibrutalized peasants and laborers will in a few generations be assimilated with our population. That can mean nothing but that our population will be lowered by that much toward the level of these immigrants. People could see this clearly enough in the case of the Chinese. It was made a complaint against them that they did not come with the intention of blending themselves with our population: but how much more vigorous would have been the complaint if they had done so! how general would have been the fear of deterioration in the Anglo-American, or Kelto-American, or Teutono-American stock! The truth that people seem unaccountably slow to recognize is that both ease and desirability of assimilation depend far more upon the class than the race. In the student class, a single generation is enough to bring the most alien blood into full sympathy and co-opera

tion with free government and "American ideas" -as can readily be seen in the case of young Chinese of this class, educated in America. Men of the same class from England, Ireland, or Germany have taken place, in a few decades from their arrival here, among the very champions and interpreters of wise republicanism. The merchant, farmer, mechanic, of any foreign race, slowly and through several generations draws into union with ours; and the ignorant drudge more slowly yet. In too many cases, the supposed “assimilation" is merely of costume, speech, and external manners: the American ways of thinking, the power of self-government, the capacity for self-help and public spirit, are no more there than at the outset, but a smattering of cant about these things has been caught from press and stump-speaker, and obscures the real ignorance; even as the Christian world of Constantine, looked at a little closely, proves to have been a pagan world, which had learned to name its superstitions Jehovah and Christ, instead of Zeus and Apollo, and to use the symbol of the cross for its incantations. It has never yet been proved that self-government is possible to all people. It grew slowly, in this country, through generations of hard practice in building up the colonies of America; it proved adapted to the earlier immigrants who joined the young republic, but these were of a different class from the vast importations of the last twenty years.

ALL this may be true, and any party movement that may take shape out of the present uneasy stirring of anxiety, be foolish and unjust. Indiscriminate proscribing of the foreign-born is both. But that measures could be propounded-perhaps better apart from any party organization than by means of one-which would meet the approval of the judicious, and would make very considerable changes in our national attitude toward immigration, seems certain.

ART.

After Theophile Gautier. Yes, Art with grievous pangs is born From Nature's most enduring molds,

The child is torn,

Not wooed, from fierce rebellious folds.

Slay not thy art by false constraint, Yet know her rules are stern as Fate; Without complaint

The muse must wear a buskin strait.

Wouldst have thy verse endure, thy muse
The common facile forms must shun,
The slip shod shoes
In which so many feet have run,

Sculptor, beware the plastic clay, Changing at every whim's command From day to day,

And marred by every careless hand.

Strive with the marbles pure of Greece Wrested from Paros' snowy mines, Smite and release

The deep imprisoned, God-like lines.

The chisel of Praxiteles

Such peerless beauty had not known, If art in Greece

Had deigned to use a meaner stone.

Let the fierce molten metal fuse
Heroic forms and soft contours,
Of Syracuse

Naught but the matchless bronze endures.

Upon the agate's flinty face Apollo's features high and pure In profile trace,

With touches delicate and sure.

Beware of water and pastel,
Deep on fantastic vase and urn
Thy colors frail

In seven-fold heated furnace burn.

Fashion the, writhing, maddening limb Of nymph and siren, bring once more The monsters grim,

Dear to the blazonary of yore,

The virgin mother, saintly, mild, Crowned with her nimbus, on her breast The wondrous child,

The globe beneath the cross of Christ.

Crowns fall, and sceptres pass, robust And radiant Art outlives them all, Torso and bust

Survive the city's triple wall.

The medal by the ploughman found
Reveals the countenance austere,

The temples crowned,
That filled the antique world with fear.

The graver guide with care supreme,
The chisel smite, fix like a rock
Thy floating dream
Deep in the stern, resisting block.

A CURIOUS error of the printing office befell recently a poem in the OVERLAND's possession. As it stood in type, for a future number, with proof unread, and an ingeniously misspelled signature uncorrected, it was placed by accident in a circular of notes to exchanges-probably in place of some other piece of type of equal length-and thence copied widely throughout the country, duly credited to the OVERLAND, without having ever appeared in the magazine. It is due to the author that, in spite of this unexpected anticipation of its appearance, it should still have a place in our pages, and with a correct signature; accordingly, it follows below:

Song.

Life, thou couldst have given to me,

Once, so much, so much!

When the slighest gift thou broughtst,

By youth's magic touch

Doubled, trebled, grew and bloomed

In hope's genial clime;

Life, how couldst thou slight me so In that olden time?

Since, thou laggard, thou'st delayed
Till I'm grown half gray,
Keep thy gifts-they have no worth
Since youth went away.

Hilda Kent.

By another error, in our last number, the signature to "Across the Isthmus by Canoe," which should have read "John Penly Haines," is also misspelled almost beyond recognition. Mr. Haines's name, when correctly rendered, and the incident of the canoe will doubtless be remembered by many pioneers.

Recent Books of Travel. SOMEBODY has said that his conception of heaven is "to receive letters by every mail and not to have to answer them." Two of the books that are now to be noticed would go far towards making such a person happy. The epistolary form offers many advantages to the writer of travels. It enables him to be scrappy, discursive, and familiar. It permits everything, it forbids nothing. Yet in this freedom lurks a danger. To be free from all restraint of literary form is not good, unless the writer has that literary perception that makes him a law unto himself.

Mr. Maclay in his A Budget of Letters from Japan,' illustrates both the benefits and the ills of his chosen vehicle of expression. The first half of the book is delightful reading, and in it there is a picture of Japanese life and character not found in any other book on Japan. The writer was a teacher in one of the Government Schools in a country district, and from his coign of vantage in close daily contact with his Japanese pupils he gives us a photograph of Japanese civilization. His accounts of the war that overthrew the power of the Shogun, the state in which that war left the people the discontent of the Samurai class, and the dazed surprise of the common people, the Satsuma rebellion that grew out of these causes, are excellent, and make clear much that was ambiguous in Japanese history. When, however, the later chapters of the book are reached, the reader grows weary of the singularly bald and monotonous style, and finds Mr. Maclay's dogmatic dissertations on women's rights and the evidences of Christianity dreary in the extreme. The mental habit of the pedagogue is not the best training for the author.

Mrs. Lane has managed better, and the reader is not weary when the final page is reached. Her field is broader, covering all Europe, and Egypt as well. The book appears to be made up of bona fide letters, written nine or ten years ago, and one of the pleasures of reading it is the mental filling in of the history of the decade, and seeing how coming events cast their shadows over the Europe that Mrs. Lane saw. If a fault must be found with the book, it lies in the fact that the splendor of the palaces and courts dazzled the lady somewhat, so

A Budget of Letters from Japan. By Arthur Collins Maclay, New York. A. C. Armstrong & Son: 1886. For sale in San Francisco by John W. Roberts.

2 Letters of Travel. By Mrs. L. C. Lane. San Francisco: 1886. For sale by A. L. Bancroft & Co.

that the lower lights of her picture lose their detail. It is none the less pleasant and profitable reading, and our insatiable letter reader would hail it with joy.

The writer of several books of travel that have been noticed favorably in these pages during the two or three years past, Mr. Ballou, is no longer an apprentice at the art of constructing books of travel. "Due West" told of a trip around the world and dwelt chiefly upon India; "Due South" gave the results of observation in Cuba; and now we have Due North3, telling of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Russia. After this it would seem that Mr. Ballou has paid all his dues to the literature of travel, and would be forced to seek for other fields. With his experience in such writing, the author knows what to look for, and how to tell it. He is a Boston man, so the educational idea is prominent in his thought, and no good chance for a moral passes unimproved. Yet his books are read and readable and he has acquired something of the touch "that marks security to please." His conclusions as regards Russia are not quite the conventional ones. He finds but little discontent, and but little cause for it. Even in Poland he thinks a popular vote would not restore the fallen monarchy, the national feeling having degenerated, in consequence of material prosperity, into the sentimental aspiration of poets and women. Nihilism comes in as the vaporings and fanaticism of a few of the half-educated, touching neither the moujik, who is placidly devoted to the White Czar, nor the aristocracy, whose interest lies in the perpetuation of a system that has an aristocracy. The nihilist in Russia Mr. Ballou finds no more palatable than the Chicago bomb-thrower and Herr Most are in the United States. Even Siberia is not so far from the tropics as we have been taught to believe by reading the writings of Englishmen, who have no cause to love the great empire of the North. Some of the telegrams that do not pass through English hands seem to point to facts not quite in accordance with this optimistic view of things, but Mr. Ballou's testimony is not without its value, none the less.

The most delightful book of travel that has come to the OVERLAND table for many a day is Mrs. Dodd's account of a jaunt through Southern Eng

Due North.3 By Maturin M. Ballou. Boston: Ticknor & Co.: 1887. For sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co.

Cathedral Days.4 By Anna Bowman Dodd. Boston: Roberts Bros. 1887. For sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co.