working-classes, under the stimulus of new-felt wants, the growing enlightenment of public opinion, have slowly and gradually won, even for the poorer workers in English cities, some small advance in material comfort, some slight expansion in the meaning of the term “necessaries of life.”  Turn a few shiploads of Polish Jews upon any of these districts, and they will and must in the struggle for life destroy the whole of this.  Remember it is not merely the struggle of too many workers competing on equal terms for an insufficient quantity of work.  That is terrible enough.  But when the struggle is between those accustomed to a higher, and those accustomed to a lower, standard of life, the latter can obviously oust the former, and take their work.  Just as a base currency drives out of circulation a pure currency, so does a lower standard of comfort drive out a higher one.  This is the vital question regarding foreign immigration which has to be faced.

Nor is it merely a question of the number of these foreigners.  The inflow of a comparatively small number into a neighbourhood where much of the work is low-skilled and irregular, will often produce an effect which seems quite out of proportion to the actual number of the invaders.  Where work is slack and difficult to get, a very small addition of low-living foreigners will cause a perceptible fall in the entire wages of the neighbourhood in the employments which their competition affects.  It is true that the Jew does not remain a low-skilled labourer for starvation wages.  Beginning at the bottom of the ladder, he rises by his industry and skill, until he gets into the rank of skilled workers, or more frequently becomes a sub-contractor, or a small shopkeeper.  It might appear that as he thus rose, the effect of his competition in the low skilled labour market would disappear.  And this would be so were it not for the persistent arrival of new-comers to take the place of those who rise.  It is the continuity in the flow of foreign emigration which constitutes the real danger.

Economic considerations do not justify us in expecting any speedy check upon this flow.  The growing means of communication among nations, the cheapening of transport, the breaking down of international prejudices, must, if they are left free to operate, induce the labourer to seek the best market for his labour, and thus tend to equalize the condition of labour in the various communities, raising the level of the lower paid and lower lived at the expense of the higher paid and higher lived.

Sec. 10.  The Water-tight Compartment Theory.—­One point remains to be mentioned.  It is sometimes urged that the foreign Jews who come to our shores do not injure our low skilled workers to any considerable extent, because they do not often enter native trades, but introduce new trades which would not have existed at all were it not for their presence.  They work, it is said, in water-tight compartments, competing