Littell's Living Age/Volume 173/Issue 2244/The Foreigners in London

It would be a curious incident in the history of English industry if an anti-Semitic agitation broke out among English workmen; but it is not entirely impossible. Certain trades in east London and two or three other great cities are said to be overrun with foreign immigrants; who work harder, live worse, and take lower wages than their English rivals. The latter feel themselves handicapped, and being voters, put such pressure on their members that the House of Commons ordered the Board of Trade to make a special report. The result is a memorandum from the able permanent secretary of the board, Mr. Calcraft, supplemented by another from Mr. Burnett, its labor correspondent, from which it appears that the real grievance is a growing immigration into London of Polish Jews The total number of foreigners resident in England is extraordinarily, indeed, to us almost incredibly small. It is nothing like ½ per cent. on the population of the United Kingdom. Indeed, if we deduct the Americans, who are not foreigners at all, and are never considered such, it is not ⅛ per cent., and would not, if it were equally distributed, be either noticeable or noticed. The figures for 1881, the last year of the census, are —

Germans resident	in the Kingdom	40,371
Frenchmen	,,	16,194
Russians	,,	15,271
Americans	,,	20,014
Other countries	,,	43,790
		135,640

The increase, except among Russians, is exceedingly small, say two thousand a year, and the entire immigration is devoid of any political importance. It is nothing compared with the immigration of Spaniards, Italians, and Germans into France, where they number more than a million, and help to keep the population from positive decline; and not much compared with the immigration of Germans into Russia, which just now so excites the imagination of M. Katkoff and the Panslavist party. There is no foreign vote here which really tells at elections, except, perhaps, in a couple of London boroughs; and the foreign press, though it exists, is neither prosperous nor influential. The very names of the papers are unknown to the majority of citizens, and even at election-time their support remains unsought. Of the other countries, a large proportion are, we imagine, Italians, who in London are numerous enough to be visible, keeping hundreds of small restaurants and confectioners’ shops; and Scandinavians, who occupy a distinct place in the shipping trade. There is no feeling against either of these nationalities, or against the Frenchmen, who for the most part, with the exception of six hundred and forty-eight shoemakers, do work Englishmen cannot do; and the whole question, therefore, so far as it is of any importance at all, is confined to the immigration of Germans and Russians. There is no doubt that a certain pressure is felt from both these nationalities, all the more severe because it is confined to London, Glasgow, and one or two more of the largest cities. The Germans are in great request as clerks, because they know languages; as servants, because they rigidly obey orders, and will do anything they can; and as bakers, sugar-refiners, and cabinet-makers, because, in the two first cases, they will do excessively laborious and painful work at the lowest market rates, and in the last case possess a special faculty of patience. Hardly any work is as bad as a baker’s, owing both to the heat and the loads to be lifted; and we are not surprised to hear that half the four thousand master bakers of London are Germans, or that they prefer to employ their countrymen. The pressure, again, from the Russians is upon one trade most severe. They are Polish Jews; and with their German co-religionists, they are not only succeeding, as might be anticipated, in all forms of peddlery, but they positively monopolize, as we should not have expected, the cheap tailoring trade. Nearly the whole of the “slop-making” of London is in their hands, and the same report comes from other cities. They live poorly, work excessively hard as regards hours, compel their women and children to work too, and have, there is no reasonable doubt, cut down wages to a point at which English journeymen tailors cannot, or at all events will not, consent to live. Our readers will remember many reports within the last thirty years upon the really terrible condition of this industry, which, though one of the most useful, is pursued under conditions fatal alike to health and to that decent measure of happiness which all men, if only from selfish motives, desire their neighbors to possess. A man need not be a Christian to regret that a large body of men are so paid, housed, and fed, that fever is with them endemic, and that every man among them who can think becomes a socialist, anarchist, or other deadly enemy of modern society. The condition of the tailors, always bad, as the condition of any class with whose labor women compete usually tends to be, is now made worse by the influx of Polish Jews, and is, we should suppose, distinctly less supportable than that of any other sedentary occupation.

Still, what remedy is there except a combination in the trade itself, made difficult, if not impossible, by female competition? It is quite impossible to prohibit foreign immigration. The foreigners add just as much to the wealth of the country as Englishmen do, — or, indeed, more, from the low kind of diet upon which they are content to subsist. They do beneficial work in clothing the whole population cheaply, and they do not deteriorate the blood of the race, or its instinctive morality, as a vast immigration, say, of Chinamen might do. The Germans and Scandinavians are ourselves over again; the Frenchmen and Italians are our equals; and the Polish Jews, like Jews everywhere, keep themselves almost entirely from intermarriage. They obey all laws, they pay all taxes, and they either as workmen add to the sum produced, or as peddlers of all kinds aid in its facile distribution. There is no national or economic reason for forbidding them to come, and no kind of justice in attempting to do it. A Frenchman has some sort of an excuse for making a China of his country; but for Englishmen, who go stumbling all over the world in quest of work, and thrust themselves habitually into all the warmest nests, to expel foreigners from England because they are foreign would be rather too cynical a defiance of common equity. Suppose the world retaliates by sending us English all home again to eat up one another, as people who palpably take more share of the world’s good things than we are entitled to! That would be just as fair, and the consideration makes a general prohibition of settlement quite impossible. The question of restricting pauper immigration is a little more difficult. We suppose a nation has a right to refuse to receive paupers, though it is not a Christian proceeding, bearing much too close an analogy to the practice of drowning the shipwrecked, and the right belongs especially to a nation with a poor-law; but how are we to distinguish between paupers and workmen? A man is not a pauper if he has an engagement to work; and who is to prevent the sale of fictitious engagements? Are we to impose a general tax on incomers, which would hamper all trade, or are custom-house officers to hold an inquiry on every steamer as to the means of livelihood the passengers may possess? In other words, are we to give up the national hospitality which has marked the kingdom for centuries, and has time and again enormously benefited it — we owe much of our manufacturing success to pauper refugees from France and Flanders — in order to prevent the arrival of a few hundred Jews, to whose creed we raise no objection, who work voluntarily like slaves — the real complaint against them being that they do too much for a penny — and who never by any chance or in any extremity of suffering enter a workhouse? The proposition is too absurd; and though we are sorry for the English slop-workers, and would gladly see them combine with the Polish Jews in a strong trade-union, we can hold out no hope that the legislature will help to relieve them from immigrant competition. They must bear it just as the clerks do, and see if they cannot make machinery work even faster and cheaper than the Jews.