Usually the reason for leaving home lies in the crowded
population of European States and the lack of opportunity for
advancement, plus the glib tongue of some agent of a contractor or of a
steamship company. In recent years those who have come have not been
desirable additions to our population because they came from nations
alien in blood, language, religion and institutions, and were not
therefore easily knit into our national structure and absorbed. There
will be little, if any, further immigration. The men are wanted for the
army and will not be allowed to leave during the war. After peace is
restored, they will be imperatively needed in the fields and factories
and every effort will be made to retain them. In fact, it does not take
any wild stretch of the imagination for one acquainted with the results
of the Thirty Years' War and of the Napoleonic wars to conceive that,
from the view of economic opportunity and rewards, Europe might become a
more favorable scene for the truly capable and ambitious than America is
today. The tendency of a war is to absorb the best of a nation and to
leave the dregs.
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