Lanterna Rally

Author: William Zebina Ripley

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2016-09-02

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13: 9781333441357

Excerpt from The European Population of the United States: The Huxley Memorial Lecture for 1908 Irish potato famine of the middle of the last century. The rapid increase year by year is shown by the accompanying diagram. It has taken the form, not of a steady growth but of an intermittent flow. First came the people of the British Isles after the downfall of Napoleon, from in 1815 to in 1819. Thereafter the numbers are about yearly until the Irish famine, when immigrants from the British Isles landed in 1852. To the English succeeded the Germans, largely moved at first by the political events of 1848. By 1854, Teutons, mainly from northern Germany, had settled in America. So many were there, that ambitious plans for the foundation of a German state in the new country were actually set on foot. \the later German immigrants were recruited largely from the Rhine Provinces and have settled further to the north-west in Wisconsin and Iowa; the earliest wave having come from northern Germany to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouril The Swedes began to come after the Civil War. Their immigration culminated in 1882 with the in ux of about in that year. More recent still are the Italians, beginning with a modest in 1876, rising to over arrivals in 1888 and constituting an army of in the single year of 1907; and accompanying the Italian, has come the great horde of Slavs, Huns and Jews. Wave has followed wave, each higher than the last; the ebb and ow being dependent upon economic conditions in large measure. It is the last great wave shown by our diagram which has most alarmed us in America. This gathered force on the revival of prosperity about 1897 but it did not assume full measure until 1900. Since that year, over people have landed on our shores, one quarter of all the total immigration since the beginning. The new comers of these eight years alone would repopulate all the five older New England states as they stand to-dav; or if properly disseminated over the newer parts of the country, they would serve to populate no less than 19 states of the Union as they stand. The new comers of the last eight years cduld, if suitably seated, elect 38 out of the present 92 Senators of the United States. Do you wonder that thoughtful political students stand somewhat aghast In the last of these eight years - 1907-there were arrivals; sufficient to entirely populate both New Hampshire and Maine, two of our oldest states with an aggregate territory approxi mately equal to Ireland and Wales. The arrivals of this one year would found a state with more inhabitants than any 21 of our other existing commonwealths. Fortunately, the commercial depression of 1908 has for the moment put a stop to this inflow. Some considerable emigration back to Europe has in fact ensued. But this can be nothing more than a breathing space. On the resumption of prosperity the tide will rise higher than before. Each immigrant, staying or returning, will in uence his friends, his entire village; and so it will be until an economic equilibrium has been finally established between one continent where labour is dearer than land, and the other where land is worth more than labour. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."