President. with the broad acres of this country yet unsettled and untilled. with a land virtually unredeemed from primeval silence and solitude. with a soil as yet virgin. with an affluence and amplitude of domain adequate to the happiness and maintenance of 500.000.000 people. there is no reason why luxury and want and why capital and labor should look askance at one another. While we have mountains to tunnel. rivers to bridge. forests to fell. and mines to develop there is no reason to turn back from our shores the offered laborer who asks for a home and opportunity of selfsupport on our unoccupied fields or in the channels of industry that need his labor. Immigration is as essential now to our development as it ever was. From 1820 down to the present time the influx of foreign population to the United States has. in all those years. never been beyond 15.000.000 people. We have today in the United States a foreignborn population of 9.000.000 people. making an average of one foreigner to every nine native born. Within the period of forty years. from 1850 to 1890. there has been an increase in the census years of only 1 per cent in the foreign immigration to the United States in each ten years. The following table shows the number and percentage of persons of foreign birth at each census from 1850 to 1890: Number Per cent Census year. Of foreign of total born. poPula1850 ------------------.---------------------------------- 2.244 602 9.68 1860 ---------------------------------------------------------- 4.138 .697 13.16 1870 -----s------------------------------------------------- 5.567.229 14.44 1880 ---------------------------------------------------------- 6 679.943 13.32& 1890 .......................................................... 9 249. 47 14.77 Instead of 72.000.000 people. the United States can accommodate hundreds of millions of people without being overcrowded.
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