Labor has to protect itself by its own determination. You shut out foreign goods. but you let in the foreign labor to compete with American labor in its own fields. Steel may not come. woolens may not come that are better and cheaper. sugar may not come freely. but 6.000 immigrants may land in a day at Castle Garden. Asiatics may work your protected orchards in California. Slavs and Huns may drive American miners from the coal mines of Pennsylvania or defeat the efforts of our miners to get what belongs to them from the relentless maw of the coal barons. whose product. forsooth. must be protected. though tribute be levied at every fireside. degraded foreign labor may fill the mills of the sugar trust. working for wages that no decent American or Englishspeaking workmen would deign to accept. Everywhere the American workman meets the fiercest competition for employment and struggles manfully to hold his own and live within the confines of respectability against the iron law of wages under the frightful odds that all endless stream of foreign labor imposes. battle he must to keep his footing. and patient he must be forever in teaching the new forces that this is not like the old countries. where wages are low. but that wages are high here and that all things else are higher. owing to the exactions of corporations and combinations that are made free to charge what they like by legislative enactment. holding a legislative franchise for control of American markets. a government ukase to levy on a percentage of the earnings of all people. by virtue of which the holders wax rich and fat while grinding toil grows apace and poverty spreads.
Identified stereotypes
Foreign laborers are described as degrading, accepting low wages, and driving American miners from their jobs.