Speech #630386002

President. I am going to vote against the amendment offered by the Senator from New Jersey for the reason that I am of the opinion that large numbers of laboring men are brought into this country for the sole purpose of beating down the price paid to laborers already here. in other words. that American labor is suffering from a competition which is not a natural one. and that. through the means men.tioned by the Senator from Georgia yesterday of flaring circulfrs and false inducements presented to ignorant people in Europe. they are brought here by interested persons. steamship companies perhaps. and passed on into the hands of large interests which use them. the one against the other. to beat down the price of labor. and afterwards prevent them from combining the one with the other to better their own condition. Believing that the literacy test. which in Itself amounts to but little and may be avoided I suspect. is partly a safeguardfor that reason and for no otherI am going to vote against the amendment. I believe that in fairness we owe it to the people of this country to allow them to have a fair opportunity with an equal chance to earn a living for themselves and their families. I noticed in the remarks of the junior Senator from Georgia yesterday his rather severe strictures upon certain immigrants who had been brought into this country and finally landed in the factory cities of Massachusetts or some other part of New England. and then had.been confronted with conditions entirely different from those which had been represented to them before they came. They had been buncoed. as I presume they realized. and they resented the country and its l1epresentatives. became a menace. made trouble. and we had a riot and quite an industrial war in consequence. Away back. early in history. before we had handed to us the Ten Commandments. in the days of Rameses the Great. the mouthpiece of the Almighty.