-4- est the mills to going. Although an immigrant on a small farm might reduce the home demand for foodstuffs, he would increase the demand for industrial goods, and this increased demand for urban goods causes a growing consumption of farm products in the cities. The immigrant of past epoche who abandoned his country and took his savings to a new land reduced unemployment at home, added to steamship and rail- way activity on his way west, set up new demands for im- ported goods in the new habitat and thus helped all parties to recovery from historic depressions: 1819-1846, 1873-1877. At the present moment all industrial countries are closed to immigrants and heavily taxed against freedom of travel. How difficult it is to cross international borders today| With lands unavailable, unacceptable, and the movement of population almost prohibited, the present depression is more fixed than those following the Napoleonic, the Civil and the Franco-Prussian wars. Two other unprecedented limitations to worldwide recovery are obvious: 1. The industrialization of England, the United States, Germany and France has been paralled with a most extraordinary application of machines to production. This has, during recent decades, released hundreds of thousands of workers per year. Even in 1928-29 there was two million unemployed in the United States. 2. Since 1870 one effect of machine production and urban conditions of life has been a declining birth rate, while more and better physicians have prolonged the average of life so that peo- ple are no longer advised to take chloroform at sixty. There are four times as many people over sixty years of age as formerly; |