A Surprising Statement

We are accustomed to think that the United States !s the one absorbent point of emigration in tho world, and that it bids fair, like Aaron's serpent, to swallow all the rest. Most of our readers will probably be surprised to learn that there i:i a country whieh, considering the size, is drawing in more foreigners than ours, and that that country is Franco. M. Leroy-Beaulieu has recently published in L'Econümiste Francais the statistics of tho increase of alien population íh France. In the first quarter of this century there was no immigration into that country. Franco was for the French alone. In 1857 a small but steady stream of foreigners beean to set in. Their proportion in 1861. however, reached onf 1.38 per cent to the whole population; in 1881 the proportion had reaohed 3 per cent. In each year the increase reached 40,000. M. Beaulieu calculates that if it continúes to inereaso in the same proportion as the last two years for the rest of the century one-fourth of the adult population will be aliens. The large proportion of this immigration is from Germany, and the causes of it are, according to M. Beaulieu, the abundance of capital, the high wages and the fact that many of the trades are left unoccupied by French boys and men. The same causes account for tho large immigration into our own country of skilied workmen. It is a very advantageous condition of aftairs for tho foreign skilled workman. But how about the native Frenchman and Americana, wbose work, wages and prosperity are thus suffered to fall into alien hands? The Freneh young man, says M. Beaulieu, is too effeminate to learn a hard steady trade. He goes to America to cook, to dance, to play some light role in life, while the Gorman comes in to iill his place at home. Procisely in the same way the young American makes of himself a bookkeeper or salesman while the skilled trades are filled bv Germans and English.