of the native population of Whitechapel is not sensitively high.  For the most part, and this is true especially of the Jews, they are steady, industrious, quiet, sober, thrifty, quick to learn, and tolerably honest.  From the point of view of the old Political Economy, they are the very people to be encouraged, for they turn out the largest quantity of wealth at the lowest cost of production.  If it is the chief end for a nation to accumulate the largest possible stock of material wealth, it is evident that these are the very people we require to enable us to achieve our object.

But if we consider it is sound national policy to pay regard to the welfare of all classes engaged in producing this wealth, we may regard this foreign immigration in quite another light.  The very virtues just enumerated are the chief faults we have to find with the foreign Jew.  Just because he is willing and able to work so hard for so little pay, willing to undertake any kind of work out of which he can make a living, because he can surpass in skill, industry, and adaptability the native Londoner, the foreign Jew is such a terrible competitor.  He is the nearest approach to the ideal “economic” man, the “fittest” person to survive in trade competition.  Admirable in domestic morality, and an orderly citizen, he is almost void of social morality.  No compunction or consideration for his fellow-worker will keep him from underselling and overreaching them; he acquires a thorough mastery of all the dishonourable tricks of trade which are difficult to restrain by law; the superior calculating intellect, which is a national heritage, is used unsparingly to enable him to take advantage of every weakness, folly, and vice of the society in which he lives.

Sec. 9.  Effect of Foreign Competition.—­One other quality he has in common with the mass of poor foreigners who compete in the London labour market—­he can live on less than the Englishman.  What Mrs Webb says of the Polish Jew, is in large measure true of all cheap foreign labour—­“As industrial competitor, the Polish Jew is fettered by no definite standard of life; it rises and falls with his opportunities; he is not depressed by penury, and he is not demoralized by gain.”  The fatal significance of this is evident.  We have seen that notwithstanding a general rise in the standard of comfort of the mass of labourers, there still remains in all our cities a body of labouring men and women engaged in doing ill-paid and irregular work for wages which keep them always on the verge of starvation.  Now consider what it means for these people to have brought into their midst a number of competitors who can live even more cheaply than they can live, and who will consent to toil from morning to night for whatever they can get.  These new-comers are obviously able, in their eagerness for work, to drive down the rate of wages even below what represents starvation-point for the native worker.  The insistence of the poorer