provides maintenance for the weaker members in order that their presence as competitors for work may not injure the stronger members.  But if the public workmen produce anything of value, by what means can it be kept from competing with and underselling the goods produced under ordinary commercial conditions?  Without alleging that the difficulties involved in these questions are necessarily fatal to all schemes of public works, we maintain that they require to be clearly faced.

Even if it be held that public workshops can furnish no economic remedy for poverty, this judgment would of course be by no means conclusive against public emergency works undertaken on charitable grounds to tide over a crisis.  Every form of charity, public or private, discriminate or indiscriminate, entails some evil consequences.  But this consideration is not final.  A charitable palliative is defensible and useful when the net advantages outweigh the net disadvantages.  This might seem self-evident, but it requires to be stated, because there are not wanting individuals and societies which imagine they have disposed of the claim of charitable remedies by pointing out the evil consequences they entail.  It is evident that circumstances might arise which would compel the wisest and steadiest Government to adopt public relief works as a temporary expedient for meeting exceptional distress.

Sec. 9.  Restriction of Foreign Emigration.—­Two further proposals for keeping down the supply of low-skilled labour deserve notice, and the more so because they are forcing their way rapidly toward the arena of practical politics.

The first is the question of an Alien law limiting or prohibiting the migration of foreign labourers into England.  The power of the German, Polish, or Russian Jew, accustomed to a lower standard of life, to undersell the English worker in the English labour market, has already been admitted as a cause of “sweating” in several city industries.  The importance of this factor in the problem of poverty is, however, a much disputed point.  To some extent these foreign labourers are said to make new industries, and not to enter into direct and disastrous competition with native workers.  In most cases, however, direct competition between foreign and native workers does exist, and, as we see, the comparatively small number of the foreign immigrants compared with the aggregate of native workers, is no true criterion of the harm their competition does to low-waged workers.  Whether this country will find it wise to reverse its national policy of free admission to outside labour, it is not easy to predict.  The point should not be misunderstood.  Free admission of cheap foreign labour must be admitted prima facie to be conducive to the greatest production of wealth in this country.  Those who seek to restrict or prohibit this admission, do so on the ground that the damage inflicted upon that class of workers, brought directly or indirectly