for they quickly became Americanized, they showed in the trade unions which they organized the remarkable qualities for political leadership which the Irish and Irish-Americans have ever since displayed in this country.  The important role which Irish and Irish-American men have played in the councils of American trade unionism is well known, and their power today remains very great.  So as regards the women, by glancing over the past we can readily trace the influence of the Irish girl, in the efforts after organization, unsuccessful as these often were.  It was Maggie McNamara who led the Brooklyn Female Burnishers’ Association in 1868.  It was during the sixties that Kate Mullaney was leading her splendid body of Troy laundresses, and twenty years later we find Leonora Barry, another Irish girl, as the leading spirit among the women of the Knights of Labor.

Except in isolated instances, no other race has come to the front among working-women until recently.  We read of German women and Bohemian women as faithful unionists.  But Germans, Bohemians and Scandinavians advanced or lost ground along with the others.  By this time, moreover, the nation had become more habituated to absorbing immigrants from various nations, and the distinction between races was less accentuated after a few years’ residence.  On the part of the Germans and Scandinavians, amalgamation has been so speedy, and in the end so complete, that most of those who have been here some time, and invariably the children of the first-comers, are Americans through and through.

With the foreign peoples that we have with us today, the situation is somewhat different.  Certain general principles are common to the course of all these migrations.  They originate, on the one hand, in economic pressure, complicated not unfrequently with religious wars or persecutions, and on the other, in the expectation of better times in a new country.  They meet the demands of a new country, asking for labor, and are further subject to the inducements of agents.  Under our haphazard social arrangements, the newly arrived often meet wretched conditions, and have no means of knowing how they are being used to lower yet further wages for themselves and others.

Always, whatever their own descent and history, the older inhabitants feel resentment, knowing no more than their unfortunate rivals what is the underlying reason of the trouble.  Milder forms of antagonism consist in sending the immigrant workers “to Coventry,” using contemptuous language of or to them, as we hear every day in “dago” or “sheeny,” and in objections by the elders to the young people associating together, while the shameful use that is continually made of the immigrants as strike-breakers may rouse such mutual indignation that there are riots and pitched battles as a consequence.