Many attempts have been made to confuse this simple issue. Many red herrings have been drawn across the track. It has been said, without one jot or tittle of evidence, that this demand for some moderate measure of restriction, veils behind it a desire to check foreign immigration altogether. Nothing could be farther from the truth. No objection can be urged against foreign immigration as a whole, but only that part of it which exercises an injurious effect upon our own people. There are, for instance, at the present time many foreigners in England employed in different professions and vocations, as teachers of languages, clerks, waiters, cooks, artisans, and so forth. These are in no sense an evil, for they supply a felt want, and are decent and cleanly in their habits and mode of living. Many of them are gradually absorbed into our national life, and become good and useful members of the community. The skilled labourer, the decent artisan, the man with brains to work, or with money to spend, is always welcome to our shores.
Such were the Huguenots. They had not much money, perhaps, but they brought with them something more precious than mere wealth—the brain, the bone, the muscle, and the manufacturing talent of France. They introduced into England arts and manufactures hitherto unknown, and they added to the lustre of their adopted country by contributing to the science and the literature of the day. They were in fact the fine fleur of the French nation.
A similar influx was that of the Flemings, which took place at an earlier period of England's history. The Flemings, who introduced into our country the finer kind of weaving, first came to England during the reign of Edward III. The weavers of England were then unable to produce any of the better kinds of cloth, and the difficulties and expense of having to send abroad whenever any material was required superior to the coarse home-made product were necessarily great. Under these circumstances, it was obviously a wise policy of the English king to induce the Flemish weavers to come over to England, and to bring their looms with them. The high wages offered, and the prospect held out of ample employment, soon brought large numbers. A like policy was pursued by several of the other English kings who reigned during the period which elapsed between the death of Edward III. and the accession of Edward VI., and there was from time to time a considerable influx of skilled artisans of all classes. In the reign of Edward VI. it appears however that public opinion had veered round. The influx of Flemings and of foreigners generally had become so considerable, that there was a general agreement on the part of the native-born population that it was no longer necessary to hold out inducements to foreign craftsmen, since their presence in large numbers destroyed the demand for good English work, and acted detrimentally upon the interests of English tradesmen. Accordingly we find the citizens of London petitioning the Privy Council to put a stop to this foreign influx, but the only result appears to have been that an estimate, or census, was taken of all the foreigners then resident in London.
One must not infer, however, from the case of the Flemings that the advent of the foreigner was always welcome, or that the outcry against him in the reign of Edward VI. was a new thing. The history of the alien in Great Britain has yet to be written, and space does not permit of its being dwelt upon to any great extent here. Yet in looking back upon the legislative enactments of the Plantagenets and early Tudor kings, which have been briefly referred to elsewhere,[3] one cannot but be struck at the way in which popular opinion—of which these acts were doubtless the outcome—wavered on this subject. The generous treatment accorded to the Flemings and other skilled foreign craftsmen who came to England from time to time contrasts strangely with the harshness with which foreigners were treated at other times. In 1155, for instance, there was an anti-foreign outcry, and many foreigners—in fact all that could be found—were first plundered of their worldly goods, and then banished from the kingdom. Later on they were allowed to return, though still compelled to suffer certain disabilities. At one time the popular prejudice against foreigners was so great that their lives and property were always in danger, and they suffered much unfair treatment. The wise policy of Edward III. removed many of these disabilities, and a special Act was passed in the reign of Richard II. by which they were relieved still more. These Acts were those rather of the king and the upper classes than of the common people, among whom the animus against the foreigner was still so strong that that bulwark of English liberty, trial by jury, was to the alien of no avail, since any charge brought against him, whether true or false, almost invariably resulted in his conviction by a British jury. To do away with this injustice the Enactment of 1430 was passed, which provided that an alien, if he so wished, might be tried by a mixed jury, of whom half were to be Englishmen and the other half foreigners. This singular Statute remained in force until 1870, when the Naturalization Act of that year abolished the privilege of the alien to claim a mixed jury. This Act also repealed all previous Acts except the now well-known Act of 6 & 7 William IV. cap. II., which provides for the registration of aliens, and to which further allusion will be made later on.
Harsh and unnecessary as some of the enactments which were directed against aliens during the reigns of the Plantagenet kings appear to us now, we may congratulate ourselves on the fact that even in the reigns of the Plantagenet kings our Statute Book was never disgraced by such an unjust measure as the French Droit d'Aubaine, which confiscated to the Crown the whole of the property of an alien, thus leaving him destitute in a foreign country. This Statute was repealed in 1791. It was revived by the Code Napoleon, but only for a brief space, and was finally abolished the year after Napoleon's downfall at Waterloo. The Droit d'Aubaine was of considerable antiquity, having been doubtless modelled on the alien laws of ancient Athens, under which similar confiscations of the property of an alien took place, though, in spite of the severity of their laws, the Athenians always welcomed the foreign craftsmen and the artists and skilled workmen of other nationalities. In Rome under the Republic somewhat similar laws to those of Athens existed against the alien, but with the Empire all disabilities were swept away, and Rome gladly welcomed all who ministered to her luxuries and to her pleasures.
It is hardly necessary to say that no unprejudiced person would desire England to revert to the harsh measures of the Plantagenet and Tudor kings, still less to stain her Statute Book by such a measure as the Droit d'Aubaine, however great might be the provocation. Yet the memory of those acts need not prevent us from considering dispassionately, and with due regard to the changed circumstances of our age and country, the advisability of passing some wise and judicious measure for the sifting of alien immigration at the present time. The objection to all the measures to which allusion has been made is, that they were directed against foreigners simply because they were foreigners, and not for the reason their presence militated to any considerable extent against the well-being of the English community, and certainly not because they added to overcrowding, to destitution, or to disease. The Flemings and the Huguenots have their parallels to-day in the foreign teachers of languages, in the French cooks and milliners, in the German clerks, cabinet-makers, and waiters; in the Italian cooks, manufacturers of Venetian glass, &c.; in the skilled craftsmen of whatever nationality who arrive upon our shores. Against these no reasonable objection can be urged. They are useful members of the community, we gain by their presence among us, and their advent is a welcome one. But it cannot be seriously contended that the Flemings and the Huguenots have their parallel in the destitute and degraded immigrants from East of Europe, or the vagrant and vicious aliens from the South. Whatever our sympathies towards these people may be, there is every reason why we should not welcome them here. As things are, these new arrivals add in a manner altogether out of proportion to their numbers to the miseries of our poor in the congested districts of our great towns, to which they invariably drift. There are many practical ways in which we can show our sympathy with the persecuted Russian Jews if we wish to do so, notably by combining to divert the stream of immigration from our own densely populated little island, and by helping the would-be immigrants to move on to some new land beyond the seas. This we may do; but for their own sake, and for the sake of our people, we should try to prevent them from coming here.
With an imperfect knowledge of the facts we are hardly in a position to judge of the action which the Russian Government has seen fit to take against its Jewish subjects. On the surface it certainly appears that a great wrong has been done, a wrong which is also a blunder, but we must remember that we have not yet heard what there