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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40535 ***
+
+  [ Transcriber's Notes:
+
+    Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully
+    as possible, including inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation.
+    Some corrections of spelling and punctuation have been made. They
+    are listed at the end of the text.
+
+    Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
+  ]
+
+
+
+
+  By Mary Antin
+
+  THEY WHO KNOCK AT OUR GATES. Illustrated.
+
+  THE PROMISED LAND. Illustrated.
+
+  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+  Boston and New York
+
+
+
+
+THEY WHO KNOCK AT OUR GATES
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: THE SINEW AND BONE OF ALL THE NATIONS]
+
+
+
+
+  THEY WHO KNOCK
+  AT OUR GATES
+
+  A COMPLETE
+  GOSPEL OF IMMIGRATION
+
+  BY
+  MARY ANTIN
+
+  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+  JOSEPH STELLA
+
+  BOSTON AND NEW YORK
+  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+  The Riverside Press Cambridge
+  1914
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE PHILLIPS PUBLISHING COMPANY
+  COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
+
+  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
+
+  Published May 1914
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  Introduction                    ix
+
+    I. The Law of the Fathers      1
+
+   II. Judges in the Gate         31
+
+  III. The Fiery Furnace          99
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+  The sinew and bone of all the nations (page 63)      Frontispiece
+
+  Rough work and low wages for the immigrant                     64
+
+  The ungroomed mother of the East Side                          72
+
+  A fresh infusion of pioneer blood                             108
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+
+Three main questions may be asked with reference to immigration--
+
+_First:_ A question of principle: Have we any right to regulate
+immigration?
+
+_Second:_ A question of fact: What is the nature of our present
+immigration?
+
+_Third:_ A question of interpretation: Is immigration good for us?
+
+The difficulty with the first question is to get its existence
+recognized. In a matter that has such obvious material aspects as
+the immigration problem the abstract principles involved are likely
+to be overlooked. But as there can be no sound conclusions without a
+foundation in underlying principles, this discussion must begin by
+seeking an answer to the ethical question involved.
+
+The second question is not easy to answer for the reason that men are
+always poor judges of their contemporaries, especially of those whose
+interests appear to clash with their own. We suffer here, too, from
+a bewildering multiplicity of testimony. Every sort of expert whose
+specialty in any way touches the immigrant has diagnosed the subject
+according to the formulæ of his own special science--and our doctors
+disagree! One is forced to give up the luxury of a second-hand opinion
+on this subject, and to attempt a little investigation of one's own,
+checking off the dicta of the specialists as well as an amateur may.
+
+The third question, while not wholly separable from the second, is
+nevertheless an inquiry of another sort. Whether immigration is good for
+us depends partly on the intrinsic nature of the immigrant and partly
+on our reactions to his presence. The effects of immigration, produced
+by the immigrant in partnership with ourselves, some men will approve
+and some deplore, according to their notions of good and bad. That thing
+is good for me which leads to my ultimate happiness; and we do not all
+delight in the same things. The third question, therefore, more than
+either of the others, each man has to answer for himself.
+
+
+
+
+THEY WHO KNOCK AT OUR GATES
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE LAW OF THE FATHERS
+
+And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
+and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children. . . . And
+thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.
+
+Deut. vi, 6, 7, 9.
+
+
+If I ask an American what is the fundamental American law, and he does
+not answer me promptly, "That which is contained in the Declaration of
+Independence," I put him down for a poor citizen. He who is ignorant of
+the law is likely to disobey it. And there cannot be two minds about
+the position of the Declaration among our documents of state. What the
+Mosaic Law is to the Jews, the Declaration is to the American people. It
+affords us a starting-point in history and defines our mission among the
+nations. Without it, we should not differ greatly from other nations who
+have achieved a constitutional form of government and various democratic
+institutions. What marks us out from other advanced nations is the
+origin of our liberties in one supreme act of political innovation,
+prompted by a conscious sense of the dignity of manhood. In other
+countries advances have been made by favor of hereditary rulers and
+aristocratic parliaments, each successive reform being grudgingly handed
+down to the people from above. Not so in America. At one bold stroke we
+shattered the monarchical tradition, and installed the people in the
+seats of government, substituting the gospel of the sovereignty of the
+masses for the superstition of the divine right of kings.
+
+And even more notable than the boldness of the act was the dignity with
+which it was entered upon. In terms befitting a philosophical discourse,
+we gave notice to the world that what we were about to do, we would do
+in the name of humanity, in the conviction that as justice is the end of
+government so should manhood be its source.
+
+It is this insistence on the philosophic sanction of our revolt that
+gives the sublime touch to our political performance. Up to the moment
+of our declaration of independence, our struggle with our English
+rulers did not differ from other popular struggles against despotic
+governments. Again and again we respectfully petitioned for redress
+of specific grievances, as the governed, from time immemorial, have
+petitioned their governors. But one day we abandoned our suit for
+petty damages, and instituted a suit for the recovery of our entire
+human heritage of freedom; and by basing our claim on the fundamental
+principles of the brotherhood of man and the sovereignty of the masses,
+we assumed the championship of the oppressed against their oppressors,
+wherever found.
+
+It was thus, by sinking our particular quarrel with George of England
+in the universal quarrel of humanity with injustice, that we emerged a
+distinct nation, with a unique mission in the world. And we revealed
+ourselves to the world in the Declaration of Independence, even as
+the Israelites revealed themselves in the Law of Moses. From the
+Declaration flows our race consciousness, our sense of what is and
+what is not American. Our laws, our policies, the successive steps of
+our progress--all must conform to the spirit of the Declaration of
+Independence, the source of our national being.
+
+The American confession of faith, therefore, is a recital of the
+doctrines of liberty and equality. A faithful American is one who
+understands these doctrines and applies them in his life.
+
+It should be easy to pick out the true Americans--the spiritual heirs
+of the founders of our Republic--by this simple test of loyalty to
+the principles of the Declaration. To such a test we are put, both as
+a nation and as individuals, every time we are asked to define our
+attitude on immigration. Having set up a government on a declaration
+of the rights of man, it should be our first business to reaffirm that
+declaration every time we meet a case involving human rights. Now
+every immigrant who emerges from the steerage presents such a case.
+For the alien, whatever ethnic or geographic label he carries, in a
+primary classification of the creatures of the earth, falls in the human
+family. The fundamental fact of his humanity established, we need only
+rehearse the articles of our political faith to know what to do with the
+immigrant. It is written in our basic law that he is entitled to life,
+liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There is nothing left for us to
+do but to open wide our gates and set him on his way to happiness.
+
+That is what we did for a while, when our simple law was fresh in our
+minds, and the habit of applying it instinctive. Then there arose
+a fashion of spelling immigration with a capital initial, which
+so confused the national eye that we began to see a PROBLEM where
+formerly we had seen a familiar phenomenon of American life; and as a
+problem requires skillful handling, we called an army of experts in
+consultation, and the din of their elaborate discussions has filled our
+ears ever since.
+
+The effect on the nation has been disastrous. In a matter involving
+our faith as Americans, we have ceased to consult our fundamental
+law, and have suffered ourselves to be guided by the conflicting
+reports of commissions and committees, anthropologists, economists, and
+statisticians, policy-mongers, calamity-howlers, and self-announced
+prophets. Matters irrelevant to the interests of liberty have taken the
+first place in the discussion; lobbyists, not patriots, have had the
+last word. Our American sensibility has become dulled, so that sometimes
+the cries of the oppressed have not reached our ears unless carried by
+formal deputations. In a department of government which brings us into
+daily touch with the nations of the world, we have failed to live up to
+our national gospel and have not been aware of our backsliding.
+
+What have the experts and statisticians done so to pervert our minds?
+They have filled volumes with facts and figures, comparing the
+immigrants of to-day with the immigrants of other days, classifying them
+as to race, nationality, and culture, tabulating their occupations,
+analyzing their savings, probing their motives, prophesying their
+ultimate destiny. But what is there in all this that bears on the right
+of free men to choose their place of residence? Granted that Sicilians
+are not Scotchmen, how does that affect the right of a Sicilian to
+travel in pursuit of happiness? Strip the alien down to his anatomy,
+you still find a _man_, a creature made in the image of God; and
+concerning such a one we have definite instructions from the founders
+of the Republic. And what purpose was served by the bloody tide of the
+Civil War if it did not wash away the last lingering doubts as to the
+brotherhood of men of different races?
+
+There is no impropriety in gathering together a mass of scientific and
+sociological data concerning the newcomers, as long as we understand
+that the knowledge so gained is merely the technical answer to a number
+of technical questions. Where we have gone wrong is in applying the
+testimony of our experts to the moral side of the question. By all means
+register the cephalic index of the alien,--the anthropologist will make
+something of it at his leisure,--but do not let it determine his right
+to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
+
+I do not ask that we remove all restrictions and let the flood of
+immigration sweep in unchecked. I do ask that such restrictions as we
+impose shall accord with the loftiest interpretation of our duty as
+Americans. Now our first duty is to live up to the gospel of liberty,
+through the political practices devised by our forefathers and modified
+by their successors, as democratic ideas developed. But political
+practices require a territory wherein to operate--democracy must have
+standing-room--so it becomes our next duty to guard our frontiers. For
+that purpose we maintain two forms of defense: the barbaric devices
+of army and navy, to ward off hostile mass invasions; and the humane
+devices of the immigration service, to regulate the influx of peaceable
+individuals.
+
+We have plenty of examples to copy in our military defenses, but when
+it comes to the civil branch of our national guard, we dare not borrow
+foreign models. What our neighbors are doing in the matter of regulating
+immigration may or may not be right for us. Other nations may be guided
+chiefly by economic considerations, while we are under spiritual bonds
+to give first consideration to the moral principles involved. For
+this, our peculiar American problem, we must seek a characteristically
+American solution.
+
+What terms of entry may we impose on the immigrant without infringing on
+his inalienable rights, as defined in our national charter? Just such
+as we would impose on our own citizens if they proposed to move about
+the country in companies numbering thousands, with their families and
+portable belongings. And what would these conditions be? They would be
+such as are required by public safety, public health, public order.
+Whatever limits to our personal liberty we are ourselves willing to
+endure for the sake of the public welfare, we have a right to impose on
+the stranger from abroad; these, and no others.
+
+Has, then, the newest arrival the same rights as the established
+citizen? According to the Declaration, yes; the same right to live, to
+move, to try his luck. More than this he does not claim at the gate of
+entrance; with less than this we are not authorized to put him off.
+We do not question the right of an individual foreigner to enter our
+country on any peaceable errand; why, then, question the rights of a
+shipload of foreigners? Lumping a thousand men together under the title
+of immigrants does not deprive them of their humanity and the rights
+inherent in humanity; or can it be demonstrated that the sum of the
+rights of a million men is less than the rights of one individual?
+
+The Declaration of Independence, like the Ten Commandments, must be
+taken literally and applied universally. What would have been the
+civilizing power of the Mosaic Code if the Children of Israel had
+repudiated it after a few generations? As little virtue is there in
+the Declaration of Independence if we limit its operation to any
+geographical sphere or historical period or material situation. How do
+we belittle the works of our Fathers when we talk as though they wrought
+for their contemporaries only! It was no great matter to shake off the
+rule of an absent tyrant, if that is all that the War of the Revolution
+did. So much had been done many times over, long before the first tree
+fell under the axe of a New England settler. Emmaus was fought before
+Yorktown, and Thermopylæ before Emmaus. It is only as we dwell on the
+words of Jefferson and Franklin that the deeds of Washington shine out
+among the deeds of heroes. In the chronicles of the Jews, Moses has a
+far higher place than the Maccabæan brothers. And notice that Moses
+owes his immortality to the unbroken succession of generations who
+were willing to rule their lives by the Law that fell from his lips.
+The glory of the Jews is not that they received the Law, but that they
+kept the Law. The glory of the American people must be that the vision
+vouchsafed to their fathers they in their turn hold up undimmed to the
+eyes of successive generations.
+
+To maintain our own independence is only to hug that vision to our own
+bosoms. If we sincerely believe in the elevating power of liberty, we
+should hasten to extend the reign of liberty over all mankind. The
+disciples of Jesus did not sit down in Jerusalem and congratulate each
+other on having found the Saviour. They scattered over the world to
+spread the tidings far and wide. We Americans, disciples of the goddess
+Liberty, are saved the trouble of carrying our gospel to the nations,
+because the nations come to us.
+
+Right royally have we welcomed them, and lavishly entertained them at
+the feast of freedom, whenever our genuine national impulses have shaped
+our immigration policy. But from time to time the national impulse has
+been clogged by selfish fears and foolish alarms parading under the
+guise of civic prudence. Ignoring entirely the _rights_ of the case,
+the immigration debate has raged about questions of expediency, as if
+convenience and not justice were our first concern. At times the debate
+has been led by men on whom the responsibilities of American citizenship
+sat lightly, who treated immigration as a question of the division of
+spoils.
+
+A little attention to the principles involved would have convinced us
+long ago that an American citizen who preaches wholesale restriction
+of immigration is guilty of political heresy. The Declaration of
+Independence accords to _all_ men an equal share in the inherent rights
+of humanity. When we go contrary to that principle, we are not acting
+as Americans; for, by definition, an American is one who lives by the
+principles of the Declaration. And we surely violate the Declaration
+when we attempt to exclude aliens on account of race, nationality, or
+economic status. "All men" means yellow men as well as white men, men
+from the South of Europe as well as men from the North of Europe, men
+who hold kingdoms in pawn, and men who owe for their dinner. We shall
+have to recall officially the Declaration of Independence before we can
+lawfully limit the application of its principles to this or that group
+of men.
+
+Americans of refined civic conscience have always accepted our
+national gospel in its literal sense. "What becomes of the rights of
+the excluded?" demanded the younger Garrison, in a noble scolding
+administered to the restrictionists in 1896.
+
+    If a nation has a right to keep out aliens, tell us how many people
+    constitute a nation, and what geographical area they have a right
+    to claim. In the United States, where a thousand millions can live
+    in peace and plenty under just conditions, who gives to seventy
+    millions the right to monopolize the territory? How few can justly
+    own the earth, and deprive those who are landless of the right to
+    life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And what becomes of the
+    rights of the excluded?
+
+If we took our mission seriously,--as seriously, say, as the Jews take
+theirs,--we should live with a copy of our law at our side, and oblige
+every man who opened his mouth to teach us, to square his doctrine with
+the gospel of liberty; and him should we follow to the end who spoke to
+us in the name of our duties, rather than in the name of our privileges.
+
+The sins we have been guilty of in our conduct of the immigration debate
+have had their roots in a misconception of our own position in the
+land. We have argued the matter as though we owned the land, and were,
+therefore, at liberty to receive or reject the unbidden guests who came
+to us by thousands. Let any man who lays claim to any portion of the
+territory of the United States produce his title deed. Are not most of
+us squatters here, and squatters of recent date at that? The rights of
+a squatter are limited to the plot he actually occupies and cultivates.
+The portion of the United States territory that is covered by squatters'
+claims is only a fraction, albeit a respectable fraction, of the land we
+govern. In the name of what moral law do we wield a watchman's club over
+the vast regions that are still waiting to be staked out? The number of
+American citizens who can boast of ancestral acres is not sufficient
+to swing a presidential election. For that matter, those whose claims
+are founded on ancestral tenure should be the very ones to dread an
+examination of titles. For it would be shown that these few got their
+lands by stepping into dead men's shoes, while the majority wrenched
+their estates from the wilderness by the labor of their own hands. In
+the face of the sturdy American preference for an aristocracy of brain
+and brawn, the wisest thing the man with a pedigree can do is to scrape
+the lichens off his family tree. Think of having it shown that he owes
+the ancestral farmhouse to the deathbed favoritism of some grouchy
+uncle! Or, worse still, think of tracing the family title to some canny
+deal with a band of unsophisticated Indians!
+
+No, it will not do to lay claim to the land on the ground of priority
+of occupation, as long as there is a red man left on the Indian
+reservations. If it comes to calling names, usurper is an uglier name
+than alien. And a squatter is a tenant who doesn't pay any rent,
+while an immigrant who occupies a tenement in the slums pays his rent
+regularly or gets out.
+
+We may soothe our pride with the reflection that our title to the land
+does not depend on the moral validity of individual claims, but on the
+collective right of the nation to control the land we govern. We came
+into our land as other nations came into theirs: we took it as a prize
+of war. Until humanity has devised a less brutal method of political
+acquisition, we must pass our national claim as entirely sound. We own
+the land because we were strong enough to take it from England. But
+the moment we hark back to the War of the Revolution, our sense of
+possession is profoundly modified. We did not quarrel with the English
+about the possession of the colonies, but about their treatment of the
+colonists. It was not a land-grab that was plotted in Independence
+Hall in 1776, but a pattern of human freedom. We entered upon the war
+in pursuit of ideals, not in pursuit of homesteads. We had to take the
+homesteads, too, because, as we have already noted, a political ideal
+has to have territory wherein to operate. But we must never forget that
+the shining prize of that war was an immaterial thing,--the triumph of
+an idea. Not the Treaty of Paris, but the Declaration of Independence,
+converted the thirteen colonies into a nation.
+
+Having taken half a continent in the name of humanity, shall we hold it
+in the name of a few millions? Not as jealous lords of a rich domain,
+but as priests of a noble cult shall we best acquit ourselves of the
+task our Fathers set us. And it is the duty of a priest to minister to
+as many souls as he can reach. The most revered of our living teachers
+has passed this word:--
+
+    It is the mission of the United States to spread freedom throughout
+    the world by teaching as many men and women as possible in freedom's
+    largest home how to use freedom rightly through practice in liberty
+    under law.
+
+And our ardor shall not be dampened by the reflection that perhaps
+the Fathers builded better than they knew. "Do you really think they
+looked so far ahead?" it is often asked. "Did the founders of the
+Republic foresee the time when foreign hordes would alight on our
+shores, demanding a share in this goodly land that was ransomed with the
+blood of heroes?" Fearful questions, these, to make us pause in the work
+of redeeming mankind! If our Fathers did not foresee the whole future,
+shall we therefore be blind to the light of our own day? If they had
+left us a mere sketch of their idea, could we do less than fill in the
+outlines? Since they left us not a sketch, but a finished model, the
+least we can do is to go on copying it on an ever larger scale. Neither
+shall we falter because the execution of the enlarged copy entails much
+labor on us and on our children. When Moses told the Egyptian exiles
+that they should have no god but the One God, he may not have guessed
+that their children would be brought to the stake for refusing other
+gods; and yet nineteen centuries of Jewish martyrdom go to show that
+the followers of Moses did not make his lack of foresight an excuse for
+abandoning his Law.
+
+Let the children be brought up to know that we are a people with a
+mission, and that mission, in the words of Dr. Eliot, to teach the uses
+of freedom to as many men as possible "in freedom's largest home."
+Let it be taught in the public schools that the most precious piece
+of real estate in the whole United States is that which supports the
+pedestal of the Statue of Liberty; that we need not greatly care how
+the three million square miles remaining is divided among the people of
+the earth, as long as we retain that little island. Let it further be
+repeated in the schools that the Liberty at our gates is the handiwork
+of a Frenchman; that the mountain-weight of copper in her sides and the
+granite mass beneath her feet were bought with the pennies of the poor;
+that the verses graven on a tablet within the base are the inspiration
+of a poetess descended from Portuguese Jews; and all these things shall
+be interpreted to mean that the love of liberty unites all races and
+all classes of men into one close brotherhood, and that we Americans,
+therefore, who have the utmost of liberty that has yet been attained,
+owe the alien a brother's share.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+To this position we are brought by a construction of the Declaration of
+Independence which makes of it the law of the land, binding on American
+citizens individually and collectively, and in all circumstances
+whatever. Out of this position there is one avenue of escape, and only
+one. We may refuse to read in the Declaration a sincere expression of
+the faith of 1776, and construe it instead as a bombastic political
+manifesto, advanced by the leaders of the rebellion as an excuse for a
+gigantic land-grab.
+
+Let the descendants of the Puritans take their choice of these two
+interpretations. For my part, I have chosen. I have chosen to read the
+story of '76 as a chapter in sacred history; to set Thomas Jefferson in
+a class with Moses, and Washington with Joshua; to regard the American
+nation as the custodian of a sacred trust, and American citizenship as a
+holy order, with laws and duties derived from the Declaration.
+
+For very pride in my country I must choose thus, for the alternate
+view takes the meaning out of American history, reduces the War of
+Independence to a war of plunder, and the Colonial heroes to a band of
+pious hypocrites. What, indeed, shall we teach our children to be proud
+of if we reject the higher interpretation of the deeds of the Fathers?
+The American Revolution as a campaign of conquest is not unique in
+history; on the contrary, it has been more than once surpassed, both in
+respect to the prowess of the conquerors and to the magnificence of the
+prize. Outside the physical realm, where our inventions and discoveries
+and the material development of a continent belong, this country has
+contributed nothing of moment to the world's progress, unless it is
+that political adaptation of the Golden Rule which is indicated in
+the Declaration and elaborated in the Constitution. In the arts and
+sciences we sit, for the most part, at the feet of foreign masters;
+in jurisprudence we have borrowed from the Romans, and the elements
+of liberal government we have from our next of kin, the English. The
+notion of the dignity of man, which is the foundation of the gospel
+of democracy, is derived from Hebrew sources, as the Psalm-singing
+founders of New England would be the first to acknowledge. It was
+not entirely due to accident nor to the exigencies of pioneer life
+that the meeting-house and the town hall were one in the New England
+settlements. The influence of the Bible is plainly stamped on the works
+of the Puritans. What, then, shall we claim as the great American
+achievement, our peculiar treasure in the midst of so much borrowed
+glory? A magnificent espousal of humanity--that or nothing can we call
+our own.
+
+Seeing that they brought nothing into the world that was all their
+own, our glorious dead are not glorious unless we make them so, by
+imputing to them the noblest motives that their case will permit, and
+rating their works at not less than face value. Pride demands it, and,
+fortunately for our country's honor, justice supports the claims of
+pride. Neither the cynics nor the enthusiasts shall have the last word
+in the matter. In the writings of their contemporaries, in the casual
+sayings of their intimates, in the critical comments of those who
+came next after them, we find convincing evidence that in the minds
+of the leaders of '76 the most advanced political thought of the age
+crystallized into a mighty conviction--the conviction of the inherent
+nobility of humankind, which makes it treason for any man to enslave his
+neighbor.
+
+That is the thought that was sent out into the world on July 4, 1776,
+and because that thought has shaped our history, we call it the
+basic law of our land, and the Declaration of Independence our final
+authority. If under that authority the immigrant appears to have rights
+in our land parallel to our own rights, we shall not lightly deny his
+claims, lest we forfeit our only title to national glory.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+JUDGES IN THE GATE
+
+Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates . . . and
+they shall judge the people with just judgment.
+
+Deut. xvi, 18.
+
+
+There is nothing so potent in a public debate as the picturesque
+catchwords in which leaders of thought sum up their convictions. Logic
+makes fewer converts in a year than a taking phrase makes in a week.
+For catchwords are the popular substitute for logic, and the man in the
+street is reduced to silence by a good round phrase of the kind that
+sticks.
+
+Two classes of citizens are especially prone to fall under the tyranny
+of phrases: those whose horizon, through no fault of their own, is
+limited by the rim of an empty dinner-pail; and those whose view of
+the universe is obstructed by the kitchen-middens of too many dinners.
+There is no clear thinking on an empty stomach, and equally muddled are
+the thoughts of the over-full. When I hear of a public measure that is
+largely supported by these two classes of citizens, I know at once that
+the measure appeals to human prejudices rather than to divine reason.
+
+Thus I became suspicious of the restrictionist movement when I realized
+that it was in greatest favor among the thoughtless poor and the
+thoughtless rich. I am well aware that the high-priests of the cult
+include some of the most conscientious thinkers that ever helped to make
+history, and their earnestness is attested by a considerable body of
+doctrine, in support of which they quote statistics and special studies
+and scientific investigations. But I notice that the rank and file of
+restrictionists do not know as much as the titles of these documents.
+They have not followed the argument at all; they have only caught the
+catchwords of restrictionism. And these catchwords are the sort that
+appeal to the mean spots in human nature,--the distrust of the stranger,
+the jealousy of possession, the cowardice of the stomach. Nothing else
+is expressed by such phrases as "the scum of Europe," "the exploitation
+of America's wealth," or "taking the bread from the mouth of the
+American workingman."
+
+Even the least venomous formula of restrictionism, "immigration isn't
+what it used to be," raises such a familiar echo of foolish human nature
+that I am bound to challenge its veracity. Does not every generation cry
+that the weather isn't what it used to be, children are not what they
+used to be, society is not what it used to be? "The good old times" and
+"the old immigration" may be twin illusions of limited human vision.
+
+If it is true that immigration is not what it used to be, the fact
+will appear from a detailed comparison of the "old" and the "new"
+immigration. But which of the immigrant stocks of the good old times
+shall be taken as a standard? Woman's wisdom urges me to go right back
+to the original pattern, just as I would do if I went to the shops to
+match samples. And the original pattern was brought to this country in
+the year 1620. Surely comparison with the Mayflower stock is the most
+searching test of the quality of our immigration that any one could
+propose.
+
+The predominant virtue of the Pilgrims was idealism. The things of the
+spirit were more to them than the things of the flesh. May we say the
+like of our present immigrants? Of very many of them, yes; a thousand
+times yes. Of the 8,213,000 foreigners landed between the years 1899
+and 1909, 990,000 were of that race which for nineteen centuries has
+sacrificed its flesh in the service of the spirit. It takes a hundred
+times as much steadfastness and endurance for a Russian Jew of to-day
+to remain a Jew as it took for an English Protestant in the seventeenth
+century to defy the established Church.
+
+Those who think that with the Spanish Inquisition Jewish martyrdom came
+to an end are asked to remember that the Kishinieff affair is only
+eight years behind us, and that Bielostock has been heard from since
+Kishinieff, and Mohileff since Bielostock. And more terrible than the
+recurrent _pogrom_, which hacks and burns and tortures a few hundreds
+now and then, is the continuous bloodless martyrdom of the six million
+Jews in Russia through the operation of the anti-Semitic laws of that
+country. Thirty minutes spent in looking over a summary of these laws
+recently compiled by an English historian(1) will convince any reader
+with a spark of imagination that every Russian Jewish immigrant to-day
+is a fugitive from religious persecution, even as were the English
+immigrants of 1620.
+
+  (1) Lucien Wolf, _Legal Sufferings of the Jews in Russia_.
+
+But while nobody questions the idealism of the Jew in religion, the
+world has been very slow to credit him with any degree of civic
+devotion. The world did not stop to think that a man has to have a
+country before he can prove himself a good citizen. But happily in
+recent times he has been put to the test of civic opportunity, notably
+in America; with the result that he was found to possess a fair share of
+the civic virtues, from the generosity displayed in the town meeting,
+when citizens vote away their substance to support a public cause, to
+the brute heroism of the battle-field, where mangled flesh gives proof
+of valiant spirit.(2) And what the Jews of West European stock proved
+in the American wars for freedom the Jews of Eastern Europe have proved
+more recently, by their forwardness in the Russian revolution of 1905.
+
+  (2) See _The Jews in America_, by Rev. Madison C. Peters.
+
+No group of people of all the heterogeneous mass that constitutes the
+Russian nation were half so prominent as the Jews in that abortive
+attempt at freedom. Witness the police records of the revolutionary
+period, which show that sixty-five out of every hundred political
+offenders were Jews, in districts where the population was fifteen parts
+Jewish and eighty-five parts Gentile. When I visited my native town in
+the Pale, several years after the revolution, it was hard to find, among
+the young men and women I talked with, one in a dozen who had not shared
+in the dangers of 1905. If we really want to know how heartily the
+Jews played their part in the revolution, we need only ask the Russian
+Government why the anti-Semitic laws have been so vengefully enforced
+since a certain crimson year within the present decade. And the whole
+significance of these things, in the present study, lies in the fact
+that precisely that spirit which prompts to rebellion in despotic Russia
+rallies in free America to the support of existing institutions.
+
+If it was a merit in 1620 to flee from religious persecution, and in
+1776 to fight against political oppression, then many of the Russian
+refugees of to-day are a little ahead of the Mayflower troop, because
+they have in their own lifetime sustained the double ordeal of fight and
+flight, with all their attendant risks and shocks.
+
+To obtain a nice balance between the relative merits of these two
+groups of rebels, we remind ourselves that, for sheer adventurousness,
+migration to America to-day is not to be mentioned on the same page with
+the magnificent exploit of 1620, and we reflect that the moral glory of
+the revolution of 1776 is infinitely greater than that of any subsequent
+revolt; because that, too, was a path-finding adventure, with no compass
+but faith, no chart but philosophical invention. On the other hand, it
+is plain that the Russian revolutionists moved against greater odds
+than the American colonists had to face. The Russians had to plot in
+secret, assemble in the dark, and strike with bare fists; all this under
+the very nose of the Czar, with the benighted condition of the Russian
+masses hanging like a cloud over their enterprise. The colonists were
+able to lay the train of revolution in the most public manner, they had
+the local government in their hands, a considerable militia obedient
+to their own captains, and the advantage of distance from the enemy's
+resources, with a populace advanced in civic experience promising
+support to the leaders.
+
+And what a test of heroism was that which the harsh nature of the
+Russian Government afforded! The American rebels risked their charters
+and their property; for some of them dungeons waited, and for the
+leaders dangled a rope, no doubt. But confiscation is not so bitter as
+Siberian exile, and a halter is less painful than the barbed whip of the
+Cossacks. The Minutemen at Concord Bridge defied a bully; the rioters
+in St. Petersburg challenged a tiger. And first of all to be thrust
+into the cage would be the rebels of Jewish faith, and nobody knew that
+better than the Jews themselves.
+
+The superior zeal and high degree of self-sacrifice displayed by the
+Jewish revolutionists would naturally be explained by the fact that,
+of all the peoples held in chains by the Russian Government, the Jews
+are the ones who have suffered the cruelest oppression. But there is
+proof, proof that will go down with the stream of history, that the
+Jewish participants in the Russian revolution of 1905 were actuated by
+the highest patriotism, their peculiar grievances being forgotten in the
+grievances of the nation as a whole. The sinking of the Jewish question
+in the national question was an important article of the revolutionary
+propaganda among the Jews; so much so, that when a prominent Jewish
+leader attempted to demonstrate, on philosophical grounds, that that was
+a false position to take, he was hotly repudiated, although up to that
+time he had stood high in the councils of the leaders.(3)
+
+  (3) See Article by Achad Ha'am, _American Hebrew_, June 21, 1907.
+
+If we find such a high degree of civic responsiveness in what we have
+been trained to think the most unlikely quarter, shall we not look
+hopefully in other corners of our world of immigrants? If the Jewish
+spirit of freedom leaps from the grave of Barkochla to the hovels of
+the Russian ghetto, half across the world and half across the civilized
+era, shall we not look for similar prodigies from the more recent graves
+of Kosciuszko and Garibaldi? If the hook-nosed tailor can turn hero on
+occasion, why not the grinning organ-grinder, and the surly miner, and
+the husky lumber-jack? We experienced a shock of surprise, a little
+while ago, when troops of our Greek immigrants deserted the bootblacking
+parlors and fruit-stands and tumbled aboard anything that happened to
+sail for the Mediterranean, in their eagerness--it's hard to bring it
+out, in connection with a "Dago" bootblack!--in their eagerness to
+strike a blow for their country in her need.
+
+But that's the worst of calling names: it deceives those who do so.
+The little bootblacks would not have fooled us as they did if we
+had not recklessly summed up the Greek character in a contemptuous
+epithet. It is quite proper for street urchins to invent nicknames for
+everybody--that is what street urchins are for; but let us not hand down
+the judgment of the gutter where the judgment of the senate is called
+for. Between Leonidas at the pass and little Metro under the saloon
+window, fawning for our nickels, is indeed a dismal gap; and yet Metro,
+when occasion demanded, reached out his grimy hand and touched the tunic
+of the Spartan hero.
+
+From these unexpected exploits of the craven Jew and the degenerate
+Greek, it would seem as if the different elements of the despised "new"
+immigration only await a spectacular opportunity to prove themselves
+equal to the "old" in civic valor. But if contemporary history fails
+to provide a war or revolution for each of our foreign nationalities,
+we are still not without the means of gauging the idealistic capacity
+of the aliens. Next after liberty, the Puritans loved education; and
+to-day, if you examine the registers of the schools and colleges they
+founded, you will find the names of recent immigrants thickly sprinkled
+from A to Z, and topping the honor ranks nine times out of ten. All
+readers of newspapers know the bare facts,--each commencement season,
+the prize-winners are announced in a string of unpronounceable foreign
+names; and every school-teacher in the immigrant section of the larger
+cities has a collection of picturesque anecdotes to contribute: of
+heroic sacrifices for the sake of a little reading and writing; of young
+girls stitching away their youth to keep a brother in college; of whole
+families cheerfully starving together to save one gifted child from the
+factory.
+
+Go from the public school to the public library, from the library to
+the social settlement, and you will carry away the same story in a
+hundred different forms. The good people behind the desks in these
+public places are fond of repeating that they can hardly keep up with
+the intellectual demands of their immigrant neighbors. In the experience
+of the librarians it is the veriest commonplace that the classics have
+the greatest circulation in the immigrant quarters of the city; and
+the most touching proof of reverence for learning often comes from the
+illiterate among the aliens. On the East Side of New York, "Teacher"
+is a being adored. Said a bedraggled Jewish mother to her little boy
+who had affronted his teacher, "Don't you know that teachers is holy?"
+Perhaps these are the things the teachers have in mind when they speak
+with a tremor of the immense reward of work in the public schools.
+
+That way of speaking is the fashion among workers of all sorts in the
+educational institutions where foreigners attend in numbers. Get a
+group of settlement people swapping anecdotes about their immigrant
+neighbors, and there is apt to develop an epidemic of moist eyes. Out
+of the fullness of their knowledge these social missionaries pay the
+tribute of respect and affection to the strangers among whom they toil.
+For they know them as we know our brothers and sisters, from living and
+working and rejoicing and sorrowing together.
+
+The testimony of everyday experience is borne out by the sudden
+revelations of catastrophic circumstances, as reported by a librarian
+from Dayton, Ohio. In Dayton they had branch libraries located in
+different parts of the city, not in separate library buildings, but
+in convenient shops or dwelling-houses, where they were left in the
+care of some responsible person in the neighborhood. After the recent
+flood,(4) when the panic was over and the people began to dig for their
+belongings underneath the accumulated slime and wreckage, the librarian
+tried to collect at the central library whatever was recovered of the
+scattered collection. Crumpled, mutilated, slimy with the filth of the
+disemboweled city, the books came back--all but one collection, which
+had been housed in the midst of the Hungarian quarter. These came back
+neatly packed, scraped clean of mud, their leaves smoothed, dried,--as
+presentable as loving care could make them.
+
+  (4) March, 1913.
+
+If that was not a manifestation of pure idealism, then is human conduct
+void of symbolism, and our public squares are cumbered in vain with
+monuments erected in commemoration of human deeds. But we read men's
+souls in their actions, and we know that they who flock to the schools
+are the spiritual kindred of those who founded them; they who cherish
+a book are passing along the torch kindled by him who wrote it. They
+pay the highest tribute to an inventor who show the most eagerness to
+adopt his invention. The great New England invention of compulsory
+education is more eagerly appropriated by the majority of our immigrants
+than by native Americans of the corresponding level. That is what the
+school-teachers say, and I suppose they know. They also say,--they and
+all public educators in chorus,--that while one foreign nationality
+excels in the love of letters, another excels in the love of music, and
+a third in the love of science; and all of them together constitute an
+army whose feet keep time with the noble rhythms of culture.
+
+Let a New Yorker on Friday night watch the crowd pushing out of a
+concert hall after one of Ysaye's recitals, and on Saturday afternoon
+let him take the subway uptown, and get out where the crowd gets out,
+and buy a ticket for the baseball game. If he can keep cool enough for
+a little study, let him compare the distorted faces in the bleachers
+with the shining faces of the crowd of the night before; and let him
+say which crowd responded to the nobler inspiration, and then let him
+declare in which group the foreigners outnumbered the Americans.
+
+The American devotion to sport is no reproach to the descendants of the
+Puritans, since it can be demonstrated from various angles that the
+baseball diamond may supplement the schoolroom and the pulpit in the
+training of American citizens. Indeed, it is not difficult to accept
+that interpretation of the national sport which reduces a good game of
+baseball to an epitome of all that is best in the lives of the best
+Americans. At the same time we need to remember that the love of art
+is more generally accepted as a mark of grace than the love of sport.
+Thus, when we speak of the glory of old Athens we have in mind not the
+Olympian games, noble as they were, but the poets and sculptors and
+philosophers who uttered her thoughts. The original of the Discobolus
+must have been a winner,--I can imagine Athenian mothers lifting up
+their beautiful bare babies to see the hero over the heads of the
+throng,--but who can tell me his name to-day? Meanwhile the name of
+Myron has been guarded as a talisman of civilization.
+
+We shall not look in the sporting columns, then, for the names of
+contemporary Americans who are likely to secure us a place of honor
+on the scrolls of history. We look under the current book reviews,
+in theatre programmes, in the announcements of art galleries. As
+a by-product of such a search we announce the discovery that the
+prizefighters seem to be near cousins of certain Americans of turbulent
+notoriety in politics, themselves derived from one of the approved
+immigrant stocks of the "old" dispensation; while the singer and painter
+and writer folk very often hail from those parts of Europe at present
+labeled "undesirable" as a source of immigration. Nay, is it not a good
+joke on the restrictionists that an American singer who aspires to be
+a prima donna must trick herself out with a name borrowed from the
+steerage lists of recent arrivals at Ellis Island?
+
+If it is the scum of Europe that we are getting in our present
+immigration, it seems to be a scum rich in pearls. Pearl-fishing, of
+course, is accompanied by labor and danger and expense, but it is
+reckoned a paying industry, or practical men would not invest their
+capital in it. The brunt of the business falls on the divers, however.
+Have we divers willing to go down into our human sea and risk an
+encounter with sharks and grope in the ooze at the bottom? We have our
+school teachers and librarians and social missionaries, whose zest
+for their work should shame us out of counting the cost of our human
+fishery. As to the accumulations of empty shells, we are told that in
+the pearl fisheries of South America about one oyster in a thousand
+yields a pearl; and yet the industry goes on.
+
+The lesson of the oyster bank goes further still. We know that the
+nine hundred and ninety-nine empty shells have a lining, at least,
+of mother-of-pearl. We are thus encouraged to look for the generic
+opalescence of humanity in the undistinguished mass of our immigrants.
+What do the aliens show of the specific traits of manhood that go to
+the making of good citizens? Immersed in the tide of American life, do
+their spiritual secretions give off that fine lustre of manhood that
+distinguished the noble Pilgrims of the first immigration? The genius of
+the few is obvious; the group virtue of the mass on exalted occasions,
+such as popular uprisings, has been sufficiently demonstrated. What
+we want to know now is whether the ordinary immigrant under ordinary
+circumstances comes anywhere near the type we have taken as a model.
+
+There can be no effective comparison between the makers of history
+of a most romantic epoch and the venders of bananas on our own
+thrice-commonplace streets. But the Pilgrims were not always engaged
+in signing momentous compacts or in effecting a historic landing. In a
+secondary capacity they were immigrants--strangers come to establish
+themselves in a strange land--and as such they may profitably be used as
+a model by which to measure other immigrants.
+
+The historic merit of their enterprise aside, the virtue of the Pilgrim
+Fathers was that they came not to despoil, but to build; that they
+resolutely turned their backs on conditions of life that galled them,
+and set out to make their own conditions in a strange and untried world,
+at great hazard to life and limb and fortune; that they asked no favors
+of God, but paid in advance for His miracles, by hewing and digging and
+ploughing and fighting against odds; that they respected humankind,
+believed in themselves, and pushed the business of the moment as if the
+universe hung on the result.
+
+The average immigrant of to-day, like the immigrant of 1620, comes to
+build--to build a civilized home under a civilized government, which
+diminishes the amount of barbarity in the world. He, too, like that
+earlier newcomer, has rebelled against the conditions of his life,
+and adventured halfway across the world in search of more acceptable
+conditions, facing exile and uncertainty and the terrors of the untried.
+He also pays as he goes along, and in very much the same coin as
+did the Pilgrims; awaiting God's miracle of human happiness in the
+grisly darkness of the mine, in the fierce glare of the prairie ranch,
+in the shrivelling heat of coke-ovens, beside roaring cotton-gins,
+beside blinding silk-looms, in stifling tailor-shops, in nerve-racking
+engine-rooms,--in all those places where the assurance and pride of
+the State come to rest upon the courage and patience of the individual
+citizen.
+
+There is enough of peril left in the adventure of emigration to mark him
+who undertakes it as a man of some daring and resource. Has civilization
+smoothed the sea, or have not steamships been known to founder as well
+as sailing vessels? Does not the modern immigrant also venture among
+strangers, who know not his ways nor speak his tongue nor worship his
+God? If his landing is not threatened by savages in ambush, he has
+to run the gauntlet of exacting laws that serve not his immediate
+interests. The early New England farmer used to carry his rifle with him
+in the fields, to be ready for prowling Indians, and the gutter-merchant
+of New York to-day is obliged to carry about the whole armory of his
+wits, to avert the tomahawk of competition. No less cruel than Indian
+chiefs to their white captives is the greedy industrial boss to the
+laborers whom poverty puts at his mercy; and how could you better match
+the wolves and foxes that prowled about the forest clearings of our
+ancestors than by the pack of sharpers and misinformers who infest the
+immigrant quarters of our cities?
+
+Measured by the exertions necessary to overcome them, the difficulties
+that beset the modern immigrant are no less formidable than those
+which the Pilgrims had to face. There has never been a time when it
+was more difficult to get something for nothing than it is to-day, but
+the unromantic setting of modern enterprises leads us to underestimate
+the moral qualities that make success possible to-day. Undoubtedly the
+pioneer with an axe over his shoulder is a more picturesque figure
+than the clerk with a pencil behind his ear, but we who have stood up
+against the shocks of modern life should know better than to confuse the
+picturesque with the heroic. Do we not know that it takes a _man_ to
+beat circumstances, to-day as in the days of the pioneers? And manliness
+is always the same mixture of courage, self-reliance, perseverance, and
+faith.
+
+Inventions have multiplied since the days of the Pilgrims, but which
+of our mechanical devices takes the place of the old-fashioned quality
+of determination where obstacles are to be overcome? The New England
+wilderness retreated not before the axe, but before the diligence
+of the men who wielded the axe; and diligence it is which to-day
+transmutes the city's refuse into a loaf for the ragpicker's children.
+Resourcefulness--the ability to adjust the means to the end--enters
+equally in the subtle enterprises of the business man and in the
+hardy exploits of the settler; and it takes as much patience to wait
+for returns on a petty investment of capital as it does to watch the
+sprouting of an acre of corn.
+
+Hardiness and muscle and physical courage were the seventeenth-century
+manifestations of the same moral qualities which to-day are expressed
+as intensity and nerve and commercial daring. Our country being in part
+cultivated, in part savage, we need citizens with the endowment of the
+twentieth century, and citizens with the pioneer endowment. The "new"
+immigration, however interpreted, consists in the main of these two
+types. Whether we get these elements in the proportion best suited to
+our needs is another question, to be answered in its place. At this
+point it is only necessary to admit that the immigrant possesses an
+abundance of the homely virtues of the useful citizen in times of peace.
+
+We arrived at this conclusion by a theoretical analysis of the qualities
+that carry a man through life to-day; and that was fair reasoning,
+since the great majority of aliens are known to make good, if not in
+the first generation, then in the second or the third. Any sociologist,
+any settlement worker, any census clerk will tell you that the history
+of the average immigrant family of the "new" period is represented by
+an ascending curve. The descending curves are furnished by degenerate
+families of what was once prime American stock. I want no better
+proof of these facts than I find in the respective vocabularies of
+the missionary in the slums of New York and the missionary in the New
+England hills. At the settlement on Eldridge Street they talk about
+hastening the process of Americanization of the immigrant; the country
+minister in the Berkshires talks about the rehabilitation of the Yankee
+farmer. That is, the one assists at an upward process, the other seeks
+to reverse a downward process.
+
+Right here, in these opposite tendencies of the poor of the foreign
+quarters and the poor of the Yankee fastnesses, I read the most
+convincing proof that what we get in the steerage is not the refuse, but
+the sinew and bone of all the nations. If rural New England to-day shows
+signs of degeneracy, it is because much of her sinew and bone departed
+from her long ago. Some of the best blood of New England answered to the
+call of "Westward ho!" when the empty lands beyond the Alleghanies gaped
+for population, while on the spent farms of the Puritan settlements too
+many sons awaited the division of the father's property. Of those who
+were left behind, many, of course, were detained by habit and sentiment,
+love of the old home being stronger in them than the lure of adventure.
+Of the aristocracy of New England that portion stayed at home which
+was fortified by wealth, and so did not feel the economic pressure of
+increased population; of the proletariat remained, on the whole, the
+less robust, the less venturesome, the men and women of conservative
+imagination.
+
+It was bound to be so, because, wherever the population is set in
+motion by internal pressure, the emigrant train is composed of the
+stoutest, the most resourceful of those who are not held back by the
+roots of wealth or sentiment. Voluntary emigration always calls for
+the highest combination of the physical and moral virtues. The law of
+analogy, therefore, might suffice to teach us that with every shipload
+of immigrants we get a fresh infusion of pioneer blood. But theory is
+a tight-rope on which every monkey of a logician can balance himself.
+We practical Americans of the twentieth century like to feel the broad
+platform of tested facts beneath our feet.
+
+[Illustration: ROUGH WORK AND LOW WAGES FOR THE IMMIGRANT]
+
+The fact about the modern immigrant is that he is everywhere continuing
+the work begun by our pioneer ancestors. So much we may learn from a
+bare recital of the occupations of aliens. They supply most of the
+animal strength and primitive patience that are at the bottom of our
+civilization. In California they gather the harvest, in Arizona they dig
+irrigation ditches, in Oregon they fell forests, in West Virginia they
+tunnel coal, in Massachusetts they plant the tedious crops suitable to
+an exhausted soil. In the cities they build subways and skyscrapers and
+railroad terminals that are the wonder of the world. Wherever rough work
+and low wages go together, we have a job for the immigrant.
+
+The prouder we grow, the more we lean on the immigrant. The Wall Street
+magnate would be about as effective as a puppet were it not for the army
+of foreigners who execute his schemes. The magic of stocks and bonds
+lies in railroad ties and in quarried stone and in axle grease applied
+at the right time. A Harriman might sit till doomsday gibbering at the
+telephone and the stock exchange would take no notice of him if a band
+of nameless "Dagos" a thousand miles away failed to repair a telegraph
+pole. New York City is building an aqueduct that will surpass the works
+of the Romans, and the average New Yorker will know nothing about it
+until he reads in the newspapers the mayor's speech at the inauguration
+of the new water supply.
+
+Our brains, our wealth, our ambitions flow in channels dug by the hands
+of immigrants. Alien hands erect our offices, rivet our bridges, and
+pile up the proud masonry of our monuments. Ignoring in this connection
+the fact that the engineer as well as the laborer is often of alien
+race, we owe to mere muscle a measure of recognition proportionate to
+our need of muscle in our boasted material progress. An imaginative
+schoolboy left to himself must presently catch the resemblance between
+the pick-and-shovel men toiling at our aqueducts and the heroes of
+the axe and rifle extolled in his textbooks as the "sturdy pioneers."
+Considered without prejudice, the chief difference between these two
+types is the difference between jean overalls and fringed buckskins.
+Contemporaneousness takes the romance out of everything; otherwise we
+might be rubbing elbows with heroes. Whatever merit there was in hewing
+and digging and hauling in the days of the first settlers still inheres
+in the same operations to-day. Yes, and a little extra; for a stick
+of dynamite is more dangerous to handle than a crowbar, and the steam
+engine makes more widows in a year than ever the Indian did with bloody
+tomahawk and stealthy arrow.
+
+There is no contention here that every fellow who successfully passes
+the entrance ordeals at Ellis Island is necessarily a hero. That there
+are weaklings in the train of the sturdy throng of foreigners nobody
+knows better than I. I have witnessed the pitiful struggles of the
+unfit, and have seen the failures drop all around me. But no bold army
+ever marched to the field of action without a fringe of camp-followers
+on its flanks. The moral vortex created by the enterprises of the
+resolute sucks in a certain number of the weak-hearted; and this is
+especially true in mass movements, where the enthusiasm of the crowd
+ekes out the courage of the individual. If it is not too impious
+to suggest it, may there not have been among the passengers of the
+Mayflower two or three or half a dozen who came over because their
+cousins did, not because they had any zest for the adventure?
+
+When we remember that the Pilgrim Fathers came with their families, we
+may be very sure that that was the case, because the different members
+of a family are seldom of the same moral fibre. No doubt the austere
+ambitions of the voyagers of the Mayflower made them stern recruiting
+masters, but our knowledge of men in the mass forbids the assumption
+that they were all heroes of the first rank who stepped ashore on
+Plymouth Rock.
+
+    I have little sympathy with declaimers about the Pilgrim Fathers,
+    who look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman
+    foresight. An entire ship's company of Columbuses is what the world
+    never saw.
+
+It takes a wizard critic like Lowell to chip away the crust of historic
+sentiment and show us our forefathers in the flesh. Lowell would agree
+with me that the Pilgrims were a picked troop in the sense that there
+was an immense preponderance of virtue among them. And that is exactly
+what we must say of our modern immigrants, if we judge them by the sum
+total of their effect on our country.
+
+Not a little of the glory of the Pilgrim Fathers rests on their own
+testimony. Our opinion of them is greatly enhanced by the expression we
+find, in the public and private documents they have left us, of their
+ideals, their aims, their expectations in the New World. Let us judge
+our immigrants also out of their own mouths, as future generations will
+be sure to judge them. And in seeking this testimony let us remember
+that humanity in general does not produce one oracle in a decade. Very
+few men know their own hearts, or can give an account of the impulses
+that drive them in a particular direction. We put our ears to the lips
+of the eloquent when we want to know what the world is thinking. And
+what do we get when we sift down the sayings of the spokesmen among
+the foreign folk? An anthem in praise of American ideals, a passionate
+glorification of the principles of democracy.
+
+Let it be understood that the men and women of exceptional intellect,
+who have surveyed the situation from philosophical heights, are not
+trumpeting forth their own high dreams alone. If they have won the ear
+of the American nation and shamed the indifferent and silenced the
+cynical, it is because they voiced the feeling of the inarticulate mob
+that welters in the foreign quarters of our cities. I am never so clear
+as to the basis of my faith in America as when I have been talking with
+the ungroomed mothers of the East Side. A widow down on Division Street
+was complaining bitterly of the hardships of her lot, alone in an alien
+world with four children to bring up. In the midst of her complaints
+the children came in from school. "Well," said the hard-pressed widow,
+"bread isn't easy to get in America, but the children can go to school,
+and that's more than bread. Rich man, poor man, it's all the same: the
+children can go to school."
+
+The poor widow had never heard of a document called the Declaration of
+Independence, but evidently she had discovered in American practice
+something corresponding to one of the great American principles,--the
+principle of equality of opportunity,--and she valued it more than the
+necessaries of animal life. Even so was it valued by the Fathers of the
+Republic, when they deliberately incurred the dangers of a war with
+mighty England in defense of that and similar principles.
+
+[Illustration: THE UNGROOMED MOTHER OF THE EAST SIDE]
+
+The widow's sentiment was finely echoed by another Russian immigrant,
+a man who drives an ice-wagon for a living. His case is the more
+impressive from the fact that he left a position of comparative opulence
+in the old country, under the protection of a wealthy uncle who employed
+him as steward of his estates. He had had servants to wait on him and
+money enough to buy some of the privileges of citizenship which the
+Russian Government doles out to the favored few. "But what good was
+it to me?" he asked. "My property was not my own if the police wanted
+to take it away. I could spend thousands to push my boy through the
+Gymnasium, and he might get a little education as a favor, and still
+nothing out of it, if he isn't allowed to be anything. Here I work like
+a slave, and my wife she works like a slave, too,--in the old country
+she had servants in the house,--but what do I care, as long as I know
+what I earn I got it for my own? I got to furnish my house one chair at
+a time, in America, but nobody can take it away from me, the little that
+I got. And it costs me nothing to educate my family. Maybe they can,
+maybe they can't go to college, but all can go through grammar school,
+and high school, too, the smart ones. And all go together! Rich and
+poor, all are equal, and I don't get it as a favor."
+
+Better a hard bed in the shelter of justice than a stuffed couch under
+the black canopy of despotism. Better a crust of the bread of the
+intellect freely given him as his right than the whole loaf grudgingly
+handed him as a favor. What nobler insistence on the rights of manhood
+do we find in the writings of the Puritans?
+
+Volumes might be filled with the broken sayings of the humblest among
+the immigrants which, translated into the sounding terms of the
+universal, would give us the precious documents of American history over
+again. Never was the bread of freedom more keenly relished than it is
+to-day, by the very people of whom it is said that they covet only the
+golden platter on which it is served up. We may not say that immigration
+to our country has ceased to be a quest of the ideal as long as the
+immigrants lay so much stress on the spiritual accompaniment of economic
+elevation in America. Nobly built upon the dreams of the Fathers, the
+house of our Republic is nobly tenanted by those who cherish similar
+dreams.
+
+But dreams cannot be brought before a court of inquiry. A diligent
+immigration commission with an appropriation to spend has little time to
+listen to Joseph. A digest of its report is expected to yield statistics
+rather than rhapsodies. The taxpayers want their money's worth of hard
+facts.
+
+But when the facts are raked together and boiled down to a summary that
+the business man may scan on his way to the office, behold! we are
+no wiser than before. For a host of interpreters jump into the seats
+vacated by the extinct commission and harangue us in learned terms on
+the merits and demerits of the immigrant, _as they conceive them_, after
+studying the voluminous report. That is, the question is still what it
+was before: a matter of personal opinion! The man with the vote realizes
+that _he_ has to make up _his_ mind what instructions to send to his
+representative in Congress on the subject of immigration. And where
+shall he, a plain, practical man, unaccustomed to interpret dreams or
+analyze statistics, find an index of the alien's worth that he can read
+through the spectacles of common sense?
+
+There is a phrase in the American vocabulary of approval that sums up
+our national ideal of manhood. That phrase is "a self-made man." To
+such we pay the tribute of our highest admiration, justly regarding our
+self-made men as the noblest product of our democratic institutions.
+Now let any one compile a biographical dictionary of our self-made men,
+from the romantic age of our history down to the prosaic year 1914, and
+see how the smell of the steerage pervades the volume! _There_ is a sign
+that the practical man finds it easy to interpret. Like fruits grow
+from like seeds. Those who can produce under American conditions the
+indigenous type of manhood must be working with the same elements as the
+native American who starts out a yokel and ends up a senator.
+
+Focused under the microscope of theoretical analysis, or viewed through
+the spectacles of common sense, the average immigrant of to-day still
+shows the markings of virtue that have distinguished the best Americans
+from the time of the landing at Plymouth to the opening of the Panama
+Canal. But popular judgment is seldom based on a study of the norm,
+especially in this age of the newspaper. The newspaper is devoted to the
+portrayal of the abnormal--the shining example and the horrible example;
+and most men think they have done justice when they have balanced the
+one against the other, leaving out of account entirely the great mass
+that lies between the two extremes. And even of the two extremes, it is
+the horrible example that is more frequently brought to the attention
+of the public. Half a dozen Italians draw knives in a brawl on a given
+evening, and the morning newspapers are full of the story. On the
+same evening hundreds of Italians were studying civics in the night
+schools, inquiring for classics at the public library, rehearsing for a
+historical pageant at the settlement--and not a word about them in the
+newspapers. One Jewish gangster makes more "copy" than a hundred Jewish
+boys and girls who win honors in college. So also it is the business of
+the police to record the fact that a Greek was arrested for peddling
+without a license, while it is nobody's business to report that a dozen
+other Greeks chipped in their spare change to pay his fine. The reader
+of newspapers is convinced that the foreigners as a whole are a violent,
+vicious, lawless crowd, and the fewer we have of them the better.
+
+Could the annual reports of libraries and settlements be circulated as
+widely as the newspapers, the American public would not be guilty of
+such errors of judgment. But who reads annual reports? The very name
+of them is forbidding! It becomes necessary, therefore, to explain
+the newspaper types that jump to the fore in every discussion of the
+immigrant.
+
+First of all we must get a good grip on our sense of proportion. To
+speak of the immigrants as undesirable because a few of them throw bombs
+or live by gambling is about as fair as it would be for the world to
+call us Americans a nation of dissolute millionaires and industrial
+pirates because a Harry Thaw drank himself into an insane asylum and a
+Rockefeller swept a host of competitors to ruin.
+
+But the bomb-thrower and the gambler are extremely undesirable. Look at
+the Black Hand outrages, look at the Rosenthal case!
+
+Aye, I have looked, and I see plainly that these horrible examples are
+due to the same causes as any shining example that could be named. Each
+is the product of the qualities the immigrant brought with him and the
+opportunities he found here to exercise them. The law-abiding, ambitious
+immigrant who came here a beggar and worked himself into the ranks
+of the princes found his opportunity in our laws and customs, which
+enable the common man to make the most of himself. The blackmailer's
+opportunity was provided by the operation of corrupt politics, which
+removes police commissioners and impeaches governors for trying to
+enforce the law. The Rosenthal case brought forth Lieutenant Becker,
+and an investigation of the spread of the Black Hand terror discovers
+political bosses behind the scenes.(5) We have laws providing for the
+deportation of alien criminals. Why are they not always enforced? When
+we have found the broom that will sweep the political vermin from our
+legislatures, we shan't need to look around for a shovel to keep back
+the scum of Europe. The two will go together.
+
+  (5) See _The Outlook_, August 16, 1913; article by Frank Marshall
+  White.
+
+In the whole catalogue of sins with which the modern immigrant is
+charged, it is not easy to find one in which we Americans are not
+partners,--we who can make and unmake our world by means of the ballot.
+The immigrant is blamed for the unsanitary conditions of the slums, when
+sanitary experts cry shame on our methods of municipal house-cleaning.
+You might dump the whole of the East Side into the German capital and
+there would be no slums there, because the municipal authorities of
+Berlin know how to enforce building regulations, how to plant trees, and
+how to clean the streets. The very existence of the slum is laid at the
+door of the immigrant, but the truth is that the slums were here before
+the immigrants. Most of the foreigners hate the slums, and all but the
+few who have no backbone get out of them as fast as they rise in the
+economic scale. To "move uptown" is the dearest ambition of the average
+immigrant family.
+
+If the slums were due to the influx of foreigners, why should London
+have slums, and more hideous slums than New York? No, the slum is not
+a by-product of the steerage. It is a sore on the social body in many
+civilized countries, due to internal disorders of the economic system. A
+generous dose of social reformation would do more to effect a cure than
+repeated doses of restriction of immigration.
+
+A whole group of phenomena due to social and economic causes have
+been falsely traced, in this country, to the quantity and quality of
+immigration. Among these are the labor troubles, such as non-employment,
+strikes, riots, etc. England has no such immigration as the United
+States, and yet Englishmen suffer from non-employment, from riots and
+bitter strikes. Whom does the English workingman blame for his misery?
+Let the American workingman quarrel with the same enemy. If wage-cutting
+is a sin more justly laid at the door of the immigrant, a minimum wage
+law might put a stop to that.
+
+The immigrant undoubtedly contributes to the congestion of population
+in the cities, but not as a chief cause. Congestion is characteristic
+of city life the world over, and the remedy will be found in improved
+conditions of country life. Moreover, the immigrant has shown himself
+responsive to direction away from the city when a systematic attempt
+is made to help him find his place in the country. There is the
+experience of the Industrial Removal Office of the Baron de Hirsch
+Foundation as a hint of what the Government might accomplish if it took
+a hand in the intelligent distribution of immigration. The records
+of this organization, dealing with a group of immigrants supposed
+to be especially addicted to city life, kill two immigrant myths at
+one stroke. They prove that it is possible to direct the stream of
+immigration in desired channels and that the Jew is not altogether
+averse to contact with the soil; both facts contrary to popular notions.
+
+A good deal of anti-immigration feeling has been based on the vile
+conditions observed in labor camps, by another turn of that logic which
+puts the blame on the victims. A labor camp at its worst is not an
+argument against immigration, but an indictment of the brutality of the
+contractor who cares only to force a maximum of work out of the workmen,
+and cares nothing for their lives; an indictment also of the Government
+that allows such shameful exploitation of the laborers to go on. That
+a labor camp does not have to be a plague spot has been gloriously
+demonstrated by Goethals at Panama. What Goethals did was to emphasize
+the _man_ in workingman, with the result that Panama during the vast
+operations of digging the Canal was a healthier, happier, more inspiring
+place to live in than many of our proudest cities; the workmen came away
+from the job better men and better citizens; and the work was better
+done and with more dispatch and at less expense than any such work was
+ever done by the old-fashioned method, where the workers are treated not
+as men but as tools.
+
+There may not be another Goethals in the country, but what a great
+man devises little men may copy. The labor camp must never again be
+mentioned as a reproach to the immigrant who suffers degradation in it,
+or the world will think that we do not know the meaning of the medals
+which we ourselves have hung on Goethals's breast.
+
+Immigrants are accused of civic indifference if they do not become
+naturalized, but when we look into the conditions affecting
+naturalization we wonder at the numbers who do become citizens.
+Facilities for civic education of the adult are very scant,
+and dependent mostly on the fluctuating enthusiasm of private
+philanthropies. The administration of the naturalization laws differs
+from State to State and is accompanied by serious material hindrances;
+while the community is so indifferent to the civic progress of its alien
+members that it is possible for a foreigner to live in this country
+for _sixteen years_, coming in contact with all classes of Americans,
+without getting the bare information that he may become a citizen of
+the United States if he wants to. Such a case, as reported by a charity
+worker of New Britain, Connecticut, makes a sensitive American choke
+with mortification. If we were ourselves as patriotic as we expect the
+immigrant to be, we would employ Salvation Army methods to draw the
+foreigner into the civic fold. Instead of that, we leave his citizenship
+to chance--or to the most corrupt political agencies.
+
+I would rather not review the blackest of all charges against the
+immigrant, that he has a baleful effect on municipal politics: I am
+so ashamed of the implications. But sensible citizens will talk and
+talk about the immigrant selling his vote, and not know whom they are
+accusing. Votes cannot be sold unless there is a market for them. Who
+creates the market for votes? The ward politician, behind whom stands
+the party boss, alert, and powerful; and behind him--the indifferent
+electorate who allow him to flourish.
+
+Among immigrants of the "new" order, the wholesale prostitution of
+the ballot is confined to those groups which are largely subjected to
+the industrial slavery of mining and manufacturing communities and
+construction camps. These helpless creatures, in their very act of
+sinning, bear twofold witness against us who accuse them. The foreman
+who disposes of their solid vote acquires his power under an economic
+system which delivers them up, body and soul, to the man who pays them
+wages, and turns it to account under a political system which makes the
+legislature subservient to the stock exchange. But let it be definitely
+noted that to admit that groups of immigrants under economic control
+fall an easy prey to political corruptionists is very far from proving
+any inherent viciousness in the immigrants themselves.
+
+Neither does the immigrant's civic reputation depend entirely on
+negative evidence. New York City has the largest foreign population
+in the United States, and precisely in that city the politicians
+have learned that they cannot count on the foreign vote, because
+it is not for sale. A student of New York politics speaks of the
+"uncontrollable and unapproachable vote of the Ghetto." Repeated
+analyses of the election returns of the Eighth District, which has
+the largest foreign population of all, show that "politically it is
+one of the most uncertain sections" in the city. Many generations of
+campaign managers have discovered to their sorrow that the usual party
+blandishments are wasted on the East Side masses. Hester Street follows
+leaders and causes rather than party emblems. Nowhere is the art of
+splitting a ticket better understood. The only time you can predict the
+East Side vote is when there is a sharp alignment of the better citizens
+against the boss-ridden. Then you will find the naturalized citizens in
+the same camp with men like Jacob Riis and women like Lillian Wald. And
+the experience of New York is duplicated in Chicago and in Philadelphia
+and in every center of immigration. Ask the reformers.
+
+How often we demand more civic virtue of the stranger than we ourselves
+possess! A little more time spent in weeding our own garden will relieve
+us of the necessity of counting the tin cans in the immigrant's back
+yard.
+
+As to tin cans, the immigrants are not the only ones who scatter
+them broadcast. How can we talk about the foreigners defacing public
+property, when our own bill-boards disfigure every open space that God
+tries to make beautiful for us? It is true that the East Side crowds
+litter the parks with papers and fruit-skins and peanut shells, but they
+would not be able to do so if the park regulations were persistently
+enforced. And in the mean time the East Side children, in their pageants
+and dance festivals, make the most beautiful use of the parks that a
+poet could desire.
+
+There exists a society in the United States the object of which is to
+protect the natural beauties and historical landmarks of our country.
+Who are the marauders who have called such a society into being? Who is
+it that threatens to demolish the Palisades and drain off Niagara? Who
+are the vulgar folk who scrawl their initials on trees and monuments,
+who chip off bits from historic tombstones, who profane the holy echoes
+of the mountains by calling foolish phrases through a megaphone? The
+officers of the Scenic and Historic Preservation Society are not
+watching Ellis Island. On the contrary, it was the son of an immigrant
+whose expert testimony, given before a legislative committee at Albany,
+helped the Society to save the Falls of the Genesee from devastation by
+a power company. This same immigrant's son, on another occasion, spent
+two mortal hours tearing off visiting-cards from a poet's grave--cards
+bearing the names of American vacationists.
+
+Some of the things we say against the immigrants sound very strange from
+American lips. We speak of the corruption of our children's manners
+through contact with immigrant children in the public schools, when
+all the world is scolding us for our children's rude deportment. Finer
+manners are grown on a tiny farm in Italy than in the roaring subways of
+New York; and contrast our lunch-counter manners with the table-manners
+of the Polish ghetto, where bread must not be touched with unwashed
+hands, where a pause for prayer begins and ends each meal, and on
+festival occasions parents and children join in folk-songs between
+courses!
+
+If there is a corruption of manners, it may be that it works in the
+opposite direction from what we suppose. At any rate, we ourselves admit
+that the children of foreigners, before they are Americanized, have a
+greater respect than our children for the Fifth Commandment.
+
+We say that immigrants nowadays come only to exploit our country,
+because some of them go back after a few years, taking their savings
+with them. The real exploiters of our country's wealth are not the
+foreign laborers, but the capitalists who pay them wages. The laborer
+who returns home with his savings leaves us an equivalent in the
+products of labor; a day's service rendered for every day's wages.
+The capitalists take away our forests and water-courses and mineral
+treasures and give us watered stock in return.
+
+Of the class of aliens who do not come to make their homes here, but
+only to earn a few hundred dollars to invest in a farm or a cottage
+in their native village, a greater number than we imagine are brought
+over by industrial agents in violation of the contract labor law. Put
+an end to the stimulation of immigration, and we shall see very few of
+the class who do not come to stay. And even as it is, not all of those
+who return to Europe do so in order to spend their American fortune.
+Some go back to recover from ruin encountered at the hands of American
+land swindlers. Some go back to be buried beside their fathers, having
+lost their health in unsanitary American factories. And some are helped
+aboard on crutches, having lost a limb in a mine explosion that could
+have been prevented. When we watch the procession of cripples hobbling
+back to their native villages, it looks more as if America is exploiting
+Europe.
+
+O that the American people would learn where their enemies lurk! Not
+the immigrant is ruining our country, but the venal politicians who try
+to make the immigrant the scapegoat for all the sins of untrammeled
+capitalism--these and their masters. Find me the agent who obstructs the
+movement for the abolition of child labor, and I will show you who it
+is that condemns able-bodied men to eat their hearts out in idleness;
+who brutalizes our mothers and tortures tender babies; who fills the
+morgues with the emaciated bodies of young girls, and the infirmaries
+with little white cots; who fastens the shame of illiteracy on our
+enlightened land, and causes American boys to grow up too ignorant to
+mark a ballot; who sucks the blood of the nation, fattens on its brains,
+and throws its heart to the wolves of the money market.
+
+The stench of the slums is nothing to the stench of the child-labor
+iniquity. If the foreigners are taking the bread out of the mouth of
+the American workingman, it is by the maimed fingers of their fainting
+little ones.
+
+And if we want to know whether the immigrant parents are the promoters
+or the victims of the child labor system, we turn to the cotton mills,
+where forty thousand native American children between seven and sixteen
+years of age toil between ten and twelve hours a day, while the fathers
+rot in the degradation of idleness.
+
+From all this does it follow that we should let down the bars and
+dispense with the guard at Ellis Island? Only in so far as the policy
+of restriction is based on the theory that the present immigration is
+derived from the scum of humanity. But the immigrants may be desirable
+and immigration undesirable. We sometimes have to deny ourselves to the
+most congenial friends who knock at our door. At this point, however,
+we are not trying to answer the question whether immigration is good
+for us. We are concerned only with the reputation of the immigrant--and
+incidentally with the reputation of those who have sought to degrade
+him in our eyes. If statecraft bids us lock the gate, and our national
+code of ethics ratifies the order, lock it we must, but we need not call
+names through the keyhole.
+
+Mount guard in the name of the Republic if the health of the Republic
+requires it, but let no such order be issued until her statesmen and
+philosophers and patriots have consulted together. Above all, let the
+voice of prejudice be stilled, let not self-interest chew the cud
+of envy in full sight of the nation, and let no syllable of willful
+defamation mar the oracles of state. For those who are excluded when our
+bars are down are exiles from Egypt, whose feet stumble in the desert
+of political and social slavery, whose hearts hunger for the bread of
+freedom. The ghost of the Mayflower pilots every immigrant ship, and
+Ellis Island is another name for Plymouth Rock.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE FIERY FURNACE
+
+Nebuchadnezzar spake and said unto them, . . . Now if ye be ready that
+at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet . . . ye fall down and
+worship the image that I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye
+shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace;
+and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?
+
+Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, answered and said to the king, O,
+Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter. If it
+be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning
+fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if
+not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor
+worship the golden image which thou hast set up.
+
+Dan. iii, 14-18.
+
+
+In the discussion of the third question,--whether immigration is good
+for us,--more honest Americans have gone astray than in the other two
+divisions. Let it be said at the outset that those who have erred have
+been about equally distributed between the ayes and the nays. For the
+answer to this question is neither aye nor nay, but something that
+cannot be put into a single syllable. If we steer our way cautiously
+between the opposing ranks, the light of the true answer will presently
+shine on us.
+
+The arguments they severally advance in defense of their respective
+positions reveal an appalling number of citizens on each side of the
+house who have entirely disregarded the principles involved. Those
+who, like the labor-union lobbyists, point to the empty dinner-pails
+of American workingmen as a reason for keeping out foreign labor, are
+no more at fault than the lobbyists of the opposite side, who offer in
+support of the open-door policy statistics showing the need of rough
+laborers in various branches of our current material development. All of
+them are wrong in that they would treat our foreign brothers as pawns
+on the chessboard of our selfish needs. Show me a million American
+workingmen out of work, and I fail to see a justification for the
+exclusion of a million men from other lands who are also looking for a
+job. Does the mother of an impoverished family strangle half her brood
+in order that the other half may have enough to eat? No; she divides the
+last crust equally among her starvelings, and the laws of nature do the
+rest.
+
+This analogy, of course, is a vessel without a bottom unless the gospel
+of the brotherhood of man is accepted as a premise of our debate. The
+only logic it will hold is the logic of a practical incarnation of
+the theories we loudly applaud on occasions of patriotic excitement.
+That ought to be acceptable both to the poor men who like to parade
+the streets with the Stars and Stripes at the head of the column and
+the _Marseillaise_ on their lips, and to the rich men who subscribe
+generously to soldiers' and sailors' monument funds, and who ransack
+ancient chronicles to establish their connection with the heroes of the
+Revolution. Let the paraders and the ancestor-worshipers unite in a
+practical recognition of the rights of their belated brothers who are
+seeking to enter the kingdom of liberty and justice, and they will have
+given a living shape to the sentiment they symbolically honor, each in
+his own way.
+
+I am not content if the labor leaders retire from the lobby when all the
+mills are running full time and shop foremen are scouring the streets
+for "hands." It is no proof of our sincerity that we are indifferent in
+times of plenty as to who it is that picks up the crumbs after we have
+fed. They only are true Americans who, remembering that this country was
+wrested from the English in the name of the common rights of humanity,
+resist the temptation to insure their own soup-kettles by patrolling the
+national pastures and granaries against the hungry from other lands.
+Share and share alike is the motto of brotherhood.
+
+But who will venture to preach such devotion to principle to the starved
+and naked and oppressed? Why, I, even I, who refuse to believe that the
+American workingman is past answering the call of a difficult ideal,
+no matter what privations are gnawing at his vitals. I have read in
+the history books that when Lincoln issued his call for volunteers,
+they came from mills and factories and little shops as promptly as from
+counting-rooms and college halls. Fathers of large families that looked
+to him for bread kissed their babies and marched off to the war, taking
+an elder son or two with them. Were they all aristocrats whose names
+are preserved on four thousand gravestones at Gettysburg? And who were
+they who went barefoot in the snow and starved with Washington in Valley
+Forge? The common people, most of them, the toilers for daily bread,
+they who give all when they give aught, because they have not enough to
+divide.
+
+They only mark themselves as calumniators of the poor who protest that
+times and men have changed since Washington's and Lincoln's day; who
+think that the breed of heroes died out with the passing of the Yankee
+farmer and the provincial townsman of the earlier periods. Shall not the
+testimony of a daughter of the slums be heard when the poor are being
+judged? I was reared in a tenement district of a New England metropolis,
+where the poor of many nations contended with each other for a scant
+living; and the only reason I am no longer of the slums is because a
+hundred heroes and heroines among my neighbors fought for my release.
+Not only the members of my family, but mere acquaintances put their
+little all at my disposal. Merely that a dreamer among them might come
+to the fulfillment of her dream, they fed and sheltered and nursed me
+and cheered me on, again and again facing the wolves of want for my
+sake, giving me the whole cloak if the half did not suffice to save the
+spark of life in my puny body.
+
+If my knowledge of the slums counts for anything, it counts for a
+positive assurance that the personal devotion which is daily manifested
+in the life of the tenements in repeated acts of self-denial, from the
+sharing of a delicacy with a sick neighbor to the education of a gifted
+child by the year-long sacrifices of the entire family, is a spark from
+the smouldering embers of idealism that lie buried in the ashes of
+sordid existence, and await but the fanning of a great purpose to leap
+up into a flame of abstract devotion.
+
+Times have changed, indeed, since the days of Washington. His was a time
+of beginnings, ours is a time ripe for accomplishment. And yet the seed
+the Fathers sowed we shall not reap, unless we consecrate ourselves to
+our purpose as they did,--all of us, the whole people, no man presuming
+to insult his neighbor by exempting him on account of apparent weakness.
+The common people in Washington's time, and again in Lincoln's time,
+stood up like men, because they were called as men, not as weaklings who
+must be coddled and spared the shock of robust moral enterprise. Not a
+full belly but a brimming soul made heroes out of ploughboys in '76.
+The common man of to-day is capable of a like transformation if pricked
+with the electric needle of a lofty appeal. Those who are teaching
+the American workingman to demand the protection of his job against
+legitimate alien competition are trampling out the embers of popular
+idealism, instead of fanning it into a blaze that should transfigure the
+life of the nation.
+
+[Illustration: A FRESH INFUSION OF PIONEER BLOOD]
+
+Idealism of the finest, heroism unsurpassed, are frequently displayed in
+the familiar episodes of the class war that is going on before our eyes,
+under unionistic leadership. But it is a narrowing of the vision that
+makes a great mass of the people adopt as the unit of human salvation
+the class instead of the nation. The struggle which has for its object
+the putting of the rapacious rich in their place does not constitute a
+full programme of national progress. If labor leaders think they are
+leading in a holy war, they should be the last to encourage disrespect
+of the principles of righteousness for which they are fighting. It
+is inconsistent, to put it mildly, to lead a demonstration against
+entrenched capital on one day, and the next day to head a delegation in
+Congress in favor of entrenched labor. Is there anything brotherly about
+a monopolization of the labor market? Substituting the selfishness of
+the poor for the selfishness of the rich will bring us no nearer the day
+of universal justice.
+
+Though I should not hesitate to insist on a generous attitude toward
+the foreigner even if it imposed on our own people all the hardships
+which are alleged to be the result of immigration, I do not disdain to
+point out the fact that, when all is said and done, there is enough of
+America to go around for many a year to come. It is hard to know whether
+to take the restrictionists seriously when they tell us that the country
+is becoming overcrowded. The population of the United States is less
+than three times that of England, and England is only a dot on our map.
+In Texas alone there is room for the population of the whole world, with
+a homestead of half an acre for every family of five, and a patch the
+size of Maryland left over for a public park. A schoolboy's geography
+will supply the figures for this pretty sum.
+
+The over-supply of labor is another myth of the restrictionist
+imagination that vanishes at one glance around the country, which
+shows us crops spoiling for want of harvesters, and women running to
+the legislature for permission to extend their legal working-day in
+the fields; such is the scarcity of men. Said ex-Secretary Nagel,
+commenting upon the immigration bill which was so strenuously pushed by
+the restrictionists in the Sixty-third Congress, only to be vetoed by
+President Taft:--
+
+    In my judgment no sufficiently earnest and intelligent effort has
+    been made to bring our wants and our supply together, and so far
+    the same forces that give the chief support to this provision of
+    the new bill [a literacy test, intended to check the influx of
+    cheap labor] have stubbornly resisted any effort looking to an
+    intelligent distribution of new immigration to meet the needs of our
+    vast country. [And] no such drastic measure [as the literacy test]
+    should be adopted until we have at least exhausted the possibilities
+    of a rational distribution of these new forces.
+
+Distribution--geographical, seasonal, occupational; that should be our
+next watch-word, if we are bent on applying our vast resources to our
+needs. It cannot be too often pointed out that a nation of our political
+confession is bound to try every other possible solution of her problems
+before resorting to a measure that encroaches on the rights of humanity.
+And so far are we from exhausting the possibilities of internal reform
+that even the most obvious economic errors have not been corrected.
+It is not good sense nor good morals to keep men at work twelve and
+thirteen hours a day, seven days in the week, as they do, for example,
+in the paper-mills. It is bad policy to use women in the mills; it is
+heinous to use the children. Every one of those over-long jobs should
+be cut in two; the women should be sent back to the nursery, and the
+children put to school, and able-bodied men set in their places.
+
+If such a programme, consistently carried out throughout the country,
+still left considerable numbers unemployed, there is one more remedy
+we might apply. We might chain to the benches in the city parks, where
+involuntary idlers now pass the day, all the agents and runners who move
+around Europe at the expense of steamship companies, labor contractors,
+and mill-owners. We must _stop_ the importation of labor, not talk about
+stopping it.
+
+To refrain from soliciting immigration is a very different thing from
+imposing an arbitrary check on voluntary immigration, and gives very
+different results. The class of men who are lured across the ocean by
+the golden promises of labor agents are not of the same moral order as
+those who are spurred to the great adventure by a desire to share in our
+American civilization. When we restrain the runners, we rid ourselves
+automatically of the least desirable element of immigration,--the
+hordes of irresponsible job-hunters without family who do not ask to
+be steered into the current of American life, and whose mission here
+is accomplished when they have saved up a petty fortune with which
+to dazzle the eyes of peasant sweethearts at home. It is this class
+that contributes, through its ignorance and aloofness, the bulk of the
+deplorable phenomena which are quoted by restrictionists as arguments
+against immigration in general. But we must go after them by the direct
+method, applying the force of the law to the agents who rout them out of
+their native villages. When we attempt to weed out this one element by
+indirect methods, such as the oft-proposed literacy test, we are guilty
+of the folly of discharging a cannon into the midst of the sheepfold
+with the object of killing the wolf.
+
+If through such a measure as the literacy test the desired results
+could be insured, we should still be loath to adopt it until every
+other possible method had been tried. To hit at labor competition
+through a pretended fear of illiteracy is a tricky policy, and trickery
+is incompatible with the moral dignity of the American nation. Are
+we bankrupt in statesmanship that we must pawn the jewel of national
+righteousness? It required no small amount of ingenuity to find a
+connection between the immigrant's ability to earn a wage and his
+inability to read. If the resourceful gentlemen who invented the
+literacy test would concentrate their talents on the problem of stopping
+the stimulation of immigration, we should soon hear the last of the
+over-supply of cheap labor. Where there's a will there's a way, in
+statecraft as in other things.
+
+It is not enough for the integrity of our principles to scrutinize the
+ethical nature of proposed legislation. It must be understood in general
+that whoever asks for restrictive measures as a means of improving
+American labor conditions must prove beyond a doubt, first, that the
+evils complained of are not the result of our own sins, and next,
+that the foreign laborer on coming to America has not exchanged worse
+conditions for better. The gospel of brotherhood will not let us define
+our own good in terms of indifference to the good of others.
+
+Preaching selfishness in the name of the American workingman is an
+insidious way of shutting him out from participation in the national
+mission. If it is good for the nation to live up to its highest
+traditions, it cannot be bad for any part of the nation to contribute
+its share toward the furtherance of the common ideal. For we are not
+a nation of high and low, where the aristocracy acts and the populace
+applauds. If America is going to do anything in the world, every man and
+woman among us will have a share in it.
+
+Objection to the influx of foreign labor is sometimes based on a
+theory the very opposite of the scarcity of work. Some say that there
+is altogether too much work being done in this country--that we are
+developing our natural resources and multiplying industries at a rate
+too rapid for wholesome growth; and to check this feverish activity it
+is proposed to cut off the supply of labor which makes it possible.
+
+I doubt, in the first place, if it is reasonable to expect a young
+nation with half a continent to explore to restrain its activity, as
+long as there are herculean tasks in sight, any more than we would
+expect a boy to walk off the diamond in the middle of the game. Or if it
+is thought best to slacken the speed of material progress, the brakes
+should be applied at Wall Street, not at Ellis Island. The foreign
+laborer is merely the tool in the hands of the promoter, indispensable
+to, but not responsible for, his activities. The workmen come in _after_
+the promoter has launched his scheme. At least, I have never heard
+of a development company or industrial corporation organized for the
+purpose of providing jobs for a shipload of immigrants. That species of
+philanthropy our benevolent millionaires have not hit on as yet.
+
+It is because the brutal method is the easiest that we are advised to
+confiscate the tools of industry in order to check the rate of material
+development. The more dignified way would be to restrain the captains of
+industry, by asserting our authority over our own citizens in matters
+affecting the welfare of the nation. An up-to-date mother, desiring
+that her little boy should not play with the scissors, would be ashamed
+to put them on a high shelf: she would train the boy not to touch them
+though they lay within his reach. Why should the assemblage of mothers
+and fathers who constitute the nation show less pride about their
+methods than a lone woman in the nursery?
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Outside the economic field, fear of the immigrant is perhaps oftenest
+expressed in the sociological anxiety concerning assimilation. The
+question is raised whether so many different races, products of a great
+variety of physical and moral environments, can possibly fuse into a
+harmonious nation, obedient to one law, devoted to one flag. Some people
+see no indication of the future in the fact that race-blending has been
+going on here from the beginning of our history, because the elements we
+now get are said to differ from us more radically than the elements we
+assimilated in the past.
+
+To allay our anxiety on this point, we have only to remind ourselves
+that none of the great nations of Europe that present such a homogeneous
+front to-day arose from a single stock; and the differences between
+peoples in the times of the political beginnings of Europe were vastly
+greater than the differences between East and West, North and South,
+to-day. Moreover, the European nations were assorted at the point of
+the sword, while in America the nations are coming together of their
+own free will; and who can doubt that the spiritual forces of common
+education, common interests and associations are more effective welding
+agents than brute force?
+
+Doubts as to the assimilative qualities of current immigration do
+not exist in the minds of the workers in settlements, libraries, and
+schools. These people have a faith in the future of the strangers that
+is based on long and intimate experience with foreigners from many
+lands. When they are dealing with the normal product of immigration, the
+people who come here following some dim star of higher destiny for their
+children, the social missionaries are jubilantly sure of the result; and
+face to face with the less promising material of the labor camps, where
+thousands are brought together by the lure of the dollar and are kept
+together by the devices of economic exploitation, the missionaries are
+still undaunted. They have discovered that sanitation is a remedy for
+the filth of the camp; that a spelling-book will make inroads on the
+ignorance of the mob; that a lecture hall will diminish the business
+of the saloon and the brothel; that substituting neighborly kindness
+for brutal neglect will fan to a glow the divine spark in the coarsest
+natures. And then there is the Goethals way of managing a labor camp.
+
+The remedy for the moral indigestion which unchecked immigration is said
+to induce is in enlarging the organs of digestion. More evening classes,
+more civic centers, more missionaries in the field, and above all more
+neighborly interest on the part of the whole people. If immigration
+were a green apple that we might take or leave, we might choose between
+letting the apple alone or eating it and following it up with a dose of
+our favorite household remedy. But immigration consists of masses of our
+fellow men moving upon our country in pursuit of their share of human
+happiness. Where human rights are involved, we have no choice. We have
+to eat this green apple,--the Law of the Fathers enjoins it on us,--but
+we have only ourselves to blame if we suffer from colic afterwards,
+knowing the sure remedy.
+
+There is no lack of resources, material or spiritual, for carrying out
+our half of the assimilation programme. We have money enough, brains
+enough, inspiration enough. The only reason the mill is grinding so
+slowly is that the miller is overworked and the hopper is choked. We
+are letting a few do the work we should all be helping in. At the
+settlements, devoted young men and women are struggling with classes
+that are too large, or turning away scores of eager children, and their
+fathers and mothers, too, because there are not enough helpers; and
+between classes they spend their energies in running down subscribers,
+getting up exhibitions to entice the rich men of the community to come
+and have a look at their mission and drop something in the plate.
+
+But why should there be a shortage of helpers at the settlement? Have
+not the rich men sons and daughters, as well as check-books? What are
+those young people doing, dancing the nights away in ballrooms and
+roof-gardens, season after season, year after year? They should be
+down on their knees washing the feet of the pilgrims to the shrine of
+liberty, binding up the wounds of the victims of European despotism,
+teaching their little foreign brothers and sisters the first steps of
+civilized life.
+
+Is it preposterous to ask that those who have leisure and wealth should
+give of these stores when they are needed in the chief enterprise of
+the nation? In what does patriotism consist if not in helping our
+country succeed in her particular mission? Our mission--the elevation
+of humanity--is one in which every citizen should have a share, or he
+is not an American citizen in the spiritual sense. The poor must give
+of their little--the workingman must not seek to monopolize the labor
+market; and the rich must give of their plenty--their time, their
+culture, their wealth.
+
+Certain texts in the restrictionist teachings are as insulting to our
+well-to-do citizens as is the labor-monopoly preachment to the classes
+who struggle for a living. The one assumes that the American workingman
+puts his family before his country; the other--the cry that we cannot
+assimilate so many strangers--implies that the country's reservoirs of
+wealth and learning and unspent energy are monopolized by the well-to-do
+for their own selfish uses. We know what schools and lectures and
+neighborhood activities can do to promote assimilation. We cannot fail
+if we multiply these agencies as fast as the social workers call for
+them. The means for such extension of service are in the hands of the
+rich. Whoever doubts our ability to assimilate immigration doubts the
+devotion of our favored classes to the country's cause.
+
+Upon the rich and the poor alike rests the burden of the fulfillment
+of the dream of the Fathers, and they are poor patriots who seek to
+lift that burden from our shoulders instead of teaching us how to bear
+it nobly. Fresh from the press, there lies on my table, as I write, a
+review of an important work on immigration, in which the reviewer refers
+to the "sincere idealists who still cling to the superstition that it is
+opposition to some predestined divine purpose to suggest the rejection
+of the 'poor and oppressed.'" It is just such teaching as that, which
+discards as so much sentimental junk the ideas that made our great men
+great, that is pushing us inch by inch into the quagmire of materialism.
+If it is true that our rich care for nothing but their ease, and our
+poor have no thought beyond their daily needs, it is due to the fact
+that the canker of selfishness is gnawing at the heart of the nation.
+The love of self, absorption in the immediate moment, are vices of the
+flesh which fastened on us during the centuries of our agonized struggle
+for brute survival. The remedy that God appointed for these evils, the
+vision of our insignificant selves as a part of a great whole, whose
+lifetime is commensurate with eternity, the materialists would shatter
+and throw on the dump of human illusions.
+
+Who talks of superstition in a world built on superstition? Civilization
+is the triumph of one superstition after another. At the very foundation
+of our world is the huge superstition of the Fatherhood of God. In a
+time when the peoples of the earth bowed down to gods of stone, gods of
+wood, gods of brass and of gold, what more incomprehensible superstition
+could have been invented than that of an invisible, omnipresent Creator
+who made and ruled and disciplined the entire universe? One nation
+ventured to adopt this superstition, and that nation is regarded as the
+liberator of humanity from the slavery of bestial ignorance. Out of that
+initial superstition followed, in logical sequence, the superstition of
+the Brotherhood of Man, spread abroad by a son of the venturesome race;
+succeeded by a refinement of the same notion, the idea that the Father
+has no favorite children, but allots to each an equal portion of the
+goods of His house. That is democracy, the latest superstition of them
+all, the cornerstone of our Republic, and the model after which all the
+nations are striving to pattern themselves.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Side by side in our public schools sit the children of many races, ours
+and others. Week by week, month by month, year by year, the teachers
+pick out the brightest pupils and fasten the medals of honor on their
+breasts; and a startling discovery brings a cry to their lips: the
+children of the foreigners outclass our own! They who begin handicapped,
+and labor against obstacles, leave our own children far behind on the
+road to scholarly achievement. In the business world the same strange
+phenomenon is observed: conditions of life and work that would prostrate
+our own boys and girls, these others use as a block from which to vault
+to the back of prancing Fortune. In private enterprises or public, in
+practical or visionary movements, these outsiders exhibit an intensity
+of purpose, a passion of devotion that do not mark the normal progress
+of our own well-cared-for children.
+
+What is the galvanizing force that impels these stranger children to
+overmaster circumstances and bestride the top of the world? Is there
+a special virtue in their blood that enables them to sweep over our
+country and take what they want? It is a special virtue, yes: the virtue
+of great purpose. The fathers and mothers of these children have not
+weaned them from the habit of contemplating a Vision. They teach them
+that, in pursuit of the Vision, bleeding feet do not count. They tell
+them that many morrows will roll out of the lap of to-day, and they must
+prepare themselves for a long and arduous march.
+
+That is the reading of the riddle, and if we do not want to be shamed by
+the newcomers in our midst, we must silence those sophisticated teachers
+of the people who ridicule or pass over with a smile the idea that we,
+as a nation, are in pursuit of a Vision, and that those things are good
+for us which further our quest, and the rest--even to bleeding feet--do
+not count with us. It is the obliteration of the Vision that causes the
+emptiness in the lives of our children which they are driven to fill
+up with tinsel pleasures and meaningless activities of all sorts. The
+best blood in the world is in their veins,--the blood of heroes and
+martyrs, of dreamers and doers,--filtered through less than half a dozen
+generations. If they do not arise and do great deeds all around us,
+it is because their noble blood is clogged in their veins through the
+infiltrations of materialism in the teachings of the day.
+
+For such an inconsequential whim as that men should be free to pray
+in any way they choose, the Pilgrim Fathers betook themselves to a
+wilderness peopled with savages, preferring to die by the tomahawk
+rather than submit to clerical authority. The free admission of
+immigrants is not half so rash an adventure, and the thing to be gained
+by it is a more obvious good than that of freedom of worship. Even
+a child can understand that it is better for human beings, be they
+Russians or Italians or Greeks, to get into a country where there is
+enough to eat and enough to wear, where nobody is permitted to abuse
+anybody else, and where story-books are given away, than it is to
+live in countries where starvation and cruel treatment is the lot of
+multitudes.
+
+No man worthy of the name will deny that moral paralysis is a worse
+evil than congestion of the labor market, and moral paralysis creeps
+on us whenever we throw down the burden of duty to recline in the lap
+of comfort. We shall see no prodigies in the ranks of our children
+as long as we are ruled by the calculating commercial spirit which
+takes nothing on faith, which spurns as impracticable whatever is not
+easily negotiable, and repudiates our debt to the past as something
+too fantastic for serious consideration. Before the present era of
+prosperity set in, a scoffer who would brand as superstition the
+ideas for which our forefathers died would not have spoken with the
+expectation of being applauded, as he does to-day. Worldly things, like
+comfort, position, security, and what is called success, have absorbed
+our attention to such a degree that some of us have forgotten that there
+is any good save the good of the flesh. Possessions have crowded out
+aspirations, the applause of the world has become more necessary than
+the inner satisfactions, and the whole horizon of life is filled with
+the glaring bulk of an overwhelming prosperity.
+
+No wonder a prophet like Edward Everett Hale was moved to pray before
+his assembled congregation, "Deliver us, O Lord! from our terrible
+prosperity." He saw what the worship of fleshly good did to our
+children: how it stripped from them the wings of higher ambition, and
+shackled their feet, that should be marching on to the conquest of
+spiritual worlds, with the weight of false successes. "Deliver us, O
+Lord! from our terrible prosperity," that our children may have burdens
+to lift, that they may learn to clutch at things afar, and their sight
+grow strong with gazing after visions. "Deliver us, O Lord! from our
+terrible prosperity," that simplicity of life may strip from us all
+sophistication, till we learn to honor the dreamers in our midst, and
+our prophets have a place in the councils of the nation.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Not the good of the flesh, but that of the spirit is the good we seek.
+If it is good for the soul of this nation that we should walk in the
+difficult path our Fathers trod, harkening only to the inner voice,
+never pausing to hear the counsels of cold prudence, then assuredly it
+is good for us to lift up the burdens of welcoming and caring for our
+brothers from other lands, thus putting into fuller use the instrument
+of democracy the Fathers invented,--our Republic, founded to promote
+liberty and justice among men.
+
+Or if we despise the omens, refuse to take up the difficult task where
+our predecessors left off, what awaits us? If we persist in pampering
+ourselves as favorite children, and bedeck ourselves with prosperity's
+coat of many colors, how long will it be before the less favored
+brethren, covetous of our superabundance, will strip us and sell us
+into the bondage of decadence? Immigration on a large scale into every
+country as thinly populated as ours must go on, will go on, as long as
+there are other countries with denser populations and scantier resources
+for sustaining them. Right through history, the needy peoples have gone
+in and taken possession of the fat lands of their neighbors. Formerly
+these invasions were effected by force; nowadays they are largely
+effected by treaties, laws, international understandings. But always
+the tide flows from the lands of want to the lands of plenty. Nature
+is behind this movement; man has no power to check it permanently. We
+in America may, if we choose, shut ourselves up in the midst of our
+plenty and gorge till we are suffocated, but that will only postpone
+the day of a fair division of our country's riches. We shall grow inert
+from fullness, drunk with the wine of prosperity, and presently some
+culminating folly, such as every degenerate nation sooner or later
+commits, will leave us at the mercy of the first comers, and our spoils
+will be divided among the watchers outside our gates.
+
+These things will not happen in a day, nor in a generation, nor in a
+century, but have we no care for the days that will follow ours? When
+we talk about providing for to-morrow, let us, in the name of all the
+wisdom that science has so laboriously amassed, think of that distant
+to-morrow when the things we now do will have passed into history, to
+stand for the children of that time either as a glorious example or a
+fearful warning. If we settle the immigration question selfishly, we
+shall surely pay the penalty for selfishness. And the rod will smite
+not our own shoulders, but the shoulders of countless innocents of our
+begetting.
+
+The law that the hungry shall feed where there is plenty is not the only
+one which we defy when we turn away the strangers now at our gates.
+A narrow immigration policy is in opposition also to a primary law
+of evolution, the law of continuous development along a given line
+until a climax is reached. Now the evolution of society has been from
+small isolated groups to larger intermingling ones. In the beginning
+of political history, every city was a world unto itself, and labored
+at its own salvation behind fortified walls that shut out the rest of
+the world. Presently cities were merged into states, states united into
+confederacies, confederacies into empires. Peoples at first unknown
+to each other even by name came to pass in and out of each other's
+territories, merging their interests, their cultures, their bloods.
+
+This process of the removal of barriers, begun through conquests,
+commerce, and travels, is approaching completion in our own era, through
+the influences of science and invention. "The world is my country" is a
+word in many a mouth to-day. East and West hold hands; North and South
+salute each other. There remain a few ancient prejudices to overcome, a
+few stumps of ignorance to uproot, before all the nations of the earth
+shall forget their boundaries, and move about the surface of the earth
+as congenial guests at a public feast.
+
+This, indeed, will be the proof of the ancient saying, "He hath made
+of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the
+earth." It is coming, inevitably it is coming. We in America are in a
+position to hasten the climax of the drama of unification. If, instead
+of hastening it, we seek to delay it, we step aside from the path of the
+world's progress.
+
+America is not God's last stand. That which is to be is conditioned by
+what has been. Sometime, somewhere, the Plan that the centuries have
+brooded over will come perfect out of the shell of Time. I am not afraid
+that humanity will stop short of its inevitable climax, but I am so
+jealous for the glory of my country that I long to have America retain
+the leadership which she has held so nobly for a while. I desire that
+the mantle of the New England prophets should rest on the shoulders of
+our own children.
+
+Of the many convincing arguments that have been advanced in support of
+the proposition that immigration is good for us, I shall quote only one,
+in the words of Grace Abbott, of Chicago, when she sums up a study of
+eleven immigrant nationalities from southern and eastern Europe. "It
+was the faith in America and not the occasional criticism that touched
+me most," she writes, referring to the sayings of the foreigners. "I
+felt then, as I have felt many times when I have met some newcomer
+who has expected a literal fulfillment of our democratic ideals, that
+fortunately for America we had great numbers who were coming to remind
+us of the 'promise of American life,' and insisting that it should not
+be forgotten."
+
+All the rest of the arguments--utilitarian, humanitarian, and
+scientific--I willingly omit. For I do not want the immigrant to be
+admitted because he can help us dig ditches and build cities and fight
+our battles in general. I beg that we make this a question of principle
+first, and of utility afterwards. Whether immigration is good for us or
+not, I am very certain that the decadence of idealism is bad for us, and
+that is what I fear more than the restrictionist fears the immigrant.
+
+It should strengthen us in our resolution to abide by the Law of the
+Fathers--the law of each for all, and all for each--if we find that the
+movement of democracy to which they imparted such a powerful impulse
+appears to be in the direct path of social evolution. But even if
+such omens were lacking I should still pray for strength to cling to
+the ideal which is defined in the opening words of the Declaration
+of Independence. For I perceive that here, in the trial at Ellis
+Island, we are put to the test of the fiery furnace. It was easy to
+preach democracy when the privileges we claimed for ourselves no alien
+hordes sought to divide with us. But to-day, when humanity asks us
+to render up again that which we took from the English in the name
+of humanity, do we dare to stand by our confession of faith? Those
+who honor the golden images of self-interest and materialism threaten
+us with fearful penalties in case we persist in our championship of
+universal brotherhood. They are binding our hands and feet with the
+bonds of selfish human fears. The fiery glow of the furnace is on our
+faces--and the world holds its breath.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+Once the thunders of God were heard on Mount Sinai, and a certain people
+heard, and the blackness of idolatry was lifted from the world. Again
+the voice of God, the Father, shook the air above Bunker Hill, and the
+grip of despotism was loosened from the throat of panting humanity.
+
+Let the children of the later saviors of the world be as faithful as the
+children of the earlier saviors, and perhaps God will speak again in
+times to come.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+  The Riverside Press
+  CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
+  U . S . A
+
+
+
+
+  [ Transcriber's Note:
+
+    The following is a list of corrections made to the original.
+    The first line is the original line, the second the corrected one.
+
+    Introduction                   vii
+    Introduction                    ix
+
+    III. The Fiery Furnace         101
+    III. The Fiery Furnace          99
+
+  (6) See Article by Achad Ha'am, _American Hebrew_, June, 21, 1907.
+  (7) See Article by Achad Ha'am, _American Hebrew_, June 21, 1907.
+
+  flesh which fastened on us during the centuries of our agonzied struggle
+  flesh which fastened on us during the centuries of our agonized struggle
+
+  ]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's They Who Knock at Our Gates, by Mary Antin
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 40535 ***