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  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