play to work, and the precise value of work lies in its call for
renunciation. Nor has any knowledge ever been acquired and retained
without endeavour. What heroic pains were taken by Montaigne’s father
to spare his little son the harsh tasks of the school-boy! At what
trouble and cost to the household was the child taught “the pure
Latin tongue” in infancy, “without bookes, rules, or grammar, without
whipping or whining”! Greek was also imparted to him in kindly fashion,
“by way of sporte and recreation.” “We did tosse our declinations and
conjugations to and fro, as they doe, who, by means of a certaine
game at tables, learne both Arithmeticke and Geometrie.” Assuredly
the elder Montaigne was a man born out of date. In our happier age
he would have been a great and honoured upholder of educational
novelties, experimenting with the school-rooms of the world. In the
sixteenth century he was only a country gentleman, experimenting
with his son,--a son who bluntly confesses that, of the Greek thus
pleasantly trifled with, he had “but small understanding,” and that
the Latin which had been his mother tongue was speedily “corrupted by
discontinuance.”
All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the
saving of labour was that he “overskipped” the lower forms in school.
What he lost was the habit of mastering his “prescript lessons,” which
he seems to have disliked as heartily as any student of Guienne.
Neither loss nor gain mattered much to a man of original parts. The
principal result of his father’s scheme was the lingering of certain
Latin words among the simple folk of Perigord, who, having painfully
acquired these strange terms in order to rescue their little master
from his schoolbooks, retained and made use of them all their lives.
An emphatic note of protest against our well-meant but enfeebling
educational methods was struck by Professor William James in his
“Talks to Teachers,” published in 1899. The phrase “Economy of Effort,”
so dear to the kindly hearts of Froebel’s followers, had no meaning
for Dr. James. The ingenious system by which the child’s tasks, as
well as the child’s responsibilities, are shifted to the shoulders
of the teacher, made no appeal to his incisive intelligence. He
stoutly asserted that effort is oxygen to the lungs of youth, and
that it is sheer nonsense to suppose that every step of education can
possibly be made interesting. The child, like the man, must meet his
difficulties, and master them. There is no lesson worth learning, no
game worth playing, which does not call for exertion. Rousseau, it
will be remembered, would not permit Émile to know what rivalry meant.
That harassed child never even ran a race, lest the base spirit of
competition should penetrate his nerveless little being. But Professor
James, deaf to social sentimentalities, averred that rivalry is
the spur of action, and the impelling force of civilization. “There
is a noble and generous kind of rivalry as well as a spiteful and
greedy kind,” he wrote truthfully, “and the noble and generous form
is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the zest which
they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the emulous
passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness and
magnanimity.”
I am aware that it is a dangerous thing to call kindness sentimental;
but our feeling that children have a right to happiness, and our
sincere effort to protect them from any approach to pain, have
led imperceptibly to the elimination from their lives of many
strength-giving influences. A recent volume on “Child Culture” (a
phrase every whit as reprehensible as “child-material”) speaks always
of naughty children as “patients,” implying that their unfortunate
condition is involuntary, and must be cured from without, not from
within. The “rights of children” include the doubtful privilege
of freedom from restraint, and the doubtful boon of shelter from
obligation. It seems sweet and kind to teach a child high principles
and steadfastness of purpose by means of symbolic games rather than by
any open exaction. Unconscious obedience, like indirect taxation, is
supposed to be paid without strain. Our feverish fear lest we offend
against the helplessness of childhood, our feverish concern lest it
should be denied its full measure of content, drive us, burdened as we
are with good intentions, past the border-line of wisdom. If we were
“Less winning soft, less amiably mild,”
we might see more clearly the value of standards.
Two years ago I had sent me several numbers of a Los Angeles newspaper.
They contained a spirited and sympathetic account of a woman who
had been arrested for stealing a child’s outfit, and who pleaded
in court that she wanted the garments for her daughter, the little
girl having refused to go to school, because other children had
laughed at her shabby clothes. The effect of this pathetic disclosure
was instantaneous and overwhelming. The woman was released, and
kind-hearted people hastened to send “nicey” frocks by the “wagon-load”
to the ill-used child. A picture of the heroic mother in a large
plumed hat, and another of little Ellen in curls and hair-ribbons,
occupied prominent places in the paper. The public mind was set at rest
concerning the quality of the goods donated. “Ellen is going to school
to-day,” wrote the jubilant reporter. “She is going to wear a fluffy
new dress with lace, and hair-ribbons to match. And if any rude boy so
far forgets himself as to tear that wondrous creation, there will be
others at home to replace it. Happy, oh, so happy was the little miss,
as she shook her curls over the dainty dress to-day. And the mother?
Well, a faith in the inherent goodness of mankind has been rekindled in
her bosom.”
Now the interesting thing about this journalistic eloquence, and
the public sentiment it represented, is that while shabbiness was
admittedly a burden too heavy for a child to bear, theft carried with
it no shadow of disgrace. Children might jeer at a little girl in a
worn frock, but a little girl in “lace and hair-ribbons” was manifestly
above reproach. Her mother’s transgression had covered her with glory,
not with shame. There seems to be some confusion of standards in such
a verdict, some deviation from the paths of rectitude and honour. It
is hard for a child to be more poorly dressed than her companions; but
to convince her that dishonesty is the best policy and brings its own
reward, is but a dubious kindness. Nor is it impossible to so stiffen
her moral fibre that her poor dress may be worn, if not with pride, at
least with sturdy self-control.
On this point I know whereof I speak, for, when I was a little girl,
my convent school sheltered a number of Southern children, reduced
to poverty by the Civil War, and educated (though of this no one was
aware) by the boundless charity of the nuns. These children were
shabby, with a pathetic shabbiness which fell far below our very
moderate requirements. Their dresses (in my prehistoric days, school
uniforms were worn only on Thursdays and Sundays) were strangely
antiquated, as though cut down from the garments of mothers and
grandmothers, their shoes were scuffed, their hats were hopeless. But
the unquenchable pride with which they bore themselves invested such
hardships with distinction. Their poverty was the honourable outcome of
war; and this fact, added to their simple and sincere conviction that
a girl born below the Mason and Dixon line must necessarily be better
than a girl born above it, carried them unscathed through the valley
of humiliation. Looking back now with an unbiassed mind, I am disposed
to consider their claim to superiority unfounded; but, at the time,
their single-mindedness carried conviction. The standards they imposed
were preeminently false, but they were less ignoble than the standards
imposed by wealth. No little American boy or girl can know to-day what
it means to have the character set in childhood by history, by the
vividness of early years lived under strange and violent conditions, by
the sufferings, the triumphs, the high and sad emotions of war.
There is a story told by Sir Francis Doyle which illustrates, after the
rude fashion of our forebears, the value of endurance as an element of
education. Dr. Keate, the terrible head-master of Eton, encountered one
winter morning a small boy crying miserably, and asked him what was
the matter. The child replied that he was cold. “Cold!” roared Keate.
“You must put up with cold, sir! You are not at a girls’ school.”
It is a horrid anecdote, and I am kind-hearted enough to wish that
Dr. Keate, who was not without his genial moods, had taken the lad to
some generous fire (presuming such a thing was to be found), and had
warmed his frozen hands and feet. But it so chanced that in that little
snivelling boy there lurked a spark of pride and a spark of fun, and
both ignited at the rough touch of the master. He probably stopped
crying, and he certainly remembered the sharp appeal to manhood.
Fifteen years later he charged with the Third Dragoons at the strongly
entrenched Sikhs (thirty thousand of the best fighting men of the
Khalsa) on the curving banks of the Sutlej. When the word was given, he
turned to his superior officer, a fellow Etonian who was scanning the
stout walls and the belching guns. “As old Keate would say, this is no
girls’ school,” he chuckled; and rode to his death on the battlefield
of Sobraon, which gave Lahore to England.
Contemplating which incident, and many like it, we become aware that
ease is not the only good in a world consecrated to the heroic business
of living and of dying.
The Modest Immigrant
It is now nearly fifty years since Mr. Lowell wrote his famous
essay, “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners”; an essay in which
justifiable irritation prompted the telling of plain truths, and an
irrepressible sense of humour made these truths amusing. It was well
for Mr. Lowell that he was seldom too angry to laugh, and he knew,
as only a man of the world can know, the saving grace of laughter.
Therefore, though confessedly unable to understand why foreigners
should be persuaded that “by doing this country the favour of coming
to it, they have laid every native thereof under an obligation,” he
was willing in certain light-minded moods to acquit himself honourably
of the debt. When a genteel German mendicant presented a letter,
“professedly written by a benevolent American clergyman,” and
certifying that the bearer thereof had long “sofered with rheumatic
paints in his limps,” Mr. Lowell rightly considered that a composition
so rich in the naïveté common to all Teuton mendacities was worth the
money asked. When a French traveller assured him, with delightful
_bon-homie_, that Englishmen became Americanized so rapidly that “they
even begin to talk through their noses, just like you do,” the only
comment of our representative American was that he felt ravished by
this testimony to the assimilating powers of democracy.
Nevertheless, it is well in these years of grace to reread Mr. Lowell’s
essay, partly because of its sturdy and dignified Americanism, and
partly because we can then compare his limited experiences with our
own. We can also speculate pleasantly upon his frame of mind could he
have lived to hear Mrs. Amadeus Grabau (Mary Antin) say, “Lowell would
agree with me,”--the point of agreement being the relative virtues of
the Pilgrim Fathers and the average immigrant of to-day. When the dead
are quoted in this fashion and nothing happens, then we know that,
despite the assurances of Sir Oliver Lodge, the seal of silence is
unbroken. Were the proud souls who have left us, able and willing to
return, it would not be to reveal the whereabouts of a lost penknife,
but to give the lie to the words which are spoken in their name.
The condescension which Mr. Lowell observed and analyzed was in his day
the shining quality of foreigners who visit our shores. Immigrants were
then less aggressive and less profoundly self-conscious than they are
now, and it is the immigrant who counts. It is his arrogance, not the
misapprehension of the tourist, or the innocent pride of the lecturer,
which constitutes a peril to our republic. We can all of us afford
to smile with Mr. Lowell at the men and women who, while accepting
our hospitality, “make no secret of regarding us as the goose bound
to deliver them a golden egg in return for their cackle.” That they
should not hesitate to come without equipment, without experience,
without even a fitness for their task, seems to us perfectly natural.
Perhaps they have written books which none of us have read, or edited
periodicals which none of us have seen. Perhaps they have known
celebrities of whom few of us have heard. It does not matter in the
least. From the days when Miss Rose Kingsley came to tell us the worth
of French art (does not the ocean roll between New York and Paris?),
to the days when Mrs. Pankhurst came to tell us the worth of womanhood
(does not the ocean roll between Boston Common and Hyde Park?), we have
listened patiently, and paid generously, and received scant courtesy
for our pains. “I find it so strange,” said an Englishman to me three
years ago, “to see my wife lecturing over the United States. It is a
thing she would not dream of doing at home. In fact, nobody would go to
hear her, you know.”
But lectures are transient things, forgiven as soon as forgotten.
Even the books which are written about us make no painful bid for
immortality. And though our visitors patronize us, they seldom fail
to throw us a kind word now and then. Sometimes a sweet-tempered and
very hurried traveller, like Mr. Arnold Bennett, is good enough to
praise everything he thinks he has seen. Before August, 1914, it was
not the habit of our guests to scold or threaten us. That privilege had
hitherto been reserved for the alien, who, having done us the honour of
accepting citizenship, wields his vote as a cudgel, bidding us beware
the weapon we have amiably placed in his hands.
Signor Ferrero, an acute and friendly critic, pronounces Americans
to be the mystics of the modern world, because they sacrifice their
welfare to a sentiment; because they believe in the miracle of the
melting-pot, which, like Medea’s magic cauldron, will turn the old and
decrepit races of Europe into a young and vigorous people, new-born in
soul and body. No other nation cherishes this illusion. An Englishman
knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years, or in twenty-five years,
become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into
English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian
or a Czech the making of another Frenchman. Our immigrants may be as
good as we are. Sometimes we are told they are better, that we might
“learn a lesson” from the least promising among them. But no one
can deny that they are different; in many instances, radically and
permanently different. And to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse is
just as difficult as the reverse operation. Mr. Horace Kallen has put
the case into a few clear conclusive words when he says, “Only men who
are alike in origin and spirit, and not abstractly, can be truly equal,
and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a
national life.”
To look for “inward unanimity” among the seething mass of immigrants
who have nothing more in common with one another than they have with
us, is to tax credulity too far. The utmost we can hope is that their
mutual antagonisms will neutralize their voting power, and keep our
necks free from an alien yoke. Those of us who have lived more than
half a century have seen strange fluctuations in the fortunes of the
foreign-born. In 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge was finished, the
Irishmen of New York made a formal protest against its being opened
on Queen Victoria’s birthday, lest this chance occurrence should be
misconstrued into a compliment to England. In 1915, a band in Saint
Patrick’s parade was halted, and forbidden to play “Tipperary” before
Cardinal Farley’s residence, lest these cheerful strains should be
misconstrued into an insult to Germany. The Reverend Thomas Thornton,
speaking to the Knights of Columbus, prophesied mournfully that the
time was at hand when Catholic voters in the United States would be
“reduced to the condition of tribute-paying aliens.” Men smiled when
they heard this, reflecting that the Irish officeholder had not yet
been consigned to oblivion; but the speaker had seen with a clear eye
the marshalling of strange forces, destined to drive the first comer
from authority. Some weeks later, the “Jewish Tribune” boasted that the
angry protest voiced by Catholics against the sending of Signor Ernesto
Nathan as commissioner to the San Francisco Fair had been “checked in
its infancy” by the power of the Jewish press.
It is all very lively and interesting, but where does the American
come in? What place is reserved for him in the commonwealth which his
heroic toil and heroic sacrifices moulded into what Washington proudly
called a “respectable nation”? The truth is contemptuously flung at us
by Mary Antin, when she says that the descendants of the men who made
America are not numerous enough to “swing a presidential election.” And
if a negligible factor now, what depths of insignificance will be their
portion in the future? I heard told with glee--the glee which expresses
pure American unconcern--a story of a public school in one of our
large eastern cities. A visitor of an investigating turn of mind asked
the pupils of various nationalities, Germans, Polacks, Russian Jews,
Italians, Armenians and Greeks, to stand up in turn. When the long
list was seemingly exhausted, he bethought himself of a nation he had
overlooked, and said, “Now let the American children arise!” Whereupon
one lone, lorn little black boy stood up to represent the native-born.
It is hardly surprising that these foreign children, recognizing
the strength of numbers, should take exception to our time-honoured
methods of education. Little boys of a socialistic turn of mind refuse
to salute the flag, because it is a military emblem. Little boys of
a rationalistic turn of mind refuse to read the Bible,--any portion
of the Bible,--because its assertions are unscientific. Little Jewish
boys and girls refuse to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,”
because of its unguarded allusions to Bethlehem and Calvary. Indeed,
any official recognition of the Deity offends the susceptibilities of
some of our future citizens; and their perplexed teachers are bidden to
eliminate from their programme “any exercises which the pupils consider
objectionable.”
A few years ago I was asked to speak to a large class of immigrant
working-girls, for whose benefit philanthropic women had planned
evening classes, dexterously enlivened by a variety of entertainments.
I was not sure whether I ranked as useful or amusing, and the number
of topics I was bidden to tactfully avoid, added to my misgivings;
when suddenly all doubts were dispelled by the superintendent saying
sweetly, “Oh, Miss Repplier, you were asked to speak for forty minutes;
but I think your address had better be cut down to twenty-five. The
girls are eager for their ice-cream.”
I said I sympathized with so reasonable an impatience. Even at my
advanced age, I prefer ice-cream to lectures.
“Moi, je dis que les bonbons
Valent mieux que la raison.”
But what did not flatter me was the clear understanding that my
audience listened to me, or at least sat tolerantly for twenty minutes
(I curtailed my already cur-tail’d cur), because their reward, in
the shape of ice-cream, was near at hand. Just as some manufacturers
provide baths for their employees, and then, recognizing the prejudices
of the foreign-born, pay the men for taking the baths provided, so the
good ladies who had served me up as a mental refreshment for their
protégées, paid the girls for being so obliging as to listen to me.
Miss Addams has reproached us most unjustly for our contemptuous
disregard of the immigrant; and Mrs. Percy Pennybacker, president
of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, has been wrought to
such a pitch of indignation over what she considers our unwarranted
superciliousness, that she writes fervidly in the “Ladies’ Home
Journal,” “I love my country; I adore her; but at times I hope that
some great shock may cause us to drop the mantle of conceit that we so
proudly wrap about us.”
This well-wisher is in a fair way to see her desires realized. We
may be left naked and shivering sooner than she anticipates. If
concessions to the Irish vote failed to teach us humility,--perhaps
because the Irish have a winning way of overriding barriers (“What’s
the Constitution between friends?”),--other immigrants are less urbane
in stripping us of our pride. “A German,” said Mr. Lowell feelingly,
“is not always nice in concealing his contempt”; and if this was his
attitude in 1868, to what superb heights of disdain has he risen
by 1916! A German ambassador has derided diplomatic conventions,
and has addressed his official communication, over the head of the
Administration, to German voters in the United States, sparing no
pains to make his words offensive. German officials have sought to
undermine our neutrality and imperil our safety. In the opening
months of the war, a German professor at Harvard, who for years has
received courteous and honourable treatment at the hands of Americans,
threatened us insolently with the “crushing power” of the German vote;
and bade us beware of the punishment which twenty-five millions of
citizens, “in whose homes lives the memory of German ancestors,” would
inflict upon their fellow citizens of less august and martial stock.
The “Frankfurter Zeitung” published a cheering letter from an American
Congressman, assuring a German correspondent that his countrymen know
how to make themselves heard, and expressing hearty hopes that Germany
would triumph over her “perfidious” rival.
Is it any wonder that, stimulated by these brilliant examples, the
average “German-American” should wax scornful, and despise his
unhyphenated fellow citizens? Is it any wonder that he should turn
bully, and threaten us with his vote,--the vote which was confided to
his sacred honour for the preservation of our country’s liberty? A
circular distributed before the Chicago elections in 1915 stated in
the plainest possible words that the German’s first allegiance was to
imperial Germany, and not to the Republic he had sworn to serve:--
“Chicago has a larger German population than any city in the world,
excepting Berlin and Vienna; and the German-, Austrian-, and
Hungarian-Americans should, at this coming election, _set aside every
other consideration_, and vote as a unit for Robert M. Sweitzer.
Stand shoulder to shoulder in this election, as our countrymen in the
trenches and on the high seas are fighting for the preservation of our
dear Fatherland. The election of a German-American would be a fitting
answer to the defamers of the Fatherland, would cause a tremendous
moral effect throughout the United States, and would reëcho in Germany,
Austria, and Hungary.”
The “moral effect” of this appeal was not precisely what its authors
had anticipated. Men asked themselves in bewilderment and wrath what
the dear Fatherland, any more than dear Dahomey or the beloved Congo,
had to do with the Chicago elections? They have been putting similar
questions ever since.
Some months later, the German-American Central Society of Passaic,
uniting itself with the German-American National Alliance, called for
assistance in these glowing words:--
“Come all of you German societies, German men, and German women, so
that united offensively and defensively [_zum Schutz und Trutz verein_]
with weapons of the spirit, we may help our beloved Germany onward.”
“Weapons of the spirit!” If this means prayer and supplication,
the matter lies between the petitioner and his God. If it means
exhortations, pamphlets, and platform oratory, the champion of Germany
stands well within his rights. But the next paragraph drops all
figures of speech, and states the real issue with abrupt and startling
distinctness:--
“We ask for your speedy decision with respect to your acquiescence, in
order to permit of an effective participation and lead in the spring
campaign of 1915.”