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."