Aliens or Americans? Part 17

10. Who and what are the Ruthenians?

III. _Slavic Elements of Strength and American Outlook._

11. Mention some encouraging features with reference to the above-named and other Slavs.

12. * If you had been born a Slav in Europe, would you be likely to prefer America to Europe? Protestantism to Roman Catholicism? The country or the city?

IV. _Social, Moral, and Religious Aspects of the Jewish and Slavic Population._

13. How many Jews are there in New York City?

14. What keeps the new arrivals in the larger cities?

15. Are they religious, quick to learn, temperate?

16. Mention some form of Christian work for Slavs or Jews about which you know.

REFERENCES FOR ADVANCED STUDY.--CHAPTER V

I. _Further Study as to Race Origin and Inter-relationship of the Slavs._

Warne: The Slav Invasion, III.

McLanahan: Our People of Foreign Speech, IV.

II. _National Conditions in Europe which the Slavs Seek to Escape._

Hall: Immigration, 60-65.

III. _Social and Moral Effects Produced by the Slav Invasion of the Anthracite Regions._

Warne: The Slav Invasion, IV, VII.

IV. _Factors in Slavic History and Conditions Favoring and Hindering the Access of the Gospel._

McLanahan: Our People of Foreign Speech, 34-58.

Charities and Commons, issues 1905-06.

V. _Conditions Among Russian Jews._

Statements of Jewish authors as to conditions among Russian Jews in their native lands and in America.

Bernheimer: The Russian Jew in the United States, I (B), IV (A), VI (A).

_The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center. The city has a peculiar attraction for the immigrant.

Here is heaped the social dynamite; here the dangerous elements are multiplied and concentered._--Josiah Strong.

VI

THE FOREIGN PERIL OF THE CITY

The city is the most difficult and perplexing problem of modern times.--_Francis Lieber._

We must save the city if we would save the nation. Munic.i.p.al government and city evangelization together const.i.tute the distinctive problem of the city, for this generation at least.--_Josiah Strong._

Talk of Dante's h.e.l.l, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach him horror.--_General Booth._

With the influx of a large foreign population into the great cities, there have come also foreign customs and inst.i.tutions, laxity and license--those phases of evil which are the most insidious foes of the purity and strength of a people. The slums of our large cities are but the stagnant pools of illiteracy, vice, pauperism, and crime, annually fed by this floodtide of immigration.--_R. M. Atchison._

You can kill a man with a tenement as easily as with an ax.--_Jacob Riis._

Our foreign colonies are to a large extent in the cities of our own country. To live in one of these foreign communities is actually to live on foreign soil. The thoughts, feelings, and traditions which belong to the mental life of the colony are often entirely alien to an American.--_Robert Hunter._

The vastness of the problem of the city slum, and the impossibility, even with unlimited resources of men and money, of permanently raising the standards of living of many of our immigrants as long as they are crowded together, and as long as the stream of newer immigrants pours into these same slums, has naturally forced itself upon the minds of thinking persons.--_Robert D. Ward._

VI

THE FOREIGN PERIL OF THE CITY

_I. The Evils of Environment_

[Sidenote: Tendency Toward the Cities]

As is the city, so will the nation be. The tendencies all seem to be toward steady concentration in great centers. The evils of congestion do not deter the thronging mult.i.tudes. The attractions of the city are irresistible, even to those who exist in the most wretched conditions.

The tenement districts baffle description, yet nothing is more difficult than to get their miserable occupants to leave their fetid and squalid surroundings for the country. To the immigrants the city is a magnet.

Here they find colonies of their own people, and prize companionship more than comfort. "Folks is more company than stumps," said an old woman in the slums to Dr. Schauffler. In the great cities the immigrants are ma.s.sed, and this const.i.tutes a most perplexing problem. If tens of thousands of foreigners could somehow be gotten out of New York, Boston, Chicago, and other cities, and be distributed where they are needed and could find work and homes, immigration would cause far less anxiety. But when the immigrant prefers New York or Chicago, what authority shall remove him to Louisiana or Oklahoma?

[Sidenote: Perils Due to Environment]

The foreigner is in the city; he will chiefly stay there; and the question is what can be done to improve his city environment; for the perils to which we refer are primarily due not to the foreigner himself but to the evil and vice-breeding conditions in which he has to exist.

These imperil him and make him a peril in turn. The overcrowded tenements and slums, the infection of long-entrenched corruption, the absence of light, fresh air, and playgrounds for the children, the unsanitary conditions and exorbitant rents, the political heelers teaching civic corruption, the saloons with their attendant temptations to vice and crime, the fraudulent naturalization--these work together upon the immigrant, for his undoing and thus to the detriment of the nation. When we permit such an environment to exist, and practically force the immigrant into it because we do not want him for a next-door neighbor, we can hardly condemn him for forming foreign colonies which maintain foreign customs and are impervious to American influences. It has too long been the common practice to lay everything to the foreigner. Would it not be fairer and more Christian to distribute the blame, and a.s.sume that part of it which belongs to us. In the study of the facts contained in this chapter, put yourself persistently in the place of the immigrant, suddenly introduced into the conditions here pictured, and ask yourself what you would probably be and become in like circ.u.mstances.

[Sidenote: A Call for Reform]

How the other half lives is not the only mystery. How little the so-called upper-ten know how the lower-ninety live. And how little you and I, who are fortunate to count ourselves in the next upper-twenty, perhaps, know how the under-seventy exist and think and do. If only the more fortunate thirty per cent. knew of the exact conditions under which a large proportion of men, women, and children carry on the pitiful struggle for mere existence, there would be an irresistible demand for betterment. Every Christian ought to know the wrongs of our civilization, in order that he may help to right them. This glimpse beneath the surface of the city should stir us out of comfortable complacency and give birth in us to the impulse that leads to settlement and city mission work, and to civic reform movements. The young men and women of America must create a public sentiment that will demolish the slums, and erect in their places model tenements; that will tear down the rookeries, root out the saloons and dens of vice, and provide the children with playgrounds and breathing s.p.a.ce. And this work will be directly in the line of Americanizing and evangelizing the immigrants, for they are chiefly the occupants and victims of the tenements and the slums.