Autobiography of Seventy Years Part 63

GEO. F. h.o.a.r

CHAPTER x.x.xI PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND THE SYRIAN CHILDREN

A very touching incident, characteristic of the kind heart of President Roosevelt, ought to be put on record in connection with his visit to Worcester.

During the Christmas holidays of 1901 a very well known Syrian, a man of high standing and character, came into my son's office and told him this story:

A neighbor and countryman of his had a few years before emigrated to the United States and established himself in Worcester.

Soon afterward, he formally declared his intention of becoming an American citizen. After a while, he ama.s.sed a little money and sent to his wife, whom he had left in Syria, the necessary funds to convey her and their little girl and boy to Worcester.

She sold her furniture and whatever other belongings she had, and went across Europe to France, where they sailed from one of the northern ports on a German steamer for New York.

Upon their arrival at New York, it appeared that the children had contracted a disease of the eyelids, which the doctors of the Immigration Bureau declared to be trachoma, which is contagious, and in adults incurable. It was ordered that the mother might land, but that the children must be sent back in the ship upon which they arrived, on the following Thursday. This would have resulted in sending them back as paupers, as the steamship company, compelled to take them as pa.s.sengers free of charge, would have given them only such food as was left by the sailors, and would have dumped them out in France to starve, or get back as beggars to Syria.

The suggestion that the mother might land was only a cruel mockery. Joseph J. George, a worthy citizen of Worcester, brought the facts of the case to the attention of my son, who in turn brought them to my attention. My son had meantime advised that a bond be offered to the Immigration authorities to save them harmless from any trouble on account of the children.

I certified these facts to the authorities and received a statement in reply that the law was peremptory, and that it required that the children be sent home; that trouble had come from making like exceptions theretofore; that the Government hospitals were full of similar cases, and the authorities must enforce the law strictly in the future. Thereupon I addressed a telegram to the Immigration Bureau at Washington, but received an answer that nothing could be done for the children.

Then I telegraphed the facts to Senator Lodge, who went in person to the Treasury Department, but could get no more favorable reply. Senator Lodge's telegram announcing their refusal was received in Worcester Tuesday evening, and repeated to me in Boston just as I was about to deliver an address before the Catholic College there. It was too late to do anything that night. Early Wednesday morning, the day before the children were to sail, when they were already on the ship, I sent the following dispatch to President Roosevelt:

TO THE PRESIDENT, WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D. C.

I appeal to your clear understanding and kind and brave heart to interpose your authority to prevent an outrage which will dishonor the country and create a foul blot on the American flag. A neighbor of mine in Worcester, Ma.s.s., a Syrian by birth, made some time ago his public declaration for citizenship.

He is an honest, hard-working and in every way respectable man. His wife with two small children have reached New York.

He sent out the money to pay their pa.s.sage. The children contracted a disorder of the eyes on the ship. The Treasury authorities say that the mother may land but the children cannot, and they are to be sent back Thursday. Ample bond has been offered and will be furnished to save the Government and everybody from injury or loss. I do not think such a thing ought to happen under your Administration, unless you personally decide that the case is without remedy. I am told the authorities say they have been too easy heretofore, and must draw the line now. That shows they admit the power to make exceptions in proper cases. Surely, an exception should be made in the case of little children of a man lawfully here, and who has duly and in good faith declared his intention to become a citizen. The immigration law was never intended to repeal any part of the naturalization laws which provide that the minor children get all the rights of the father as to citizenship. My son knows the friends of this man personally and that they are highly respectable and well off. If our laws require this cruelty, it is time for a revolution, and you are just the man to head it.

GEORGE F. h.o.a.r.

Half an hour from the receipt of that dispatch at the White House Wednesday forenoon, Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States, sent a peremptory order to New York to let the children come in. They have entirely recovered from the disorder of the eyes, which turned out not to be contagious, but only caused by the glare of the water, or the hardships of the voyage. The children are fair-haired, with blue eyes, and of great personal beauty, and would be exhibited with pride by any American mother.

When the President came to Worcester he expressed a desire to see the children. They came to meet him at my house, dressed up in their best and glorious to behold. The President was very much interested in them, and said when what he had done was repeated in his presence, that he was just beginning to get angry.

The result of this incident was that I had a good many similar applications for relief in behalf of immigrants coming in with contagious diseases. Some of them were meritorious, and others untrustworthy. In the December session of 1902 I procured the following amendment to be inserted in the immigration law.

"Whenever an alien shall have taken up his permanent residence in this country and shall have filed his preliminary declaration to become a citizen and thereafter shall send for his wife or minor children to join him, if said wife or either of said children shall be found to be affected with any contagious disorder, and it seems that said disorder was contracted on board the ship in which they came, such wife or children shall be held under such regulations as the Secretary of the Treasury shall prescribe until it shall be determined whether the disorder will be easily curable or whether they can be permitted to land without danger to other persons; and they shall not be deported until such facts have been ascertained."

CHAPTER x.x.xII NATIONAL BANKRUPTCY

I have, since I have been in the Senate, taken great interest in the pa.s.sage of a bill for a system of National Bankruptcy.

The Const.i.tution gives Congress power to establish a uniform system of Bankruptcy. The people of Ma.s.sachusetts, a commercial and manufacturing State from the beginning, have always desired a Bankrupt law. They were large dealers with other States and with other countries. Insolvent debtors in Ma.s.sachusetts could not get discharge from their debts contracted in such dealings. The Ma.s.sachusetts creditors having debts against insolvents in other States found that their debtors under the laws of those States either got preferences or made fraudulent a.s.signments which they could not detect or prevent.

On the other hand, the bankruptcy laws have always been unpopular in many parts of the country. The Democrat who strictly construed the Const.i.tution did not like to see this power of Congress vigorously exercised. The National Courts, who must administer such laws, were always the object of jealousy and suspicion in the South and West. The people did not like to be summoned to attend the settlement of an estate in bankruptcy, hundreds and hundreds of miles, to the place where the United States Court was sitting, in States like Texas or Missouri. The sympathy of many communities is apt to be with the debtor, and not with the creditors, who were represented as harpies or vultures preying on the flesh of their unfortunate victims.

A good example of this prejudice will be found in an extract from the speech of Senator Ingalls, of Kansas. He said in defending what was known as the equity scheme:

"The opposition arose first, from the great wholesale merchants in the chief distributing centres of the country. They have their agents and attorneys in the vicinity of every debtor, obtaining early information of approaching disaster, and ready to avail themselves of the local machinery of State courts by attachment or by preferences, through which they can secure full payment of their claims, to the exclusion of less powerful or less vigilant but equally meritorious creditors. Naturally they want no Bankrupt law of any description.

"Second. From the disabled veterans of the old army registers; from the professional a.s.signees and wreckers of estates, who, by exorbitant fees and collusive sales of a.s.sets to convenient favorites, plundered debtor and creditor alike and made the system an engine of larceny and confiscation.

"Third. From those who desire, instead of a system for the discharge of honest but unfortunate debtors upon the surrender of their estates, a criminal code and a thumb-screw machine for the collection of doubtful and desperate debts. They covet a return to the primitive practices which prevailed in Rome, when the debtor was sold into slavery or had his body cut into pieces and distributed pro rata among his creditors.

"Fourth. From those timid and cautious conservatives who believe that nothing is valuable that is not venerable.

"Like the statesman described by Macaulay, they prefer to perish by precedent rather than be saved by innovation. They adhere to ancient failures rather than incur the risk of success through venture and experiment.

"Fifth. From Boards of Trade, Chambers of Commerce and other ornamental organizations who, being entirely uninformed on the subject, permit themselves to become the conduits through which the misrepresentation and animosity of avaricious creditors and rapacious attorneys are discharged upon Congress and the country."

I had moved in the Senate, in 1882, a bill favored by the merchants and manufacturers of Ma.s.sachusetts, which was largely the work of Judge John Lowell, of the United States Circuit Court, one of the most accomplished lawyers of his day, as an amendment to a bill which Mr. Edmunds, Mr. Davis and Mr.

Ingalls had reported as a Subcommittee to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and which had been reported from that Committee to the Senate.

The Lowell Bill was on my motion subst.i.tuted for the report of the Judiciary Committee, by a majority of three. This bill was extensively discussed in June and December. But I was unable to secure its pa.s.sage. It pa.s.sed the Senate, but it did not get through the House.

I have had the Parliamentary charge of all Bankruptcy measures in the Senate from that time. After the failure of the Lowell Bill, the Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce, and other like a.s.sociations throughout the country, took up the matter very zealously by employing an able lawyer, the Hon. Jay L. Torrey of Missouri, to present the matter in the two Houses of Congress. He was thoroughly acquainted with the principles and history of Bankruptcy laws in this country and England.

But he had no compromise in him. He insisted on the Bill which he drew, which was a modification of the Lowell Bill, without being willing to make any concession to objection or difference of opinion in Congress, or out of it. He said he would have a perfect law, or none at all. The measure as he drew it was apparently very austere and harsh to the debtor. It enumerated a large number of offences for which the debtor was to be punished by fine and imprisonment, and by a denial of his discharge. Mr. Torrey's provisions were not very unreasonable. But they made it seem as if the Bill were a penal code for the punishment of fraudulent debtors.

A simple provision that any debtor who wilfully should make false answer to any question lawfully put to him by the Court, or who wilfully concealed or attempted to conceal any property from his a.s.signee should lose his discharge and be punished with a proper and moderate punishment, would have answered the whole purpose. I take some blame to myself for not insisting more strenuously upon modifying Mr. Torrey's measure. But he constantly visited different Senators and Representatives and came back to me with glowing accounts of the prospects of the Bill, and of their promises to support the Bill. He was also the agent of the business organizations of the country who had pa.s.sed resolutions in favor of the measure as he had drawn it. It seemed to me therefore that if I should get the Bill amended and then it got lost, I should incur the great reproach of having obstinately set up my judgment against that of this large number of the ablest men in the country, who were so deeply interested in the matter. So the Bill, though brought up and pressed Congress after Congress, failed until Mr. Torrey enlisted in the Spanish War.

I then introduced a Bill in a softened and modified form.

It was attacked in that form by Senator Nelson of Minnesota, a very excellent lawyer and gentleman of great influence, in the Senate. He succeeded in having the Bill modified and softened still more. The Bill then pa.s.sed and went to the House which, under the leadership of the Judiciary Committee, subst.i.tuted the original Bill.

Mr. Nelson and I, with Mr. Lindsay of Kentucky, were put on the Conference Committee in the Senate, with Mr. Henderson, afterward Speaker, Mr. Ray of New York, now Judge of the U. S. District Court, and Mr. Terry of Missouri, on the part of the House. We struggled nearly the whole winter. Mr.

Nelson and Mr. Ray took the burden of the contest upon their shoulders. Their attempts at compromise reminded their brethren of the old scientific problem--"What will happen when an irresistible force encounters an immovable obstacle." But both gentlemen, each exceedingly firm in his own opinion when he thought he was in the right, were wise and reasonable and conscientious men. So at last they agreed upon the present Bankruptcy Bill, which became a law July 1, 1898. It was on the whole satisfactory to the country, except for one clause in it, which was interpreted by the United States Supreme Court in a manner contrary to the understanding and expectation of the framers of the Bill.

A law was pa.s.sed February 7, 1903, correcting this and some minor defects. It is hoped, though we cannot be sure in such a matter, that a permanent system of Bankruptcy, so essential to all commercial, indeed to all civilized nations, is now established, and will be maintained in the United States.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

It has been my singular ill fortune that I have been compelled to differ from the Republican Party, and from a good many of my political a.s.sociates, upon many important matters.

It has been my singular good fortune that, so far, they have all come to my way of thinking, as have the majority of the American people, in regard to every one, with perhaps one exception. That is the dealing of the American people with the people of the Philippine Islands, by the Treaty with Spain.

The war that followed it crushed the Republic that the Philippine people had set up for themselves, deprived them of their independence, and established there, by American power, a Government in which the people have no part, against their will. No man, I think, will seriously question that that action was contrary to the Declaration of Independence, the fundamental principles declared in many State const.i.tutions, the principles avowed by the founders of the Republic and by our statesmen of all parties down to a time long after the death of Lincoln.

If the question were, whether I am myself right, or whether my friends and companions in the Republican Party be right, I should submit to their better judgment. But I feel quite confident, though of that no man can be certain, that if the judgment of the American people, even in this generation, could be taken on that question alone, I should find myself in the majority. If it be not so, the issue is between the opinion of the American people for more than a century, and the opinion that the American people has expressed for one or two Presidential terms.

Surely I do not need to argue the question; at any rate, I will not here undertake to argue the question, that our dealing with the Philippine people is a violation of the principles to which our people adhered from 1776 to 1893. If the maintenance of slavery were inconsistent with them, it was admitted that in that particular we were violating them, or were unable from circ.u.mstances to carry them into effect. Mr. Jefferson thought so himself.

But the accomplishment by this Republic of its purpose to subjugate the Philippine people to its will, under the claim that it, and not they, had the right to judge of their fitness for self-government, is a rejection of the old American doctrine as applicable to any race we may judge to be our inferior.

This doctrine will be applied hereafter, unless it be abandoned, to the Negro at home. Senator Tillman of South Carolina well said, and no gentleman in the Senate contradicted him: "Republican leaders do not longer dare to call into question the justice or the necessity of limiting Negro suffrage in the South."

The same gentleman said at another time: "I want to call your attention to the remarkable change that has come over the spirit of the dream of the Republicans. Your slogans of the past--brotherhood of man and fatherhood of G.o.d--have gone glimmering down through the ages. The brotherhood of man exists no longer." These statements of Mr. Tillman have never been challenged, and never can be.

I do not mean here to renew the almost interminable debate.

I will only make a very brief statement of my position:

The discussion began with the acquisition of Hawaii. Ever since I came to the Senate I had carefully studied the matter of the acquisition of Hawaii. I had become thoroughly satisfied that it would be a great advantage to the people of the United States, as well as for the people of Hawaii.

Hawaii is 2,100 miles from our Pacific coast. Yet if a line be drawn from the point of our territory nearest Asia to the Southern boundary of California, that line being the chord of which our Pacific coast is the bow, Hawaii will fall this side of it. Held by a great Nation with whom we were at war, it would be a most formidable and valuable base of supplies.