They Who Knock At Our Gates Part 4

The remedy for the moral indigestion which unchecked immigration is said to induce is in enlarging the organs of digestion. More evening cla.s.ses, 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 ma.s.ses 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 a.s.similation 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses who struggle for a living. The one a.s.sumes that the American workingman puts his family before his country; the other--the cry that we cannot a.s.similate 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 a.s.similation. 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 a.s.similate immigration doubts the devotion of our favored cla.s.ses 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 n.o.bly. 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 superst.i.tion 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 G.o.d 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 superst.i.tion in a world built on superst.i.tion? Civilization is the triumph of one superst.i.tion after another. At the very foundation of our world is the huge superst.i.tion of the Fatherhood of G.o.d. In a time when the peoples of the earth bowed down to G.o.ds of stone, G.o.ds of wood, G.o.ds of bra.s.s and of gold, what more incomprehensible superst.i.tion 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 superst.i.tion, and that nation is regarded as the liberator of humanity from the slavery of b.e.s.t.i.a.l ignorance. Out of that initial superst.i.tion followed, in logical sequence, the superst.i.tion 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 superst.i.tion 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s; and a startling discovery brings a cry to their lips: the children of the foreigners outcla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion 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 circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.body 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 mult.i.tudes.

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 superst.i.tion 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 a.s.sembled 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 a.s.suredly 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 ama.s.sed, think of that distant to-morrow when the things we now do will have pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d'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 sh.e.l.l 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 n.o.bly 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 G.o.d were heard on Mount Sinai, and a certain people heard, and the blackness of idolatry was lifted from the world. Again the voice of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d will speak again in times to come.

THE END