Part 12

“I am convinced that a settlement in some healthful region there will have, by the ordinary blessing of God, excellent temporal and moral results, especially for the rising generation.... Should it then excite much wonder that I have firmly resolved to leave The Netherlands and together with so many Christian relatives adopt the United States as a new fatherland?

“There I shall certainly meet with the same wickedness which troubles me here; yet I shall find also opportunity to work. There I shall certainly find the same, if not still greater, evidence of unbelief and superstition; but I shall also find a constitutional provision which does not bind my hands in the use of the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God; there I can fight for what I believe without being disobedient to the magistrates and authorities ordained by God. There I shall find among men the same zeal to obtain this world’s goods; but I shall not find the same impulse to get the better of one another, for competition is open to all; I shall not find the same desire to reduce the wages of labor, nor the same inducement to avoid taxation, nor the same peevishness and groaning about the burden of taxation.

“There I shall find no Minister of Public Worship, for the separation of Church and State is a fact. There I shall not need to contribute to the support of pastors whose teachings I abhor. I shall find no school commissions nor school supervisors who prohibit the use of the Bible in schools and hinder the organization of special schools, for education is really free. I shall find there the descendants of earlier inhabitants of Holland, among whom the piety of our forefathers still lives, and who are now prepared to give advice and aid to Hollanders who are forced to come to them.”

Scholte, however, never claimed to be a refugee from the oppression of the Old World. He left Europe because the social, religious, and political condition of his native country was such that, according to his conviction, he could not with any reasonable hope of success work for the actual benefit of honest and industrious fellow-men. Very many members of Scholte’s emigrant association felt certain that they and their children would sink from the middle class and end their lives as paupers, if they remained in Holland.

Later emigration to America was in no small degree due to a cause which has always operated in inducing people to abandon their European homes. After a period of residence in America, Hollanders, elated by reason of their prosperity and general change of fortune, very naturally reported their delight to friends and relatives in the fatherland, strongly urging them to come and share their good luck instead of suffering from want in Holland. They wrote of higher wages, fertile soil, cheapness of the necessities of life, abundance of cheap land, and many other advantages. If one’s wages for a day’s work in America equalled a week’s earnings in Holland, surely it was worth while to leave that unfortunate country. Such favorable reports as these were largely instrumental in turning the attention of Hollanders to the New World as the one great land of opportunity.

EDWARD BOK

Although it was impossible to include in this volume selections from “The Americanization of Edward Bok,” recently published, it seems that some mention should be made of this delightfully reminiscent autobiography and of its author, who came to this country in 1870 as a little Dutch boy of six years.

There are entertaining chapters on his passion for collecting autographs from famous people, on his visit to Boston and Cambridge to see Holmes and Longfellow and Emerson, on his relations with prominent statesmen and other notable men of his time, and on his experiences as editor of an influential and successful magazine; but most pertinent to the purpose of this work are the last two chapters of the book, “Where America Fell Short with Me,” and “What I Owe to America,” which should be read by all those actively interested in the Americanization of the foreign-born. In the first of these he points out that America failed to teach him thrift or economy; that the importance of doing a task thoroughly, the need of quality rather than quantity, was not inculcated; that the public school fell short in its responsibility of seeing that he, a foreign-born boy, acquired the English language correctly; that he was not impressed with a wholesome and proper respect for law and authority; and that, at the most critical time, when he came to exercise the right of suffrage, the State offered him no enlightenment or encouragement. Yet, in spite of all this, he is able to say: “Whatever shortcomings I may have found during my fifty-year period of Americanization; however America may have failed to help my transition from a foreigner into an American, I owe to her the most priceless gift that any nation can offer, and that is opportunity.”

OSCAR SOLOMON STRAUS

Oscar S. Straus, formerly United States Ambassador to Turkey, was born in Bavaria. Besides the degree A.B. from Columbia University, he has received honorary degrees from various institutions. He was appointed a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, 1902, and Secretary of Commerce and Labor in the cabinet of President Roosevelt, and has held many other prominent positions in civil and political affairs.

His chief writings are: “The Origin of Republican Form of Government in the United States,” 1886; “Roger Williams, the Pioneer of Religious Liberty,” 1894; “The American Spirit,” a collection of various addresses, published in one volume by the Century Company in 1893. The address selected for quotation here is that delivered at the banquet of the American Hebrew Congregations, in New York, January 18, 1911.

AMERICA AND THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN JUDAISM

The spirit of American Judaism first asserted itself when Stuyvesant, the Governor of New Amsterdam, would not permit the few Jews who had emigrated from Portugal to unite with the other burghers in standing guard for the protection of their homes. When the tax-collector came to Asser Levy to demand a tax on this account, he asked whether that tax was imposed on all the residents of New Amsterdam. “No,” was the reply, “it is only imposed upon the Jews, because they do not stand guard!” “I have not asked to be exempted,” replied Asser Levy. “I am not only willing, but I demand the right to stand guard.” That right the Jews have asserted and exercised as officers in the ranks of the Continental Army and in every crisis of our national history from that time until the present day.

The American spirit and the spirit of American Judaism were nurtured in the same cradle of Liberty, and were united in origin, in ideals, and in historical development. The closing chapter of the chronicles of the Jews on the Iberian peninsula forms the opening chapter of their history on this Continent. It was Luis Santangel, “the Beaconsfield of his time,” assisted by his kinsman Gabriel Sanches, the Royal Treasurer of Aragon, who advanced out of his own purse seventeen thousand florins which made the voyages of Columbus possible. Luis de Torres, the interpreter as well as the surgeon and the physician of the little fleet, and several of the sailors who were with Columbus on his first voyage, as shown by the record, were Jews.

Looking back through this vista of more than four centuries, we have reason to remember with justified gratitude the foresight and signal services of those Spanish Jews who had the wisdom to divine the far-reaching possibilities of the plans of the great navigator, whom the King and the Queen, the Dukes and the Grandees united in regarding as merely “a visionary babbler” or, worse than this, as “a scheming adventurer.” The royal patrons were finally won over by the hope that Columbus might discover new treasures of gold and precious stones to enrich the Spanish crown. But not so with the Jewish patrons, who caused Columbus, or, as he was then called, Christopher Colon, to be recalled, and who, without security and without interest, advanced the money to fit out his caravels, since they saw, as by divine inspiration, the promise and possibility of the discovery of another world, which, in the words of the late Emilio Castelar--the historian, statesman, and one time President of Spain--“would afford to the quickening principles of human liberty a temple reared to the God of enfranchised and redeemed conscience, a land that would offer an unstained abode to the ideals of progress.” Fortunately, the records of these transactions are still preserved in the archives of Simancas in Seville.

It is idle to speculate upon hypothetical theories in the face of the facts of history. Of course, America would have been discovered and colonized had Columbus never lived; but had the streams of the beginnings of American history flown from other sources in other directions, it would be futile even to make an imaginative forecast of the effect they would have produced upon the history and development of this Continent. The merciless intolerance of an ecclesiastical system and the horror of its persecutions stimulated the earliest immigration, and subsequently brought about the Reformation in Saxon and Anglo-Saxon lands, and the same spirit drove to our shores the Pilgrim and the Puritan fathers; which chain of circumstances destined this country from the very beginning to be the land of the immigrant and a home for the fugitive and the persecuted.

The difference between government by kings and nobles and government under a Democracy is, that the former rests upon the power to compel obedience, while the latter rests essentially upon the sacrifice by the individual for the community, based upon the ideals of right and justice. If the Pilgrims, the Puritans, and the Huguenots brought with them, as they certainly did, the remembrance of sufferings for ideals and the spirit of sacrifice, how much longer was that remembrance, and with how much greater intensity did that spirit glow in the souls of the Jews, whose whole history is a record of martyrdom, of suffering, and of sacrifice for the ideals of civil and religious liberty; concerning whom it has been said: “Of all the races and nations of mankind which quarter the arms of Liberty on the shields of their honor, none has a better title to that decoration than the Jews.”

The spirit of Judaism became the mother spirit of Puritanism in Old England; and the history of Israel and its democratic model under the Judges inspired and guided the Pilgrims and the Puritans in their wandering hither and in laying the foundation of their commonwealths in New England. The piety and learning of the Jews bridged the chasm of the Middle Ages; and the torch they bore amidst trials and sufferings lighted the pathway from the ancient to the modern world.

“The historical power of the prophets of Israel,” says James Darmesteter, “is exhausted neither by Judaism nor by Christianity, and they hold a reserve force for the benefit of the coming century. The twentieth century is better prepared than the nineteen preceding it to understand them.” While Zionism is a pious hope and a vision out of despair in countries where the victims of oppression are still counted by millions, the republicanism of the United States is the nearest approach to the ideals of the prophets of Israel that ever has been incorporated in the form of a state. The founders of our government converted the dreams of philosophers into a political system,--a government by the people, for the people, whereunder the rights of man became the rights of men, secured and guaranteed by a written constitution. Ours is peculiarly a promised land wherein the spirit of the teachings of the ancient prophets inspired the work of the fathers of our country.

American liberty demands of no man the abandonment of his conscientious convictions; on the contrary, it had its birth, not in the narrowness of uniformity, but in the breadth of diversity, which patriotism fuses together into a conscious harmony for the highest welfare of all. The Protestant, the Catholic, and the Jew, each and all need the support and the sustaining power of their religion to develop their moral natures and to keep alive the spirit of self-sacrifice which American patriotism demands of every man, whatever may be his creed or race, who is worthy to enjoy the blessings of American citizenship.

I do not wish to be misunderstood as claiming any special merit for the Jews as American citizens which is not equally possessed by the Americans of other creeds. They have the good as well as the bad among them, the noble and the ignoble, the worthy and the unworthy. They have the qualities as well as the defects of their fellow-citizens. In a word, they are not any less patriotic Americans because they are Jews, nor any less loyal Jews because they are primarily patriotic Americans.

The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock.

FELIX ADLER

Felix Adler, lecturer and writer on moral and ethical subjects, was born in Alzey, Germany, in 1851. He received the degree A.B. from Columbia University, and continued his studies at Berlin and at the University of Heidelberg. From 1874 to 1876 he was professor of Hebrew at Cornell University. Since 1902 he has been professor of political and social ethics at Columbia. He has produced numerous works on moral and ethical topics. In 1915 there was published his book, “The World Crisis and its Meaning,” the third chapter of which is here quoted in part.

Adler’s keen interest in international ethics has been expressed in several addresses delivered before the New York Society of Ethical Culture, which was founded by him in 1876. Among other things he pleads for altruism among the nations, and truthfulness, and believes in a purified nationalism instead of anti- or inter-nationalism.

THE AMERICAN IDEAL

The American ideal is that of the uncommon quality latent in the common man. Necessarily it is an ethical ideal, a spiritual ideal; otherwise it would be nonsense. For, taking men as they are, they are assuredly not equal. The differences between them, on the contrary, are glaring. The common man is not uncommonly fine spiritually, but rather, seen from the outside, “uncommonly” common. It is therefore an ethical instinct that has turned the people toward this ethical conception.

It is true that in Germany and in England, side by side with the efficiency and the mastery ideals, there has always existed this same spiritual or religious ideal; side by side with the stratification and entitulation of men, the labelling of them as lower and higher, as empirically better or worse, there has always been the recognition that men are equal,--equal, that is to say, in church, but not outside, equal in the hereafter, but not in this life. If we would fathom the real depth and inner significance of the democratic ideal as it slumbers or dreams in the heart of America, rather than as yet explicit, we must say that it is an ideal which seeks to overcome this very dualism, seeks to take the spiritual conception of human equality out of the church and put it into the market place, to take it from far off celestial realms for realization upon this earth. For men are not equal in the empirical sense; they are equal only in the spiritual sense, equal only in the sense that the margin of achievement of which any person is capable, be it wide or narrow, is infinitesimal compared with his infinite spiritual possibilities.