Part 18

Copyright, by Fleming H. Revell Co. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

The author was working as a miner at Connellsville, Pennsylvania, when the strike and general riot occurred, during which he was beaten into unconsciousness and hustled off to jail.

GEORGE A. GORDON

The Old South Church, Boston, has had a prominent and patriotic part in American history since early days. It was a Puritan immigrant and layman of this church, Samuel Sewall, who was one of the first to speak out against human slavery in his tract, “The Selling of Joseph”; and it was in this church that the five patriotic addresses, published in 1917 under the title, “The Appeal of the Nation,” were delivered by George Angier Gordon, pastor of the church since 1884. The Rev. Dr. Gordon, who was born in Scotland in 1853 and received his common school education there, came to the United States in 1871. In 1881 he obtained the degree A.B. from Harvard. He has since served his Alma Mater frequently in the capacity of University preacher, and many Harvard men will recall his inspiring talks in the college chapel. In the following selection he manifests the poignant homesickness, the sterling loyalty, and the noble aspiration so common in the writings of the immigrant.

THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN: COST, PRIVILEGE AND DUTIES OF HIS CITIZENSHIP

The Republic of the United States is in fact a nation of immigrants, a nation of aliens. All have made the great migration, all have come hither from other parts of the earth. The only difference among Americans is that some came earlier while others came much later, indeed as it were yesterday, to these shores. The only aboriginal American is the Indian. This historic fact should be forever borne in mind. We came hither first or last, across the ocean, and from the ends of the earth.

There is however a ground of distinction among Americans; they are rightly divided into native citizens and citizens foreign-born. The native citizen has grown into the being of the society that his alien ancestors helped to form. He has in his blood an American inheritance; his instincts have been fed with native food; he is alive to nothing else as he is to the American Republic. We foreign-born Americans acknowledge his distinction, we rejoice in his happiness, we count ourselves fortunate to stand with him in the great communion of free citizens. We ask him, in his turn, to read in the story of our migration the struggle of his ancestors; we remind him of what we left behind, what we brought with us, and at what cost we gained our American citizenship.

In the words that I have chosen as my text we have a foreign-born Roman citizen. Exactly where he was born we do not know; we do know that he was born outside Roman citizenship. He was, therefore, an adopted citizen of the Roman Empire, and to this he refers in the words that I have quoted, “With a great sum obtained I this citizenship.”

There are three implications in these words: the cost of citizenship to this man; the privilege of citizenship to him; his duty as a Roman citizen. These three points will be a convenient guide to us in our discussion of the subject of the morning--“The Foreign-born American Citizen.”

1. First of all, then, there is the cost to this man of citizenship in the Roman Empire. He obtained it with a great sum; to get it made him poor.

There are few among native-born American citizens who understand the sacrifice made by the foreign-born citizens of the heritage of childhood and boyhood in the wonder world of early life. There is the bereavement of the early mystic, unfathomable touch of nature that comes to one only through one’s native land. Never again to see the sun rise and set over the dear old hills, with the hero’s mantle like the bloom of the heather resting upon them, and the shadow of an immemorial race, is truly a great bereavement. Never again to see the green pastures, with the flocks quietly feeding in them, under the shade of the plot of trees here and there mercifully provided by the humanity of previous generations, nor to hear the music of the river that has sung into being and out of being forty generations of human lives; never again to see the fields covered with corn, nor to hear the reaper’s song among the yellow corn; never again to see the light that welcomed you when you were born, that smiled on you when you were baptized, that went with you to school, that watched your play, that constituted the beautiful, the glorious environment of your early days; never again to hear the song of the native birds, the skylark in the morning, the mavis at nightfall, and the wild whistle of the blackbird under the heat of noon from his thorny den,--all this is simply inexpressible bereavement. Nature is inwoven with the soul in its earliest years; its beauty, its wildness, its soul becomes part of the soul of every deep-hearted human being, and never again can nature be seen as she was seen through the wonder of life’s morning.

It is this spell of nature over the young soul that gives its exquisite pathos to Hood’s world-familiar melody:

“I remember, I remember, The house where I was born, The little window where the sun Came peeping in at morn; He never came a wink too soon. Nor brought too long a day, But now I often wish the night Had borne my breath away!

...

“I remember, I remember, The fir trees dark and high; I used to think their slender tops Were close against the sky: It was a childish ignorance, But now ’tis little joy To know I’m farther off from heav’n Than when I was a boy.”

There it is, the mystic, divine influence of nature through the atmosphere of the country of one’s birth; every immigrant to this country makes that great surrender.

There is, too, the early humanity. You go down town, you who are native-born American citizens, and every day you meet those whom you have known from birth, your earliest playmates and schoolmates, and those who went to college with you, who entered business with you, who fought side by side with you through the Great War, who loved what you loved in early life, revered what you revered, laughed at what you laughed at and felt as you felt over the glory and the tenderness of existence. You do not know what they have left behind them who never see a face that they knew in childhood, who will never meet again, till time is no more, a schoolmate or an early companion, who will never gather again in the old home with father and mother and brothers and sisters; only the most favored have had a fugitive glance, like looking at a telegraph pole from an express train, of those dear, early faces. There is a whole world of bereavement of early, tender, beautiful humanity on the part of all who come here. And this again you hear in those two verses in “Auld Lang Syne”:--

“We twa hae run about the braes, And pu’d the gowans fine, But we’ve wander’d monie a weary foot Sin’ auld lang syne.

“We twa hae paidl’d in the burn From morning sun till dine, But seas between us braid hae roar’d Sin’ auld lang syne.”

There is due other surrender: there is the suffering of adjustment in a new country. The first year I spent in Boston, from July, 1871, to considerably more than July, 1872, I conceived my condition to be as near that of the spirits in hell as anything I could well imagine! To be in a city where nobody knew you, where you knew nobody, where so many wanted to take advantage of the “greenhorn,” to laugh at him if he ever grew for a moment a bit sentimental, was not exactly heaven. Many and many a time I went down to the wharf to see the ships with their white sails, written all over with invisible tidings from the far, sunny islands left behind, and if I had not been restrained by shame and pride I should have gone home. That is the experience of Scandinavian, English, Scotch, Irish, Teuton, Slav, Armenian, Syrian, and Latin; the great bereavement of nature and of early humanity is deepened by the sorrow of readjustment in a foreign land. “With a great sum obtained we this citizenship”; few understand it, few indeed. Foreign-born American citizenship is preceded by a vast sacrifice, and you never can understand that sort of citizenship till you take account of this really profound experience.

2. The next thing in the experience of the chief captain was his privilege as a Roman citizen. His station and bearing and power told of that privilege. He was a military tribune in the legion stationed in Jerusalem; he had risen to important command and power impossible for him, inaccessible to him if he had not obtained citizenship.

America has been called the land of opportunity. Look at this fact in three directions only, since time will not allow more. The common workman may become, by intelligence, by diligence and by fidelity, the master workman. Cast your eyes over the land to-day and assemble the master workmen, and you will find that the vast majority of them have risen from the position of ordinary workmen to the chief places in their trade and calling. Such a chance for ascension in a broad way for all competent men, in the Old World, is a simple impossibility. The chance does not exist there. Men rise there by talent and by luck, by talent and by favoritism. But here in a broad and magnificent manner they rise by talent and industry, fidelity and force; here as nowhere else, they have a chance to work out what is in them.

Consider this in the things of the intellect. The Old World calls us an uneducated race. It is true that we have not many great scholars; the reason is that we are engaged with immediate pressing problems; we apply intelligence to living issues which in other lands is applied to the Genitive and the Accusative and the Dative cases of the Latin and Greek languages. When we look backward and consider the provision made for the intellect of the nation during the last fifty years, we claim that there is no parallel to it in any country on which the sun shines. More money has gone to found colleges and schools and universities for men and for women, open to all talent from ocean to ocean and from the Canadian border to the Gulf, than was ever dedicated to education in the same length of time in the history of mankind. Not only is there provision for the regulars, but also for the irregulars; all sorts of evening schools flourish in our cities where the first teachers of the community are available for talented and aspiring youth of slender means. Men are practicing medicine and law; they are in the ministry and in other professions, usually called learned, who never saw the inside of a college or a university, who have obtained an education in what is called an irregular way, from and by the very men who are teaching in these regular academic institutions.

Let me remind you of the abundant hospitality, the wonderful generosity of the American people toward aspiring youth. Talent which would be ignored in Great Britain, promise which would be sneered at in every continental country in Europe, is here discovered and encouraged to develop into power. This is a phenomenon of which we must never lose sight, the chance here in the United States for a man to be intellectually all that it is possible for him to be. The best teachers may often be seen here wielding the educational power of history and the arts to train the youth to whom college is an impossibility, for service requiring educated powers, in his day and generation.

There is to be noted the opportunity in the way of character and moral influence that comes to citizens of the United States. What does that mean? The chance to change and improve the law of the land, the chance for a man to change and improve the government of the United States, the chance to modify, in the line of humanity, the social feeling of the United States. And freedom is here the condition of all; every man who complains that things are not what they should be has a chance by his vote to remedy the abuse and to take another step toward the ideal.

Here again there is something new, measuring it against the whole people. We are dupes and fools when we allow ourselves to be ruled by groups in this country; we are free men, with the power in our hands. If we have moral ideals of our own, and moral character, we can so use them as to lift the character of the land in which we live.

3. Finally, there was the duty of the tribune as a Roman citizen. Paul was about to be bound and tortured, without trial, when he appealed to the chief captain, “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman and uncondemned?” This startled the man. “Tell me, art thou a Roman? Good heavens, this will never do! I am pledged to do my duty! Get off those shackles and set the man free and guard his life!” There was the man’s sense of his duty.

What is the duty of foreign-born American citizens? First to learn the English language and to prefer it to all other tongues on the face of the earth. That tongue comes in the splendor of a June day; it breaks over life like a June sunrise, with an atmosphere, tone, beauty, and power which for Americans must ever be unapproachable. Let no American citizen hug his foreign tongue, go into the closet with it and shut out the light of the great English language which carries all our ideals as Americans! The very vessel of the Lord it is, in which American freedom is carried,--the language of Shakespeare and Milton, the incomparable free man; the language of Bacon and Burke and Washington and Hamilton and Webster and Lincoln. This tongue consecrates the immigrant who would be a citizen; he never can be a citizen of the United States without that, never. This is the tongue that carries in a unique translation the literature of Israel; the Bible is the maker of free peoples.