Part 7

If my knowledge of the slums counts for anything, it counts for a positive assurance that the personal devotion which is daily manifested in the life of the tenements in repeated acts of self-denial, from the sharing of a delicacy with a sick neighbor to the education of a gifted child by the year-long sacrifices of the entire family, is a spark from the smouldering embers of idealism that lie buried in the ashes of sordid existence, and await but the fanning of a great purpose to leap up into a flame of abstract devotion.

Times have changed, indeed, since the days of Washington. His was a time of beginnings, ours is a time ripe for accomplishment. And yet the seed the Fathers sowed we shall not reap, unless we consecrate ourselves to our purpose as they did,--all of us, the whole people, no man presuming to insult his neighbor by exempting him on account of apparent weakness. The common people in Washington's time, and again in Lincoln's time, stood up like men, because they were called as men, not as weaklings who must be coddled and spared the shock of robust moral enterprise. Not a full belly but a brimming soul made heroes out of ploughboys in '76. The common man of to-day is capable of a like transformation if pricked with the electric needle of a lofty appeal. Those who are teaching the American workingman to demand the protection of his job against legitimate alien competition are trampling out the embers of popular idealism, instead of fanning it into a blaze that should transfigure the life of the nation.

Idealism of the finest, heroism unsurpassed, are frequently displayed in the familiar episodes of the class war that is going on before our eyes, under unionistic leadership. But it is a narrowing of the vision that makes a great mass of the people adopt as the unit of human salvation the class instead of the nation. The struggle which has for its object the putting of the rapacious rich in their place does not constitute a full programme of national progress. If labor leaders think they are leading in a holy war, they should be the last to encourage disrespect of the principles of righteousness for which they are fighting. It is inconsistent, to put it mildly, to lead a demonstration against entrenched capital on one day, and the next day to head a delegation in Congress in favor of entrenched labor. Is there anything brotherly about a monopolization of the labor market? Substituting the selfishness of the poor for the selfishness of the rich will bring us no nearer the day of universal justice.

Though I should not hesitate to insist on a generous attitude toward the foreigner even if it imposed on our own people all the hardships which are alleged to be the result of immigration, I do not disdain to point out the fact that, when all is said and done, there is enough of America to go around for many a year to come. It is hard to know whether to take the restrictionists seriously when they tell us that the country is becoming overcrowded. The population of the United States is less than three times that of England, and England is only a dot on our map. In Texas alone there is room for the population of the whole world, with a homestead of half an acre for every family of five, and a patch the size of Maryland left over for a public park. A schoolboy's geography will supply the figures for this pretty sum.

The over-supply of labor is another myth of the restrictionist imagination that vanishes at one glance around the country, which shows us crops spoiling for want of harvesters, and women running to the legislature for permission to extend their legal working-day in the fields; such is the scarcity of men. Said ex-Secretary Nagel, commenting upon the immigration bill which was so strenuously pushed by the restrictionists in the Sixty-third Congress, only to be vetoed by President Taft:--

In my judgment no sufficiently earnest and intelligent effort has been made to bring our wants and our supply together, and so far the same forces that give the chief support to this provision of the new bill [a literacy test, intended to check the influx of cheap labor] have stubbornly resisted any effort looking to an intelligent distribution of new immigration to meet the needs of our vast country. no such drastic measure [as the literacy test] should be adopted until we have at least exhausted the possibilities of a rational distribution of these new forces.

Distribution--geographical, seasonal, occupational; that should be our next watch-word, if we are bent on applying our vast resources to our needs. It cannot be too often pointed out that a nation of our political confession is bound to try every other possible solution of her problems before resorting to a measure that encroaches on the rights of humanity. And so far are we from exhausting the possibilities of internal reform that even the most obvious economic errors have not been corrected. It is not good sense nor good morals to keep men at work twelve and thirteen hours a day, seven days in the week, as they do, for example, in the paper-mills. It is bad policy to use women in the mills; it is heinous to use the children. Every one of those over-long jobs should be cut in two; the women should be sent back to the nursery, and the children put to school, and able-bodied men set in their places.

If such a programme, consistently carried out throughout the country, still left considerable numbers unemployed, there is one more remedy we might apply. We might chain to the benches in the city parks, where involuntary idlers now pass the day, all the agents and runners who move around Europe at the expense of steamship companies, labor contractors, and mill-owners. We must stop the importation of labor, not talk about stopping it.

To refrain from soliciting immigration is a very different thing from imposing an arbitrary check on voluntary immigration, and gives very different results. The class of men who are lured across the ocean by the golden promises of labor agents are not of the same moral order as those who are spurred to the great adventure by a desire to share in our American civilization. When we restrain the runners, we rid ourselves automatically of the least desirable element of immigration,--the hordes of irresponsible job-hunters without family who do not ask to be steered into the current of American life, and whose mission here is accomplished when they have saved up a petty fortune with which to dazzle the eyes of peasant sweethearts at home. It is this class that contributes, through its ignorance and aloofness, the bulk of the deplorable phenomena which are quoted by restrictionists as arguments against immigration in general. But we must go after them by the direct method, applying the force of the law to the agents who rout them out of their native villages. When we attempt to weed out this one element by indirect methods, such as the oft-proposed literacy test, we are guilty of the folly of discharging a cannon into the midst of the sheepfold with the object of killing the wolf.

If through such a measure as the literacy test the desired results could be insured, we should still be loath to adopt it until every other possible method had been tried. To hit at labor competition through a pretended fear of illiteracy is a tricky policy, and trickery is incompatible with the moral dignity of the American nation. Are we bankrupt in statesmanship that we must pawn the jewel of national righteousness? It required no small amount of ingenuity to find a connection between the immigrant's ability to earn a wage and his inability to read. If the resourceful gentlemen who invented the literacy test would concentrate their talents on the problem of stopping the stimulation of immigration, we should soon hear the last of the over-supply of cheap labor. Where there's a will there's a way, in statecraft as in other things.

It is not enough for the integrity of our principles to scrutinize the ethical nature of proposed legislation. It must be understood in general that whoever asks for restrictive measures as a means of improving American labor conditions must prove beyond a doubt, first, that the evils complained of are not the result of our own sins, and next, that the foreign laborer on coming to America has not exchanged worse conditions for better. The gospel of brotherhood will not let us define our own good in terms of indifference to the good of others.

Preaching selfishness in the name of the American workingman is an insidious way of shutting him out from participation in the national mission. If it is good for the nation to live up to its highest traditions, it cannot be bad for any part of the nation to contribute its share toward the furtherance of the common ideal. For we are not a nation of high and low, where the aristocracy acts and the populace applauds. If America is going to do anything in the world, every man and woman among us will have a share in it.

Objection to the influx of foreign labor is sometimes based on a theory the very opposite of the scarcity of work. Some say that there is altogether too much work being done in this country--that we are developing our natural resources and multiplying industries at a rate too rapid for wholesome growth; and to check this feverish activity it is proposed to cut off the supply of labor which makes it possible.

I doubt, in the first place, if it is reasonable to expect a young nation with half a continent to explore to restrain its activity, as long as there are herculean tasks in sight, any more than we would expect a boy to walk off the diamond in the middle of the game. Or if it is thought best to slacken the speed of material progress, the brakes should be applied at Wall Street, not at Ellis Island. The foreign laborer is merely the tool in the hands of the promoter, indispensable to, but not responsible for, his activities. The workmen come in after the promoter has launched his scheme. At least, I have never heard of a development company or industrial corporation organized for the purpose of providing jobs for a shipload of immigrants. That species of philanthropy our benevolent millionaires have not hit on as yet.

It is because the brutal method is the easiest that we are advised to confiscate the tools of industry in order to check the rate of material development. The more dignified way would be to restrain the captains of industry, by asserting our authority over our own citizens in matters affecting the welfare of the nation. An up-to-date mother, desiring that her little boy should not play with the scissors, would be ashamed to put them on a high shelf: she would train the boy not to touch them though they lay within his reach. Why should the assemblage of mothers and fathers who constitute the nation show less pride about their methods than a lone woman in the nursery?

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Outside the economic field, fear of the immigrant is perhaps oftenest expressed in the sociological anxiety concerning assimilation. The question is raised whether so many different races, products of a great variety of physical and moral environments, can possibly fuse into a harmonious nation, obedient to one law, devoted to one flag. Some people see no indication of the future in the fact that race-blending has been going on here from the beginning of our history, because the elements we now get are said to differ from us more radically than the elements we assimilated in the past.

To allay our anxiety on this point, we have only to remind ourselves that none of the great nations of Europe that present such a homogeneous front to-day arose from a single stock; and the differences between peoples in the times of the political beginnings of Europe were vastly greater than the differences between East and West, North and South, to-day. Moreover, the European nations were assorted at the point of the sword, while in America the nations are coming together of their own free will; and who can doubt that the spiritual forces of common education, common interests and associations are more effective welding agents than brute force?

Doubts as to the assimilative qualities of current immigration do not exist in the minds of the workers in settlements, libraries, and schools. These people have a faith in the future of the strangers that is based on long and intimate experience with foreigners from many lands. When they are dealing with the normal product of immigration, the people who come here following some dim star of higher destiny for their children, the social missionaries are jubilantly sure of the result; and face to face with the less promising material of the labor camps, where thousands are brought together by the lure of the dollar and are kept together by the devices of economic exploitation, the missionaries are still undaunted. They have discovered that sanitation is a remedy for the filth of the camp; that a spelling-book will make inroads on the ignorance of the mob; that a lecture hall will diminish the business of the saloon and the brothel; that substituting neighborly kindness for brutal neglect will fan to a glow the divine spark in the coarsest natures. And then there is the Goethals way of managing a labor camp.

The remedy for the moral indigestion which unchecked immigration is said to induce is in enlarging the organs of digestion. More evening classes, 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 masses 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 assimilation 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 classes 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 classes 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 classes who struggle for a living. The one assumes that the American workingman puts his family before his country; the other--the cry that we cannot assimilate 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 assimilation. 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 assimilate immigration doubts the devotion of our favored classes 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 nobly. 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 superstition 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 God 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 superstition in a world built on superstition? Civilization is the triumph of one superstition after another. At the very foundation of our world is the huge superstition of the Fatherhood of God. In a time when the peoples of the earth bowed down to gods of stone, gods of wood, gods of brass and of gold, what more incomprehensible superstition 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 superstition, and that nation is regarded as the liberator of humanity from the slavery of bestial ignorance. Out of that initial superstition followed, in logical sequence, the superstition 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 superstition of them all, the cornerstone of our Republic, and the model after which all the nations are striving to pattern themselves.

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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 breasts; and a startling discovery brings a cry to their lips: the children of the foreigners outclass 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 passion of devotion that do not mark the normal progress of our own well-cared-for children.