THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN THE WRITINGS
OF AMERICANS OF FOREIGN BIRTH

The American Spirit in the
Writings of Americans
of Foreign Birth

SELECTIONS CHOSEN AND EDITED

BY
ROBERT E. STAUFFER, A. M., B. L. S.

The Christopher Publishing House
Boston, U. S. A.

A visit to the public library of many towns and cities of five to twenty thousand inhabitants, and inquiry among persons of considerable and even college education, reveals a widespread unacquaintance with the writings of our foreign-born citizens. Seldom does one find the books of more than four or five of these authors upon the shelves of the smaller public and college libraries; yet these institutions are doing much to develop public opinion in countless communities made up for the most part of native Americans who have hitherto been largely ignorant of and indifferent to the condition and aims of the foreign population, but whose intelligent and sympathetic interest in the foreign-born must be aroused if the great gulf between the two is to be bridged.

The funds of many libraries, it is true, are so limited as to preclude the purchase of a majority of these books, worth while as they are; yet the splendid American spirit to be found in many of them ought to be more familiar to Americans, whether native or foreign-born. This volume of selections is offered, therefore, not as an equivalent for the reading of the complete works here represented, but to help stimulate a more general interest in their authors and in books of this type, and to show with a cumulative emphasis the essence of the genuine Americanism with which these writings are imbued.

As one reads these and other works of the foreign-born in historical sequence, he will notice that their manner of writing has become less reflective and philosophical and more critical and impassioned, but that keeping pace there has been an intense and burning patriotism. The early colonists and immigrants were seldom touched except in their political liberties; recent immigrants have been growing increasingly sensitive to the infringement of their social and economic rights. This, of course, is a quality not peculiar to the writings of the foreign-born, but is incident to the modern industrial and social situation with conditions very[10] different from those obtaining in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The struggle against social forces with their great complexity and ever renewed and boundless energy has demanded of the recent immigrants the highest qualities for success.

Nearly all the selections included in this volume will be found charged with a strong human quality, revealing the poignant homesickness of the stranger in a new world, his sensitiveness, his forward-looking hope, his realization of both the humorous and the tragic side of his case, his fine hero-worship, his firm belief in the unique mission and high destiny of his adopted country, and his faith in the brotherhood of man and the dawning of a new day upon the earth.

It is not within the scope of this introduction to plead for any particular immigration policy. Whether we shall adopt one of rigid restriction or assume a liberal attitude, and what shall be the bases of the selection of the immigrant in the future, are questions to be answered not by the petty politician, the unscrupulous demagogue, the uninformed provincial, or the alarmists of little faith who, in their hysteria, would completely reverse the traditions of the nation by closing the gates entirely, but are matters to be determined by fair-minded and representative leaders after a careful and unbiased study of the problem in its various economic, social and national aspects. The chief concern here is with our attitude toward the millions of unassimilated immigrants already among us. To them it would be well for most of us to give our attention before attempting to solve the intricate and perplexing question of an immigration policy. Perhaps if we did, we might get more light and arrive at a more unanimous and consistent conclusion regarding the admission of those who are now said to be ready in such great numbers to knock at our gates.

In these selections, it is believed, will be found convincing proof that to try to educate and Americanize the foreign-born by force is not only unwise and will prove futile, because it flies in the face of the principles of human nature, but is also unnecessary. Still, the dejection on the part of[11] many persons over our apparent failure to assimilate the immigrant is truly pathetic. But why so much despair about this, when countless thousands of native Americans have little or no realizing sense of the duties of citizenship? Who is the more culpable, the man who, being in a new land and often lonely and neglected, finds it difficult to overleap the barriers of timidity and suspicion and a foreign language and strange customs, in order to seize the larger opportunities; or the man who, though born and reared in the midst of all the advantages of American life, fails to appreciate his precious heritage and treats with indifference or abuses the sacred right of franchise? Certainly hostility and neglect will accomplish nothing, where hospitality and helpfulness may go far to induce the newcomers to avail themselves of the opportunities and responsibilities open to them in America.

An illustration of how readily the foreigner may respond to the least show of kindness and fellowship is afforded by the following incident. A traveller on a west-bound train out of New York was accosted by a young Italian immigrant, who handed him a card of the Italian Immigration Society on the reverse of which was written, “Please direct this man to Santa Cruz train.” Now it happened that the American had once visited Italy and had picked up a smattering of the language, and partly by this and partly by the use of signs he did his best to convey the desired information. He then asked the young man into his own seat; and, as they talked together of Italy and the places the American had visited, the youth’s face glowed with the joy of remembrance. And then it was revealed that this sturdy and warm-hearted Italian, from whom the American might have turned as from a “dago” and “scum of the earth,” was one of the heroes of the Great War; that he had been wounded in the terrible disaster of Caporetto, and had received from the Italian minister of war testimonials and medals for gallant conduct in battle.

It is at least a question whether a vast amount of time, energy, and money has not been misspent in a hysterical endeavor[12] to get the adult immigrant to change his vernacular and foreign ways. Realizing from my own experience, both as a student and as a teacher of English to foreigners, the immense effort necessary to acquire even a rudimentary knowledge of a strange language after the plastic period of youth has passed, I am convinced that too much stress may be laid upon the importance of the mere acquisition of the English language by the adult immigrant.

A change in the manners and customs of the immigrant has undoubtedly a useful and necessary part in his Americanization; but undue emphasis upon mere externals may, with its false implications, easily create erroneous impressions. Just now there comes to mind in this connection an illustration prominently displayed upon the front page of one of our most respected periodicals,—a photograph of an immigrant mother standing between her two sons, one of whom is garbed in American hat and overcoat, the other in uncouth workaday attire. Beneath the picture appears this question, “Which is Americanized?” One feels he must protest against the shallow and all too prevalent thinking which finds in the mere alteration of language and dress the essentials of Americanism, and which consequently has so little constructive and farsighted assistance to give to the momentous work of Americanization. It has been far too frequently demonstrated that a person may not only wear American clothes and speak English fluently, but may have been educated from his youth up in American institutions without being really Americanized.

The elder generation should, of course, be aided in every reasonable and practicable way; but it should soberly be borne in mind that it is going to take decades, if not centuries, to Americanize America, and that the hope of the nation is in the children, both native and foreign-born. It is a splendid demonstration of the truth of this that the most fervid tributes to America come from the lips of those who have arrived in the United States in the impressionable years of youth. If, then, the rate of progress toward perfection is to be appreciably accelerated, there must be much more[13] liberality in the support of the public schools and other educational and humanizing institutions.

What is an American, or what is Americanism? Many persons to-day are asking this question, to which perhaps only the future can give a complete answer. I venture to say, however, that an American is not one who expects to find in the United States Utopian conditions, but one who realizes the imperfections of American society and yet has faith in the ultimate goal toward which the diverse human elements here are struggling; that he is one who does not seek or propose any single panacea for the ills of the nation, but who, above all else, is conscious of his spiritual unity with those American minds that are striving in the sanest and best, though various, ways for the attainment of the high ends for which the republic was founded, and that desire to see the golden rule and “reason and the will of God” prevail in American life.

And it is just this consciousness of spiritual unity that is perhaps the most intense and valuable element in the writings of those who have paid the highest price for their citizenship, and that is so well worth bringing to the attention of those who, whether native or foreign-born, have never passed from the “centre of indifference” into the “everlasting yea” of patriotism and national feeling.

Much available and appropriate material has of necessity been omitted from this compilation, periodical articles in particular, with two exceptions, being excluded. But although the selections chosen constitute the utterances of only a small minority of the foreign-born, it is felt that their validity and representative character are not impaired. It must be remembered that there are thousands of American citizens of foreign birth leading contented and useful lives,—lawyers, physicians, clergymen, artists, teachers, and craftsmen, whose ideals and life-work have either not found expression in books, or whose writings have been impersonal in character, but who, if they were to write down their feelings, would express themselves in sentiments similar to those of their gifted compatriots of literary tendencies; and[14] even among the inarticulate mass there is a potential devotion, which, under the proper conditions, can be kindled into an ardent loyalty and patriotism.

Theodore Roosevelt once said, in writing the foreword to one of the works here quoted: “When we tend to grow disheartened over some of the developments of our American civilization, it is well worth while seeing what this same civilization holds for starved and eager souls who have elsewhere been denied what here we hold to be as a matter of course, rights free to all—although we do not, as we should do, make these rights accessible to all who are willing with resolute earnestness to strive for them.” That in part has been the aim in bringing these selections together. It is hoped that they may contribute not a little to a better understanding between America, new and old, and that they may help to allay the fears of those who have been inclined to ascribe most of our national ills to the presence among us of the foreign-born, and who have had their share in the “wave of blind distrust of the foreigner” which has recently swept over the land. Surely, no one is justified in judging the foreign-born, or is worthy or fitted to aid in educating them in regard to the duties of citizenship, unless he has first acquainted himself with their hopes, their disappointments, their aspirations, the travail and pathos of their new birth, and their deep-rooted love for America, as set forth in their own writings; for these are probably the strongest Americanization documents we possess and one of the surest proofs of the soundness of our institutions.

For generous permission to use copyrighted selections grateful acknowledgment is given to the following publishers and individuals: To Messrs. Harper & Brothers for the selections by M. E. Ravage; to The Pilgrim Press for the selection by George A. Gordon; to Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons for the selection by Edwin L. Godkin; to The Four Seas Company for the selections by Robert M. Wernaer; to Fleming H. Revell Company for the selections by Edward A. Steiner; to J. B. Lippincott Company for the use of part of the address, “True Americanism,” by Carl Schurz; to The Christopher Publishing House for the selections by Enrico C. Sartorio; to Messrs. D. Appleton & Co. for the selection by Felix Adler; to Messrs. P. J. Kenedy & Sons, to the trustees of the estate of Mary J. A. O’Reilly, and to the daughters of the poet, Mrs. William E. Hocking, Miss Mary Boyle O’Reilly and Miss Elizabeth Boyle O’Reilly for the use of poems or parts of poems from the work of John Boyle O’Reilly; to The Century Company and to Miss Anzia Yezierska for the selection, “How I Found America,” from the Century Magazine; to The Century Company also for the selection by Oscar Straus; to Mr. Seraphim G. Canoutas for the selection from his “Hellenism in America”; to The State Historical Society of Iowa and to Mr. Jacob Van der Zee for the selection from “The Hollanders of Iowa”; to Messrs. Doubleday, Page & Co. and to Mr. Stefano Miele for the selection from an article by Mr. Miele in the World’s Work; to The Macmillan Company for the selections by Angelo Patri and E. G. Stern; to The Macmillan Company and The Outlook Company for the selections by Jacob Riis; and to Mr. Otto H. Kahn and to Mr. John Kulamer for the selections appearing under their names.

The selections by Mary Antin and Abraham M. Rihbany, and the one from Carl Schurz’s “Abraham Lincoln” are used by permission of, and by special arrangement with, Houghton[16] Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers of their works.

Thanks are here also cordially given to those persons, including several authors not mentioned above, who, by their courtesies and encouragement, and in a number of instances by specific suggestions, have assisted in the work of compilation and editing.

The American Spirit in the Writings
of Americans of Foreign Birth

[21]

Cosmopolitan Character of American Nationality

By nationality we understand the peculiar genius of a people which animates its institutions, prompts its actions and begets a feeling of common interest and sympathy. It is not the result of any compact, but an instinct of human nature in its social capacity, an expansion of the inborn love of self and kindred. To hate his own countrymen is as unnatural as to hate his own brothers and sisters.

Nationality grows with the nation itself and acts as a powerful stimulus in its development. But on the other side it presupposes an organized state of society and is the result of a historical process. Barbarians have no nationality, because they are no nations, but simply material for nations. It is not only the community of origin and language, but also the community of rights and duties, of laws and institutions, of deeds and sufferings, of freedom and oppression, of literature and art, of virtue and religion, that enters into the definition of a nation and gives vigor to the sense of nationality. Historical reminiscences of glory and woe, whether preserved in monuments, or written records, or oral traditions, popular songs and national airs, such as “God save the Queen,” “Ye mariners of England,” “Rule, Britannia,” “Scots wha hae with Wallace bled,” “Allons enfants de la patrie,” “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” “Hail, Columbia,” contribute powerfully to strengthen the national tie and to kindle the fire of national enthusiasm.

Nationality begets patriotism, one of the noblest of natural virtues that has filled the pages of history with so many heroic deeds and sacrifices. Who can read without admiration the immortal story of Gideon, Leonidas, Cincinnatus, Horatius Cocles, William Tell, Arnold von Winkelried, the Maid of[22] Orleans, John Hampden, Prince William of Orange, Andreas Hofer, George Washington, who lived or died for their country?

True patriotism does not imply hatred or contempt of foreigners, and is entirely compatible with a proper regard for the rights and welfare of other nations, just as self-love and self-respect may and should coexist with the most generous philanthropy. A narrow-minded and narrow-hearted nationalism which walls out the life of the world, and for this very reason condemns itself to perpetual imprisonment in the treadmill of its own pedantry and conceit, may suit semi-barbarians, or the stagnant heathen civilization of China and Japan[2], but not an enlightened Christian people. True and false nationalism and patriotism are related to each other, as self-love to selfishness. The first is a law of nature, the second a vice. We respect a man in the same proportion in which his self-love expands into love of kindred and country, and his patriotism into love of humanity at large. Washington was always generous to the enemy and was the first to establish amicable relations with England after the conclusion of the American war. The Christian religion, which commands us to love God supremely and our neighbor as ourselves, tends to purify and elevate patriotism, like every other natural virtue, by emancipating it from the selfish, overbearing, all-grasping passion of conquest, and making it contributory to the general welfare of the human family. One of the noblest acts of the English nation, as a nation, is the disinterested abolition of the African slave trade.

The events of modern times tend more and more to break down the barriers between the nations, to bring the ends of the earth together and to realize the unity and universality of the human race.

This we must steadily keep in view, if we would understand the distinctive character and mission of the American nation, i. e., the people of the United States, who are emphatically called by that name, as the chief bearers of the[23] historical life and future significance of the entire Western Continent.

In discussing this interesting topic, we shall avoid, of course, the whirlpool of party politics, and endeavor to rise above those violent sectional strifes, which, for some time past, have been and are still agitating our country on the question of the true nature of Americanism.

Of all the great nations of the earth none has entered into existence under more favorable auspices and prospects, none is better prepared and more clearly called to represent a compact, well defined and yet expansive, world-embracing nationality, than the American. Our motto, E Pluribus Unum, is an unconscious prophecy of our national character and destiny, as pointed out by the irresistible course of events and the indications of Providence. Out of many nations, yea, out of all the nations of Christendom, is to be gathered the one cosmopolitan nation of America on the strong and immovable foundation of the Anglo-Saxon race....

Let us now proceed to an analysis of the different elements, which enter into the composition of the American nationality and will, in their combined action, enable it to fulfil its great destiny.

It is evident to the most superficial observer that the basis of our national character is English. It is so, not only in language, but also in manners and customs, in our laws and institutions, in the structure of our domestic, political and ecclesiastical life, in our literature and religion. It is perfectly idle to think that this country will ever become German, or French, or Irish, or Dutch. Let them emigrate by hundreds of thousands from the continent of Europe, they will modify and enrich, but they can never destroy or materially change the Anglo-Saxon ground-element of the American people....

But with all due regard for good old England, America is by no means intended to be a mere copy or continuation of it. If our nationality, owing to its youth and the many foreign elements still entering into its composition, is less solid and compact than that of our older brother, it is, on the[24] other hand, more capable of expansion and development; it is composed of a greater variety of material and destined ultimately for more comprehensive ends by the Almighty Ruler of nations, who assigned us not an island, but a continent for a home, and two oceans for a field of action.

If ever a nation was laid out on a truly cosmopolitan basis and gifted with an irresistible power of attraction, it is the American. Here where our globe ends its circuit seems to terminate the migration of the human race. To our shores they come in an unbroken stream from every direction. Even the tribes of Africa and Asia are largely represented amongst us and call our country their home. But whatever may be the ultimate fate of the red man, the negro and the Chinese, who are separated from us by the unsurmountable difference of race, it is evident that all the civilized nations of Europe, especially those of Germanic origin, have contributed and will continue to contribute to our stock. They meet here on the common ground of freedom and equality, to renew their youth and to commingle at last into one grand brotherhood, speaking one language, pervaded by one spirit, obeying the same laws, laboring for one aim, and filling in these ends of the earth the last and the richest chapter in the history of the world. As Europe is a great advance on the civilization of Asia, so we have reason to believe that America will be in the end a higher continuation of the consolidated life of Europe. The eyes of the East are instinctively turned to the West, and civilization follows the march of the sun.

The history of the colonization and growth of this country strongly supports the view here taken. The descendants of England were indeed the chief, but by no means the only agents in the Colonial period. The Dutch on the banks of the Hudson, the Swedes on the Delaware, the Germans in Pennsylvania and the neighboring States, the Huguenots in South Carolina, New York and Boston, were amongst our earliest and most useful settlers. In a more recent period Scotland, Ireland and all parts of Germany have made the largest contributions to our population. Florida, California[25] and New Mexico are of Spanish origin. The French claimed once by right of exploration and partial occupation the immense central valley from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains; and although these possessions have long since been ceded to England and the United States, the French element can never be entirely effaced on the banks of the lower Mississippi or in Canada East.

In the Revolutionary War the descendants of the Continental Europeans, especially the Germans of Pennsylvania and Virginia, in proportion to their number, fought with as much zeal and success and shed their blood as freely for the independence of the country as the Anglo-Americans. Some of them, as the Muhlenbergs and the Hiesters, acquired considerable distinction as officers of the army or members of the first Congress.

But a number of our most eminent Revolutionary heroes were not even native Americans, but came from different nations to offer us the aid of their means, their enthusiasm, their military skill and experience in the hour of trial. The Irish Montgomery died for us at the gates of Quebec. General Mercer, who fell in the battle of Princeton, was a native of Scotland. Kosciusko, the Pole, paid his early vows to liberty in our cause, and his countryman, Pulaski, perished for it at Savannah. The noble Germans, Baron de Kalb, who shared with Gaines the glory of capturing Burgoyne and fell in the battle of Camden in South Carolina, bleeding of seven wounds, and Steuben, the pupil of Frederic the Great, and the Seven Years War, who left a handsome pension to serve his adopted country and helped to decide the day at Yorktown, crowned in the new world the high military reputation which they had previously acquired in the old; they were amongst the most experienced officers in the American army, and did it essential service, especially by training, with immense labor, the raw recruits, and preparing them for the victories of the battle-field. Our Congress knew well how to appreciate their merits, by erecting to the former a monument at Annapolis, and by voting to the latter[26] a handsome annual pension, to which the legislatures of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York added large donations of land. France threw the weight of her powerful moral influence and material aid into our scale, and sent us the Count de Rochambeau, Baron de Viomenil, and especially the Marquis of Lafayette, the citizen of two worlds, whose name will be handed down to the latest American, as well as French posterity, in inseparable connection with Washington. The West Indies gave us Alexander Hamilton, who fought gallantly in the war, and, after its conclusion, organized our financial credit and took the most distinguished part in the formation and defence of our Federal Constitution, thus joining to the laurels of the battle-field the more enduring honors of peace, like his friend, the Father of his Country, whom we justly revere and love as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

Thus all the leading nations of Christendom were actively and honorably represented in the first settlement of our country, and in that great struggle which resulted in the birth of a new nation, and thus earned a title to a share in the blessings of its freedom....

As long, then, as we have such an immense body of land waiting for living men, and such a gigantic task of the future before us, there is no cause to discourage immigration. Let this continent of land continue to attract another continent crowded with men, that they may thus both prove a blessing to each other. How could we cherish a proscriptive spirit without striking at the fundamental creed and glory of our institutions? How could we indulge in hatred of foreigners and shut the gate to the stranger, without insulting the memory of our own fathers and of the fathers of this country? Let us never forget the sacred trust of civil and religious liberty committed to us; never forget our past history and our comprehensive destiny. Ourselves the children of the pilgrims of a former generation, let us welcome the pilgrims of the present day, and open a hospitable asylum to the oppressed and persecuted of every Christian nation. Favored[27] by the free gift of Providence with a territory almost as large as Europe, and capable of sustaining ten times the amount of our present population, let us cordially invite and encourage the immigrants, till prairies and forests, and mountains and valleys resound with the songs of living men and the praises of God.

Here are our millions of acres stretching towards the setting sun and teeming with hidden wealth, that must be made available for the benefit of society. Here is room enough for all the science, learning, art, wisdom, virtue and religion of Europe, that, transplanted into a virgin soil and breathing the atmosphere of freedom, they may bring forth new blossoms and fruit and open a new epoch in the onward march of civilization. Here is the general congress of the noblest nations of Christendom, the sterling, energetic Briton; the strong-willed, enterprising Scotch; the hard-working, generous Irish; the industrious, deep-thinking German; the honest, liberty-loving Swiss; the hardy, thrifty Scandinavian; the even-tempered, tenacious Dutch; the easy, elegant Frenchman; the earnest, dignified Spaniard; the ingenious, imaginative Italian; the patriotic, high-minded Magyar and Pole,—that they might renew their youth, and, laying aside their prejudices and defects and uniting their virtues, may commingle into the one American nation, the freest, the most enlightened, the most comprehensive of all, the nation of the new world, the nation of the future....

The destiny and mission of such a cosmopolitan nation can hardly be estimated. It must be majestic as our rivers, magnificent as the Niagara Falls, lofty as the Rocky Mountains, vast as our territory, deep as the two oceans around it, far-reaching as the highways of commerce that already carries our name and influence to the remotest regions of the globe. History points to a boundless future before it, and nothing can prevent it from filling the most important pages in the annals of coming centuries [except] its own unfaithfulness to its providential trust....

Such high views on the destiny of our nation, so far from nourishing the spirit of vanity and self-glorification, ought[28] rather to humble and fill us with a deep sense of our responsibility to the God of nations, who entrusted us with a great mission for the world and the Church, not from any superior excellency of our own, but from free choice and an inscrutable decree of infinite wisdom. Nor should we forget that there are fearful tendencies and dangers growing up in our national life, which threaten to unfit us for our work and to expose us to the judgment of the Almighty Ruler of the Universe, who is not bound to any particular human instrumentality, but can raise a new generation on the ruins of our own to carry out His designs. It is only in steady view of these dangers, and by an earnest struggle against evil temptations, that we can at all succeed and accomplish the great ends for which Providence has called us into existence.

[30]

THE CONSTITUTION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT

What is most worthy of admiration in the history of America is not merely the spirit of liberty which has ever animated her people, but their perfect acquaintance with the science of government, which has ever saved that spirit from preying on itself. The sages who laid the foundation of her greatness possessed at once the pride of freemen and the knowledge of English freemen; in building the edifice, they knew how to lay the foundation; in preserving untouched the rights of each individual, they knew how to prevent his attacking those of his neighbor: they brought with them the experience of the best governed nation then existing; and, having felt in their own persons the errors inherent in that constitution, which had enlightened, but only partly protected them, they knew what to shun as well as what to imitate in the new models which they here cast, leisurely and sagely, in a new and remote world. Thus possessed from the beginning of free institutions, or else continually occupied in procuring or defending them, the Colonies were well prepared to assume the character of independent States. There was less of an experiment in this than their enemies supposed.[3] Nothing, indeed, can explain the obstinacy of the English ministry at the commencement of the Revolutionary struggle but the supposition that they were wholly ignorant of the history of the people to whom they were opposed. May I be forgiven the observation, that the inquiries of ... have led me into the belief that some candid and well-informed English gentlemen of the present day have almost as little acquaintance with it as had Lord North.

[31]

Respecting the Revolution itself, the interest of its military history is such as to fix the attention of the most thoughtless readers; but in this, foreigners sometimes appear to imagine, was expended the whole virtue of America. That a country which could put forth so much energy, magnanimity, and wisdom, as appeared in that struggle, should suddenly lose a claim to all these qualities, would be no less surprising than humiliating. If we glance at the civil history of these republics since the era of their independence, do we find no traces of the same character? Were we to consider only the national institutions, the mild and impartial laws, the full establishment of the rights of conscience, the multiplication of schools and colleges to an extent unknown in any other country of the world, all the improvements in every branch of internal policy which have placed this people in their present state of peace and unrivalled prosperity, we must allow them to be not only wise to their interests, but alive to the pleas of humanity; but there are not wanting instances of a yet more liberal policy.

How seldom is it that history affords us the example of a voluntary sacrifice on the part of separate communities to further the common good! It appears to me that the short history of America furnishes us with more examples of this kind than that of any other nation, ancient or modern. Throughout the war of the Revolution, and for some years preceding it, the public feeling may be said to have been unusually excited. At such times, men, and societies of men, are equal to actions beyond the strength of their virtue at cooler moments. Passing on, therefore, to the peace of 1783, we find a number of independent republics gradually reconciling their separate and clashing interests, each yielding something to promote the advantage of all, and sinking the pride of individual sovereignty in that of the united whole. The remarks made by Ramsay on the adoption of the federal constitution are so apposite that I cannot resist quoting them:

“The adoption of this constitution was a triumph of virtue and good sense over the vices and follies of human nature; in some respects, the merit of it is greater than that of the[32] Declaration of Independence. The worst of men can be urged to make a spirited resistance to invasion of their rights; but higher grades of virtue are requisite to induce freemen, in the possession of a limited sovereignty, voluntarily to surrender a portion of their natural liberties; to impose on themselves those restraints of good government which bridle the ferocity of man, compel him to respect the claims of others, and to submit his rights and his wrongs to be decided upon by the voices of his fellow citizens. The instances of nations which have vindicated their liberty by the sword are many; of those which have made a good use of their liberty when acquired are comparatively few.”

Nor did the liberality of these republics evince itself only in the adoption of the general government. We find some making voluntary concessions of vast territories, that they might be devoted to national purposes; others releasing part of their own people from existing engagements, and leaving them to consult their wishes and convenience by forming themselves into new communities.

Should we contrast this policy with that employed by other nations, we might hastily pronounce this people to be singularly free from the ordinary passions of humanity. But, no; they are only singularly enlightened in the art of government; they have learned that there is no strength without union, no union without good fellowship, and no good fellowship without fair dealing; and, having learned this, they are only singularly fortunate in being able to reduce their knowledge to practice.

[34]

A GERMAN IMMIGRANT POINTS OUT THE DANGERS OF SEGREGATION

The Germans, as I said, form a most valuable addition to our population, when mingled with the great predominant race inhabiting the northern part of this continent. Whenever colonists settle among a different nation, in such numbers and so closely together that they may live on among themselves, without intermixture with the original inhabitants, a variety of inconveniences will necessarily arise. Living in an isolated state, the current of civilization of the country in which they live does not reach them; and they are equally cut off from that of their mother country: mental stagnation is the consequence. They remain a foreign element, an ill-joined part of the great machinery of which they still form, and needs must form, a part. Sometimes, indeed, particular circumstances may alter the view of the case. When the French Protestant colonists were received into Prussia, it was perhaps judicious to allow them, for example in Berlin, to form for a time a community for themselves, to have their own jurisdiction, schools, and churches, because they were more perfect in many branches of industry than the people among whom they settled; and, had they been obliged to immerge forthwith, their skill, so desirable to those who received them, might have been lost.

At present, however, they too are immerged in the mass of the population. Besides, the inconvenience arising from their forming a separate community was never very great, since they were few in number, and belonged by their professions to the better educated classes. But take an example in the Hussites, who settled in Germany; remember the Bohemian village near Berlin, called Rixdorf, the inhabitants of which obstinately refused intermarrying with Germans, and many of whom, until very recently, continued to speak Bohemian only. Those, therefore, who lately proposed to form a whole German state in our west, ought to weigh well their project before they set about it, if ever it should become[35] possible to put this scheme into practice, which I seriously doubt. “Ossification,” as the Germans call it, would be the unavoidable consequence. These colonists would be unable, though they might come by thousands and tens of thousands, to develop for themselves German literature, German language, German law, German science, German art; everything would remain stationary at the point where it was when they brought it over from the mother country, and within less than fifty years our colony would degenerate into an antiquated, ill-adapted element of our great national system, with which, sooner or later, it must assimilate. What a voluntary closing of the eyes to light would it be for a colony among people of the Anglican race, which, in point of politics, has left every other race far behind, to strive to isolate itself!

[36]

POLITICAL LIBERTY IN AMERICA

As a thousand things co-operated in ancient Greece to produce that unrivalled state of perfection in which we find the fine arts to have been there,—a happy constellation of the most fortunate stars,—so a thousand favorable circumstances concur in America to make it possible that a far greater amount of liberty can be introduced into all the concerns of her political society than ever was possible before with any other nation, or will be at any future period, yet also requiring its sacrifices, as the fine arts with the Greeks required theirs.

The influence of this nation has been considerable already; it will be much more so yet in ages to come; political ideas will be developed here, and have a decided effect on the whole European race, and, for aught I know, upon other races. But as the Grecian art has kindled the sense of the beautiful with many nations, but never could be equalled again (as a national affair), so it is possible that political notions, developed here and received by other nations, will have a sound influence only if in their new application they are modified to the given circumstances; for it is not in the power of any man or nation to create all those circumstances under the shade of which liberty reposes here. Politics is civil architecture, and a poor architect indeed is he who forgets three things in building: the place where the building is to be raised, the materials with which he has to build, and the object for which the structure is erected. If the materials are Jews of Palestine, and if the object of the fabric be to keep the people as separate from neighbors as possible, the architect would not obtain his end by a constitution similar to that of one of our new States.

It was necessary for the Americans, in order to make them fit to solve certain political problems, which, until their solution here, were considered chimerical (take as an instance the keeping of this immense country without a garrison), that they should descend from the English, should begin as[37] persecuted colonists severed from the mother country, and yet loving it with all their heart and all their soul; to have a continent, vast and fertile, and possessing those means of internal communication which gave to Europe the great superiority over Asia and Africa; to be at such a distance from Europe that she should appear as a map; to be mostly Protestants, and to settle in colonies with different charters, so that, when royal authority was put down, they were as so many independent States, and yet to be all of one metal, so that they never ceased morally to form one nation, nor to feel as such.

You may say, “Strange, that an abuse of liberty, as this apparent or real party strife in election contests actually is, should lead you to the assertion that no nation is fitter for a government of law.” Yet I do repeat it. How would it be with other nations? It would be after an election of this kind that the real trouble would only begin; we see an instance in South America. Here, on the other hand, as soon as the election is over, the contest is settled, and the citizen obeys the law. “Keep to the right, as the law directs,” you will often find on sign-boards on bridges in this country. It expresses the authority which the law here possesses. I doubt very much whether the Romans, noted for their obedience to the law, held it in higher respect than the Americans.

[39]

AN IMMIGRANT’S TRIBUTE TO LINCOLN

To the younger generation Abraham Lincoln has already become a half-mythical figure, which, in the haze of historic distance, grows to more and more heroic proportions, but also loses in distinctness of outline and feature. This is indeed the common lot of popular heroes; but the Lincoln legend will be more than ordinarily apt to become fanciful, as his individuality, assembling seemingly incongruous qualities and forces in a character at the same time grand and most lovable, was so unique, and his career so abounding in startling contrasts. As the state of society in which Abraham Lincoln grew up passes away, the world will read with increasing wonder of the man who, not only of the humblest origin, but remaining the simplest and most unpretending of citizens, was raised to a position of power unprecedented in our history; who was the gentlest and most peace-loving of mortals, unable to see any creature suffer without a pang in his own breast, and suddenly found himself called to conduct the greatest and bloodiest of our wars; who wielded the power of government when stern resolution and relentless force were the order of the day, and then won and ruled the popular mind and heart by the tender sympathies of his nature; who was a cautious conservative by temperament and mental habit, and led the most sudden and sweeping social revolution of our time; who, preserving his homely speech and rustic manner even in the most conspicuous position of that period, drew upon himself the scoffs of polite society, and then thrilled the soul of mankind with utterances of wonderful beauty and grandeur; who, in his heart the best friend of the defeated South, was murdered because a crazy fanatic took him for its most cruel enemy; who, while in power, was beyond measure lampooned and maligned by sectional passion and an excited party spirit, and around whose bier friend and foe gathered to praise him—which they have since never ceased to do—as one of the greatest of Americans and the best of men.

[40]

TRUE AMERICANISM

It is one of the earliest recollections of my boyhood that one summer night our whole village was stirred up by an uncommon occurrence. I say our village, for I was born not far from the beautiful spot where the Rhine rolls his green waters out of the wonderful gate of the Seven Mountains, and then meanders with majestic tranquillity through one of the most glorious valleys of the world. That night our neighbors were pressing around a few wagons covered with linen sheets and loaded with household utensils and boxes and trunks to their utmost capacity. One of our neighboring families was moving far away across a great water, and it was said they would never again return. And I saw silent tears trickling down weather-beaten cheeks, and the hands of rough peasants firmly pressing each other, and some of the men and women hardly able to speak when they nodded to one another a last farewell. At last the train started into motion, they gave three cheers for America, and then in the first gray dawn of the morning I saw them wending their way over the hill until they disappeared in the shadow of the forest. And I heard many a man say, how happy he would be if he could go with them to that great and free country, where a man could be himself.

That was the first time that I heard of America, and my childish imagination took possession of a land covered partly with majestic trees, partly with flowery prairies, immeasurable to the eye, and intersected with large rivers and broad lakes,—a land where everybody could do what he thought best, and where nobody need be poor because everybody was free.

And later, when I was old enough to read, and descriptions of this country and books on American history fell into my hands, the offspring of my imagination acquired the colors of reality, and I began to exercise my brain with the thought what man might be and become when left perfectly free to himself. And still later, when ripening into manhood,[41] I looked up from my schoolbooks into the stir and bustle of the world, and the trumpet-tones of struggling humanity struck my ear and thrilled my heart, and I saw my nation shake her chains in order to burst them, and I heard a gigantic, universal shout for Liberty rising up to the skies; and at last, after having struggled manfully and drenched the earth of Fatherland with the blood of thousands of noble beings, I saw that nation crushed down again, not only by overwhelming armies, but by the dead weight of customs and institutions and notions and prejudices, which past centuries had heaped upon them, and which a moment of enthusiasm, however sublime, could not destroy; then I consoled an almost despondent heart with the idea of a youthful people and of original institutions clearing the way for an untrammeled development of the ideal nature of man. Then I turned my eyes instinctively across the Atlantic Ocean, and America and Americanism, as I fancied them, appeared to me as the last depositories of the hopes of all true friends of humanity.

I say all this, not as though I indulged in the presumptuous delusion that my personal feelings and experience would be of any interest to you, but in order to show you what America is to the thousands of thinking men in the old world, who, disappointed in their fondest hopes and depressed by the saddest experience, cling with their last remnant of confidence in human nature, to the last spot on earth where man is free to follow the road to attainable perfection, and where, unbiased by the disastrous influence of traditional notions, customs, and institutions, he acts on his own responsibility. They ask themselves: Was it but a wild delusion when we thought that man has the faculty to be free and to govern himself? Have we been fighting, were we ready to die, for a mere phantom, for a mere product of a morbid imagination? This question downtrodden humanity cries out into the world, and from this country it expects an answer....

They speak of the greatness of the Roman Republic! Oh, sir, if I could call the proudest of Romans from his grave, I[42] would take him by the hand and say to him, Look at this picture, and at this! The greatness of the Roman Republic consisted in its despotic rule over the world; the greatness of the American Republic consists in the secured right of man to govern himself. The dignity of the Roman citizen consisted in his exclusive privileges; the dignity of the American citizen consists in his holding the natural rights of his neighbor just as sacred as his own. The Roman Republic recognized and protected the rights of the citizen, at the same time disregarding and leaving unprotected the rights of man; Roman citizenship was founded upon monopoly, not upon the claims of human nature. What the citizen of Rome claimed for himself, he did not respect in others; his own greatness was his only object; his own liberty, as he regarded it, gave him the privilege to oppress his fellow-beings. His democracy, instead of elevating mankind to its own level, trampled the rights of man into the dust. The security of the Roman Republic, therefore, consisted in the power of the sword; the security of the American Republic rests in the equality of human rights! The Roman Republic perished by the sword; the American Republic will stand as long as the equality of human rights remains inviolate. Which of the two Republics is the greater—the Republic of the Roman, or the Republic of man?

Sir, I wish the words of the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created free and equal, and are endowed with certain inalienable rights,” were inscribed upon every gatepost within the limits of this Republic. From this principle the Revolutionary Fathers derived their claim to independence; upon this they founded the institutions of this country, and the whole structure was to be the living incarnation of this idea. This principle contains the programme of our political existence. It is the most progressive, and at the same time the most conservative one; the most progressive, for it takes even the lowliest members of the human family out of their degradation, and inspires them with the elevating consciousness of equal human dignity; the most conservative, for it makes a common cause of individual[43] rights. From the equality of rights springs identity of our highest interests; you cannot subvert your neighbor’s rights without striking a dangerous blow at your own. And when the rights of one cannot be infringed without finding a ready defence in all others who defend their own rights in defending his, then, and only then, are the rights of all safe against the usurpation of governmental authority.

This general identity of interests is the only thing that can guarantee the stability of democratic institutions. Equality of rights, embodied in general self-government, is the great moral element of true democracy; it is the only reliable safety-valve in the machinery of modern society. There is the solid foundation of our system of government; there is our mission; there is our greatness; there is our safety; there, and nowhere else! This is true Americanism, and to this I pay the tribute of my devotion.

[45]

AN IMMIGRANT’S FAITH IN DEMOCRACY[4]

If, indeed, the defects which foreign observers see, and many of which Americans acknowledge and deplore, in the politics and society of the United States were fairly chargeable to democracy,—if “the principle of equality” were necessarily fatal to excellence in the arts, to finish in literature, to simplicity and force in oratory, to fruitful exploration in the fields of science, to statesmanship in the government, to discipline in the army, to grace and dignity in social intercourse, to subordination to lawful authority, and to self-restraint in the various relations of life,—the future of the world would be such as no friend of the race would wish to contemplate; for the spread of democracy is on all sides acknowledged to be irresistible. Even those who watch its advance with most fear and foreboding confess that most civilized nations must erelong succumb to its sway. Its progress in some countries may be slower than in others, but it is constant in all; and it is accelerated by two powerful agencies,—the Christian religion and the study of political economy.

The Christian doctrine that men, however unequal in their condition or in their gifts on earth, are of equal value in the eyes of their Creator, and are entitled to respect and consideration, if for no other reason, for the simple one that they are human souls, long as it has been preached, has, strange to say, only very lately begun to exercise any perceptible influence on politics. It led a troubled and precarious life for nearly eighteen hundred years in conventicles and debating clubs, in the romance of poets, in the dreams of philosophers and the schemes of philanthropists. But it is now found in the cabinets of kings and statesmen, on the floor of parliament houses, and in the most secret of diplomatic conferences. It gives shape and foundation[46] to nearly every great social reform, and its voice is heard above the roar of every revolution.

And it derives invaluable aid in keeping its place and extending its influence in national councils from the rapid spread of the study of political economy, a science which is based on the assumption that men are free and independent. There is hardly one of its principles which is applicable to any state of society in which each individual is not master of his own actions and sole guardian of his own welfare. In a community in which the relations of its members are regulated by status and not by contract, it has no place and no value. The natural result of the study and discussion which the ablest thinkers have expended on it during the last eighty years has been to place before the civilized world in the strongest light the prodigious impulse which is given to human energy and forethought and industry, and the great gain to society at large, by the recognition in legislation of the capacity, as well as of the right, of each human being to seek his own happiness in his own way. Of course no political system in which this principle has a place can long avoid conceding to all who live under it equality before the law; and from equality before the law to the possession of an equal share in the making of the laws, there is, as everybody must see who is familiar with modern history, but a very short step.

If this spread of democracy, however, was sure, as its enemies maintain, to render great attainments and great excellence impossible or rare, to make literary men slovenly and inaccurate and tasteless, artists mediocre, professors of science dull and unenterprising, and statesmen conscienceless and ignorant, it would threaten civilization with such danger that no friend of progress could wish to see it. But it is difficult to discover on what it is, either in history or human nature, that this apprehension is founded. M. de Tocqueville and all his followers take it for granted that the great incentive to excellence, in all countries in which excellence is found, is the patronage and encouragement of an aristocracy; that democracy is generally content with mediocrity.[47] But where is the proof of this? The incentive to exertion which is widest, most constant, and most powerful in its operation in all civilized countries, is the desire of distinction; and this may be composed either of love of fame or love of wealth, or of both. In literary and artistic and scientific pursuits, sometimes the strongest influence is exerted by a love of the subject. But it may be safely said that no man has ever yet labored in any of the higher callings to whom the applause and appreciation of his fellows was not one of the sweetest rewards of his exertions. There is probably not a masterpiece in existence, either in literature or in art, probably few discoveries in science have ever been made, which we do not owe in a large measure to the love of distinction. Who paints pictures, or has ever painted them, that they may delight no eye but his own? Who writes books for the mere pleasure of seeing his thoughts on paper? Who discovers or invents, and is willing, provided the world is the better of his discoveries or inventions, that another should enjoy the honor? Fame has, in short, been in all ages and in all countries recognized as one of the strongest springs of human action—

sweetening toil, robbing danger and poverty and even death itself of their terrors.

What is there, we would ask, in the nature of democratic institutions, that should render this great spring of action powerless, that should deprive glory of all radiance, and put ambition to sleep? Is it not notorious, on the contrary, that one of the most marked peculiarities of democratic society, or of a society drifting toward democracy, is the fire of competition which rages in it, the fevered anxiety which possesses all its members to rise above the dead level to which the law is ever seeking to confine them, and by some brilliant stroke become something higher and more remarkable than their fellows? The secret of that great restlessness,[48] which is one of the most disagreeable accompaniments of life in democratic countries, is in fact due to the eagerness of everybody to grasp the prizes of which in aristocratic countries only the few have much chance. And in no other society is success more worshipped, is distinction of any kind more widely flattered and caressed. Where is the successful author, or artist, or discoverer, the subject of greater homage than in France or America? And yet in both the principle of equality reigns supreme; and his advancement in the social scale has gone on pari passu in every country with the spread of democratic ideas and manners. Grub Street was the author’s retreat in the aristocratic age; in this democratic one, he is welcome at the King’s table, and sits at the national council board. In democratic societies, in fact, excellence is the first title to distinction; in aristocratic ones, there are two or three others which are far stronger, and which must be stronger, or aristocracy could not exist. The moment you acknowledge that the highest social position ought to be the reward of the man who has the most talent, you make aristocratic institutions impossible. But to make the thirst for distinction lose its power over the human heart, you must do something more than establish equality of conditions; you must recast human nature itself....

There are some, however, who, while acknowledging that the love of distinction will retain its force under every form of social or political organization, yet maintain that to excel in the arts, science, or literature requires leisure, and the possession of leisure implies the possession of fortune. This men in a democratic society cannot have, because the absence of great hereditary wealth is necessary to the perpetuation of democracy. Every man, or nearly every man, must toil for a living; and therefore it becomes impossible for him to gratify the thirst for distinction, let him feel it ever so strongly. The attention he can give to literature or art or science must be too desultory and hasty, his mental training too defective, to allow him to work out valuable results or conduct important researches. To achieve great things in these fields, it is said and insinuated, men must be elevated, by the possession of[49] fortune, above the vulgar, petty cares of life; their material wants must be provided for before they concentrate their thoughts with the requisite intensity on the task before them. Therefore it is to aristocracy we must look for any great advance in these pursuits.

The history of literature and art and philosophy is, however, very far from lending confirmation to this opinion. If it teaches us anything, it teaches us that the possession of leisure, far from having helped men in the pursuit of knowledge, seems to have impeded them. Those who have pursued it most successfully are all but invariably those who have pursued it under difficulties. The possession of great wealth no doubt gives facilities for study and cultivation which the mass of mankind do not possess; but it at the same time exerts an influence on the character which, in a vast majority of cases, renders the owner unwilling to avail himself of them. We owe to the Roman aristocracy the great fabric of Roman jurisprudence; but, since their time, what has any aristocracy done for art and literature, or law? They have for over a thousand years been in possession of nearly the whole resources of every country in Europe. They have had its wealth, its libraries, its archives, its teachers, at their disposal; and yet was there ever a more pitiful record than the list of “Royal and Noble Authors.” One can hardly help being astonished, too, at the smallness and paltriness of the legacies which the aristocracy of the aristocratic age has bequeathed to this democratic age which is succeeding it. It has, indeed, handed down to us many glorious traditions, many noble and inspiring examples of courage and fortitude and generosity. The democratic world would certainly be worse off than it is if it never heard of the Cid, or Bayard, or Du Guesclin, of Montrose, or Hampden, or Russell. But what has it left behind it for which the lover of art may be thankful, by which literature has been made richer, philosophy more potent or more fruitful? The painting and sculpture of modern Europe owe not only their glory, but their very existence, to the labors of poor and obscure men. The great architectural monuments by which its soil is covered[50] were hardly any of them the product of aristocratic feeling or liberality. If we except a few palaces and a few fortresses, we owe nearly all of them to the labor or the genius or the piety of the democratic cities which grew up in the midst of feudalism. If we take away the sum total of the monuments of Continental art all that was created by the Italian republics, the commercial towns of Germany and Flanders, and the communes of France, and by the unaided efforts of the illustrious obscure, the remainder would form a result poor and pitiful indeed. We may say much the same thing of every great work in literature, and every great discovery in science. Few of them have been produced by men of leisure, nearly all by those whose life was a long struggle to escape from the vulgarest and most sordid cares. And what is perhaps most remarkable of all is, that the Catholic Church, the greatest triumph of organizing genius, the most impressive example of the power of combination and of discipline which the world has ever seen, was built up and has been maintained by the labors of men drawn from the humblest ranks of society.

Aristocracy applied itself exclusively for ages to the profession of arms. If there was anything at which it might have seemed hopeless for democracy to compete with it, it was in the raising, framing and handling of armies. But the very first time that a democratic society found itself compelled to wage war in defence of its own ideas, it displayed a force, an originality, a vigor and rapidity of conception, in this, to it, new pursuit, which speedily laid Europe at its feet. And the great master of the art of war, be it ever remembered, was born in obscurity and bred in poverty.

Nor, long as men of leisure have devoted themselves to the art of government, have they made any contributions worth mentioning to political science. They have displayed, indeed, consummate skill and tenacity in pursuing any line of policy on which they have once deliberately fixed; but all the great political reforms have been, though often carried into effect by aristocracies, conceived, agitated, and forced on the acceptance of the government by the middle and lower[51] classes. The idea of equality before the law was originated in France by literary men. In England, the slave-trade was abolished by the labors of the middle classes. The measure met with the most vigorous opposition in the House of Lords. The emancipation of the negroes, Catholic emancipation, Parliamentary reform, law reform, especially the reform in the criminal law, free trade, and, in fact, nearly every change which has had for its object the increase of national happiness and prosperity, has been conceived by men of low degree, and discussed and forced on the upper classes by men busy about many other things.

We are, however, very far from believing that democratic society has no dangers or defects. What we have been endeavoring to show is that the inquiry into their nature and number has been greatly impeded by the natural disposition of foreign observers to take the United States as a fair specimen of what democracy is under the most favorable circumstances. The enormous extent of unoccupied land at our disposal, which raises every man in the community above want, by affording a ready outlet for surplus population, is constantly spoken of as a condition wholly favorable to the democratic experiment,—more favorable than could possibly offer itself elsewhere. In so far as it contributes to the general happiness and comfort, it no doubt makes the work of government easy; but what we think no political philosopher ought to forget is that it also offers serious obstacles to the settlement of a new society on a firm basis, and produces a certain appearance of confusion and instability, both in manners and ideas, which unfit it to furnish a basis for any inductions of much value as to the tendencies to defects either of an equality of conditions or of democratic institutions.

THE EXILE OF THE GAEL

[54]

THE PILGRIM FATHERS

LIBERTY LIGHTING THE WORLD[5]

[57]

AMERICA[6]

[59]

SCANDINAVIAN CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN NATIONALITY

It is a great mistake which some make, to think that it is only for their brawn and muscle that the Northmen have become a valuable acquisition to the American population; on the contrary, they have done, and are doing, as much as any other nationality within the domain of mind and heart. Not to speak of the early discovery of America by the Scandinavians four hundred years before the time of Columbus, they can look back with proud satisfaction on the part they have taken in all respects to make this great republic what it is to-day.

The early Swedish colonists in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey worked as hard for liberty and independence as the English did in New England and in the South. There were no tories among them, and when the Continental Congress stood wavering equal in the balance for and against the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, it was a Swede, John Morton (Mortenson), of the old Delaware stock, who gave the casting vote of Pennsylvania in favor of the sacred document.

When, nearly a century later, the great rebellion burst upon the land, a gallant descendant of the Swedes, Gen. Robert Anderson, met its first shock at Fort Sumter, and, during the bitter struggle of four years which followed, the Scandinavian-Americans were as true and loyal to their adopted country as their native-born neighbors, giving their unanimous support to the cause of the Union and fighting valiantly for it. Nor should it be forgotten that it was the Swede, John Ericsson, who, by his inventive genius, saved the navy and the great seaports of the United States, and that it was another Swede by descent, Admiral Dahlgren, who furnished the model for the best guns of our artillery. Surely love of freedom, valor, genius, patriotism and religious fervor was not planted in America by the seeds brought over in the Mayflower alone.

[60]

Yes, it is verily true that the Scandinavian immigrants, from the early colonists of 1638 to the present time, have furnished strong hands, clear heads and loyal hearts to the republic. They have caused the wilderness to blossom like the rose; they have planted schools and churches on the hills and in the valleys; they have honestly and ably administered the public affairs of town, county and state; they have helped to make wise laws for their respective commonwealths and in the halls of Congress; they have, with honor and ability, represented their adopted country abroad; they have sanctified the American soil by their blood, shed in freedom’s cause on the battle-fields of the Revolution and the Civil War; and, though proud of their Scandinavian ancestry, they love America and American institutions as deeply and as truly as do the descendants of the Pilgrims, the starry emblem of liberty meaning as much to them as to any other citizen.

Therefore, the Scandinavian-American feels a certain sense of ownership in the glorious heritage of American soil, with its rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys, woods and prairies, and in all its noble institutions; and he feels that the blessings which he enjoys are not his by favor or sufferance, but by right;—by moral as well as civil right. For he took possession of the wilderness, endured the hardships of the pioneer, contributed his full share toward the grand results accomplished, and is in mind and heart a true and loyal American citizen.

[63]

A YOUNG MAN’S HERO: AN IMMIGRANT’S TRIBUTE TO ROOSEVELT

There was never a day that called so loudly for such as he, as does this of ours. Not that it is worse than other days; I know it is better. I find proof of it in the very fact that it is as if the age-long fight between good and evil had suddenly come to a head, as if all the questions of right, of justice, of the brotherhood, which we had seen in glimpses before, and dimly, had all at once come out in the open, craving solution one and all. A battle royal, truly! A battle for the man of clean hands and clean mind, who can think straight and act square; the man who will stand for the right “because it is right”; who can say, and mean it, that “it is hard to fail, but worse never to have tried to succeed.” A battle for him who strives for “that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to him who does not shrink from danger, from hardship or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.” I am but quoting his own words, and never, I think, did I hear finer than those he spoke of Governor Taft when he had put by his own preferences and gone to his hard and toilsome task in the Philippines; for the whole royal, fighting soul of the man was in them.

“But he undertook it gladly,” he said, “and he is to be considered thrice fortunate; for in this world the one thing supremely worth having is the opportunity coupled with the capacity to do well and worthily a piece of work the doing of which is of vital consequence to the welfare of mankind.”

There is his measure. Let now the understrappers sputter. With that for our young men to grow up to, we need have no fear for the morrow. Let it ask what questions it will of the Republic, it shall answer them, for we shall have men at the oars.

This afternoon the newspaper that came to my desk contained a cable despatch which gave me a glow at the heart[64] such as I have not felt for a while. Just three lines; but they told that a nation’s conscience was struggling victoriously through hate and foul play and treason: Captain Dreyfus was to get a fair trial. Justice was to be done at last to a once despised Jew whose wrongs had held the civilized world upon the rack; and the world was made happy. Say now it does not move! It does, where there are men to move it,—I said it before: men who believe in the right and are willing to fight for it. When the children of poverty and want came to Mulberry Street for justice, and I knew they came because Roosevelt had been there, I saw in that what the resolute, courageous, unyielding determination of one man to see right done in his own time could accomplish. I have watched him since in the Navy Department, in camp, as Governor, in the White House, and more and more I have made out his message as being to the young men of our day, himself the youngest of our Presidents. I know it is so, for when I speak to the young about him, I see their eyes kindle, and their handshake tells me that they want to be like him, and are going to try. And then I feel that I, too, have done something worth doing for my people. For, whether for good or for evil, we all leave our mark upon our day, and his is that of a clean, strong man who fights for the right and wins.

Now, then, a word to these young men who, all over our broad land, are striving up toward the standard he sets, for he is their hero by right, as he is mine. Do not be afraid to own it. The struggle to which you are born, and in which you are bound to take a hand if you would be men in more than name, is the struggle between the ideal and the husk; for life without ideals is like the world without the hope of heaven, an empty, meaningless husk. It is your business to read its meaning into it by making the ideals real. The material things of life are good in their day, but they pass away; the moral remain to bear witness that the high hopes of youth are not mere phantasms. Theodore Roosevelt lives his ideals; therefore you can trust them. Here they are in working shape: “Face the facts as you find them; strive[65] steadily for the best.” “Be never content with less than the possible best, and never throw away the possible best because it is not the ideal best.” Maxims, those, for the young man who wants to make the most of himself and his time. Happily for the world, the young man who does not is rare.

[67]

WHY DUTCH EMIGRANTS TURNED TO AMERICA

Such was the condition of things in The Netherlands that thousands of people lived from hand to mouth, the prey of poverty and hunger, stupefied by the hopelessness of securing the necessities of life, and barely enabled through the gifts of the well-to-do to drag out their wretched lives. At the same time many of these unfortunate persons were hopeful and eager to find a place where they might obtain a livelihood, lead quiet lives of honesty and godliness, and educate their children in the principles of religion without let or hindrance. The leaders of the Separatists looked forward to a life of freedom in a land where man would not have to wait for work, but where work awaited man, where people would not rub elbows by reason of the density of population, and where God’s creation would welcome the coming of man.

When social forces such as these, mostly beyond human control, began to operate with increasing power, the Dutch people were not slow to recognize the truth that emigration was absolutely necessary. The seriousness of the situation dawned upon all thinking men,—especially upon state officials, who feared that unless the stream of emigration could be directed toward the Dutch colonies, their country would suffer an enormous drain of capital and human lives. Accordingly the attention of prospective emigrants was called to the Dutch East Indies,—chiefly to the advantages of the rich island of Java, “that paradise of the world, the pearl in Holland’s crown.”

The religion of the Dissenters, however, was responsible for turning the balance in favor of some other land. To them Java was a closed door. Beside the fear of an unhealthful climate towered the certainty of legislation hostile to their Christian principles and ideals. Moreover, could poor men afford the expense of transportation thither, and could they feel assured of getting land or work in Java? State officials, men of learning, and men of business from several parts of[68] the country were summoned to an important conference at Amsterdam to discuss the whole emigration movement. The Separatist leaders were asked why they should not remain Netherlanders under the House of Orange by removing to the colonies just as the people of the British Isles found homes in the English colonies. Two Separatist ministers appealed to the government to direct the flood of emigration toward Java by promises of civil and religious liberty. But the attempt to secure a free Christian colony in Java produced only idle expectations.

Then it was that the people turned their eyes away from the East toward the United States of North America,—a land of freedom and rich blessings, where they hoped to find in its unsettled interior some spot adaptable to agriculture, and thus rescue themselves from the miseries of a decadent state. To the discontented, ambitious Hollander was presented the picture of a real land of promise, where all things would smile at him and be prepared, as it were, to aid him. It was said that “after an ocean passage of trifling expense the Netherlander may find work to do as soon as he sets foot on shore; he may buy land for a few florins per acre; and feel secure and free among a people of Dutch, German and English birth, who will rejoice to see him come to increase the nation’s wealth.” Asserting that they could vouch for the truthfulness of this picture, as based on the positive assurances and experiences of friends already in America, the Separatist clergyman-pamphleteers openly declared that they would not hesitate to rob Holland of her best citizens by helping them on their way to America.

Of the people and government of the United States, Scholte, who was destined to lead hundreds of his countrymen to the State of Iowa, at an early date cherished a highly favorable opinion, which he expressed as follows:—

“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[69] 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[70] 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.

[73]

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[74] 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[75] 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[76] 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.

[78]

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.

It is because of this subconscious ethical motive that there is this generous air of expectation in America, that we are always wondering what will happen next, or who will happen next. Will another Emerson come along? Will another Lincoln come along? We do not know. But this we know, that the greatest lusters of our past already tend to fade in our memory, not because we are irreverent, but because[79] nothing that the past has accomplished can content us; because we are looking for greatness beyond greatness, truth beyond truth ever yet spoken. The Germans have a legend that in their hour of need an ancient emperor will arise out of the tomb where he slumbers to stretch his protecting hand over the Fatherland. We Americans, too, have the belief that, if ever such an hour comes for us, there will arise spirits clothed in human flesh amongst us sufficient for our need, but spirits that will come, as it were, out of the future to meet our advancing host and lead it, not ghosts out of the storied past. For America differs from all other nations in that it derives its inspiration from the future. Every other people has some culture, some civilization, handed down from the past, of which it is the custodian, and which it seeks to develop. The American people have no such single tradition. They are dedicated, not to the preservation of what has been, but to the creation of what never has been. They are the prophets of the future, not the priests of the past.

I have spoken above of ideals, of what is fine in a nation, of fine tendencies. The idea which a people has of itself, like the idea which an individual has of himself, often does not tally with the reality. If we look at the realities of American life,—and, on the principle of corruptio optimi pessima, we should be prepared for what we see,—we are dismayed to observe in actual practice what seems like a monstrous caricature,—not democracy, but plutocracy; kings expelled and the petty political bosses in their stead; merciless exploitation of the economically weak,—a precipitate reduction of wages, for instance, at the first signs of approaching depression, in advance of what is required,—instead of respect for the sacred personality of human beings, the utmost disrespect. Certainly the nation needs strong and persistent ethical teaching in order to make it aware of its better self and of what is implied in the political institutions which it has founded.

But ethical teaching alone will not suffice. It must be admitted that a danger lurks in the idea of equality itself. The danger is that differences in refinement, in culture, in intellectual[80] ability and attainments are apt to be insufficiently emphasized; that the untutored, the uncultivated, the intellectually undeveloped, are apt presumptuously to put themselves on a par with those of superior development; and hence that superiority, failing to meet with recognition, will be discouraged and democracy tend to level men downward instead of upward. This will not be true so much of such moral excellence as appears in an Emerson or a Lincoln,—for there is that in the lowliest which responds to the manifestations of transcendent moral beauty,—but it will hold good of those minor superiorities that fall short of the highest in art and science and conduct, yet upon the fostering of which depends the eventual appearance of culture’s richest fruits.

In order to ward off this danger we must have a new and larger educational policy in our schools than has yet been put in practice. Vocational training in its broadest and deepest sense will be our greatest aid.

Democracy, the American democracy, is the St. Christopher. St. Christopher bore the Christ child on his shoulders as he stepped into the river, and the child was as light as a feather. But it became heavier and heavier as he entered the stream, until he was well nigh borne down by it. So we, in the heyday of 1776, stepped into the stream with the infant Democracy on our shoulders, and it was light as a feather’s weight; but it is becoming heavier and heavier the deeper we are getting into the stream—heavier and heavier. When we began, there were four or five millions. Now there are ninety millions. Heavier and heavier! And there are other millions coming. When we began we were a homogeneous people; now there are those twenty-three languages spoken in a single school. And with this vast multitude, and this heterogeneous population, we are trying the most difficult experiment that has ever been attempted in the world,—trying to invest with sovereignty the common man. There has been the sovereignty of kings, and now and then a king has done well. There has been the sovereignty of aristocracies, and now and then an English aristocracy or a Venetian aristocracy has done well—though never wholly[81] well. And now we are imposing this most difficult task of government, which depends on the recognition of excellence in others, so that the best may rule in our behalf, on the shoulders of the multitude. These are our difficulties. But our difficulties are also our opportunities. This land is the Promised Land. It is that not only in the sense in which the word is commonly taken—that is to say, a haven for the disadvantaged of other countries, a land whither the oppressed may come to repair their fortunes and breathe freely and achieve material independence. That is but one side of the promise. In that sense the Anglo-American native population is the host, extending hospitality, the benefactor of the immigrants. But this is also the land of promise for the native population themselves, in order that they may be penetrated by the influence of what is best in the newcomers, in order that their too narrow horizon may be widened, in order that their stiffened mental bent may become more flexible; that festivity, pageant and song may be added to their life by the newcomers; that echoes of ancient prophecy may inspire the matter-of-fact, progressive movements, so-called, of our day.

America is the Wonderland, hid for ages in the secret of the sea, then revealed. At first, how abused! Spanish conquerors trampled it; it was the nesting place of buccaneers, adventurers, if also the home of the Puritans—bad men and good men side by side. Then for dreary centuries the home of slavery. Then the scene of prolonged strife. And now, on the surface, the stamping ground of vulgar plutocrats! And yet, in the hearts of the elect,—yes, and in the hearts of the masses, too,—inarticulate and dim, there has ever been present a fairer and nobler ideal, the ideal of a Republic built on the uncommon fineness in the common man! To live for that ideal is the true Americanism, the larger patriotism. To that ideal, not on the field of battle, as in Europe, but in the arduous toil of peace, let us be willing to give the “last full measure of devotion.”

[83]

AN IMMIGRANT’S TRIBUTE TO THE PUBLIC SCHOOL AND TO GEORGE WASHINGTON

The public school has done its best for us foreigners, and for the country, when it has made us into good Americans. I am glad it is mine to tell how the miracle was wrought in one case. You should be glad to hear of it, you born Americans; for it is the story of the growth of your country; of the flocking of your brothers and sisters from the far ends of the earth to the flag you love; of the recruiting of your armies of workers, thinkers, and leaders. And you will be glad to hear of it, my comrades in adoption; for it is a rehearsal of your own experience, the thrill and wonder of which your own hearts have felt.

How long would you say, wise reader, it takes to make an American? By the middle of my second year in school I had reached the sixth grade. When, after the Christmas holidays, we began to study the life of Washington, running through a summary of the Revolution, and the early days of the Republic, it seemed to me that all my reading and study had been idle until then. The reader, the arithmetic, the song book, that had so fascinated me until now, became suddenly sober exercise books, tools wherewith to hew a way to the source of inspiration. When the teacher read to us out of a big book with many bookmarks in it, I sat rigid with attention in my little chair, my hands tightly clasped on the edge of my desk; and I painfully held my breath, to prevent sighs of disappointment escaping, as I saw the teacher skip the parts between bookmarks. When the class read, and it came my turn, my voice shook and the book trembled in my hands. I could not pronounce the name of George Washington without a pause. Never had I prayed, never had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child’s story of the patriot. I gazed with adoration at the portraits of George and Martha Washington,[84] till I could see them with my eyes shut. And whereas formerly my self-consciousness had bordered on conceit, and I thought myself an uncommon person, parading my schoolbooks through the streets, and swelling with pride when a teacher detained me in conversation, now I grew humble all at once, seeing how insignificant I was beside the Great.

As I read about the noble boy who would not tell a lie to save himself from punishment, I was for the first time truly repentant of my sins. Formerly I had fasted and prayed and made sacrifice on the Day of Atonement, but it was more than half play, in mimicry of my elders. I had no real horror of sin, and I knew so many ways of escaping punishment. I am sure my family, my neighbors, my teachers in Polotzk—all my world, in fact—strove together, by example and precept, to teach me goodness. Saintliness had a new incarnation in about every third person I knew. I did respect the saints, but I could not help seeing that most of them were a little bit stupid, and that mischief was much more fun than piety. Goodness, as I had known it, was respectable, but not necessarily admirable. The people I really admired, like my Uncle Solomon and Cousin Rachel, were those who preached the least and laughed the most. My sister Frieda was perfectly good, but she did not think the less of me because I played tricks. What I loved in my friends was not inimitable. One could be downright good if one really wanted to. One could be learned if one had books and teachers. One could sing funny songs and tell anecdotes if one traveled about and picked up such things, like one’s uncles and cousins. But a human being strictly good, perfectly wise, and unfailingly valiant, all at the same time, I had never heard or dreamed of. This wonderful George Washington was as inimitable as he was irreproachable. Even if I had never, never told a lie, I could not compare myself to George Washington; for I was not brave,—I was afraid to go out when snowballs whizzed,—and I could never be the First President of the United States.

So I was forced to revise my own estimate of myself. But the twin of my new-born humility, paradoxical as it may[85] seem, was a sense of dignity I had never known before. For if I found that I was a person of small consequence, I discovered at the same time that I was more nobly related than I had ever supposed. I had relatives and friends who were notable people by the old standards,—and I had never been ashamed of my family,—-but this George Washington, who died long before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were Fellow-Citizens. There was a great deal about Fellow-Citizens in the patriotic literature we read at this time; and I knew from my father how he was a Citizen through the process of naturalization, and how I also was a Citizen by virtue of my relation to him. Undoubtedly I was a Fellow-Citizen, and George Washington was another. It thrilled me to realize what sudden greatness had fallen on me, and at the same time sobered me, as with a sense of responsibility. I strove to conduct myself as befitted a Fellow-Citizen.

Before books came into my life, I was given to stargazing and daydreaming. When books were given me, I fell upon them as a glutton pounces on his meat after a period of enforced starvation. I lived with my nose in a book, and took no notice of the alterations of the sun and stars. But now, after the advent of George Washington and the American Revolution, I began to dream again. I strayed on the Common after school instead of hurrying home to read. I hung on fence rails, my pet book forgotten under my arm, and gazed off to the yellow-streaked February sunset, and beyond, and beyond. I was no longer the central figure of my dreams; the dry weeds in the lane crackled beneath the tread of Heroes.

What more could America give a child? Ah, much more! As I read how the patriots planned the Revolution, and the women gave their sons to die in battle, and the heroes led to victory, and the rejoicing people set up the Republic, it dawned on me gradually what was meant by my country. The people all desiring noble things, and striving for them together, defying their oppressors, giving their lives for each other,—all this it was that made my country. It was not a[86] thing that I understood; I could not go home and tell Frieda about it, as I told her other things I learned at school. But I knew one could say “my country” and feel it, as one felt “God” or “myself.” My teacher, my schoolmates, Miss Dillingham, George Washington himself, could not mean more than I when they said “my country,” after I had once felt it. For the Country was for all the Citizens, and I was a citizen. And when we stood up to sing “America,” I shouted the words with all my might. I was in very earnest proclaiming to the world my love for my new-found country.

Boston Harbor, Crescent Beach, Chelsea Square,—all was hallowed ground to me. As the day approached when the school was to hold exercises in honor of Washington’s Birthday, the halls resounded at all hours with the strains of patriotic songs; and I, who was a model of the attentive pupil, more than once lost my place in the lesson as I strained to hear, through closed doors, some neighboring class rehearsing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” If the doors happened to open, and the chorus broke out unveiled,—

delicious tremors ran up and down my spine, and I was faint with suppressed enthusiasm.

Where had been my country until now? What flag had I loved? What heroes had I worshipped? The very names of these things had been unknown to me. Well I knew that Polotzk was not my country. It was goluth—exile. On many occasions in the year we prayed to God to lead us out of exile. The beautiful Passover service closed with the words, “Next year, may we be in Jerusalem.” On childish lips, indeed, those words were no conscious aspiration; we repeated the Hebrew syllables after our elders, but without their hope and longing. Still not a child among us was too[87] young to feel in his own flesh the lash of the oppressor. We knew what it was to be Jews in exile, from the spiteful treatment we suffered at the hands of the smallest urchin who crossed himself; and thence we knew that Israel had good reason to pray for deliverance. But the story of the Exodus was not history to me in the sense that the story of the American Revolution was. It was more like a glorious myth, a belief in which had the effect of cutting me off from the actual world, by linking me with a world of phantoms. Those moments of exaltation which the contemplation of the Biblical past afforded us, allowing us to call ourselves the children of princes, served but to tinge with a more poignant sense of disinheritance the long humdrum stretches of our life. In very truth we were a people without a country. Surrounded by mocking foes and detractors, it was difficult for me to realize the persons of my people’s heroes or the events in which they moved. Except in moments of abstraction from the world around me, I scarcely understood that Jerusalem was an actual spot on the earth, where once the Kings of the Bible, real people, like my neighbors in Polotzk, ruled in puissant majesty. For the conditions of our civil life did not permit us to cultivate a spirit of nationalism. The freedom of worship that was grudgingly granted within the narrow limits of the Pale by no means included the right to set up openly any ideal of a Hebrew State, any hero other than the Czar. What we children picked up of our ancient political history was confused with the miraculous story of the Creation, with the supernatural legends and hazy associations of Bible lore. As to our future, we Jews in Polotzk had no national expectations; only a life-worn dreamer here and there hoped to die in Palestine. If Fetchke and I sang, with my father, first making sure of our audience, “Zion, Zion, Holy Zion, not forever is it lost,” we did not really picture to ourselves Judæa restored.

So it came to pass that we did not know what my country could mean to a man. And as we had no country, so we had no flag to love. It was by no far-fetched symbolism that the banner of the House of Romanoff became the emblem[88] of our latter-day bondage in our eyes. Even a child would know how to hate the flag that we were forced, on pain of severe penalties, to hoist above our housetops, in celebration of the advent of one of our oppressors. And as it was with country and flag, so it was with heroes of war. We hated the uniform of the soldier, to the last brass button. On the person of a Gentile, it was the symbol of tyranny; on the person of a Jew, it was the emblem of shame.

So a little Jewish girl in Polotzk was apt to grow up hungry-minded and empty-hearted; and if, still in her outreaching youth, she was set down in a land of outspoken patriotism, she was likely to love her new country with a great love, and to embrace its heroes in a great worship. Naturalization, with us Russian Jews, may mean more than the adoption of the immigrant by America. It may mean the adoption of America by the immigrant.

[89]

THE LAW OF THE FATHERS: A VIEW OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

If I ask an American what is the fundamental American law, and he does not answer me promptly, “That which is contained in the Declaration of Independence,” I put him down for a poor citizen. He who is ignorant of the law is likely to disobey it. And there cannot be two minds about the position of the Declaration among our documents of State. What the Mosaic Law is to the Jews, the Declaration is to the American people. It affords us a starting-point in history and defines our mission among the nations. Without it, we should not differ greatly from other nations who achieved a constitutional form of government and various democratic institutions. What marks us out from other advanced nations is the origin of our liberties in one supreme act of political innovation, prompted by a conscious sense of the dignity of manhood. In other countries advances have been made by favor of hereditary rulers and aristocratic parliaments, each successive reform being grudgingly handed down to the people from above. Not so in America. At one bold stroke we shattered the monarchical tradition, and installed the people in the seats of government, substituting the gospel of the sovereignty of the masses for the superstition of the divine right of kings.

And even more notable than the boldness of the act was the dignity with which it was entered upon. In terms befitting a philosophical discourse, we gave notice to the world that what we were about to do, we would do in the name of humanity, in the conviction that as justice is the end of government, so should manhood be its source.

It is this insistence on the philosophic sanction of our revolt that gives the sublime touch to our political performance. Up to the moment of our declaration of independence, our struggle with our English rulers did not differ from other popular struggles against despotic governments. Again[90] and again we respectfully petitioned for redress of specific grievances, as the governed, from time immemorial, have petitioned their governors. But one day we abandoned our suit for petty damages, and instituted a suit for the recovery of our entire human heritage of freedom; and by basing our claim on the fundamental principles of the brotherhood of man and the sovereignty of the masses, we assumed the championship of the oppressed against their oppressors, wherever found.

It was thus, by sinking our particular quarrel with George of England in the universal quarrel of humanity with injustice, that we emerged a distinct nation, with a unique mission in the world. And we revealed ourselves to the world in the Declaration of Independence, even as the Israelites revealed themselves in the Law of Moses. From the Declaration flows our race consciousness, our sense of what is and what is not American. Our laws, our policies, the successive steps of our progress,—all must conform to the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, the source of our national being.

The American confession of faith, therefore, is a recital of the doctrines of liberty and equality. A faithful American is one who understands these doctrines and applies them in his life.

[92]

AMERICA OFFERS SOMETHING BETTER THAN MONEY

I was told while in Syria that in America money could be picked up everywhere. That was not true. But I found that infinitely better things than money—knowledge, freedom, self-reliance, order, cleanliness, sovereign human rights, self-government, and all that these great accomplishments imply—can be picked up everywhere in America by whosoever earnestly seeks them. And those among Americans who are exerting the largest influence toward the solution of the “immigration problem” are, in my opinion, not those who are writing books on “good citizenship,” but those who stand before the foreigner as the embodiment of these great ideals.

The occasions on which I was made to feel that I was a foreigner—an alien—were so rare that they are not worth mentioning. My purpose in life, and the large, warm heart of America which opens to every person who aspires to be a good and useful citizen, made me forget that there was an “immigration problem” within the borders of this great Commonwealth. When I think of the thousand noble impulses which were poured into my soul in my early years in this country by good men and women in all walks of life; when I think of the many homes in which I was received with my uncomely appearance and with my crude manners, where women who were visions of elegance served me as an honored guest, of the many counsels of men of affairs which fed my strength and taught me the lasting value of personal achievements, and that America is the land of not only great privileges, but great responsibilities, I feel like saying (and I do say whenever I have the opportunity) to every foreigner, “When you really know what America is, when you are willing to share in its sorrows, as well as its joys, then you will cease to be a whining malcontent, will take your harp down from the willows, and will not call such a country ‘a strange land.’”

[93]

Of all the means of improvement other than personal associations with good men and women, the churches and the public schools gripped most strongly at the strings of my heart. Upon coming into town, the sight of the church spires rising above the houses and the trees as witnesses to man’s desire for God, always gave me inward delight. True, religion in America lacks to a certain extent the depth of Oriental mysticism; yet it is much more closely related than in the Orient to the vital issues of “the life which now is.” Often would I go and stand on the opposite side of the street from a public-school building at the hour of dismissal (and this passion still remains with me) just for the purpose of feasting my eyes on seeing the pupils pour out in squads, so clean and so orderly, and seemingly animated by all that is noblest in the life of this great nation. My soul would revel in the thought that no distinctions were made in those temples of learning between Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, the churched and the unchurched; all enjoyed the equality of privileges, shared equally in the intellectual and moral feast, and drank freely the spirit of the noblest patriotism.

[94]

AN IMMIGRANT TELLS HIS STRUGGLES WITH THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

My struggles with the English language (which have not yet ceased) were at times very hard. It is not at all difficult for me to realize the agonizing inward struggles of a person who has lost the power of speech. When I was first compelled to set aside my mother-tongue and use English exclusively as my medium of expression, the sphere of my life seemed to shrink to a very small disk. My pretentious purpose of suddenly becoming a lecturer on Oriental customs, in a language in which practically I had never conversed, might have seemed to any one who knew me like an act of faith in the miraculous gift of tongues. My youthful desire was not only to inform but to move my hearers. Consequently, my groping before an audience for suitable diction within the narrow limits of my uncertain vocabulary was often pitiable.

The exceptions in English grammar seemed to be more than the rules. The difference between the conventional and the actual sounds of such words as “victuals” and “colonel” seemed to me to be perfectly scandalous. The letter c is certainly a superfluity in the English language; it is never anything else but either k or s. In my native language, the Arabic, the accent is always put as near the end of the word as possible; in the English, as near the beginning as possible. Therefore, in using my adopted tongue, I was tossed between the two extremes and very often “split the difference” by taking a middle course. The sounds of the letters, v, p, and the hard g, are not represented in the Arabic. They are symbolized in transliteration by the equivalents of f, b, and k. On numerous occasions, therefore, and especially when I waxed eloquent, my tongue would mix these sounds hopelessly, to the amused surprise of my hearers. I would say “coal” when I meant “goal,” “pig man” for “big man,” “buy” for “pie,” “ferry” for “very,” and vice[95] versa. For some time I had, of course, to think in Arabic and try to translate my thoughts literally into English, which practice caused me many troubles, especially in the use of the connectives. On one occasion, when an American gentleman told me that he was a Presbyterian, and I, rejoicing to claim fellowship with him, sought to say what should have been, “We are brethren in Christ,” I said, “We are brothers, by Jesus.” My Presbyterian friend put his finger on his lip in pious fashion, and, with elevated brows and a most sympathetic smile, said, “That is swearing!”

But in my early struggles with English, I derived much negative consolation from the mistakes Americans made in pronouncing my name. None of them could pronounce it correctly—Rih-bá-ny—without my assistance. I have been called Rib-beny, Richbany, Ribary, Laborny, Rabonie, and many other names. An enterprising Sunday School superintendent in the Presbyterian Church at Mansfield, Ohio, introduced me to his school by saying, “Now we have the pleasure of listening to Mr. Rehoboam!” The prefixing of “Mr.” to the name of the scion of King Solomon seemed to me to annihilate time and space, and showed me plainly how the past might be brought forward and made to serve the present.

[97]

THE CRIMINAL IMMIGRANT

To recall prison experiences is not pleasant, and would not be profitable, if this were merely a narration of what happened to one individual, a quarter of a century ago. Conditions are not sufficiently changed, either in judicial procedure or in methods of punishment, to make this account of historic importance. Its value lies only in the fact that no changes have occurred, and that my experience then is still the common fate of multitudes of immigrants, who swell the criminal records of their race or group, and are therefore looked upon with dislike and apprehension.

The jail in which I found myself was an unredeemed, vermin-infested building, crowded by a motley multitude of strikers and strike breakers,—bitter enemies all, their animosity begotten in the elemental struggle for bread, and hating one another with an unmodified, primitive passion.[8]

The strikers had the advantage over us, for they were more numerous and were acquainted with the ways of American officials. This gave them the opportunity (which they improved) to make it unpleasant for the “Hunkies.”

The straw mattress upon which I slept the first night was missing the second; salt more completely spoiled the mixture called by courtesy coffee, and the only thing which saved me from bodily hurt was the fact that there was no spot on me which was not already suffering.

I mention without malice and merely as a fact in race psychology, that the Irish were the most cruel to us, with the Germans a close second, while the Welsh were not only inoffensive, but sometimes kind.

One of them, David Hill—smaller than the ordinary Welshman, but with the courage of his Biblical namesake—stood between me and a burly Irish Goliath who wanted to thrash this particular “furriner, who came over here to take[98] away the bread from the lips of dacent, law-abiding Americans.”

The jailer maintained no discipline and heeded no complaints. His task was to keep us locked up; the bars were strong and the key invariably turned.

The strikers gradually drifted from the jail, being bailed out or released, and I was not sorry to see them go.

Poor food, vermin of many varieties and the various small tortures endured, were all as nothing to me compared with the fact that for more than six weeks I was permitted to be in that jail without a hearing; without even the slightest knowledge on my part as to why I had forfeited my liberty.

From the barred jail window I could see the workmen going unhindered to their tasks; on Sunday pastor and people passed, as they went to worship their Lord who, too, was once a prisoner. None, seemingly, gave us a thought or even responded by a smile to the hunger for sympathy which I know my face must have expressed.

My letters to the Austro-Hungarian Consul remained unanswered, and the jailer gave my repeated questionings only oaths for reply.

The day of my hearing finally came, and I was dragged before the judge. The proceedings were shockingly disorderly, irreverent and unjust. I was charged with shooting to kill. The weapon which had been found in my pocket was the revolver bequeathed me by the dying man in the Pittsburgh boarding house. As all its six cartridges were safely embedded in rust, the charge was changed to “carrying concealed weapons.” I think my readers will agree with me that the sentence of one hundred dollars fine and three months in the county jail was out of all proportion to the offence.

The court wasted exactly ten minutes on my case, and then I was returned to my quarters in the jail, an accredited prisoner. Let me here record the fact that I carried back to my cell a fierce sense of injustice and a contempt for the laws of this land and its officials, feelings that later ripened into active sympathy with anarchy, which at that time occupied[99] the attention of the American people. My knowledge of that subject came to me through old newspapers which drifted as waste around the jail.

In all those months, more than six, for my fine had to be worked out, or rather idled out, no one came to me to comfort or explain. For more than six months I was with thugs, tramps, thieves and vermin. I was a criminal immigrant, a component element of the new immigration problem.

I recall all this now in no spirit of vengeance; as far as my memory is concerned, I have purged it of all hate. I recall my experience because those same conditions exist to-day in more aggravated form, while multitudes of ignorant, innocent men suffer and die in our jails and penitentiaries.

Since then I have visited most of the county jails, prisons and penitentiaries in which immigrants are likely to be found. Intelligent and humane wardens, of whom there are a few, have told me that more than half the alien prisoners are suffering innocently, from transgressing laws of which they were ignorant, and that their punishment is too often much more severe than necessary.

The following narration of several incidents which recently came under my observation will be pardoned, I hope, when their full import is seen.

Not long ago I went to lecture in a Kansas town,—one of those irreproachable communities in which it is good to bring up children because of the moral atmosphere. The town has a New England conscience with a Kansas attachment. It boasts of having been a station in the underground railway, and it maintains a most uncompromising attitude toward certain social delinquencies, especially the sale of liquor.

Upon my arrival I was cordially received by a committee, and one of its members told me that the jail was full of criminal foreigners—Greeks. What crimes they had committed he did not know.

Recalling my own experience, I made inquiries and found that six Greeks were in the county jail. They had been[100] arrested in September (it was now March) charged with the heinous crime of having gone to the unregenerate State of Nebraska, where they purchased a barrel of beer which they drank on the Sabbath day in their camp by the railroad.

Possibly these Greeks were just ignorant foreigners and now harbor no sense of injustice suffered; possibly they still think this country “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” They may even be ready to obey its laws and reverence its institutions. I do not know how they feel, but I do know this: those Greeks were kept in prison for breaking a law of which they were ignorant, and even if they were aware of its existence and broke it knowingly, the punishment did not fit the crime.

They were kept as criminals and regarded as criminals; they were unvisited and uncomforted; and they were incarcerated at a time when their country called for her native sons to do battle against the Turk.

Some day the sense of injustice suffered may come to them, and they will ask themselves whether every man in Kansas who drinks beer is punished as they were. They will wonder why real criminals go free, or escape with nominal punishment. I venture to predict that in some great crisis, when this country needs men who respect her laws and love her institutions, these men, and multitudes of others who have suffered such injustices as they have, will fail her.

I pleaded for those imprisoned Greeks that night, and my plea was effective. The just judge who condemned them pardoned them; but so just was he that the fine of one hundred dollars each, not yet paid, was left hanging over them, and to their credit be it said, they remained in that town and paid every cent of it. This judge no doubt knows his New Testament; he certainly made the Greeks pay the “uttermost farthing” before his outraged sense of justice was appeased.

Those Greeks spent, together, over three years in jail,[101] forfeited more than fifteen hundred dollars in wages, and lost in bodily health and self-respect beyond calculation.

Another incident occurred last spring as I was passing through a border on one of those nerve-racking coal roads.

At a small, desolate mining village a group of men entered the car, unwillingly enough. They were chained to one another and were driven to their seats with curses and the butt of a gun. They were Italian miners, part of that human material now scattered all over the United States, carried by something swifter, though not less insistent than the glacial movements which graved the beds of the rivers and shifted so much of earth’s original scenery. There was some danger of violence, and the accompanying minions of the law held back the angry passengers. There was scarcely a moment, however, when they themselves did not apply some vigorous measure to assure themselves that three undersized Southern Italians, chained to one another, should not escape them.

The car was uncomfortably crowded and grew more so at every station; for the next day the new governor was to be inaugurated at the capital, toward which our train was leisurely travelling.

I had some difficulty in ethnologically classifying the man who shared my seat. He was large, the colonel and major type, although his head was rounder. The features, too, were of a different cast, his speech less refined and his manners less gentle.

He wore a broad, new hat, his hair was long, curling slightly, and he had an air of special importance, the cause of which I discovered later.

“I wonder why they are treating those poor fellows so roughly,” I audibly soliloquized, turning to him. He was studying a typewritten document and evidently did not relish the interruption.

“Is that any of your business?” he asked, punctuating the short sentence with a liberal supply of oaths.

“Yes, I have no other business,” I replied. “I travel[102] about the world trying to find out why we people treat one another as we do, if we happen to be of different races.”

“What kind of business is that?” looking up from his manuscript and regarding me suspiciously.

“Well,” I said, “we call that ‘Social Psychology.’”

“That’s a new graft,” he replied with a laugh. “How much is there in it?”

“A little money and a great deal of joy,” I said with an answering smile.

Then he folded his manuscript and made ready to find out more about my “graft,” which I proceeded to explain.

“You see, from the beginning, when a man saw another who wasn’t just like him, he said: ‘Will he kill me or shall I kill him?’ Then they both went about finding out. The man who survived regarded himself as the greater man, and his descendants belonged to the superior race.

“We haven’t gone much beyond that point,” I continued. “We hide our primitive hate under what we proudly call race prejudice or patriotism, but it’s the old, unchanged fear and dislike of the unlike, and we act very much as the savages did who may have lived here before the glaciers ploughed up your State and helped to manufacture the coal you are now digging.

“I don’t know you,” I went on, “but I am pretty sure that you feel mean toward those poor ‘Dagoes’ just because you want to assert your superiority.

“I have discovered that a man isn’t quite happy unless he can feel himself superior to something, and these mountain folk of yours take those mangy, hungry looking dogs along just so they can have something to kick. Am I right?”

“Well,” he replied, clearing his throat and straightening himself, while into his eyes came a steel-like coldness, “you don’t mean to say that we are not superior to these Dagoes, these Black Hand murderers?”

“No, I am not ready to say that yet; but tell me about them. Whom did they kill, and how?”

Then he told me the story and he knew it well, for he was a re-elected State official now going to be sworn in.[103] There was a coal miners’ strike—rather a chronic disease in that somewhat lawless State—and the militia was called out. Violence begat violence, and one of the militiamen, standing guard at night, was killed by a bullet, fired from a Winchester rifle at an approximately certain distance.

The Italians were found at that place the next day, were arrested, and were now on their way to the county seat to be tried.

My companion evidently had found my “graft” interesting, for he permitted me to interview the Italians.

None of them knew definitely of what crime they were accused, and all, of course, protested their innocence.

None of them had served as soldiers and all said they were unacquainted with the use of firearms.

When we reached the end of the road where we were all admonished to change cars and not forget our parcels, the officer graciously allowed me to make an experiment. The men were freed from their shackles, and I told them that a high and mighty official was watching them and that the best marksman of the group would find favor in his sight. They were then in turn given the Winchester rifle, which they handled as if it were a pickaxe. They did not know how to load it, and after it was loaded for them and I asked them to fire, they fell upon their knees and begged to be permitted to show their prowess with a stiletto, the use of which they understood. Within twenty-four hours additional testimony was furnished, which proved beyond doubt that the Italians were not implicated in the crime with which they were charged.

I felt deeply grateful to the man who permitted me to intervene in their behalf; but what would have happened if by chance, or the power we call Providence, I had not been thrown into the sphere of their suffering? Undoubtedly they would have been convicted of murder and paid the penalty for a crime which they never committed.

Not only is ignorance of our laws and language a fruitful cause of the delinquency of immigrants and their children, but the venality of police officials, the condition of our[104] courts and prisons, not only fail to inspire respect, but contribute much to the development of those criminal tendencies with which nature has, to a degree, endowed all men....

Fortunately, I left the county jail with no thirst for blood; but with a fiercer passion to right the wrongs under which men suffer, and that, I think, was my one purpose in life when the prison door closed behind me.

[105]

INDUSTRIALISM AND THE IMMIGRANT

We talk much about the American home, which is even yet the basis of national well-being, although many of its functions are abrogated. The home still determines the good or ill of the child, and through him the good or ill of the nation. Yet we permit millions of people to work, with no chance to make a real home.

Children there will be, Nature sees to that; but what kind of children can be begotten in our slums?

The slums in America are as much a national disgrace as they are a national menace. The gunmen of New York were bred in hovels which even the home-making genius of the Jewish people could not turn into homes, or make fit for the training of children to decent living.

You who go slumming to see the sights, and turn up your sensitive noses at the bad smells, and your eyes to heaven, thanking God that you “are not as other men,” must not forget that the vast majority of our foreign-born workers are compelled to live as they do by economic and social forces, which they cannot control.

You remain ignorant of the brave struggles for the home, and the heroic stand for virtue behind those sooty walls. You know nothing of the fear of God, the desire to obey His law, and the love of their country, which filters in to those receptive souls.

The growth and power of the I. W. W., a revolutionary organization of the most radical type, anti-national, anti-religious, repudiating God and State with horrifying blasphemy, were made possible by the fact that our industrial leaders, our so-called “hard-headed business men,” have the hard spot in their hearts and a very soft spot in their heads.

Of all the blind men I have met, the blindest are those farsighted ones who see wealth in everything, and every common bush aflame with gold, and see nothing else. Blind they are to their own larger good, blind to the nation’s needs,[106] blind to the signs of the times. The social weal of our country is in the hands of the most unsocial....

As I analyze my own relation to the nation of which I am as much a part as if I had been born under its flag, I find that it rests itself upon the feeling of gratitude. Not for the bread I eat, for I had bread enough in my native country; not for the comfort of home, for I had fair comforts before I came; not even for liberty and democracy as abstractions, or even as embodied in the State; for I have found that freedom is within, and democracy a matter of attitude towards one’s fellows.

I am grateful for the chance I have had here to develop unhampered my own self, for a certain largeness of vision which I think I would not have developed anywhere else; for the richness which a broad, unhindered contact with all sorts and conditions of men has brought into my life.

There is something more than gratitude in my heart now. There is a larger sense of the values I received which I have not yet appropriated. There is in my heart a sublime passion for America. Would it have grown into the burning flame it is, if I had always worked in New York’s sweat-shops?

If I had been beaten by New York’s police? If I had reared my family in a tenement, and had to send my children to work when they should have played and studied?

If I had known America only through her yellow journalism, and sensed her spirit only in ward elections? I do not know.

What has kept me from becoming an Anarchist, from being jailed or hanged for leading mobs against their despoilers, God alone knows. His guidance is as unquestioned as it is mysterious. There were disclosed to me, early in my career, in some strange way, the spiritual values latent here. In spite of the gross, granite-like materialism at the top, I discovered the richness of the heritage left by the fathers of this Republic; in spite of the poverty and hardship in which I had to share, I saw here the fine quality of its vision; in spite of the crudeness of its blundering ways, all the love a[107] man may have for a country grew in my heart, and changed only in growing stronger. Yet I am not in the mood to call to account those toilers whose patriotism is less fervent than mine and whose ideals are still held in check by the “stomach line.”

Editors and preachers, teachers and capitalists, with all the loud if not mighty host of us who are yammering about the want of patriotism among the masses, and the weakness of our national spirit; we are the first who must move a notch higher in our love of country and above the “stomach line.” We must make real the spiritual ideals for which this country stands, or at least try to realize them, before we can teach the alien and his children, or even our own, the meaning of liberty and democracy. Before we can ask them to die for our country we shall have to learn to live for it, and the definite task we have before us is not the mere idolatry of our flag, or the making of shard and shell.

To provide an adequate wage for our men, to so arrange our industrial order that there shall not be feverish activity to-day, and idleness, poverty, bread lines and soup kitchens to-morrow. To make working conditions tolerable, to provide against accidents and sickness, unemployment and old age, and to be true to the life about us.

These are national factors, essential to the making of an effective national state in our industrial age. Capital, in common with labor, must learn how to lend itself to the national purpose; for we have come upon a time, or the time has come upon us, when we must learn how to melt all classes, all sections and all races into a final unit. This is the time to touch the hearts and gain the confidence of all the people by a high regard for all, so that together we may turn our faces towards our ultimate goal....

The Commonwealth Steel Company of Granite City, Illinois, one of those remarkable corporations with a soul, whose business is rooted in the ideal of service, found its foreign laborers quartered in what was called “Hungry Hollow.” This company so exemplified the American spirit of fair play that, when the foreign employees were aroused to proper civic[108] pride, they rebaptized “Hungry Hollow” into “Lincoln Place,” because Lincoln’s spirit was manifested towards them.

The Lincoln Progressive Club, as they named their organization, has as its immediate aim the study of the English language, and Americanization.

I wish there might be erected in every industrial center a statue of Abraham Lincoln for masters and men to see and reverence, thus being reminded of their duty towards each other and towards their common country.

What a people we could become if the immortal words he spoke were graven upon the pedestal of such a statue, “With malice towards none, with charity towards all,” ... to greet our eyes daily, and to challenge our conduct.

The history of the United States since the Civil War has not yet been written, for it is the story of an epoch just closing. It marks the sudden leaping of a people into wealth, if not into power; the fabulous growth of cities, the end of the pioneer stage, the beginning of an industrial period, and the pressure of economic and social problems towards their solution.

At least twenty millions of people have come full grown into our national life from the steerage, the womb out of which so many of us were born into this newer life. Most of us came to build and not to destroy; we came as helpers and not exploiters; we brought virtues and vices, much good and ill, and that, not because we belonged to this or the other national or racial group, but because we were human.

It is as easy to prove that our coming meant the ill of the nation as that it meant its well-being. To appraise this fully is much too early; it is a task which must be left to our children’s children, who will be as far removed from to-day’s scant sympathies as from its overwhelming prejudices.

The great war has swung us into the current of world events, and it ought to bring us a larger vision of the forces and processes which shape the nations and make their peoples. As yet we are thinking hysterically rather than historically, and the indications are that we may not learn anything, nor yet unlearn, of which we have perhaps the greater need.

[109]

Thus far we have become narrower rather than broader, for the feeling towards our alien population is growing daily less generous, and our treatment of it less wise.

Nor am I sure in what wisdom consists; the situation is complex; for we are the Balkan with its national, racial and religious contentions. We are Russia with its Ghetto, its Polish and Finnish problem. We are Austria and Hungary with their linguistic and dynastic difficulties. We are Africa and Asia; we are Jew and Gentile; we are Protestant and Greek, and Roman Catholic. We are everything out of which to shape the one thing, the one nation, the one people.

Yet I am sure that we cannot teach these strangers the history of their adopted country, and make it their own, unless we teach them that our history is theirs as well as ours, and that their traditions are ours, at least as far as they touch humanity generally, and convey to all men the blessings which come from the struggle against oppression and superstition.

In their inherited, national prejudices, in their racial hates, in their tribal quarrels, we wish to have no share, except as we hope to help them forget the old world hates in the new world’s love.

None of us who have caught a vision of what America may mean to the world wish to perpetuate here any one phase of Europe’s civilization or any one national ideal.

Although our institutions are rooted in English history, though we speak England’s language and share her rich heritage of spiritual and cultural wealth, we do not desire to be again a part of England, or nourish here her ideals of an aristocratic society.

In spite of the fact that for nearly three hundred years a large part of our population has been German, and that our richest cultural values have come from Germany, in spite of her marvellous resources in science, commerce and government, we do not care to become German, and I am sure that Americans of German blood or birth would be the first to repudiate it, should Germany’s civilization threaten to fasten itself upon us.

[110]

We do not wish to be Russian, in spite of certain values inherent in the Slavic character, nor do we desire to be French.

We do crave to be an American people—and develop here an American civilization; but if we are true to the manifold genius of our varied peoples, we may develop here a civilization, richer and freer than any of these, based upon all of them, truly international and therefore American.

Historians tell us that the history of the United States illumines and illustrates the historic processes of all ages and all people.

To this they add the disconcerting prophecy that we are drifting towards the common goal, and that our doleful future can be readily foretold. We have had our hopeful morning, our swift and brilliant noon, and now the dark and gruesome end threatens us.

I will not believe this till I must.

I will not, dare not lose the hope that we can make this country to endure firmly, to weather the storm, or at least put off the senility of old age to the last inevitable moment.

When, however, the end comes, as perhaps it must, I pray that we may project our hopes and ideals upon the last page of our history, so that it may read thus: This was a state, the first to grow by the conquest of nature, and not of nations. Here was developed a commerce based upon service, and not upon selfishness; a religion centering in humanity and not in a church.

Here was maintained sovereignty without a sovereign, and here the people of all nations grew into one nation, held together by mutual regard, not by the force of law.

Here the State was maintained by the justice, confidence and loyalty of its people, and not by battleships and armaments. When it perished, it was because the people had lost faith in God and in each other.

[112]

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[9] 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;[113] 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:

[114]

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[115] the part of all who come here. And this again you hear in those two verses in “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[116] 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[117] 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.

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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.

Next, we foreign-born American citizens must read the story of the Revolution into our blood. What is the significance of the Revolution for the foreign-born American citizen? These men were Englishmen or the sons of Englishmen; they loved the British Isles better than any portion of the earth’s surface, except their own Colonies; they loved them with an inexpressible love. Yet when it came to question of principle they stood out and said, “We must be free; the Colonies, or the United States, first!” You recall Daniel Webster’s splendid eloquence here:—

“On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjection, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared,—a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.”

Against that power to which they were as nothing, against that lovely land of their origin they stood out when it was[119] a question of their own independence and their own manhood.

That applies to every foreign-born American citizen to-day,—Saxon, Celt, Scandinavian, Teuton, Slav, Latin, Syrian, bond and free. Learn the lesson of the Revolution. This country will have no hands upon it, from any origin, anywhere outside of itself. Learn the lesson of the Civil War; the nation that set to work to keep its integrity as a political whole, to keep its integrity as a human whole, to fight, as it had done a foreign dominion, an evil genius inside its own border. There again is a vast lesson to all of us who are foreign-born. Once again we should store in memory and ponder in clearest conscience and intelligence the great ideas, the great political ideas of America as they are exhibited in Washington, in Hamilton the Nationalist and in Jefferson the State Rights’ patriot; and again in Webster and Calhoun, in Lincoln and the Confederate, and as they issued at last in a true conception of State freedom in a sisterhood of States that constitutes a great nation. These things should be part of the common store of knowledge of the adopted citizen. They are the great forces that have moved this country from its earliest beginning, and that have lifted it into power and renown.

America must be first; cherish your love for the old country, your tenderness,—a man does not need to hate his mother because he loves his wife, but it is his duty to stand by his wife even against his mother. What kind of a country should we have if every citizen, when trouble comes, should prefer in loyalty the land of his birth! What a confused mob of a country we should have! Duty overrides origin, tradition, sentiment. Here and here alone is our supreme and inviolable obligation.

I often think that this great country of ours is ultimately to be the deepest-hearted and the brightest-minded nation of the world. Hither come, with sore hearts, burdened humanity and quickened intelligence, the elect from all nations. You look at them when they land, and you laugh. If you had been in Quebec when I landed, perhaps you would not have[120] wanted me as your minister! The elect from all nations, parts of a splendid orchestra,—violin, flute, cornet, drum, trumpet, and a score of other instruments, all pouring forth their genius to make the great, swelling, soul-stirring symphony of this mighty nation. Thus from Scandinavia, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Armenia, Greece; from England, Ireland, and Scotland they come,—all are here with great souls to make a new and greater America. Out of this composite land, this Pentecostal nation,—sometimes it seems to me minus the Holy Ghost,—this nation gathered from every people under the heaven, rags and tatters and dirt and all, I believe the Eternal Spirit will evolve and establish the most gifted, the most far-shining and the mightiest people in the world. God grant that our dream may come true!

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AMERICANIZATION: ITS PRINCIPLES AND MEANING

It was a wrong practice, in my opinion, and against the principles of true democracy, for certain Americans to induce foreigners to become American citizens quickly if they wished “to make more money and to get better jobs.” Because love of mere money and better jobs, above all other things, leads to materialism, plutocracy, bureaucracy and aristocracy, and not to true democracy.

Candidates for admission to citizenship of a democratic country should be taught to understand and appreciate the superiority and the beauty of its democratic principles instead of being promised “better jobs and more money.”[10]

When a man or woman is inspired by those high and noble ideas and principles stated in the Declaration of Independence, and repeated by such unselfish and magnanimous heads of a Republic as Lincoln and Wilson, and feels them and applies them, we can say that person has been influenced by Americanism or is Americanized. But unfortunately a tendency prevails lately to confuse the word “Americanization” with the word “naturalization.” There is nothing more erroneous than to consider every naturalized person as Americanized, or to accept as a general proposition that a person not naturalized cannot be Americanized. Naturalization is simply a matter of form, while Americanization refers to a person’s heart and soul and mind. A naturalized American citizen who has not been inspired by the lofty principles which Americanism stands for, but who has been induced to acquire American citizenship for some material profit, bears the same relation to the State as a hypocrite bears to the Church. For this reason I have always been astonished to hear Americans, even among the best statesmen and educators, encouraging wholesale naturalization before[124] they become sure of the Americanization of the applicants. What has the State or the nation to gain from the man who is induced by the petty politician to become a citizen because it pays? What has the State to profit by me, for instance, for being an American citizen if I am not Americanized? On the contrary, it is dangerous, because in a serious crisis, like the present one, I may use my citizenship as a shield in defence of my un-American conduct. Common sense therefore requires that the foreigner should not be given that powerful weapon before we are sure that he will use it in defending his fellow-citizens and American institutions, and not in destroying them.

Prudence requires us to educate the foreigner and thoroughly Americanize him, if he appreciates Americanism, before admitting him to citizenship. But this education and Americanization cannot be carried out successfully by words or preaching alone. We must show to the foreigners by our example, by acts and deeds, that we ourselves stand for Americanism and apply the American ideals in our daily life, in our every-day contact with foreigners.

If Americans look down with contempt upon the immigrant, because he is poor, uneducated, or cursed with certain faults which he acquired while living in a poor or ill-governed country, they cannot make him believe that America stands for democracy, justice and general brotherhood....

When Americans, in their struggle to instruct the foreigners, have acquired for their own part a better knowledge of the characteristics of each race, when they rightly attribute the faults of foreigners to the painful conditions under which they lived in their own country, when they patiently bring to light the better qualities of those whom they aspire to educate, then that unity so desirable, so necessary for this great nation, will be perfected. Then there will be no more “foreigners,” but all races will be one people, offering their best efforts to the land in which they have equal obligations and equal rights.

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SOME OBSTACLES TO AMERICANIZATION

I was about twenty years old when I first thought of going to America. But it is not so easy to leave one’s native land: it was not until three years later that I said good-by to my father and mother and our neighbors. I did not think for a moment that it was for the last time—I was only going to America to make money and then return to Baiano and the old folks.

My father gave me a little money so that I could buy a second-class ticket. But I was young; I was starting on my first big adventure; and—in Naples my money went, this way, that way—I came in the steerage. It was no great hardship. My fellow-passengers were Italians, most of them laborers, men used to hard work. They were very happy—laughing, singing, playing—full of dreams, ambitions.

Then came Ellis Island!

Every one crowded—discomfort—lice—dirt—harshness—the officers shouting “Come here,” “Go there,” as though they were driving animals. And then the uncertain period of detention—sometimes a week, sometimes two, three, or even four weeks—it is as though a man were in prison. Ellis Island does not give the immigrant a good first lesson in Americanization.

America wants the immigrant as a worker; but does it make any effort to direct him, to distribute him to the places where workers are needed? No; it leaves the immigrant to go here, there, any place. If the immigrant were a horse instead of a human being, America would be more careful of him; if it loses a horse, it feels it loses something; if it loses an immigrant, it feels it loses nothing. At any rate, that is the way it seems to the immigrant; and it strengthens his natural disposition to settle among people of his own race.

A man needs to be a fighter to come to America without friends. I was more fortunate than many: I had a brother in America. He worked in a private bank. He met me[127] when I landed and took me to his home in Brooklyn. I looked for a job for about a month. I tried to get work on the Italian newspapers; I tried to get work in a law office. Finally a friend took me to a Jewish law office, and I was employed—I was to get 25 per cent. of the fees from any clients that I brought in. I stayed there two months and got $5. Three months after I arrived in New York I was given the kind of a place that I had looked for in vain in my native land—one that would enable me to support myself and study my chosen profession. I was given a place on an Italian religious newspaper. I worked from eight in the morning to six in the evening, and attended the night course of the New York Law School.

It was about August when I landed in America, and already there was election talk. (It was the year McClellan ran for Mayor.) I met some of the Italian-American politicians. It is said that I have a gift for oratory. The politicians asked what would be my price to talk in the Italian sections of the city. I said that I did not want anything. I made speeches for McClellan, and I have made speeches in every campaign since.

That was one of the first things that struck me in America—that every one working in politics was working for his own pocket. Another thing that also amazed me was that most of the men elected to an office, in which they are supposed to deliberate and legislate, were in reality only figureheads taking orders from some one else. They had no independence, no individuality. Another discovery was that the Italians with most political influence were men of low morality, of low type. Then I discovered the reason: the politicians needed repeaters and guerillas, and that was why “the boss had to be seen” through a saloon- or dive-keeper.

A thing that seemed very strange was the way the American newspapers magnified crime in Italian districts, how they made sensational stories out of what were really little happenings, how they gave the Italians as a people a character for criminality and violence. No less strange was the way the Italian newspapers answered the American press. They were[128] both building up a barrier of prejudice. If I were to judge America through the American newspapers, I would not have become an American citizen; or if I could know America only through the Italian-American newspapers, I would say that the Americans are our enemies.

It must be frankly admitted, however, that there is a change in the second generation, a change that is too frequently not for the better. As I have said, the majority of Italian immigrants come from the rural districts of Italy, and, because there is no policy of distribution, most of them settle in the big cities. They are not prepared to meet the situation presented in a big industrial centre. They think to apply the same principle in bringing up children that had been applied in the little village or on the farm in Italy. They let the children run loose. And in the streets of the crowded tenement districts the children see graft, pocketpicking, street-walking, easy money here, easy money there; they see the chance to make money without working. The remedy is to be found in distributing the newly arrived immigrants.

Most of what I have said has been of the faults of America. I have spoken of them because they are things that hold back Americanization.

America has been good to me. I have prospered here as I could not have prospered in Italy. I came to make money and return; I have made money and stayed. A little more than five years after I had landed at Ellis Island I was admitted to the New York bar. I have already had greater success than I dreamed, when I left Italy, that I should have. And I look forward to still greater success. For me, America has proved itself, and promises to continue to prove itself, the land of opportunity, but I have not forgotten Italy—it is foolish to tell any Italian to forget Italy. I say Italy; but for me, as for the others, Italy is the little village where I was raised—the little hills, the little church, the little garden, the little celebrations. I am forty years old, but Christmas and Easter never come around but what I want to return to Baiano. In my mind I become a[129] little child again. But I know enough to realize that I see all those scenes from a distance and with the eye of childhood.

But even if I wanted to return to Italy, my children would not let me. America is their country. My father is dead. I have brought my mother here. When an Italian brings his parents to America, he is here to stay.

America is a wonderful nation. But we make a mistake if we assume that the Anglo-Saxon is the perfect human being. He has splendid qualities, but he also has faults. The same thing is true of the Latins. The Anglo-Saxon is pre-eminently a business man, an executive, an organizer, energetic, dogged. But in the Anglo-Saxon’s civilization the Latin finds a lack of the things that go to make life worth living. I remember the returned Italians, the “Americans,” that I used to see at Baiano: they had made money in America and were prosperous and independent, but they had also lost something—a certain light-heartedness, a joy in the little things—the old jests no longer made them laugh. The Latin has the artistic, the emotional temperament, a gift for making little things put sunshine into life, a gift for the social graces. If the Latin could get the qualities that the Anglo-Saxon has, and give to the Anglo-Saxon those that he lacks,—if all the nationalities that make up America could participate in this give-and-take process,—then we would have a real Americanization.

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THE AMERICAN SPIRIT AND AMERICANIZATION

No matter how uncouth in appearance the immigrant when he sets foot on American soil, the criminal fleeing from the hands of justice excepted, there burns in his soul an intense love for the country of his nativity, inherited from generations of his ancestors; the more primitive his heart, the simpler and stronger is this love. He may have come to this country only to earn sufficient money to relieve his wants at home or to enlarge his means of living, or he may have come here as to a land of promise of whose great opportunities and larger freedom he has heard, still his heart remains in the land of his birth where the ashes of his forefathers are resting and to which the memories of his happiest childhood days are clinging. Leaving his home-nest, forsaking friends and family and turning his face to a strange land to mix with people whose customs and language he knows not, is a thrilling and tragic adventure to every immigrant. And it is well that his soul is so constituted, because he has the capacity to become a true patriot. Your cosmopolite is of different stuff; he is callous and incapable of those noble sentiments which urge the patriot to sacrifice even his life for his country, either of birth or adoption. A man who pays no homage to any land is incapable of harboring those feelings of brotherly love and kinship on which the solidarity of a nation rests. If Americanizers wish to wean the immigrant from the old to the new, they must have genuine respect for his feelings and not wound them; he must be wooed, he cannot be forced.

What is the object of this Americanization which is so much talked about and on which so much energy and money is spent? Is it simply to wipe out the difference between the customs and habits of the older and newer settlers; or is it to amalgamate the various human elements into one homogeneous mass, into one nation? If it is the former, it is[132] wasted energy; time will accomplish it. If it is the latter, then the aliens must be considered as human beings whose souls are made of the same material as those of the Pilgrim Fathers. Nations do not appear on the earth spontaneously; they are the result of historical growth, lasting for centuries. Many factors exert their influences upon a nation in the formative stage. Stop immigration, if you can get along without it, and in another generation the inhabitants of this country will be such Americans as America will have made them. If they should not turn out to be true Americans, it will be America’s fault. Even now the children of alien parents speak the same language, dress the same way, dance the same dances, sing the same songs, have the same good qualities and the same faults as the children whose ancestors came here sooner. If you want to convert the old folks into Americans, then it is necessary to handle the situation with tact. Love is a tender plant; it does not take root easily, and the least inclement weather will blast it; but it is very sturdy when full grown, nothing less than a thunderbolt will shatter it. Furthermore, it is of a spiritual essence, and money cannot buy it.

To succeed in this purpose it is, first of all, necessary to study each nationality separately. The very fact that all of them are treated alike is detrimental. It is unfair to class them all alike. They all have their good and bad qualities; and justice demands that the latter be not attributed to those who do not possess them. There is not one nationality that would admit its inferiority to the others, and every one of them considers itself equal to, if not better than, many others. Consequently, to be classed with races looked down upon is a humiliation to which no one with self-respect will submit without protest. This is a fact which must not be lost sight of; it is rooted in human nature. It is further necessary to study the habits, customs, prejudices and inclinations of every nationality separately, so that such as are too deeply rooted may not be violently antagonized.

Take, for example, the matter of language. The Swede or the Spaniard may not object to being forced by law to learn English, because in his mother country this question never[133] arose, it did not enter into his daily life. It is different with the Slovak or the Pole, whose soul was stirred to its very depths because the Magyar or the Prussian wanted by law to force a strange tongue on him. It was a tradition with him to resist such an attempt; he looked upon it as an oppression in his mother country, and he is likely to look upon it in the same light here. The conditions in Europe and here may be different; he may be justified in objecting there and not here; but his mind is habituated to opposing the ruling powers in their efforts to force upon him a strange language. A common workingman is not used to psychological self-analysis or to studying archæology; he is controlled mainly by his impulses. He will note only that he is required to submit here to laws which he considered oppressive and tyrannical in the old country.

The glories and advantages of this country should not be fed to the immigrant in excessive doses, but presented tactfully. He is liable to look upon it as an attempt to humiliate him, as unwarranted boasting. It is not difficult to pick flaws in the armor of American complacency. Every man is a hero-worshipper at heart, and every man has his childhood heroes to whom he clings. Judged by an absolute standard, if there is such a standard, the American heroes may stand on a higher plane; but if rude hands are placed upon the childhood heroes of the alien he is likely to resent it. The skies are just as blue, the fields are carpeted just as beautifully with flowers and the nights are illuminated with the same glorious stars on the Eastern as on the Western Hemisphere. The majority of the aliens enjoyed more of these beauties at home than they do in the mines and smoke-infested atmosphere of the industrial American cities. It is true that they earn more money here in dollars and cents; but they work harder for it and sometimes under the most cruel taskmasters.

Teaching aliens the English language, American customs, ideals, political institutions and history, will, of course, go a great way in making them formal Americans, and, in some cases, it may awaken in them a love for their new home; but it is indispensably necessary that in their daily contact with[134] the older Americans they see that these ideals are put into practice. They have a very high idea of Americanism, and they scrutinize very critically the conduct of the Americans with whom they come into contact, to see whether it squares with these ideals. They watch the manner in which the laws are enforced by the officials, and compare it with the way in which they are enforced in their native land; and, if they find out that the Americans do not practice what they preach, that the administration of public affairs is not essentially different here from what they know it to be at home, their opinion of America is not exalted. They look upon all the loud protestations as bluff and hypocrisy, and no amount of Americanization work will change their views. They are on trial here, but they also put the Americans to a test.

This Americanization work must be looked upon as the molding of human souls. When men’s habits of thought and action have become fixed by age, when they have lost their youthful plasticity, to recast their souls into predetermined molds without subjecting them first to the gentle heat of sympathy is like forging cold steel into new shapes. It can be done, but it requires enormous energy and the results are never as satisfactory as when the steel is first heated into a flux and then cast.

If Americanization is to accomplish its purpose,—the amalgamation of all the races and nationalities that inhabit the United States into one nation, the transformation of the aliens into one hundred per cent. Americans,—if it is to be beneficial and not harmful, it must be looked upon as a spiritual regeneration. Naturalization makes a citizen out of an alien; learning the English language makes him more efficient both for good and evil; conformity to American habits and customs wipes out social differences; knowledge of American institutions and laws enables him to live up to them or to break them consciously; but none of these nor all combined will make him an enthusiastic American unless his heart has been alienated from his mother country and his affections transferred to his adopted home. Not until the alien will[135] love America above all, not until he will boast of it and defend its faults, can he be considered a true American. And he will do neither unless he has placed America above his mother country in his estimation. This means a re-birth in his soul.

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PATRONIZING THE FOREIGNER

Among certain people there still exists the old prejudice that there must be something the matter with a foreigner. Exclusiveness on one side, loneliness on the other, do not help to interpret American life in the right spirit to the foreigner. If educated Italians thus do not know the real America, you can easily imagine what the immigrant’s conception of America may be. My barber, who has been in this country twenty-eight years, was dumbfounded when I told him the other day that six people out of seven in America are Protestant. The poor fellow had gone about for twenty-eight years tipping his hat to every church, thinking that they were all Roman Catholic churches. I have found over and over again Italian couples living together in the belief that they were husband and wife, because they misunderstood American law. They had been told that in America a civil marriage was as valid as a religious one, so they went to the City Hall, and by going through the process of answering questions in taking out the marriage license, they thought they had been married and went happily home to live together as husband and wife. An Italian tried to explain to me the meaning of Thanksgiving Day. “You see,” he said, “the word explains itself, ‘Tacchins-giving Day’”; “tacchin” meaning turkey in Italian, it was, according to this man, the day on which Americans gave away turkeys.

And what opportunity has an immigrant to know this country when he sees America only at its worst? Through the gum-chewing girls whom he meets in factories, through the hard-drinking and hard-swearing “boss” who orders him about, through the dubious type of youth whom he meets at the saloon and in the dance hall, through the descriptions given in Italian newspapers and by cheap orators he comes to know America. Add to that poor wages, quarters in the slums, policemen, car conductors and ushers who laugh at him when he asks for information, “bosses” who claim a fee[138] for securing him a job, and the sweet names of “Dago” and “Guinea” by which the supposed American thinks himself entitled to call him, and you can imagine what a delightful feeling the average Italian has toward this country.

Where does the fault lie? In prejudice and indifference, and in the spirit of patronage. Americans who judge by appearances, who have not travelled in Italy or studied modern Italian life, scornfully turn away from the Italian immigrant because he is not as clean-shaven or as well-kempt as the American workingman. Other Americans do not concern themselves with foreigners. They have a vague knowledge that there is somewhere, in some God-forsaken corner of the city, a foreign population, and that is all. Still others take a sentimental view of the matter; they have somewhat the feeling that existed in the bosom of an Irishwoman, a neighbor of mine. On Saturday night,—she was always affectionate on that special night,—she would wipe her eyes and say, “Thim poor Eyetalians.” This kind of person means well, but generally has zeal without knowledge.

A lady of refinement, born in a leading city of Italy, married to an Italian Protestant minister who is now at the head of an important religious movement in Italy, one day received the following letter:—

A son of a leading lawyer of Naples came to this country and was soon holding a fine position and making a good living. He met at church an American lady, who told him that she would be very glad to see him the next day at her house. At the appointed hour our young gentleman went there and handed his card to the servant. “Oh, yes,” she said, “the lady gave me something for you,” and she thrust into his hand a dilapidated suitcase and a note. The note read:—

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On another occasion an Italian minister was sent to a new field. A few days after he had settled down he had a telephone call from the wife of a minister of the town, who invited him to call at her house. At the appointed hour he went and was met by the servant, who gave him a newspaper bundle. The young man protested, saying that he had come to call in response to an invitation. The servant went upstairs, but came back, saying there was no mistake, that the lady wished that given to him. On reaching home he found that the contents consisted of cast-off clothing for his children. He bought a handsome edition of an Italian book for children, translated into English, and sent it with his regards to the patronizing lady.

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TRAINING FOR CITIZENSHIP

There should be, in the large foreign colonies, organized lectures, clubs, stereopticon lectures, distribution of information, both in Italian and in English, to explain and to instruct in regard to American history, laws, institutions, and ideals. There should be free courses on a university extension plan for Italian professional men, with a view to preparing them to expound to their people in the right way the principles and standards of American life. A regular and carefully carried out campaign should be started in the Italian newspapers, with well-written articles by leading men on the subject of American life; and a careful censorship of Italian newspapers should be established to challenge every article that is unduly depreciatory of America.

Churches should be centres where American volunteers of the best kind can in deed and word represent their country to the foreigner. Churches furnish a good means to bring about Americanization. Italians are apt to move from place to place, and those who become attached to Evangelical churches, besides the good which they eventually get in their own churches, are also brought into contact with American congregations, who by their example initiate them into the ways of American life.

A campaign to enlighten the immigrant as to his duties towards his new country should be started on a somewhat different basis from those already tried. The immigrant is often made to feel how great the material advantage is for him in becoming an American citizen, and thus is trained to enter into American public and political life in a mercenary spirit. When I applied for citizenship papers, I received this letter from the Bureau of Naturalization, Washington, D.C.:—

As you see, four times there occurs in this letter the exhortation to become a citizen and to learn the English language in order to get “a better job.” The letter contains not a single appeal to higher motives nor a reference to the duties and responsibilities of American citizenship, yet it is sent to every foreigner who applies for citizenship. I think a letter of this kind is demoralizing. I wonder whether America is better off for exhorting foreigners to become citizens from such motives, or whether it would not be more desirable to instruct immigrants carefully on the altruistic side as to the duty of sharing the responsibilities of American life.

It may be worth mentioning that thirty years of residence in the city of Rome is required of any man, even of Italian birth, in order to become a Roman citizen.

Human nature, fortunately, is always longing for an appeal to its best side. I accompanied a friend when the American[142] citizenship was granted to him. The judge, a man with a fine, clean-cut face, turned toward the candidates—there were about a hundred in the room—and told the story of the Pilgrim Fathers who, although starved and in great distress, refused the opportunity of going back to England, where religious and political freedom was denied them. The words were to me an inspiration, and in glancing around I saw the faces of those present light up and show signs of emotion. Big Irishmen, heavy-faced Slavs, small, dried-up Jews, dark Italians, small-headed Greeks, I could see in the eyes of them all the light of men who were seeing a vision. The appeal to the best there is in man should be the leading thought in educating immigrants to a desire for American citizenship.

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CAPITAL AND LABOR—A FAIR DEAL

We have often heard it said recently—it has become rather the fashion to say it—that the rulership of the world will henceforth belong to labor. I yield to no one in my respect and sympathy for labor, or in my cordial and sincere support of its just claims. The structure of our institutions cannot stand unless the masses of workmen, farmers, indeed all large strata of society, feel that under and by these institutions they are being given a square deal within the limits, not of Utopia, but of what is sane, right and practicable.

But the rulership of the world will and ought to belong to no one class. It will and ought to belong neither to labor nor to capital, nor to any other class. It will, of right and in fact, belong to those of all classes who acquire title to it by talent, hard work, self-discipline, character and service.

He is no genuine friend or sound counselor of the people nor a true patriot who recklessly, calculatingly or ignorantly raises or encourages expectations which cannot or which ought not to be fulfilled.

We must deal with all these things with common sense, mutual trust, with respect for all, and with the aim of guiding our conduct by the standard of liberty, justice and human sympathy. But we must rightly understand liberty. We must resolutely oppose those who in their impatient grasping for unattainable perfection would make of liberty a raging and destructive torrent instead of a majestic and fertilizing stream.

Liberty is not fool-proof. For its beneficent working it demands self-restraint, a sane and clear recognition of the reality of things, of the practicable and attainable, and a realization of the fact that there are laws of nature and of economies which are immutable and beyond our power to change.

Nothing in history is more pathetic than the record of the instances when one or the other of the peoples of the world[145] rejoicingly followed a new lead which it was promised and fondly believed would bring it to freedom and happiness, and then suddenly found itself, instead, on the old and only too well-trodden lane which goes through suffering and turmoil to disillusionment and reaction.

I suppose most of us when we were twenty knew of a short cut to the millennium, and were impatient, resentful and rather contemptuous of those whose fossilized prejudices or selfishness, as we regarded them, prevented that short cut from becoming the high road of humanity.

Now that we are older, though we know that our eyes will not behold the millennium, we should still like the nearest possible approach to it; but we have learned that no short cut leads there, and that anybody who claims to have found one is either an impostor or self-deceived.

Among those wandering signposts to Utopia we find and recognize certain recurrent types:—

There are those who, in the fervor of their world-improving mission, discover and proclaim certain cure-alls for the ills of humanity, which they fondly and honestly believe to be new and unfailing remedies, but which, as a matter of fact, are hoary with age, having been tried on this old globe of ours at one time or another, in one of its parts or another, long ago,—tried and found wanting and discarded after sad disillusionment.

There are the spokesmen of sophomorism rampant, strutting about in the cloak of superior knowledge, mischievously and noisily, to the disturbance of quiet and orderly mental processes and sane progress.

There are the sentimental, unseasoned, intolerant and cocksure “advanced thinkers,” claiming leave to set the world by the ears, and with their strident and ceaseless voices to drown the views of those who are too busy to indulge in much talking.

There are the self-seeking demagogues and various related types, and finally there are the preachers and devotees of liberty run amuck, who in fanatical obsession would place a visionary and narrow class interest and a sloppy internationalism[146] above patriotism, and with whom class hatred and envy have become a ruling passion. They are perniciously, ceaselessly and vociferously active, though constituting but a small minority of the people, and though every election and other test has proved, fortunately, that they are not representative of labor, either organized or unorganized.

Among these agitators and disturbers who dare clamorously to assail the majestic and beneficent structure of American traditions, doctrines and institutions there are some, far too many, indeed—I say it with deep regret, being myself of foreign birth—who are of foreign parentage or descent. With many hundreds of thousands they or their parents came to our free shores from lands of oppression and persecution. The great republic generously gave them asylum and opened wide to them the portals of her freedom and her opportunities.

The great bulk of these newcomers have become loyal and enthusiastic Americans. Most of them have proved themselves useful and valuable elements in our many-rooted population. Some of them have accomplished eminent achievements in science, industry and the arts. Certain of the qualities and talents which they contribute to the common stock are of great worth and promise.

When the great test of the war came, the overwhelming majority of them rang wholly and finely true. The casualty lists are eloquent testimony to the patriotic devotion of “the children of the crucible,” doubly eloquent because many of them fought against their own kith and kin.

But some there are who have been blinded by the glare of liberty as a man is blinded who, after long confinement in darkness, comes suddenly into the strong sunlight. Blinded, they dare to aspire to force their guidance upon Americans who for generations have walked in the light of liberty.

They have become drunk with the strong wine of freedom, these men who until they landed on America’s coasts had tasted little but the bitter water of tyranny. Drunk, they presume to impose their reeling gait upon Americans to whom[147] freedom has been a pure and refreshing fountain for a century and a half.

Brooding in the gloom of age-long oppression, they have evolved a fantastic and distorted image of free government. In fatuous effrontery they seek to graft the growth of their stunted vision upon the splendid and ancient tree of American institutions.

Admitted in generous trust to the hospitality of America, they grossly violate not only the dictates of common gratitude, but of those elementary rules of respect and consideration which immemorial custom imposes upon the newcomer or guest. They seek, indeed, to uproot the foundations of the very house which gave them shelter.

We will not have it so, we who are Americans by birth or by adoption. We reject these impudent pretentions. By all means, let us move forward and upward, but let us proceed by the chart of reason, experience and tested American principles and doctrines, and let us not entrust our ship to demagogues, visionaries or shallow sentimentalists who most assuredly would steer it on the rocks.

When you once leave the level road of Americanism to set foot upon the incline of Socialism, it is no longer in your power to determine where you will stop. It is an axiom only too well attested by the experience of the past, that the principal elements of the established order of civilization (of which the institution of private property is one) are closely interrelated. If you tolerate grave infringement upon any of these elements, all history shows that you will have laid open to assault the foundations of personal liberty, of orderly processes of government, of justice and tolerance, as well as the institution of marriage, the sanctity of the home, and the principles and practices of religion.

The strident voices of the fomenters of unrest do not cause me any serious apprehension, but we must not sit silently by, we must not look on inactively. Where there are grievances to redress, where there are wrongs existing, we must all aid in trying to right them to the best of our conscience and ability.

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To the extent that social and economic institutions, however deep and ancient their roots, may be found to stand in the way of the highest achievable level of social justice and the widest attainable extension of opportunity, welfare and contentment, they will have to submit to change. And the less obstructive and stubborn, the more broad-minded, co-operative, sympathetic and disinterested those who pre-eminently prospered under the old conditions will prove themselves in meeting the spirit of the new day and the reforms which it may justly call for, the better it will be both for them and for the community at large.

But to the false teaching and the various pernicious “isms” with which un-Americans, fifty per cent. Americans or anti-Americans are flooding the country, we must give battle through an organized, persistent, patient, nationwide campaign of education, of information, of sane and sound doctrine. The masses of the American people want what is right and fair, but they “want to be shown.” They will not simply take our word for it that because a thing is so and has always been so, therefore it should remain so. They do not mean to stand still. They want progress. They have no use for the standpatter and reactionary.

Even before the war a great stirring and ferment was going on in the land. The people were groping, seeking for a new and better condition of things. The war has intensified that movement. It has torn great fissures in the ancient structure of our civilization. To restore it will require the co-operation of all patriotic men of sane and temperate views, whatever may be their occupation or calling or political affiliations.

It cannot be restored just as it was before. The building must be rendered more habitable and attractive to those whose claim for adequate houseroom cannot be left unheeded, either justly or safely. Some changes, essential changes, must be made. I have no fear of the outcome and of the readjustment which must come. I have no fear of the forces of freedom unless they be ignored, repressed or falsely or selfishly led.

Changes the American people will make as their needs become[149] apparent, improvements they welcome, the greatest attainable well-being for all those under our national roof-tree is their aim. They will strive to realize what formerly were considered unattainable ideals. But they will do all that in the American way of sane and orderly progress—and in no other.

Whatever betide in European countries, this nation will not be torn from its ancient moorings. Against foes within, no less than against enemies without, the American people will ever know how to preserve and protect the splendid structure of light and order, which is the treasured inheritance of all those who rightfully bear the name Americans, whatever their race and origin.

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THE NEW IMMIGRATION

Oh, if I could show you America as we of the oppressed peoples see it! If I could bring home to you even the smallest fraction of this sacrifice and this upheaval, the dreaming and the strife, the agony and the heartache, the endless disappointments, the yearning and the despair,—all of which must be ours before we can make a home for our battered spirits in this land of yours. Perhaps if we be young we dream of riches and adventure, and if we be grown men we may merely seek a haven for our outraged human souls and a safe retreat for our hungry wives and children. Yet however aggrieved we may feel toward our native home, we cannot but regard our leaving it as a violent severing of the ties of our life, and look beyond toward our new home as a sort of glorified exile. So, whether we be young or old, something of ourselves we always leave behind in our hapless, cherished birthplaces. And the heaviest share of our burden inevitably falls on the loved ones that remain when we are gone. We make no illusions for ourselves. Though we may expect wealth, we have no thought of returning. It is farewell forever. We are not setting out on a trip; we are emigrating. Yes, we are emigrating, and there is our experience, our ordeal, in a nutshell. It is the one-way passport for us every time. For we have glimpsed a vision of America, and we start out resolved that, whatever the cost, we shall make her our own. In our heavy-laden hearts we are already Americans. In our own dumb way we have grasped her message to us.

Yes, we immigrants have a real claim on America. Every one of us who did not grow faint-hearted at the start of the battle, and has stuck it out, has earned a share in America by the ancient right of conquest. We have had to subdue this new home of ours to make it habitable, and in conquering it we have conquered ourselves. We are not what we were when you saw us landing from the Ellis Island ferry. Our own kinsfolk do not know us when they come over. We sometimes hardly know ourselves.

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WHAT COLLEGE LIFE IN THE WEST DID FOR AN IMMIGRANT

ACQUIRING A SENSE OF HUMOR

On the whole, then, it looked as if I might yet work out my salvation if only those barbarians would leave me to myself. But it was not in them to do that. They seemed determined on disturbing my peace of mind. They were devoting, I honestly believe, all their spare thoughts and all their inventive genius to thinking up ways of making me uncomfortable. One young gentleman, still reminiscent of my ignorance of rural things, made up a tale of how I went to get a job on a farm, and proceeded to relate it at the table. “The farmer gave Max a pail and a stool and sent him out to milk the cow. About an hour later, when the old boy failed to show up with the stuff, Reuben went out to see what was the trouble. He found his new assistant in a fierce pickle. His clothes were torn and his hands and face were bleeding horribly. ‘What in heck is the matter?’ asked the farmer. ‘Oh, curse the old cow!’ said Max, ‘I can’t make her sit on that stool.’” A burst of merriment greeted the climactic ending, although the yarn was a trifle musty; and the most painful part of it was that I must laugh at the silly thing myself.

It was not at all true, as one of my numerous room-mates tried to intimate, that I shunned baths. I was merely conservative in the matter. One day, however, he had the indelicacy to ask me the somewhat personal question whether I ever took a bath; and I told him rather sullenly, that I did once in a while. Some time later I overheard him repeat the dialogue to the other men in the house and provoking shouts of laughter. It puzzled me to see where the joke was, until I learned that these fellows were taking a shower-bath at the gymnasium every day. It seemed to me that that was running a good thing into the ground. Again, I noticed that my[153] room-mates were making a great show of their toothbrushes. They used them after every meal and before retiring—as the advertisements say—and always with an unnecessary amount of splash and clatter. At home I had been taught to keep my mouth and teeth clean without all this fuss. Nevertheless, I thought that I would get a brush and join in the drill. After that the other brushes became noticeably quiet.

And then, of course, there was the institution of the practical joke. On April 1st there was soap in the pie. If you got in late to a meal, it was wise to brush your chair and “pick your bites,” if any bites were left. If not, there was no telling what you might swallow or sit on. More than once I tasted salt in my water and pepper in my biscuits. I seemed to have been marked from the first as a fit subject for these pranks.

On Hallowe’en a squad of cadets commanded by a corporal entered my room and ordered me to get into my uniform, shoulder my gun, and proceed to the gymnasium, which, according to the order read, the commandant assigned me to guard against stragglers. I guarded through a whole uneventful night. Toward morning the captain of the football team, who had a room in the gymnasium, returned from a party. I ordered him to halt and give the password. He smiled and tried to enter. I made a lunge for him, and would have run my bayonet through him if he had not begun to laugh. “Go on home, you poor boy,” he said. “They pull that stunt off every year. Poor joke, I think.” The next day my table-mates tried to jolly me about it. They said I would be court-martialed as a deserter from duty. I got angry, and that made them all the more hilarious. Then a great, strapping fellow named Harvey spoke up. “Be still, you galoots,” he said to them; and then to me, “For gosh sake, fellow, be human!” I tried a long time to figure out what he meant by “human,” and for the rest of my college career I strove to follow his advice. It was the first real hint I had got on what America, through her representatives[154] in Missouri, was expecting of me. Harvey became my first American friend.

THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT

So to New York I went, and lived through the last and the bitterest episode in the romance of readjustment. During that whole strenuous year, while I was fighting my battle for America, I had never for a moment stopped to figure the price it was costing me. I had not dreamed that my mere going to Missouri had opened up a gulf between me and the world I had come from, and that every step I was taking toward my ultimate goal was a stride away from everything that had once been mine, that had once been myself. Now, no sooner had I alighted from the train than it came upon me with a pang that that one year out there had loosened ties that I had imagined were eternal.

There was Paul faithfully at the ferry, and as I came off he rushed up to me and threw his arms around me and kissed me affectionately. Did I kiss him back? I am afraid not. He took the grip out of my hand and carried it to the Brooklyn Bridge. Then we boarded a car. I asked him where we were going, and he said, mysteriously, “To Harry’s.” A surprise was awaiting me, apparently. As we entered the little alley of a store in the Italian quarter, I looked about me and saw no one. But suddenly there was a burst of laughter from a dozen voices, a door or two opened violently, and my whole family was upon me,—brothers, a new sister-in-law, cousins of various degrees, some old people, a few children. They rushed me into the apartment behind the store, pelting me with endearments and with questions. The table was set as for a Purim feast. There was an odor of pot-roasted chicken, and my eye caught a glimpse of chopped eggplant. As the meal progressed, my heart was touched by their loving thoughtfulness. Nothing had been omitted,—not even the red wine and the Turkish peas and rice. Harry and every one else kept on urging me to eat. “It’s a long time since you have had a real meal,” said my sister-in-law. How[155] true it was! But I felt constrained, and ate very little. Here were the people and the things I had so longed to be with; but I caught myself regarding them with the eyes of a Western American. Suddenly—at one glance, as it were—I grasped the answer to the problem that had puzzled me so long; for here in the persons of those dear to me I was seeing myself as those others had seen me.

I went about revisiting old scenes, and found that everything had changed in my brief absence. My friends were not the same; the East Side was not the same. They never would be the same. What had come over them? My kinsfolk and my old companions looked me over and declared that it was I who had become transformed. I had become soberer. I carried myself differently. There was an unfamiliar reserve, something mingled of coldness and melancholy, in my eye. My very speech had a new intonation. It was more incisive, but, less fluent, less cordial, they thought. Perhaps so. At any rate, while my people were still dear to me, and always would be dear to me, the atmosphere about them repelled me. If it was I who had changed, then, as I took in the little world I had emerged from, I could not help telling myself that the change was a salutary one.

While calling at the old basement bookshop on East Broadway I suddenly heard a horrible wailing and lamenting on the street. A funeral procession was hurrying by, followed by several women in an open carriage. Their hair was flying, their faces were red with weeping, their bodies were swaying grotesquely to the rhythm of their violent cries. The oldest in the group continued mechanically to address the body in the hearse: “Husband dear, upon whom have you left us? Upon whom, husband dear?” A young girl facing her in the vehicle looked about in a terrified manner, seized every now and then the hand of her afflicted mother, and tried to quiet her. The frightful scene, with its tragic display, its abysmal ludicrousness, its barbarous noise, revolted me. I had seen the like of it before, but that was in another life. I had once been part of such a performance myself, and the grief of it still lingered somewhere in my motley soul. But[156] now I could only think of the affecting simplicity, the quiet, unobtrusive solemnity of a burial I had witnessed the previous spring in the West.

The afternoon following my arrival I flew uptown to see Esther. She waved to me and smiled as I approached—she had been waiting on the “stoop.” As she shook my hand in her somewhat masculine fashion, she took me in with a glance, and the first thing she said was: “What a genteel person you have become! You have changed astonishingly.” “Do you think so?” I asked her. “I am afraid I haven’t. At least they do not think so in Missouri.” Then she told me that she had got only ten points, but that she was expecting three more in the fall. She was almost resigned to wait another year before entering college. That would enable her to make her total requirements, save up a little more money, and get her breath. “A woman is not a man, you know,” she added. “I am beginning to feel the effects of it all. I am really exhausted. Geometry has nearly finished me. And mother has added her share. She is no longer young, and this winter she was ill. I have worried and I have had to send money. But let us not talk about my troubles. You are full of things to tell me, I know.”

Yes, I had lots I wanted to say, but I did not know where to begin; and the one thing that was uppermost in my mind I was afraid to utter lest she should misunderstand and feel injured and reproach me. I did not want her to reproach me on first meeting. I wanted to give myself time as well as her. And so we fell into one of those customary long silences, and for a while I felt at home again, and reflected that perhaps I had been hasty in letting the first poignant reactions mislead me. Toward evening Esther remarked that it was fortunate I had got to town the day before. If I had no other plans, she would take me to a meeting at Clinton Hall where Michailoff was to speak on “The Coming Storm in America.” It would be exciting, she said, and enlightening. Michailoff had just come out of prison. He was full of new impressions of America and “the system” generally, and one could rely on him to tear things open.

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Of course we went, and the assemblage was noisy and quarrelsome and intolerant, and the hall was stuffy and smelly, and the speaker was honest and fiery and ill-informed. He thundered passionately, and as if he were detailing a personal grievance against American individualism and the benighted Americans who allowed a medieval religion and an oppressive capitalistic system to mulct and exploit them, and referred to a recent article in the Zukunft where the writer had weakly admitted the need of being fair even to Christianity, and insisted that to be fair to an enemy of humanity was to be a traitor to humanity. I listened to it all with an alien ear. Soon I caught myself defending the enemy out there. What did these folk know of Americans, anyhow? Michailoff was, after all, to radicalism what Higgins and Moore were to Christianity. His idea of being liberal was to tolerate anarchism if you were a socialist and communism if you were an individualist. And, as we left the hall, I told Esther what I had hesitated to tell her earlier in the evening.

“Save yourself, my dear friend. Run as fast as you can. You will find a bigger and freer world than this. Promise me that you will follow me to the West this fall. You will thank me for it. Those big, genuine people out in Missouri are the salt of the earth. Whatever they may think about the problem of universal brotherhood, they have already solved it for their next-door neighbors. There is no need of the social revolution in Missouri; they have a generous slice of the kingdom of heaven.”

Maybe I was exaggerating, but that was how I felt. From this distance and from these surroundings Missouri and the new world she meant to me was enchanting and heroic. The loneliness I had endured, the snubbing, the ridicule, the inner struggles—all the dreariness and the sadness of my life in exile—had faded out of the picture, and what remained was only an idealized vision of the clean manhood, the large human dignity, the wholesome, bracing atmosphere of it, which contrasted so strikingly with the things around me.

No, there was no sense in deceiving myself, the East Side had somehow ceased to be my world. I had thought a few[158] days ago that I was going home. I had yelled to Harvey from the train, as it was pulling out of the station at Columbia, “I am going home, old man!” But I had merely come to another strange land. In the fall I would return to that other exile. I was, indeed, a man without a country.

During that entire summer, while I opened gates on an Elevated train in Brooklyn, I tussled with my problem. It was quite apparent to me from the first what its solution must be. I knew that now there was no going back for me; that my only hope lay in continuing in the direction I had taken, however painful it may be to my loved ones and to myself. But for a long time I could not admit it to myself. A host of voices and sights and memories had awakened within me that clutched me to my people and to my past.

As long as I remained in New York I kept up the tragic farce of making Sunday calls on brother Harry and pretending that all was as before, that America and education had changed nothing, that I was still one of them. I had taken a room in a remote quarter of Brooklyn, where there were few immigrants, under the pretense that it was nearer to the railway barns. But I was deceiving no one but myself. Most of my relatives, who had received me so heartily when I arrived, seemed to be avoiding Harry’s house on Sundays, and on those rare occasions when I ran into one of them he seemed frigid and ill at ease. Once Paul said to me: “You are very funny. It looks as if you were ashamed of the family. You aren’t really, are you? You know they said you would be when you went away. There is a lot of foolish talk about it. Everybody speaks of Harry and me as the doctor’s brothers. Can’t you warm up?”

I poured out my heart in a letter to Harvey. If a year ago I had been told that I would be laying my sorrows and my disappointments in my own kindred before any one out there, I would have laughed at the idea. But that barbarian in Missouri was the only human being, strangely enough, in whom I could now confide with any hope of being understood. I tried to convey to him some idea of the agonizing moral experience I was going through. I told him that I[159] was aching to get back to Columbia (how apt the name was!), to take up again where I had left off the process of my transformation, and to get through with it as soon as might be.

And in the fall I went back—this time a week before college opened—and was met by Harvey at the station, just as those rural-looking boys had been met by their friends the year before. When I reached the campus, I was surprised to see how many people knew me. Scores of them came up and slapped me on the back and shook hands in their hearty, boisterous fashion, and hoped that I had had a jolly summer. I was asked to join boarding-clubs, to become a member in debating societies, to come and see this fellow or that in his room. It took me off my feet, this sudden geniality of my fellows toward me. I had not been aware how, throughout the previous year, the barriers between us had been gradually and steadily breaking down. It came upon me all at once. I felt my heart going out to my new friends. I had become one of them. I was not a man without a country. I was an American.

[161]

THE PATHOS OF READJUSTMENT

AUTHOR’S PURPOSE IN WRITING

The mere writing of this account is a chain, slight, but never to be broken; one that will always bind me to that from which I had thought myself forever cut off. For I am writing not only of myself. In myself I see one hundred thousand young men and women with dark eyes aflame with enthusiasm, or blue eyes alight with hope. In myself, as I write this record, I see the young girl whose father plucked oranges in Italian gardens, the maiden whose mother worked on still mornings in the wide fields of Poland, the young man whose grandmother toiled in the peat bogs of Ireland. I am writing this for myself and for those who, like me, are America’s foster children, to remind us of them, through whose pioneer courage the bright gates of this beautiful land of freedom were opened to us, and upon whose tumuli of gray and weary years of struggle we, their children, rose to our opportunities. I am writing to those sons and daughters of immigrant fathers and mothers who are now in America, and to those who will come after this devastating war to America, and to those who will receive them.

MARRIAGE AND AFTER

My friends are now my husband’s friends. My home is that kind of a home in which he has always lived. With my marriage I entered into a new avenue. We have traveled. We have worked at tasks we believed in and loved. We have our little son. I have not written much to mother about my life. My letters have been—just letters. Her own letters have been growing briefer these last years. She never came to see me in my home.

It was our little son who was the real cause of her coming finally. I thought of his birth as the tearing down of that barrier that had come between us. Mother was intoxicated[162] with the delight of her first grandchild, the first child of her first child. “Now we understand each other better, now that we both are mothers, my daughter,” she wrote to me, not knowing how much more than she meant to say her letters told. I, too, felt that in my own motherhood I saw the explanation now for mother’s unquestioning, unceasing striving and toiling and hoping and planning and achieving for her children. “Now I can find the joy of all mothers again. I can find my lost young motherhood in your child,” she wrote. “I am coming to my grandson.”

Mother had not traveled since she took that long trip, twenty-five years ago, from Poland to America, to come to her husband. And now she was preparing to come from Soho—to us, to her first grandchild. We were excited as the letters from home told us that they were. Day after day, my sisters wrote to us, women came to mother, giving her messages to take to me, whom they had known so well as a child. They brought mother cake and jellies and wines, as if she were about to travel a year instead of one night. My aunts came to help her sew her clothes, my uncles came to pack her suitcases. It was as if all Soho were coming here to us in the person of mother. Father hurried back and forth securing mileages, a berth. He carefully explained to mother what a berth was, and warned her above all not to forget to give the black man, when he gave her her hat, a quarter. My sisters wrote such dear letters, describing it all there at home.

We could hardly wait. Our little boy asked every day for “grammy.” There came a deluge of telegrams to us, which clearly told us the haste and nervousness in the little home in Soho, and we knew that mother was on her way to us.

She came in the morning. She did not stop to kiss me, nor to look about her, but as soon as she entered my home she cried breathlessly, “Where is my grandchild?” And she held him to her, and the tears filled her eyes. “Such a boy! But a boy!” she cried. We had written to her that our boy was speaking now. She sat down beside him, and she crooned love-words to him.

Son is a friendly little lad. I felt that, if I left them alone[163] together, he and mother would grow close in a day or two. I peeped one morning into the nursery. Mother was standing, looking dully at the spotless baby cot, the white wicker chairs, the little washable rugs on the floor, the gay pictures on the white walls. Her worn plump hands were folded one upon the other in a gesture that I know. Little son was in a corner, gravely building a tower. Little son has been taught that he must play without demanding help or attention from adults about him, that “son must help himself.” In Soho little boys are spanked and scolded and carried and physicked and loved and fed all day and all night.

Mother called to little son a quaint love name, and he turned to her with his bright smile, understanding her love tone. Then he quietly turned away from her to his toys again. And mother stood there in that strange white baby world which was her grandson’s. Perhaps she was thinking of what she had thought to find him, like one of the children of her own young motherhood, dear burdens that one bore night and day. She was afraid to touch the crib, to soil the spotless rugs. Here was her grandchild, they were together, it is true. And her grandchild had no need of her. She felt alien, unnecessary.

I felt the tears in my eyes. I ran in, called son to come to play with grammy and mother. He came readily, laughingly, speaking his baby phrases that are so adorably like the words we adults, his parents, use. I had been anticipating, even before she came, how much mother and I would enjoy his baby talk. But mother said in a very low voice, “You say he speaks, daughter. I do not understand the words he means to say now. And—he will never learn—learn my language.”

And mother’s first tears fell.

We had planned for every hour of her visit to us, even for the hours of needed rest between whiles. In those rest spaces she would come into our living room. She is not accustomed to sitting in living rooms. Her life has been a life of toil. And our living room is to her as strange a place as was to me the first sitting room I saw long ago.

[164]

She looked with a little smile about her. She glanced at the bookcase, filled with books she cannot read, and about things she does not know. Finally her gaze rested upon a certain place, and my eyes followed hers. There stood the old candlesticks which she had known in her father’s home in Poland, and which had stood in her own kitchen in Soho. And there, in my living room stands also, with its bronze curves holding autumn leaves—the copper fish pot! “In America,” said mother quaintly, with a little “crooked smile” only on her trembling, questioning lips, “they have all things—so different.”

There is no need for mother’s pot in my kitchen; it has become an emblem of the past, an ornament in my living room. Mother cannot understand our manner of cooking, the manner I learned away from home. She cannot eat the foods we have; her plate at meals was left almost untouched. She does not understand my white kitchen, used only for cooking. When she came into my kitchen, my maid asked her quickly, eager to please her, pleasantly and respectfully, “What can I do for you?”

So mother went out to the porch, and she looked out upon the tree-shaded street. And an infinite loneliness was hers, a loneliness at thought of the crowded, homely ghetto street, where every one goes about in shirt sleeves, or apron and kimono, where every one knows his neighbor, where every one speaks mother’s speech.

She cannot understand my friends, nor they her. I am the only thing here that is part of her life. I for whom those hands of hers are hard and worn, and her eyes weary with the stitching of thousands of seams. She helped me to come into this house, to reach the quiet peace of this street. And she has come to see this place whither she toiled to have me come; and now that she came to see my goal she was afraid, lonely. She did not understand.

There is nothing that we have in common, it may appear, this mother of mine, and I, the mother of my son. Her life has lain always within the four dim walls of her ghetto home. And I have books, clubs, social service, music, plays. My[165] motherhood is a privilege and an experience which is meaningful not only to my son and to me, but to my community. In this short visit of hers, for the first time mother saw me as that which I had always wished to be, an American woman at the head of an American home. But our home is a home which, try as I may, we cannot make home to mother. She has seen come to realization those things which she helped me to attain, and she cannot share, nor even understand, them.

But there is one thing we have in common, mother and I. We have this woman that I am, this woman mother has helped me to become. And I shall always remember that, though my life is now part of my land’s, yet, if I am truly part of America, it was mother, she who does not understand America, who made me so. I wonder if, as the American mother I strive to be, I can find a finer example than my own mother!

There are many men and women who have gone, as I have, far from that place where we started. When I think of them lecturing on the platform, teaching in schools and colleges, prescribing in offices, pleading before the bar of law, I shall never be able to see them standing alone. I shall always see, behind them, two shadowy figures who will stand with questioning, puzzled eyes, eyes in which there will be love, but no understanding, and always an infinite loneliness.

For those men and women who are physicians and lawyers and teachers and writers, they are young, and they belong to America. And they who recede into the shadow, they are old, and they do not understand America. But they have made their contribution to America—their sons and their daughters.

[167]

THE SOUL OF AMERICA[11]

III

IV

[170]

VII

[172]

WE MUST BE TRUE

[173]

[174]

AN IMMIGRANT AND HIS FATHER

I remember sitting with the family and the neighbors’ families about the fireplace, while father, night after night, told us stories of the Knights of the Crusades or recounted the glories of the heroes of proud Italy.

How he could tell a story! His voice was strong and soft and soothing, and he had just sufficient power of exaggeration to increase the attractiveness of the tale. We could see the soldiers he told us about pass before us in all their struggles and sorrows and triumphs. Back and forth he marched them into Asia Minor, across Sicily, and into the castles of France, Germany and England. We listened eagerly and came back each night ready to be thrilled and inspired again by the spirit of the good and the great.

Then came the journey over the sea, and the family with the neighbors’ families were part of the life of New York. We were Little Italy.

I was eleven before I went to a city school. All the English I knew had been learned in the street. I knew Italian. From the time I was seven I had written letters for the neighbors. Especially the women folk took me off to a corner and asked me to write letters to their friends in Italy. As they told me the story, I wrote it down. I thus learned the beat of plain folks’ hearts.

My uncle from whom I had learned Italian went back to Italy, and I was left without a teacher; so one day I attached myself to a playmate and went to school,—an “American” school. I gave my name and my age, and was told to sit in a long row of benches with some sixty other children. The teacher stood at the blackboard and wrote “March 5, 1887.” We all read it after her, chanting the singsong with the teacher. Each morning we did the same thing; that is, repeated lessons after the teacher. That first day and the second day were alike, and so were the years that followed. “If one yard of goods cost three cents, how much will twenty-five[175] yards cost?” If one yard costs three cents, then twenty-five yards will cost twenty-five times three cents, or seventy-five cents. The explanation could not vary, or it might not be true or logical.

But there was one thing that was impressed more strongly than this routine. I had always been a sickly, thin, pale-faced child. I did not like to sit still. I wanted to play, to talk, to move about. But if I did any of these things, I was kept after school as a punishment. This would not do. I had to get out of the room, and frequently I endured agonies because the teacher would not permit me to leave the room whenever I wanted to. Many times I went home sick and lay abed.

Soon I discovered that the boys who sat quietly, looked straight ahead and folded their arms behind their backs, and even refused to talk to their neighbors, were allowed the special privilege of leaving the room for one minute, not longer. So I sat still, very still, for hours and hours, so that I might have the one minute. Throughout my whole school life this picture remains uppermost. I sat still, repeated words, and then obtained my minute allowance.

For ten years I did this, and because I learned words I was able to go from the first year of school through the last year of college. My illness and the school discipline had helped after all. They had made my school life shorter by several years than it otherwise might have been.

The colony life of the city’s immigrants is an attempt to continue the village traditions of the mother country. In our neighborhood there were hundreds of families that had come from the same part of Italy. On summer nights they gathered in groups on the sidewalks, the stoops, the courtyards, and talked and sang and dreamed. In winter the men and boys built Roman arches out of the snow.

But gradually the families grew in size. The neighborhood became congested. A few families moved away. Ours was one of them. We began to be a part of the new mass instead of the old. The city with its tremendous machinery, its many demands, its constant calling, calling, began to take[176] hold. What had been intimate, quaint, beautiful, ceased to appeal.

I went to school, father went to work, mother looked after the house. When evening came, instead of sitting about the fire, talking and reliving the day, we sat, each in his own corner. One nursed his tired bones, another prepared his lessons for the morrow. The demands of the school devoured me; the work world exhausted my father. The long evenings of close contact with my home people were becoming rare. I was slipping away from my home; home was slipping away from me.

Yet my father knew what he was about. While the fathers of most of the boys about me were putting their money into business or into their houses, mine put his strength, his love, his money, his comforts into making me better than himself. The spirit of the crusaders should live again in his son. He wanted me to become a priest: I wanted to become a doctor.

During all the years that he worked for me, I worked for myself. While his hopes were centred in the family, mine were extending beyond it. I worked late into the nights, living a life of which my father was not a part. This living by myself tended to make me forget, indeed to undervalue, the worth of my people. I was ashamed sometimes because my folk did not look or talk like Americans.

When most depressed by the feeling of living crudely and poorly, I would go out to see my father at work. I would see him high up on a scaffold a hundred feet in the air, and my head would get dizzy and my heart would rise to my throat. Then I would think of him once more as the poet story-teller with the strong, soothing voice and the far-off visioned eye, and would see why on two-dollar-a-day wages he sent me to college.

Proud of his strength, I would strengthen my moral fibre and respond to his dream. Yet not as he dreamed; for when he fell fifty feet down a ladder and was ill for a whole year, I went to work at teaching.

[177]

AN IMMIGRANT AND THE CHILDREN

The schools will change for the better when their life is made basically different from what it has been.

They are pointed in the direction of the fundamentals of knowledge, but working with the tools of the classicists. They have developed and developed until we find life on one side,—that is, outside the school,—and learning on the other side,—that is, inside the school. Now the schools must be pointed so that life and the school become one.

To begin with, better school conditions must be provided for the youngest children. The first steps in child teaching must be sound. The primary years of school must be worth while. Unless the basic structure is real, soul satisfying, higher education will be halting and futile. The child is entitled to a fine start in his life’s journey if he is to have a fair chance of carrying his head high and his shoulders straight.

He comes to school a distinct personality. He is joyous, spontaneous, natural, free. But from the first day, instead of watching, encouraging that personality, the school begins to suppress it and keeps up the process year in and year out. By and by we begin to search for the individuality that has been submerged. We make tempting offers to the student in the high school and in the college—we give him better teachers, better equipment, greater freedom, more leisure, smaller classes, direct experiences. We call upon him to stand out, to face the problems of life honestly, squarely,—to be himself. How blind we are! First we kill, and then we weep for that which we have slain.

We do not look upon the children as an important economic factor. Children are a problem to the parent and teacher, but not to the race.

Do you raise pigs? The government is almost tearful in its solicitude for their health and welfare. The Agricultural Bureau sends you scientific data gathered at great pains and expense. But do you raise children? Ah! They are very[178] expensive. And there are so many of them! One teacher to fifty is the best we can do for you. Teachers who are specialists in their profession? Oh, now really! You know we could never afford that. We must pay for high-priced teachers for the high schools and upper grades, but for the little children—all you want is a pleasant personality that is able to teach the rudiments of learning. There’s not much to do in those grades—just the rudiments, you know. There’s no disciplining to do there, the children are so easily suppressed. It’s only in the upper grades we have the trouble!

Stupid and topsy-turvy!

We need the scientist, the child specialist, the artist, in the first year of school. We need few children to a teacher and plenty of space to move about in.

It’s there the teacher should eagerly, anxiously, reverently, watch for the little spark of genius, of soul, of individuality, and so breathe the breath of life upon it that it can never again be crushed or repressed.

We must spend more money on elementary education if the money we now spend on higher education is to bring forth results that are commensurate with our national needs. We spend fifty dollars a year on the education of a child and ten times that amount on the education of a young college man....

Do we really believe in children? Can we say with the Roman mother, “These are my jewels”? How long ago is it that the state legislature passed a bill enabling the canneries to employ children and women twelve hours a day? Fifty children to a teacher, adulterated foods, military discipline, are not beliefs in children. Enslaving mothers is not a belief in children.

Our belief in children, like our belief in many other good things, is mainly a word belief. What we need is a practical belief. We are still at the stage where we separate work and thought, action and theory, practice and ethics. If we would be saved, we must follow the child’s way of life. His way is the direct way. He learns from contact with the forces about him. He feels them, he sees them, he knows what they[179] do to him. He thinks and does and discovers all in one continuous flow of energy.

The child says: “I am of things as they are. I am the fighter for the things that ought to be. I was the beginning of human progress, and I am the progress of the world. I drive the world on. I invent, I achieve, I reform. About me is always the glory of mounting. I have no fear of falling, of slipping down, down. I have no fear of being lost. I am truth. I am reality, and always I question chaos.”

When the child begins to question the wisdom of the group, its religion, its literature, its dress, its tastes, its method of government, its standard of judgment, that moment the group should begin to take heed. It should take the child’s questioning seriously. When the group fails to do this, it gives up its existence, it ceases to grow because it looks back, it worships tradition, it makes history in terms of the past rather than in terms of the future.

Belief in evolution is a belief in the child.

What the race needs is a principle of growth, spiritual growth, that can never be denied. Such a principle it will find in the child, because the spirit of the child is the one factor of the group existence that in itself keeps changing, growing. The child is nature’s newest experiment in her search for a better type, and the race will be strong as it determines that the experiment shall be successful.

We develop national characteristics in accord with our adherence to a common ideal. We must therefore surrender ourselves for the common good, and the common good to which we should surrender is epitomized in the child idea.

I feel that the attitude towards the school and the child is the ultimate attitude by which America is to be judged. Indeed, the distinctive contribution America is to make to the world’s progress is not political, economical, religious, but educational, the child our national strength, the school as the medium through which the adult is to be remade.

What an ideal for the American people!

When my father came to America, he thought of America only as a temporary home. He learned little or no English.[180] As the years went by he would say, “It is enough; my children know English.” Then more years rolled by. One day he came to me and asked me to help him get his citizenship papers. He and I began reading history together. Month after month we worked, laboring, translating, questioning, until the very day of his examination.

That day I hurried home from college to find a smiling, happy father. “Did you get them?” I asked.

“Yes, and the judge wanted to know how I knew the answers so well, and I told him my son who goes to college taught me, and the judge complimented me.”

I have been a part of many movements to Americanize the foreigner, but I see that the child is the only one who can carry the message of democracy if the message is to be carried at all. If the child fails to make the connection between the ideals of the school and the fundamental beliefs of the people, there is none other to do it. The children are the chain that must bind people together.

I have told about parents growing because they sought growth for their children. I saw them grow through the initiative of the school. These were tenement dwellers. Would this thing hold where the parents are well to do, and the streets are clean and music is of the best, and home ideals are of the highest and the social life of the neighborhood is intimate? Is it still necessary for the school to gather the parents about itself? Is it still necessary for the school to go out into the community and get the parents to consciously work as a group for the children’s interest, to consciously shape their philosophy of life in conformity with the dynamic philosophy that childhood represents?

More necessary! If not to save the children, it should be done to save the parents.

No matter who the people are, they need the school as a humanizing force, so that they may feel the common interest, revive their visions, see the fulfillment of their dreams in terms of their children, so that they may be made young once more. Americanize the foreigner, nay, through the child let us fulfill our destiny and Americanize America.

[182]

HOW I FOUND AMERICA

Times changed. The sweat-shop conditions that I had lived through had become a relic of the past. Wages had doubled, tripled, and went up higher and higher, and the working day became shorter and shorter. I began to earn enough to move my family uptown into a sunny, airy flat with electricity and telephone service. I even saved up enough to buy a phonograph and a piano.

My knotted nerves relaxed. At last I had become free from the worry for bread and rent, but I was not happy. A more restless discontent than ever before ate out my heart. Freedom from stomach needs only intensified the needs of my soul.

I ached and clamored for America. Higher wages and shorter hours of work, mere physical comfort, were not yet America. I had dreamed that America was a place where the heart could grow big with living. Though outwardly I had become prosperous, life still forced me into an existence of mere getting and getting.

Ach! how I longed for a friend, a real American friend, some one to whom I could express the thoughts and feelings that choked me! In the Bronx, the uptown ghetto, I felt myself farther away from the spirit of America than ever before. In the East Side the people had yet alive in their eyes the old, old dreams of America, the America that would release the age-old hunger to give; but in the prosperous Bronx good eating and good sleeping replaced the spiritual need for giving. The chase for dollars and diamonds deadened the dreams that had once brought them to America.

More and more the all-consuming need for a friend possessed me. In the street, in the cars, in the subways, I was always seeking, ceaselessly seeking for eyes, a face, the flash of a smile that would be light in my darkness.

I felt sometimes that I was only burning out my heart for a shadow, an echo, a wild dream, but I couldn’t help it.[183] Nothing was real to me but my hope of finding a friend. America was not America to me unless I could find an American that would make America real.

The hunger of my heart drove me to the night-school. Again my dream flamed. Again America beckoned. In the school there would be education, air, life for my cramped-in spirit. I would learn to think, to form the thoughts that surged formless in me. I would find the teacher that would make me articulate.

I joined the literature class. They were reading “The De Coverley Papers.” Filled with insatiate thirst, I drank in every line with the feeling that any moment I would get to the fountain-heart of revelation. Night after night I read with tireless devotion. But of what? The manners and customs of the eighteenth century, of people two hundred years dead.

One evening, after a month’s attendance, when the class had dwindled from fifty to four, and the teacher began scolding us who were present for those who were absent, my bitterness broke.

“Do you know why all the girls are dropping away from the class? It’s because they have too much sense than to waste themselves on ‘The De Coverley Papers.’ Us four girls are four fools. We could learn more in the streets. It’s dirty and wrong, but it’s life. What are ‘The De Coverley Papers?’ Dry dust fit for the ash-can.”

“Perhaps you had better tell the principal your ideas of the standard classics,” she scoffed, white with rage.

“All right,” I snapped, and hurried down to the principal’s office.

I swung open the door.

“I just want to tell you why I’m leaving. I—”

“Won’t you come in?” The principal rose and placed a chair for me near her desk. “Now tell me all.” She leaned forward with an inviting interest.

I looked up, and met the steady gaze of eyes shining with light. In a moment all my anger fled. “The De Coverley Papers” were forgotten. The warm friendliness of her face[184] held me like a familiar dream. I couldn’t speak. It was as if the sky suddenly opened in my heart.

“Do go on,” she said, and gave me a quick nod. “I want to hear.”

The repression of centuries rushed out of my heart. I told her everything—of the mud hut in Sukovoly where I was born, of the Czar’s pogroms, of the constant fear of the Cossack, of Gedalyah Mindel’s letter, of our hopes in coming to America, and my search for an American who would make America real.

“I am so glad you came to me,” she said. And after a pause, “You can help me.”

“Help you?” I cried. It was the first time that an American suggested that I could help her.

“Yes, indeed. I have always wanted to know more of that mysterious, vibrant life—the immigrant. You can help me know my girls. You have so much to give—”

“Give—that’s what I was hungering and thirsting all these years—to give out what’s in me. I was dying in the unused riches of my soul.”

“I know; I know just what you mean,” she said, putting her hand on mine.

My whole being seemed to change in the warmth of her comprehension. “I have a friend,” it sang itself in me. “I have a friend!”

“And you are a born American?” I asked. There was none of that sure, all-right look of the Americans about her.

“Yes, indeed. My mother, like so many mothers,”—and her eyebrows lifted humorously whimsical,—“claims we’re descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and that one of our lineal ancestors came over in the Mayflower.”

“For all your mother’s pride in the Pilgrim Fathers, you yourself are as plain from the heart as an immigrant.”

“Weren’t the Pilgrim Fathers immigrants two hundred years ago?”

She took from her desk a book and read to me.

Then she opened her arms to me, and breathlessly I felt myself drawn to her. Bonds seemed to burst. A suffusion[185] of light filled my being. Great choirings lifted me in space. I walked out unseeingly.

All the way home the words she read flamed before me: “We go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America that we create.”

So all those lonely years of seeking and praying were not in vain. How glad I was that I had not stopped at the husk, a good job, a good living! Through my inarticulate groping and reaching out I had found the soul, the spirit of America.