They Who Knock at Our Gates

ee in all thy gates . . . and they sha

. xv

convictions. Logic makes fewer converts in a year than a taking phrase makes in a week. For catchwords are the popula

hose whose view of the universe is obstructed by the kitchen-middens of too many dinners. There is no clear thinking on an empty stomach, and equally muddled are the thoughts of the over-

rable body of doctrine, in support of which they quote statistics and special studies and scientific investigations. But I notice that the rank and file of restrictionists do not know as much as the titles of these documents. They have not followed the argument at all; they have only caught the catchwords of restrictionism. And the

that I am bound to challenge its veracity. Does not every generation cry that the weather isn't what it used to be, children are not what the

good old times shall be taken as a standard? Woman's wisdom urges me to go right back to the original pattern, just as I would do if I went to the shops to match samples. And the origin

a thousand times yes. Of the 8,213,000 foreigners landed between the years 1899 and 1909, 990,000 were of that race which for nineteen centuries has sacrificed its flesh in the service of the spirit.

errible than the recurrent pogrom, which hacks and burns and tortures a few hundreds now and then, is the continuous bloodless martyrdom of the six million Jews in Russia through the operation of the anti-Semitic laws of that country. Thirty minutes spent in lo

s he has been put to the test of civic opportunity, notably in America; with the result that he was found to possess a fair share of the civic virtues, from the generosity displayed in the town meeting, when citizens vote away their substance to support a public cause, to the

sh and eighty-five parts Gentile. When I visited my native town in the Pale, several years after the revolution, it was hard to find, among the young men and women I talked with, one in a dozen who had not shared in the dangers of 1905. If we really want to know how heartily the Jews played their part in the revolution, we need only ask the Russi

n, then many of the Russian refugees of to-day are a little ahead of the Mayflower troop, because they have in

as a path-finding adventure, with no compass but faith, no chart but philosophical invention. On the other hand, it is plain that the Russian revolutionists moved against greater odds than the American colonists had to face. The Russians had to plot in secret, assemble in the dark, and strike with bare fists; all this under the very nose of the Czar, with the benighted condition o

or the leaders dangled a rope, no doubt. But confiscation is not so bitter as Siberian exile, and a halter is less painful than the barbed whip of the Cossacks. The Minutemen at Concord Bridge def

go down with the stream of history, that the Jewish participants in the Russian revolution of 1905 were actuated by the highest patriotism, their peculiar grievances being forgotten in the grievances of the nation as a whole. The sinking of the Jewish question in the national question was an importa

and half across the civilized era, shall we not look for similar prodigies from the more recent graves of Kosciuszko and Garibaldi? If the hook-nosed tailor can turn hero on occasion, why not the grinning organ-grinder, and the surly miner, and the husky lumber-jack? We experienced a shock of surprise, a little whil

quite proper for street urchins to invent nicknames for everybody-that is what street urchins are for; but let us not hand down the judgment of the gutter where the judgment of the senate is called for. Between Leon

ealistic capacity of the aliens. Next after liberty, the Puritans loved education; and to-day, if you examine the registers of the schools and colleges they founded, you will find the names of recent immigrants thickly sprinkled from A to Z, and topping the honor ranks nine times out of ten. All readers of newspapers know the bare facts,-each commencement season, the prize-winners are announced in

their immigrant neighbors. In the experience of the librarians it is the veriest commonplace that the classics have the greatest circulation in the immigrant quarters of the city; and the most touching proof of reverence for learning often comes from the illiterate among the aliens. On the East Sid

dotes about their immigrant neighbors, and there is apt to develop an epidemic of moist eyes. Out of the fullness of their knowledge these social missionaries pay the tribute of

they were left in the care of some responsible person in the neighborhood. After the recent flood,(4) when the panic was over and the people began to dig for their belongings underneath the accumulated slime and wreckage, the librarian tried to collect at the central library whatever was recovered of the scattere

ish a book are passing along the torch kindled by him who wrote it. They pay the highest tribute to an inventor who show the most eagerness to adopt his invention. The great New England invention of compulsory education is more eagerly appropriated by the majority of our immigrants than by native Americans of the corresponding level. That is wh

re the crowd gets out, and buy a ticket for the baseball game. If he can keep cool enough for a little study, let him compare the distorted faces in the bleachers with the shining fac

d game of baseball to an epitome of all that is best in the lives of the best Americans. At the same time we need to remember that the love of art is more generally accepted as a mark of grace than the love of sport. Thus, when we speak of the glory of old Athens we have in mind not the Olympian games, noble as they were, but the poets a

earch we announce the discovery that the prizefighters seem to be near cousins of certain Americans of turbulent notoriety in politics, themselves derived from one of the approved immigrant stocks of the "old" dispensation; while the singer and painter and writer folk very often hail from

r capital in it. The brunt of the business falls on the divers, however. Have we divers willing to go down into our human sea and risk an encounter with sharks and grope in the ooze at the bottom? We have our school teachers and librarians and social missionaries,

do the aliens show of the specific traits of manhood that go to the making of good citizens? Immersed in the tide of American life, do their spiritual secretions give off that fine lustre of manhood that distinguished the noble Pilgrims of the first immigration? The genius o

reets. But the Pilgrims were not always engaged in signing momentous compacts or in effecting a historic landing. In a secondary capacity they were imm

lled them, and set out to make their own conditions in a strange and untried world, at great hazard to life and limb and fortune; that they asked no favors of God, but paid in advance for His miracl

ss the world in search of more acceptable conditions, facing exile and uncertainty and the terrors of the untried. He also pays as he goes along, and in very much the same coin as did the Pilgrims; awaiting God's miracle of human happiness in the grisly darkness of the mine, in the fierce glare of t

f his landing is not threatened by savages in ambush, he has to run the gauntlet of exacting laws that serve not his immediate interests. The early New England farmer used to carry his rifle with him in the fields, to be ready for prowling Indians, and the gutter-merchant of New York to-day is obliged to carry about the whole armory of his wits, to avert the t

romantic setting of modern enterprises leads us to underestimate the moral qualities that make success possible to-day. Undoubtedly the pioneer with an axe over his shoulder is a more picturesque figure than the clerk with a pencil behind his ear, but we who have stood up against t

fore the axe, but before the diligence of the men who wielded the axe; and diligence it is which to-day transmutes the city's refuse into a loaf for the ragpicker's children. Resourcefulness-the ability to adjust the means to the end-en

savage, we need citizens with the endowment of the twentieth century, and citizens with the pioneer endowment. The "new" immigration, however interpreted, consists in the main of these two types. Whether we get these elements in the

that the history of the average immigrant family of the "new" period is represented by an ascending curve. The descending curves are furnished by degenerate families of what was once prime American stock. I want no better proof of these facts than I find in the respective vocabularies of the missionary in the slums of New York and th

r long ago. Some of the best blood of New England answered to the call of "Westward ho!" when the empty lands beyond the Alleghanies gaped for population, while on the spent farms of the Puritan settlements too many sons awaited the division of the father's property. Of those who were left behind, many, of course, were detained by habit and sentiment, lo

sentiment. Voluntary emigration always calls for the highest combination of the physical and moral virtues. The law of analogy, therefore, might suffice to teach us that with every shipload of immigrants we get a fresh in

LOW WAGES FOR

itive patience that are at the bottom of our civilization. In California they gather the harvest, in Arizona they dig irrigation ditches, in Oregon they fell forests, in West Virginia they tunnel coal, in Massachusetts they plant th

arried stone and in axle grease applied at the right time. A Harriman might sit till doomsday gibbering at the telephone and the stock exchange would take no notice of him if a band of nameless "Dagos" a thousand miles away failed to repair a te

n imaginative schoolboy left to himself must presently catch the resemblance between the pick-and-shovel men toiling at our aqueducts and the heroes of the axe and rifle extolled in his textbooks as the "sturdy pioneers." Considered without prejudice, the chief difference between these two types is the difference between jean overalls and fringed buckskins. Contemporaneousness takes the romance out of

een the failures drop all around me. But no bold army ever marched to the field of action without a fringe of camp-followers on its flanks. The moral vortex created by the enterprises of the resolute sucks in a certain number of the weak-hearted; and this is especially true in mass movements,

f a family are seldom of the same moral fibre. No doubt the austere ambitions of the voyagers of the Mayflower made them stern recruiting maste

look upon them all as men of grand conceptions and superhuman foresigh

would agree with me that the Pilgrims were a picked troop in the sense that there was an immense preponderance of virtue among th

also out of their own mouths, as future generations will be sure to judge them. And in seeking this testimony let us remember that humanity in general does not produce one oracle in a decade. Very few men know their own hearts, or can give an account of the impulses that drive them in a particu

feeling of the inarticulate mob that welters in the foreign quarters of our cities. I am never so clear as to the basis of my faith in America as when I have been talking with the ungroomed mothers of the East Side. A widow down on Division Street was complaining bitterly of the hardships of her lot, alone in an a

ding to one of the great American principles,-the principle of equality of opportunity,-and she valued it more than the necessaries of animal life. Even so wa

D MOTHER OF

t doles out to the favored few. "But what good was it to me?" he asked. "My property was not my own if the police wanted to take it away. I could spend thousands to push my boy through the Gymnasium, and he might get a little education as a favor, and still nothing out of it, if he isn't allowed to be anything. Here I work like a slave, and my wife she works like a slave, too,-in the old country she had servants in the house,-but wh

r a crust of the bread of the intellect freely given him as his right than the whole loaf grudgingly handed

freedom more keenly relished than it is to-day, by the very people of whom it is said that they covet only the golden platter on which it is served up. We may not say that immigration to our country has ceased to be a quest of the idea

n appropriation to spend has little time to listen to Joseph. A digest of its report is expected

terms on the merits and demerits of the immigrant, as they conceive them, after studying the voluminous report. That is, the question is still what it was before: a matter of personal opinion! The man with the vote realizes that he has to make up his mind what instruct

emocratic institutions. Now let any one compile a biographical dictionary of our self-made men, from the romantic age of our history down to the prosaic year 1914, and see how the smell of the steerage pervades the volume! There is a sign that the practic

hen they have balanced the one against the other, leaving out of account entirely the great mass that lies between the two extremes. And even of the two extremes, it is the horrible example that is more frequently brought to the attention of the public. Half a dozen Italians draw knives in a brawl on a given evening, and the morning newspapers are full of the story. On the same evening hundreds of Italians were studying civics in the night schools, inquiring for classics at the public library, rehearsing for a historical pageant at th

ould not be guilty of such errors of judgment. But who reads annual reports? The very name of them is forbidding! It b

ow bombs or live by gambling is about as fair as it would be for the world to call us Americans a nation of dissolute millionaires a

extremely undesirable. Look at the Black

nces found his opportunity in our laws and customs, which enable the common man to make the most of himself. The blackmailer's opportunity was provided by the operation of corrupt politics, which removes police commissioners and impeaches governors for trying to enforce the law. The Rosenthal case brought forth Lieutenant Becker, and an investigation of the spre

methods of municipal house-cleaning. You might dump the whole of the East Side into the German capital and there would be no slums there, because the municipal authorities of Berlin know how to enforce building regulations, how to plant trees, and how to clean the streets. The very existence of the slum is la

s not a by-product of the steerage. It is a sore on the social body in many civilized countries, due to internal disorders of the eco

employment, strikes, riots, etc. England has no such immigration as the United States, and yet Englishmen suffer from non-employment, from riots and bitter strikes. Whom does the English workingma

ity when a systematic attempt is made to help him find his place in the country. There is the experience of the Industrial Removal Office of the Baron de Hirsch Foundation as a hint of what the Government might accomplish if it took a hand in the intelligent distribution of immigration. The records of this organizatio

s nothing for their lives; an indictment also of the Government that allows such shameful exploitation of the laborers to go on. That a labor camp does not have to be a plague spot has been gloriously demonstrated by Goethals at Panama. What Goethals did was to emphasize the man in workingman, with the result that Panama during the vast operations of diggin

camp must never again be mentioned as a reproach to the immigrant who suffers degradation in it, or the worl

ers from State to State and is accompanied by serious material hindrances; while the community is so indifferent to the civic progress of its alien members that it is possible for a foreigner to live in this country for sixteen years, coming in contact with all classes of Americans, without getting the bare information that he may become a citizen of the United States if he wa

nsible citizens will talk and talk about the immigrant selling his vote, and not know whom they are accusing. Votes cannot be sold unless there is a market for them. Who cr

nning, bear twofold witness against us who accuse them. The foreman who disposes of their solid vote acquires his power under an economic system which delivers them up, body and soul, to the man who pays them wages, and turns it to account under a political system which ma

e election returns of the Eighth District, which has the largest foreign population of all, show that "politically it is one of the most uncertain sections" in the city. Many generations of campaign managers have discovered to their sorrow that the usual party blandishments are wasted on the East Side masses. Hester Street follows leaders and causes rather than party emblems. Nowhere is the art of splitt

ossess! A little more time spent in weeding our own garden will relieve u

ace that God tries to make beautiful for us? It is true that the East Side crowds litter the parks with papers and fruit-skins and peanut shells, but they would not be able to do so if the par

initials on trees and monuments, who chip off bits from historic tombstones, who profane the holy echoes of the mountains by calling foolish phrases through a megaphone? The officers of the Scenic and Historic Preservation Society are not watching Ellis Island. On the contrary, it was the son of an immigrant whose ex

l the world is scolding us for our children's rude deportment. Finer manners are grown on a tiny farm in Italy than in the roaring subways of New York; and contrast our lunch-counter manners with the table-manne

m what we suppose. At any rate, we ourselves admit that the children of foreigners, before

country's wealth are not the foreign laborers, but the capitalists who pay them wages. The laborer who returns home with his savings leaves us an equivalent in the product

mmigration, and we shall see very few of the class who do not come to stay. And even as it is, not all of those who return to Europe do so in order to spend their American fortune. Some go back to recover from ruin encountered at the hands of American land swindlers. Some go back to be buried beside their

s the movement for the abolition of child labor, and I will show you who it is that condemns able-bodied men to eat their hearts out in idleness; who brutalizes our mothers and tortures tender babies; who fills the morgues with the emaciated bodies of young girls, and the in

ity. If the foreigners are taking the bread out of the mouth of the Ameri

stem, we turn to the cotton mills, where forty thousand native American children between seven and sixteen

desirable and immigration undesirable. We sometimes have to deny ourselves to the most congenial friends who knock at our door. At this point, however, we are not trying to answer the question whether immigration is good for us. We are concerned only with the reput

ice be stilled, let not self-interest chew the cud of envy in full sight of the nation, and let no syllable of willful defamation mar the oracles of state. For those who are excluded when our bars are down are exiles from Eg