CHAPTER XVOUR ALLIES FROM ABROAD
TheEuropean “hordes” continue to pour in upon us, and the agitation over, and against, the “foreign devil” increases. We shall soon be “welcoming to our shores” upwards of a million strangers a year, all of them with no “capital”—except their muscles and the potentialities of their minds and hearts. If Washington and Jefferson could have looked forward to this time, they would have lifted jubilant prayers of thankfulness that their hopes that this land would become “the refuge of the poor and oppressed of all nations” were being superbly realized. But many of our statesmen view the tidal-wave incursions with anything but joy; and their woful cries find echo everywhere among those who do not take the trouble to put facts into proper perspective. Russian and Finn, Polack, Hun and Lithuanian, Sicilian and Greek andSyrian and Bohemian, on they come, streaming from the noisome steerages of great ocean liners, pouring through the gates of the immigration offices. They are obviously poor, obviously the descendants of generations of toilers. And with them are their wives and their children. Myriads of anxious, troubled faces, in which hope and fear alternately triumph in the struggle for expression. Indeed, a disquieting spectacle to those who cannot or will not look beneath surfaces at universal human nature with its powerful instincts for and resolves toward progress. But let us watch this incoming flood with American eyes. Let us see what the facts plead—the facts, as distinguished from prejudices.
What is our so-called foreign-population problem?
According to the latest census there were in the United States, of our 76,300,000 population, no less than 26,200,000 persons of foreign birth or parentage. Of these, ten and a half millions were born abroad, while 11,000,000 more were born in this country of parents who were foreign-born. Since 1880 and up to 1901 no less than 18,000,000 foreigners have come to us. That is to say, countingin arrivals and births since the taking of our latest census, and making due mortality allowance, we have to-day a population more than one-fourth of which was born abroad or is of foreign parentage.
The anti-immigration crusade based upon these figures insists that the foreigners come too fast for Americanism to digest and assimilate them, that they will undermine and destroy free institutions. Also, there is the cry that these recent comers are of peoples less desirable than those that used to send their millions to us. The newcomers are impossible in point of numbers, undesirable in point of quality.
As to numbers—Our first, and last previous, great flood of immigration was between 1840 and 1861. In those twenty years about 13,000,000 immigrants came. Our population in 1840 was 17,000,000. Thus, the immigration was about 80 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901, the immigration was about 18,000,000. Our population in 1880 was 50,000,000. Thus, the immigration was not much above 35 per cent. Clearly, the present “horde” is numerically not imposing or alarming in comparison with the foreign invasion of half acentury ago. Our country is still sparsely inhabited; one-third of its area is still absolutely undeveloped. If half a century ago, with the then comparatively limited and crude means of transforming the foreigner into the American, thirteen million foreigners did not “swamp” seventeen million Americans, how can the present lesser immigration seriously or permanently hinder the alert, democratically militant America of to-day?
Then, there is the matter of distribution. Let us take New York City by way of illustration. There the “congestion” of immigration is greater than anywhere else; and the advocates of exclusion always point to it as the crowning “awful example.” In the ’40s and ’50s that city grew almost altogether by immigration from abroad. Between 1840 and 1861 New York City increased from 312,000 to 814,000—502,000. The rate of growth, then, was just over 160 per cent. Between 1880 and 1901 the same territory increased in population from 1,200,000 to 2,050,000—850,000, and a large part of that increase was from the smaller cities, the towns and the rural districts of the United States. The ratio of increase was about 70 per cent., less than half what it was during thepreceding great immigration. Further, the charitable and corrective forces, official and unofficial, at work in New York are not much occupied with the immigrants who have come in the last twenty years. The crime, the abject poverty, the destitution are among the earlier immigrants and their descendants. The later immigration is not from peoples given to excess in drink—and drunkenness is the chief cause of the miseries of crime and pauperism.
Looking at the immigration problem thus numerically, we see that the pessimists and the panic-stricken are afflicted with the narrowness of geographic and historical vision which is responsible for so many jeremiads. The shriek that the nation, and especially its cities, are being “swamped” has no basis in mathematics.
“But the quality! The quality!” they cry. Well, what of the quality? Turn to the files of the publications in the middle of the last century; read what the “good Americans” then said and wrote and thought of the vast in-marching armies of “foreign devils,” whose grandchildren are a valuable part of our citizenship to-day. They were “the scum of Ireland and Germany.” They were“incapable of receiving American ideas.” They were “welcomed by the rich employers because their coming meant cheap labor.” And loudest in lamentation and fiercest in demand for bars and barriers were the people who had themselves just arrived!
But, that was a false alarm, say the anti-immigrationists; this is the real thing. Again a lamentable lack of historical perspective, a pitiful narrowness of human sympathy. The truth is that man, from whatever clime or nation, is first of all man, the materials of progress and civilization. If the present millions of newcomers are ignorant, so much the less will they have to unlearn. If they have been savagely oppressed, so much the more brightly will burn hatred of inequality and injustice, love of equality and justice. If they are poor—and poor they are—then, Heaven be praised! They will work hard; and hard work and a passionate eagerness to get on in the world, and the prospect of being able to rise by work instead of, as at home, toiling that others might reap all, will make them hasten to become the best possible Americans.
From poverty and experience of oppressioncomes the most militant Democracy. Let us not be afraid of this our brother-man. Let us not judge him by the superficial and unimportant differences between him and us. Let us welcome him. He needs us, but not more than we need him, and his familiarity with hard work, and his nature unspoiled by over-prosperity. Above all, we need his children. They will be American through and through. They will help us to outvote and to over-balance and to counteract the supercilious breed of falsely educated who have fallen away from the high and noble ideal of the equality and the brotherhood of man. These newcomers are the descendants of the peoples that built the splendid civilization of the past—the civilization around the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe. For centuries the immense energy and imagination of those peoples have been forcibly suppressed and repressed. But they are there, and in free America they will burst forth again. Indeed, they are already bursting forth.
We hear so much about the glories of the Civil War that we are apt to overlook its fearful cost. One item is important here:
In the Southern States, practically all the whitemales able to bear arms went to the war. In the Northern States the two and three-quarter millions who served were, on the average, under rather than over twenty years of age.
That is to say, to the war the South gave all its manhood; the North gave the fathers of its present native-born generation. So abounding is our vitality as a people that we cannot clearly see the full results of this fearful sacrifice. But let us remember that war kills only a few; it returns to peaceful pursuits the vast majority poisoned and weakened by all kinds of diseases.
What is the connection between these facts and immigration? Look at the South, which sent all its manhood to camp and march and battle; at the South, into which almost no immigration has gone to make good the enormous losses. The trouble with the South to-day is not the destruction or abolition of property, not the failure of natural resources, but the depletion, the decay, the destruction of so large a part of the splendid stock that made the South great in ante-bellum days. Despite its abounding natural resources, despite the valiant efforts it has made and is making, the South advances slowly and with difficulty. And while theNorth had to make no such complete sacrifice to war, still even there, in the few places to which foreign immigration has not penetrated, the effects of the impairment of the sources of the best manhood are plainly visible. Not infrequently you find a Northern town with all the natural opportunities to progress, yet with retrogression and decay eating it away. What’s the matter? The war; the Civil War. The best young men, the most vigorous, the most enterprising, the most ambitious, went to the war. Many of them came back; but they had left at the war their best—their health, their energy. And the present generation shows it, suffers for it.
It is indeed inspiring to see young men eager to die gloriously for their country. We also need young men eager tolivegloriously for their country. And war, the arch-enemy of progress, the great trickster of man through his finest instincts, how many of those who would have lived most gloriously for their country has it cost us!
Do we not owe to the “hordes” from Europe, to immigration, the good fortune that our nation has pushed on apparently almost unaffected in its manhood by the great calamity of ’61-’64? Is it unwarrantedto suggest that but for these inpourings of vigor and vitality, the losses in that frightful catastrophe might have all but cost us our national greatness, would certainly have set us back several generations?
As to the political effect of immigration: Among our cities the two most conspicuous examples of misgovernment are New York and Philadelphia. In each the dominant political machine is scandalously corrupt. But it is far more audacious, far more cynically and openly contemptuous of public opinion in Philadelphia than in New York. Philadelphia is an “American” city; New York is a “foreign” city. In Philadelphia the corruption seems almost hopeless; in New York the element to which every movement for betterment looks—not in vain—is the “foreign” element. The weakness of Tammany’s control over the masses of “German-Americans” and “Italian-Americans” and “Jewish Russian-Americans” is the chief reason why it does not feel easy and secure in the enjoyment of plunder. Cities where the “foreign vote” is preponderant may be corrupt; but so also are cities where the native American rules undisputed. Manifestly, the causes of political corruptionare deeper than immigration, are not aggravated by it. And since our most hopeful States politically are for the most part those into which immigration from abroad has been pouring in a vast and steady stream for fifteen years, is there not sufficient ground for the confident assertion that the newcomer with his untainted passion for Democracy and his new-born hope of rising in the world is one of our tremendous political assets?
As to the industrial effect. The overwhelming mass are farmers or unskilled laborers. But the wages of unskilled labor cannot be much depressed. In all ages and in all countries the unskilled laborer has got just about enough to keep him alive—never much more, often a little less. In America, as a whole, the condition of unskilled labor to-day is better than it ever has been. The fact that we have so much rough work to do in developing our vast raw resources makes America the best market for unskilled labor the world has ever seen; and it will be many generations before that rough work is completed, so inadequate is our supply of unskilled labor in proportion to the demand. In the trades the competition of the immigrant has not lowered wages. There again we have morework to do than there are workers.The forces that have operated unfavorably upon wages are notoriously not forces of competition among wage-earners, but forces tending to abolish competition among employers for the services of the skilled laborer.And in combating these forces, is the immigrant a help or a hindrance? Does his vote go for tyranny or for freedom?
The disposition of prosperity to look down on poverty, to drift out ofbrotherlysympathy with it, to misunderstand it, is as old as property rights. The disposition of the so-called educated to look down on the less educated, to mistake knowledge for intellect, absurdly to exaggerate the practical and even the æsthetic value of “polite learning,” to under-estimate the all-round importance of that real education which is got only in the school of rude experience—this supercilious disposition is as old as human vanity. It insinuates itself into the sanest characters; it makes fools and incompetents and snobs of many promising young men. And these two errors—the one, through prosperity; the other, through false education—are responsible for the failure of such a large section of our “elegantly articulate” to appreciate that we are to-day gettingfrom abroad the best in brain and in vitality that we have ever got.
What differentiates the immigrant from those he left behind him? Why, he had the enterprise, the courage to protest against the slavery in which militarism and despotism were enwrapping all. He left; he made the long and arduous journey into this remote and unknown land. He did not give up when conditions became too hard, did not sink into serfdom; he boldly made a hazard of new fortunes.
Away back in the centuries, Asia’s most vigorous fled from her into Europe—and Asia sank into the slough of despotism and Europe became great and strong, advancing in all the arts. Now-a-days—to-day no less than when Salem and Jamestown and New Amsterdam and New Orleans were founding—Europe is causing her best to fly to us. Her best, indeed! We must be American enough, democratic enough, to disregard the snob standards of our weak wanderers off after European caste and culture; we must look at men in the true American fashion—must look at men asmen.
From the common people our Democracy—like all Democracy—sprang; by the common people isit nourished; by the common people will it prevail. And these newcomers are of the common people, the custodians of the highest ideals that irradiate the human imagination. Unimportant indeed is the traffic of individuals and ideas that goes first-class between America and Europe, in the comparison with the traffic that goes steerage.