There is a story told by Sir Francis Doyle which illustrates, after the rude fashion of our forebears, the value of endurance as an element of education. Dr. Keate, the terrible head-master of Eton, encountered one winter morning a small boy crying miserably, and asked him what was the matter. The child replied that he was cold. “Cold!” roared Keate. “You must put up with cold, sir! You are not at a girls’ school.”
It is a horrid anecdote, and I am kind-hearted enough to wish that Dr. Keate, who was not without his genial moods, had taken the lad to some generous fire (presuming such a thing was to be found), and had warmed his frozen hands and feet. But it so chanced that in that little snivelling boy there lurked a spark of pride and a spark of fun, and both ignited at the rough touch of the master. He probably stopped crying, and he certainly remembered the sharp appeal to manhood. Fifteen years later he charged with the Third Dragoons at the strongly entrenched Sikhs (thirty thousand of the best fighting men of the Khalsa) on the curving banks of the Sutlej. When the word was given, he turned to his superior officer, a fellow Etonian who was scanning the stout walls and the belching guns. “As old Keate would say, this is no girls’ school,” he chuckled; and rode to his death on the battlefield of Sobraon, which gave Lahore to England.
Contemplating which incident, and many like it, we become aware that ease is not the only good in a world consecrated to the heroic business of living and of dying.
The Modest Immigrant
It is now nearly fifty years since Mr. Lowell wrote his famous essay, “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners”; an essay in which justifiable irritation prompted the telling of plain truths, and an irrepressible sense of humour made these truths amusing. It was well for Mr. Lowell that he was seldom too angry to laugh, and he knew, as only a man of the world can know, the saving grace of laughter. Therefore, though confessedly unable to understand why foreigners should be persuaded that “by doing this country the favour of coming to it, they have laid every native thereof under an obligation,” he was willing in certain light-minded moods to acquit himself honourably of the debt. When a genteel German mendicant presented a letter, “professedly written by a benevolent American clergyman,” and certifying that the bearer thereof had long “sofered with rheumatic paints in his limps,” Mr. Lowell rightly considered that a composition so rich in the naïveté common to all Teuton mendacities was worth the money asked. When a French traveller assured him, with delightful bon-homie, that Englishmen became Americanized so rapidly that “they even begin to talk through their noses, just like you do,” the only comment of our representative American was that he felt ravished by this testimony to the assimilating powers of democracy.
Nevertheless, it is well in these years of grace to reread Mr. Lowell’s essay, partly because of its sturdy and dignified Americanism, and partly because we can then compare his limited experiences with our own. We can also speculate pleasantly upon his frame of mind could he have lived to hear Mrs. Amadeus Grabau (Mary Antin) say, “Lowell would agree with me,”—the point of agreement being the relative virtues of the Pilgrim Fathers and the average immigrant of to-day. When the dead are quoted in this fashion and nothing happens, then we know that, despite the assurances of Sir Oliver Lodge, the seal of silence is unbroken. Were the proud souls who have left us, able and willing to return, it would not be to reveal the whereabouts of a lost penknife, but to give the lie to the words which are spoken in their name.
The condescension which Mr. Lowell observed and analyzed was in his day the shining quality of foreigners who visit our shores. Immigrants were then less aggressive and less profoundly self-conscious than they are now, and it is the immigrant who counts. It is his arrogance, not the misapprehension of the tourist, or the innocent pride of the lecturer, which constitutes a peril to our republic. We can all of us afford to smile with Mr. Lowell at the men and women who, while accepting our hospitality, “make no secret of regarding us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in return for their cackle.” That they should not hesitate to come without equipment, without experience, without even a fitness for their task, seems to us perfectly natural. Perhaps they have written books which none of us have read, or edited periodicals which none of us have seen. Perhaps they have known celebrities of whom few of us have heard. It does not matter in the least. From the days when Miss Rose Kingsley came to tell us the worth of French art (does not the ocean roll between New York and Paris?), to the days when Mrs. Pankhurst came to tell us the worth of womanhood (does not the ocean roll between Boston Common and Hyde Park?), we have listened patiently, and paid generously, and received scant courtesy for our pains. “I find it so strange,” said an Englishman to me three years ago, “to see my wife lecturing over the United States. It is a thing she would not dream of doing at home. In fact, nobody would go to hear her, you know.”
But lectures are transient things, forgiven as soon as forgotten. Even the books which are written about us make no painful bid for immortality. And though our visitors patronize us, they seldom fail to throw us a kind word now and then. Sometimes a sweet-tempered and very hurried traveller, like Mr. Arnold Bennett, is good enough to praise everything he thinks he has seen. Before August, 1914, it was not the habit of our guests to scold or threaten us. That privilege had hitherto been reserved for the alien, who, having done us the honour of accepting citizenship, wields his vote as a cudgel, bidding us beware the weapon we have amiably placed in his hands.
Signor Ferrero, an acute and friendly critic, pronounces Americans to be the mystics of the modern world, because they sacrifice their welfare to a sentiment; because they believe in the miracle of the melting-pot, which, like Medea’s magic cauldron, will turn the old and decrepit races of Europe into a young and vigorous people, new-born in soul and body. No other nation cherishes this illusion. An Englishman knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years, or in twenty-five years, become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making of another Frenchman. Our immigrants may be as good as we are. Sometimes we are told they are better, that we might “learn a lesson” from the least promising among them. But no one can deny that they are different; in many instances, radically and permanently different. And to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse is just as difficult as the reverse operation. Mr. Horace Kallen has put the case into a few clear conclusive words when he says, “Only men who are alike in origin and spirit, and not abstractly, can be truly equal, and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a national life.”
To look for “inward unanimity” among the seething mass of immigrants who have nothing more in common with one another than they have with us, is to tax credulity too far. The utmost we can hope is that their mutual antagonisms will neutralize their voting power, and keep our necks free from an alien yoke. Those of us who have lived more than half a century have seen strange fluctuations in the fortunes of the foreign-born. In 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge was finished, the Irishmen of New York made a formal protest against its being opened on Queen Victoria’s birthday, lest this chance occurrence should be misconstrued into a compliment to England. In 1915, a band in Saint Patrick’s parade was halted, and forbidden to play “Tipperary” before Cardinal Farley’s residence, lest these cheerful strains should be misconstrued into an insult to Germany. The Reverend Thomas Thornton, speaking to the Knights of Columbus, prophesied mournfully that the time was at hand when Catholic voters in the United States would be “reduced to the condition of tribute-paying aliens.” Men smiled when they heard this, reflecting that the Irish officeholder had not yet been consigned to oblivion; but the speaker had seen with a clear eye the marshalling of strange forces, destined to drive the first comer from authority. Some weeks later, the “Jewish Tribune” boasted that the angry protest voiced by Catholics against the sending of Signor Ernesto Nathan as commissioner to the San Francisco Fair had been “checked in its infancy” by the power of the Jewish press.