No apter illustration of how little we have tackled our job can be found than in American Socialism. There is no American Socialism. Orthodox socialism in America is dead doctrine, brought across by German and Russian revolutionaries, reacting on their peculiar environment, and then exhumed in a new country. Meanwhile a great vital movement toward democratic control goes on in Europe, in Trades Unionism, Coöperation and municipal and State ownership. Our socialist locals repeat formulæ which Shaw, the Webbs, Rowntree, Wallas, Kautsky, Vandervelde and Hervé outgrew a generation ago. It is here I hold that the old American stock can do a service in interpreting American conditions to our recent arrivals.
But if we continue to leave the door open we shall continue to be swamped, and we shall employ our little hasty ready-made devices for turning peasants with a thousand years of inherited characteristics into citizens. We shatter them against our environment, and then are astonished that their thwarted instincts, trained to another world, revenge themselves in political corruption, abnormal vices, and murderous "gunman" activities. Psychologists like Ross warn us in vain.
These overlapping hordes of "aliens" destroy the economic basis on which alone free institutions can be reared. People, to whom we cannot afford to pay a living wage, or for whom we do not care to arrange a living wage, will not help us in creating free institutions. Instead, they are manipulated by the industrial oligarchy into a force for breaking down the standard of living of all workers. A resolute restriction of immigration is not a discrimination against any race. It is the first step toward unlocking the capacities of the races already among us. The reason for stopping immigration, then, is economic. It rests in the fact that our wage-scale and standard of living are being shot to pieces by the newcomers. As the result our existent institutions are not developing in liberal directions, and we are failing to create new free institutions. It requires a somewhat stable population, and a fairly uniform economic basis to create a Coöperative movement, like that in Ireland, or a Trade Union movement, like that in Australia.
Slowly the new order is coming, the day of the Commonwealth of nationalities, where men from many lands, drawing their spiritual reserves from the home that nourished their line through the long generations, will yet render loyal citizenship to the new State which harbors them and gives them a good life. The task of America is to create that Commonwealth, that entity which men gladly serve, and for which at need they willingly die. Our politics have not yet held that appeal. Not yet can an American of these recent years stand off from the stream of his experience, saying, "What does it mean that I am an American?" and answer it in the high terms which a Frenchman can use. Fifty years ago the American could answer in fairly definite terms. But does our recent history mean much to Czech or Russian Jew or Calabrian who has settled among us? It does not. The stirring of their blood responds to another history than ours. Shall we take away their tradition from them? We cannot if we would. What we can do with their help is to create free institutions which will win them to a new allegiance, and this will slowly root itself in the fiber of their line.
For a few generations they will continue at time of stress to hear the call of their old home, as a bird in the autumn takes the call of the South. The Serb will return to his mountains when the battle-line is drawn, as he returned five years ago. The German will go back to his barracks when Russia begins to spread toward the West. And over those that do not go back a great restlessness will come, and they will torment themselves, like a caged bird in the month of flight. But with each generation the call will grow fainter, till finally the old tradition is subdued and the citizen is domesticated. In this way only can the new allegiance and instinctive sense of nationality be created, growing very gradually out of free institutions.
Out of free institutions in State, property, religion and marriage, ever-developing to fit a developing people; out of the unfolding process of law, escaping from legalism and applying psychology to human relationship; out of an education, sanctioned by human interest, and devoted not only to vocational training but to the sense of beauty and wonder; out of vast movements of the mass-people toward democratic control; there will some day grow the new American tradition, which in the fullness of time will take possession of the heart of these diverse races and clashing nationalities. It will not root itself and grow in the years of "naturalization," nor yet in one or two generations. But in a hundred or two hundred years it will coalesce infinitely repellant particles and gently conquer antagonisms, and in that day, which not even our children's children will see, there will at last emerge the American Commonwealth.
VI
THE REMEDY