A song was popular about forty years ago, in which was couched an invitation to every nation to come along and make no delay, as “Uncle Sam is rich enough to give you all a farm.” At Castle Garden, since that invitation, respondent aliens to the number of over seven and a half million have “come along,” and Uncle Sam has redeemed the promise to all who applied. Yet, munificent as is this bounty, the State of New York bestows a more liberal hospitality, and a more beneficent care on the immigrant. During a discussion in a New York club lately of the question “What does this country owe to other nations?” a gentleman vehemently protested against the assumption couched in the question. “When a subject of another nation lands on our shores,” he said, “we meet him with food and raiment, find him occupation, and give him a farm. Talk about our owing other people anything! The obligation is all on the other side.”
The speaker did not half recite the obligation that the Empire State assumes on behalf of the stranger. It reaches out arms of protection to him, like a mother yearning across seas, almost from the time he sets sail. It meets the ship at the Lower Bay of New York, inspects its sanitary condition and that of the passenger; hears his complaints, and if he have any grievance, tries to remedy it. It receives him at Castle Garden, helps him to secure and check his baggage and buy a passage ticket to any point at lowest rates. It gives him his mail, if he have any waiting; telegraphs or writes the news of his arrival to his friends, if he have any in this country, and sends him and his baggage to them if his destination be in or near the city. It gives him food if he be hungry; medicine and nursing if he be ill; a Bible if he can read; sends him to an asylum, if he be non compos mentis, or back to Europe if he be a pauper. It changes his foreign coin into American on terms of equal value, and gives him a piece of paper with the whole transaction figured out so he can ponder over it and come back for explanations or corrections, if need be. It finds him a hotel, if he want one, the proprietor of which is under heavy bonds to kindly entreat the stranger and not overcharge him; it stands guard with big clubs to keep off biped wolves, and if, notwithstanding, in the exercise of his new-found liberty, he walk into pitfalls, it sends a detective or a policeman to secure him restitution. It finds him immediate occupation at prices that sound fabulous by the side of his old-time pittance; it furnishes interpreters, guides and guardians—in a word, exercises over him a wiser and more helpful paternalism of government than he has ever known. And all this paternal care it extends to him not only when he arrives; it stands ready to renew the guardianship at any time within a year thereafter if he return to Castle Garden and ask it. Most of this it does without charge to the immigrant; all of it is free if he have no money to pay withal. Not so much is done for any other visitor—not even for the titled and wealthy stranger. Nay, the opera singer or the champion pugilist receives less consideration. Really, the only “distinguished arrivals” in this country are the steerage passengers.
The State of New York stands guardian to the whole United States in this matter. Its little timely aid and provision of employment, its security extended to those destined inland, as well as the care it takes to prohibit entirely the landing of paupers and helpless ones, prevent many from becoming a public expense in other states.
Perhaps you are ready to give it credit, in all this, for Christian philanthropy. Not at all. It is enlightened self-interest on the part of the State. She is simply guarding the chief city of the country, which happens to be within her borders, from the peril and cost of unregulated immigration. And she takes care to make some one else pay all the bills, my friend. The expense of doing all this is chiefly met by a tax on the steamship lines, called “head-money;” a tax of two dollars a head, for all steerage passengers. And besides that she makes the steamship company, at its own expense, carry back to the old country any emigrant who has no money or friends in this. In collecting the head-money tax and in enforcing the restrictions against pauper immigration the State has indirectly the powerful aid of the United States government—a plain recognition of the fact that the whole duty properly belongs to the latter.
The regulation of immigration by states is one of the anomalies of our government. It is a relic of the early conflicts between the powers of state and nation. After the infant Yankee nation had outgrown its first constitution—that absurd, distrustful experiment of setting up a nation and denying it all governmental powers—the matter of imposing and collecting duties on imports of merchandise, etc., which had formed one of the chief bones of contention between states, was taken from state authority entirely, and given in charge of the general government. But at the same time the regulation of the more important human importations was left with the states, and to this day the general government assumes no control in the matter of what is strictly an international interest, and concerns the welfare of all the states. Thus it came about that the states in which are immigration ports acquired a large control over the character of the population, and hence over the prosperity of other states. That a business so much international and interstate in character should have been left to local governments is a curious illustration of the lack of foresight on the part of the founders of the constitution, as well as one of the many evidences that they were not at heart democratic enough to thoroughly believe in and understand the common people. Had they anticipated that the time would ever come when human cargoes should disbark upon our shores to the number of half a million in a year, of people unused to our institutions and uneducated in self-government, they doubtless would have devised a protective tariff which would have prevented an invasion so threatening, as they might think, to our peace and stability. It is often well that statesmen are not more prescient. Legislating for the future in the light of the present, they would most certainly go wrong, especially in legislating for a country of such rapidly changing conditions as have followed each other here. Those adopted citizens who raise the cry against the Chinese and demand protection against imported labor, may thank their stars that the same spirit did not seize the prophetic minds of the earlier law-makers of the country.
Castle Garden, on the Battery, gives on the loveliest and healthiest park of New York and the noblest harbor in the world. The main structure is old Castle Clinton, a large circular fort built early in the century for the protection of the city. Now it is converted to the uses of peace, to welcome invaders instead of repelling them, but still to protect the city, and the state and the nation. The open central space has been roofed over and converted into a great rotunda; while the embrasures and casemates designed for great cannon and magazines are used for baggage rooms and various apartments. This is better than hammering swords into plow-shares, this using forts to welcome ploughmen to our broad acres. Wooden excrescences around the wall provide offices, hospitals, insane asylums, labor bureaus, and various other departments. The rotunda and fort walls can accommodate 3,000 immigrants and their baggage—and do you know all that the words, immigrant’s baggage, implies?
On this little amphitheater of war is daily held a Congress of All Nations. If you want to see Europe, come to Castle Garden, not go abroad. There is nothing left over there but the houses and the superfluous nobility and wealthy. Men are Europe, and the manhood of Europe is being skimmed off for America’s use. A gentleman told me that when he traveled in Circassia he looked in vain through the mass of awe-inspiring female ugliness for the famous types of Circassian beauty. “Where are the beautiful women?” he asked. “In Constantinople, all,” was the answer. So, he said, it is with the manliness of Europe—it goes to America. Not the most cultured, intelligent and favored. It would be small merit in them to break away and come to America; that they do not proves that they are too contented, fat and selfish for our use. But a man who, being born and trained to a life of subjection and dependence; rooted to the spot on which generations of his fathers have lived and died; who hardly knows whether his native hills or city streets bound the world or not—when one of these tears up his roots and sets out three thousand miles in search of a chance to breathe and grow, be sure, be very sure there is a spark in him of something that is wanted in this country. There is the germ of an American citizen; the growth of it will appear in a few generations. It is this surviving, vital spark of character that enables this nation to assimilate so much crude human material and convert the so-called “offscourings of Europe” into elements of national prosperity and strength. What could we have done in forty years with seven and a half million foreign aristocrats and capitalists? What would have become of us if they had come to us! A few of them have come lately, and they are already trying to build here a landed aristocracy, and on stolen land at that. Men should be estimated by the abuses and disadvantages they have survived, as well as by what they are. The courage, independence and aspiration that outlive centuries of subjection in sufficient force to carry a man half around the world into terra incognita are the elements of empire.
A ship load of six or ten hundred does not make a very big caucus in this rotunda of the world’s congress, but it makes the scene picturesque, as to costumes, more so as to goods and chattels—the latter seeming to include women and children. All the family heir-looms, such as pots, pans, feather-beds and nondescript furniture came along. I can believe in all the dozen ship loads of “traps” that “came over in the ‘Mayflower,’” since seeing one load of later immigrants debouch. And they come, like a lot of wealthy bankrupts, with all their property on their wives’ backs. The loads on these biped beasts of burden make one think of the loads of hay on small donkeys in Spain, or those mountains packed on camels in the East. At the head of the family caravan marches the pater familias loaded down with a shot-gun, half a dozen canes, a long-tailed pipe or some queer fiddle-looking instrument. Well, he has never been able to stand upright and hold up his head in the presence of anybody but his wife. A man must rise superior to something. One of these years, mayhap, the order of superiority will be reversed, and some of the daughters of this flock be advocating, or at least thinking, women’s rights at Chautauqua. Housewives can tell you how soon some of the daughters of these subjugated women learn a goodly degree of independence. I anticipate this result more for the girls than the boys, because when the caravan files before the clerk’s desk for registration these “beasts of burden” are often the only ones self-possessed enough to give the names, ages and intentions of the family. Often the lord and master has forgotten the names, generally the ages of his children, and not infrequently he has to refer to his chattel for his own name and age. There is a scared look in all eyes. I don’t wonder, after such an uprooting and hegira, that they look dazed, and that some go clean daft—as they do.
One naturally looks here for the queer in dress, action or design, and there is plenty to gratify the curiosity. Far across are two men who look like Digger Indians in queer costumes—dirty red, long sacks and short laced leggings. They are squatty, swarthy, sluggish, and outwardly uncanny-looking. We go across the wide rotunda and find that each of these unpromising delegates has a Bible, and that one of them is writing the fly-leaf over with much small, neat chirography—a language which no one here can interpret. They are Russian Finns. Despise nothing you see here, my friend. You would look a trifle out of condition, and mayhap your “plug hat” would excite a smile after a steerage journey to Finland. I doubt if, arrived there, you would settle to as intelligent and philosophical an occupation as writing a commentary on the Bible.