We follow him into a room which harbours some eight or ten young women marked for deportation. They are gaily attired and betray at a glance that they belong to the guild of the daughters of the street. They claim to have come to America for all sorts of purposes; but they were caught with the men who imported them, members of a firm whose business it is to supply the New York market with human flesh. They know neither shame nor remorse; it is all crushed out of them, and they brazenly demand to know just when they may go into New York to begin their careers. America will be none the worse for their speedy departure.
We have seen “the lame, the halt and the blind” and one is apt to think that they represent the normal type of immigrants; while they are really but a small fraction of the mass which is strong, young, industrious and virtuous and which makes of the “man at the gate” an optimist. He does not share the feeling that the immigration of to-day is worse than that of the past; in fact he will say quite freely that it is growing better every day. He has his fears and forebodings; but he knows that the miracle of transformation wrought on us, can still be wrought on this mass which is just like us, in that it is like clay in the hands of the potter, which may be moulded just as millions of us have been moulded, into the likeness of a new humanity. The danger, he does not hesitate to say, lies less in the clay than in the potter.
The visit over, we take the little boat for the battery, crowding through a mass of men who look up to the guarded roof where their loved ones are detained. “Tate Tateleben” comes the painful cry of the little children, and one envies the man at the gate who on the morrow may answer these cries and give the children to their fathers and the wives to their husbands; who may unite those who have been divided by long years and a wide sea.... But what if he cannot answer the cry of the children?
The “man at the gate” need not be envied for the hard, daily task which awaits him; the task of opening or shutting the gates, of saying: “This one shall be taken, and the other shall be left.”
Clear and vivid before his eyes constantly stands the law, commanding him, on his allegiance, to refuse admission, not merely to those physically or morally tainted in such degree as to endanger the nation’s life, but to those “persons likely to become a public charge.” He is not responsible for the law. He is responsible for its execution, even though his decisions sometimes are not less hard for himself than for those who find the gates shut against them.
It requires a buoyant spirit, a steady hand, a tender heart, and a resolute mind. He must be both just and kind, show no preferences and no prejudices, guard the interests of his country and yet be humane to the stranger. To be able to say of “the man at the gate” that he accomplishes this in a very large measure is not scant praise; and if here and there his judgment is questioned, it simply proves that he is as human as his critics.
VII
THE GERMAN IN AMERICA
THE past had its apprehensions about its various problems no less than the present has, and our forefathers looked upon the non-English speaking immigrants much as we look upon them to-day. No doubt they spoke of them as an undesirable class.
Many of us remember when the German and the Scandinavian immigrants who came, received no heartier welcome than we now give the Slav, the Italian and the Jew.