In Minneapolis you have no such strong convictions of righteousness and you have a Scandinavian population which men in authority say is unfit to exercise its citizenship. Our cities need to cultivate a twentieth century Puritanism—broad and deep, intense yet sympathetic, unyielding yet charitable; and they will find that the most ready imitators will be the foreigners; especially these Scandinavians who were our kinsmen before they came here and who are ready to be our brothers, and heirs of the same Kingdom.
In everything which makes a strong people and a great state they have taken an active and conscientious part. They are staunch supporters of the public schools; their children finally become teachers and in every academy and university of the northwest the Scandinavians are an important contingent, industrious and faithful as students, scholarly and loyal as professors. Their churches are well built, well supported, and more and more their pastors are taking their places as true leaders among the people. They are intensely interested in the larger mission of the gospel and in the evangelization of the world; they believe in missions, pray for missions, give to missions, and thus have a wide horizon. In the Northwest they are the greatest foes of the liquor traffic, and one can always count on many of them in an effort to enforce existing laws or frame new ones for its restriction or destruction. Neither they nor any nationality which has come to America is alike good or free from serious faults, but a man would have to be short-sighted indeed not to realize that they have brought to this country rich moral treasures which we have not sufficiently used or developed.
What a people we might be, if we would appropriate all that the Jew brings of spiritual vision and cut down his business ardour and craftiness by our own emphasis of the nobler gift; if we would receive the Slav’s virgin strength and plant upon it all that we of older civilization have learned to hold precious; if we would emulate the German’s thoughtfulness and thoroughness and not imitate and encourage him in the trade in lager beer and the use of it. What a nation we should be if we would take the Hungarian’s devotion to his native land and make it burn with just such a true fire upon the altar of this country; and finally, if we would mingle all the virtues that the nations bring us with the seriousness and loftiness of the Scandinavian’s mind and heart,—if we did this through one generation, in one city of our country we would bring the Kingdom of God down upon the earth.
Nor is this all a pious wish or simply a flow of rhetoric: we shall have to do that,—cultivate in one another the best gifts,—or we shall reap a harvest of the worst; for in the Scandinavian we can see how the very best may become like the worst simply through our own neglect. We must believe about one another only the best, for people, like bad boys, live up to their reputation.
This country ought to be no place for racial or national hatreds, and no people must be branded as this or that simply because of one superficial or even deep seated fault. How often I have heard from well meaning, respectable people: “You can’t trust the Scandinavians, they are immoral, they are treacherous;” when in fact they had no proof for their assertions, and simply sowed seeds of discord of which they must some day reap the harvest.
IX
THE JEW IN HIS OLD WORLD HOME
IT is said of a certain English scientist that he began a work on “Snakes in Ireland” by the sentence: “There are no snakes in Ireland”; and one could easily without seeming to be facetious begin this chapter by saying: “The Jew has no home.”
He is a man without a country, and without a king; he belongs to a nation which, scattered over the face of the earth has yet retained the chief elements of an ancient faith, although no centralized authority guards it. Inheriting the cultural influences of his past, he absorbs the culture of each race which harbours him for a season. Although driven in turn from each insecure habitation, he has not degenerated into a nomad, but begins the task of home and fortune making, wherever a more hospitable people affords a resting place for his weary feet.
In his ancient home in Palestine, in the very citadel of his faith,—Jerusalem, he is the greatest stranger, and people of alien beliefs have built their monuments on the sites of his grandest spiritual conquests, and over the tombs of his prophets and seers.
Weeping, he tears his garments and beats his head against a wall which is all that is left of the temple thrice rebuilt, thrice ruined, and now having upon its ancient foundations a mosque, with crescent crowned minaret, from whose height the Muezzin cries: “Allah ho Akbar,” a sound which vibrates against the ears of the Jew like the mocking of the prophets who seem to say: “I told you so.”