“Do not foreign governments dump their rubbish of criminals and paupers upon our shores?”
“Is the Constitution of the United States safe in the hands of people who crucified Jesus?”
“Did not our forefathers come to fight for liberty, and do not these people come to despoil us?”
The questions asked displayed such animosity and such ignorance, that to print them all would seem like slandering our Western colleges and the churches in which these young men were reared.
The churches and the Y. M. C. A.’s have no small task in converting their membership to some Christian view-point of these, their neighbours; even if they cannot be converted to a spirit of brotherliness.
The following instance, while not typical, shows the attitude of Y. M. C. A. memberships in many industrial communities, towards the immigrant. An Association in Pennsylvania wished to enlarge its building and solicited funds in the shops of its own community. Slav and Hungarian day labourers subscribed $2,000, every cent of which was paid; which cannot be said of all the money subscribed by Americans.
Some of these foreigners were anxious to learn English, and one of the rooms in the building—not the best—was opened to them and a teacher procured. When one of these boys used some of the public conveniences in the building, the American membership notified the secretary that the “Hunkies” must not be admitted to the building; and they were not, in spite of the fact that they had helped pay for its erection.
While no other such gross injustice has come to my knowledge, I know of many Y. M. C. A.’s in which an Armenian or Greek would be excluded from such a thoroughly religious privilege as taking a bath.
Wherever a church or Y. M. C. A. has shown itself hospitable to the strangers it has had as many of their souls to keep as it has cared to have; but most of them prefer to save the foreigner by “absent treatment.”
The feeling of the strangers regarding the efforts which the churches are making on their behalf in so-called missions, which are often repellently unclean and devoid of any saving grace, is explained in the following letter, written by a graduate of Oberlin Seminary, a young Pole, whose spirit and intelligence the letter itself reveals.