“Yes,” he said, “it is perfectly true; but you’d better save your strength. In this city, not only the foreigners, who are not citizens, vote; but the dead vote, long after they have become citizens of Kingdom Come.”
One of these same Poles recently took me through the Capitol of Pennsylvania at Harrisburg. With great pride he guided me from foundation to dome, pointing out those objects of interest which every stranger must see, as if they were the memorials of noble deeds of valour.
They consist of wood, painted to imitate marble, chandeliers of base metal, to be sold by the pound, at fabulous prices, and among many other spurious things, a safe, supposed to be fire-proof and burglar-proof, but which was not politician-proof, for an ordinary gimlet bored a hole into its corrupt heart.
What was distressing to me was not so much that the State paid millions for this veneered and varnished fraud, but that my Polish guide pronounced the word graft with evident relish and without fear or shame.
I do not doubt that the presence of the new immigrant is “a great strain upon our political institutions”; but not greater than the old immigrant was, and still is. This certainly is true of Pennsylvania; for there are counties in that state, into whose wilds the new immigrant has not yet penetrated, and where those who have been living off its fat acres since their birth—the sons of immigrants who came 200 years ago—hold their right of franchise cheap. I am told that in these counties nearly every vote can be bought for five dollars.
This may be idle rumour; but the fact remains and can be proved by any one who chooses to investigate, that Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Connelsville and a hundred other cities and towns, are better governed now than they were before Slav, Latin and Jew came to live in their Patches and Ghettos. This is true in spite of our having tried to corrupt these new citizens from the very hour when they received their political rights, and that when they had no rights, we treated them with neglect and scorn.
The mayor of Greensburg, Pa., a man of the newer and better type of administrators, whose territory is completely environed by the coke regions and has an almost totally foreign population—says:
“They make reliable citizens. They can be trusted absolutely. Their worst enemy is drink; but when a foreigner comes before me and is fined, if he has no money and I let him go home, he will come the next day to pay his fine even if he lives ten miles from town. Yet in spite of the fact that the ‘Hunkey’ and the ‘Dago’ have helped build up Greensburg, and have enriched its citizens, they are still held in contempt by the majority of its people.”
This same official told me that a few years ago when the Italians celebrated their Independence Day, the High School boys of that city threw decayed vegetables at them and their national flag.
Without the slightest reserve I can say this: Wherever an enlightened official, like this mayor, or teachers of the public schools, ministers of the Gospel and business men, have come in real contact with the new immigrant, their verdict was entirely different from that of Mr. Edwards and many of the professional writers upon the problem which the foreigner represents.