“This,” I replied. “These people have lived for many hundreds of years, in chaos and confusion. Each in his little world, hemmed in by the pride of his race or the hate of other people. Each day the barriers grow taller and the hate grows stronger.
“I lived in it for a good many years, and it is an awfully little world one is locked into; yet it is as big and terrible as Hell. That being branded by the marks of your race, by the speech your ancestors have bequeathed you, by your blood or your religion, and isolated as if you were a leper, while your heart yearns for the larger fellowships—all that I have felt from my youth.”
“Haven’t you felt it in America, too?”
“Yes; but with a difference, a tremendous difference. There they may shut one from the social contact, but there remain the public schools, the libraries, the churches and settlements. And what schools you have in Hartford! I have been in schoolrooms there, in the first grade, where 90% of the children were of alien birth, and at a glance I knew their nationality.
“Italians, miniature old men and women, although scarcely seven years of age.
“Serious, little black-eyed Jews, with the burden of ages upon their bent backs.
“Polish boys and girls, with small foreheads, as if some tyrant had trampled upon their heads.
“Armenians, sad-looking, dark-skinned creatures, haunted by the remembrance of their village street, red from the blood of the slain.
“Syrian children, out of the very village in whose meadows the angels sang when Christ was born; but who have never known either peace or good will.
“I went to the second and third grades, and there it seemed as if the hand of a good angel had already passed over those marked and marred faces; I could almost hear the voice of the All-Father saying: