We have departed from the careful intent of that government which originally abolished for us even the law of primogeniture, a clause adopted in the state constitutions nearly throughout the Union. Our general public is more absolutely ruled by a few than is the case in any portion of the earth. Offsetting this, we boast of our “prosperity”! Let those that like call this a national prosperity. It is national fate, but there may be those that do not care to call it by the name of prosperity. Times are good when all the people are busy. Most of the people in the South were busy before the war; we called that slavery. It was as nothing compared to the industrial slavery impending over the American people to-day. It was simple by comparison as a problem. Tremendous indeed is the problem this implies, and grave and serious indeed should he be who attempts to solve it. We need statesmen, not politicians, to-day. We need men willing to do their duty in office, without regard to the question of their re-election to office.
We have promised that our study of American transportation should bring us close to the heart of things in our national life. The promise may be made good in the review of the work of the iron trails in the Age of Transportation. It would be but raving to hold the captains of transportation alone responsible for the deplorable changes that are taking place in America and the American character; yet only an equal folly could deny that too little fearless statesmanship, combined with too much politics and too much ungoverned transportation, has been responsible for many of these changes. Any candid student of American transportation and of American politics will find himself irresistibly arriving at the great question of the unrestricted American immigration.
We Americans have claimed this continent for humanity. We say that America is not to be used by the Old World as colonization ground, or for the planting ground of Old World ideas of government; and yet, even as we speak these words, we vitiate doctrine even wider than the Monroe doctrine—the doctrine of common sense. We throw open the gates of America and invite the sodden hordes of worthless peasantry to flock hither and pillage this country, the choicest of the continent, without let or hindrance, without requiring of them the first standard of fitness for American citizenship; without asking of them even the slightest educational test as to their fitness to enter into and enjoy a part of the once splendid heritage of this American people. The only price we ask is a ticket and a vote.
Of a truth, there would be justice in saying that we would better watch not so much South America as Castle Garden. There is where much of the degradation and depression of American life is going on. There is where trades-unionism begins, and indeed must begin. There is where monopolies begin. There is where, indeed, we are being colonized by the European peoples. For those that come here to work, to study, to learn and to grow there may be room yet in this great America. For those that come here to exist as parasites there should be no longer any room. All this is to some extent the act of common carriers in search of commerce. Behind this search there often lies all too certainly the intent of importation of a passive and semi-servile class,[[65]] content to accept the hardest conditions of life, and content to accept life barren of all hope, of all chance for future betterment.
Such life is un-American. Every one of these foreigners comes here with a vote in his hand. We have long allowed the vote to pay for everything; and, seeing that he had a vote, the poor foreigner though turbulent and discontented, has perforce satisfied himself with an America not much better and not much different from Europe. Assuredly, the time will come, and perhaps presently, when there must be considered with all seriousness this question of a mis-chosen and wrongfully used factor in our commercial fabric. It is not the upper branches of our model system of commerce which are wrong, nor will pruning those upper branches set that wrong right. We must go to the root of things.
Surely we have gone forward far enough in our commercial growth to learn that our country is not exhaustless. Were it so we should not to-day be considering the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars to stretch the shrunken acreage of the once boundless West. Once we had enough for all, but now we no longer have enough for all. Once we could keep open house, but we can now no longer do so. There comes a time even in the question of open house when the doctrine of self preservation, greater than any Monroe doctrine, greater than any constitution, must have its place.
We, as well as Great Britain and other world powers, must eventually come to the doctrine of selfishness. Great Britain herself, a land not offering the inducements held out by America to the penniless settler, seriously contemplates the restriction of immigration along the severest lines. She fears becoming the great almshouse of Europe. Shall we in her stead become the great almshouse of the world? It is suggested by a foreign-born philanthropist, for instance, that America should forthwith throw open her doors to the five millions of persecuted Russian Jews. English authorities cheerfully believe that America could easily assimilate this great mass of new population. There are many American captains of politics and captains of transportation who would cheerfully agree in throwing this task of assimilation upon this country; but this attitude can not long remain indorsed by fearless men and thoughtful men unsodden in the mire of modern American politics, or unsmirched in the grime of headlong and heedless American commerce.
Under all this discussion and all these generalizations there lies, of course, the great, human, individual question. Back of all stands that great, pathetic figure, the man about whose neck fate has hung the destiny of a wife and children. Once there was room in America for that man. Once there was hope and a chance ultimately to be called his own. It is this man, this simple, common, plain American citizen who is to-day most vitally concerned. The man we have with us, the man of America, who has helped win and make America, is the one that ought to be protected by America, rather than the one that still has root in the Old World soil that bore him.
This is selfishness; but it is the only plan that offers hope to humanity in either world. The glory, the pride of America, the beauty and the flowering of her growth, have root in her splendid heritage, the heritage of a virile character born of a magnificent environment; but there exists no heritage which may not be dissipated, there lives no blood forever proof against continuous vitiation.
“The American people,” says the governor of a Western state, “will no more submit to commercial despotism than they would to governmental despotism, and the tendency in the one case can be, and will be, as easily thwarted as the tendency in the other.” Let us leave to an impartial and intelligent judgment of readers the question whether or not there exists or threatens to exist in America a commercial despotism; whether or not there exists any American people; whether or not we have, in the foregoing pages, found any causes for the changes and tendencies toward change that are to-day unmistakable phenomena—changes so rapid and elemental that any true American ought to be ashamed to say, “I belong without thought to this, that or the other political party.” Perhaps we shall be all the better fortified with premises if we delve a trifle deeper into the statistics of this question of foreign immigration; for any writer deals better in undeniable premises than in ready-made conclusions.