The map shows you all these things inexorably. It shows the shrinking of the American-born regions to-day to only a small spot on the tops of the Cumberlands in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and a corner of Alabama and Georgia. Now check up this rough census outline with the reports printed in these pages from all over America. We soberly must conclude that America is not America. We find that the great states of each coast are practically foreign—New York most of all; that the Bolsheviki abound in the mines of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Montana, where coal and copper and iron are found; that Southern Europe has not yet moved its center of population west of the Mississippi; that the Scandinavian and German element occupies Wisconsin, Minnesota and parts of upper Iowa. And the American—where is he?
Would to God that the chameleon record, that fatally accurate census map, could show us the American hue spreading decade after decade, and not these other colors of the map of America, showing the extension of the foreign-born! It is time now, old as we are, that we should seek a far more normal balance of the increase of our foreign-born.
Something is wrong. The census map shows that it is time to put up the bars at Ellis Island. They ought to go up for ten years at least. Twenty—thirty—lo! Then this would be America, and all inside our gates would be Americans. The gates ought never to go down as they have in the past. We ought to pick and select our foreign-born population. If we have not the courage to do that, we are lost.
Give us a generation of selected immigration; deport the un-Americans who divide their loyalty; revoke the naturalization of every man interned in this war and of every other disloyal man,—every adherent to the law of violence and destruction,—and then, and then only, the result may be an American population and a real America.
The best possible news for America would be that of the deportation of more than 300,000 false and foresworn citizens who have acted as German spies in America during this war. Send that many away from America, and those remaining soon would learn that the hyphen must go for all time. If not, let them also go. We do not need Germans now. The world is done with Germans. We want Americans now.
It is by no means impossible that some such action will be taken very soon. In his last annual report, the Attorney General of the United States recommends that all aliens who were interned during the war should be deported and that Congress shall pass a law to that effect. This would deprive us at once of a select society, estimated to number from 3,000 to 6,000, who have been taking their ease in their inn at our expense. Banded or disbanded, when the American Protective League says that law must be passed, it will be passed. And then we shall begin to have an America and not a mining camp with open doors. Hunt out Americans for your leaders. Vote for them. Where have we ever found better leaders?
The Department of Justice officials are on record to the effect that these interned aliens should not be left in this country to make future trouble and to serve actively as German agents. They were often trained propagandists; men involved in bomb plots; men who plotted against our shipping, against the transportation of our troops. We have no law by which we can punish those men further. Are they good citizens to retain? Our Department of Justice thinks not.
Among these interned prisoners are bank presidents, exporters and importers, college professors, merchants, musicians, actors, former officers of the German army and navy and merchant marine. Many of the names which have appeared in the testimony of the Senate Overman Committee appear also on the internment rolls. There are consuls, officials and noblemen, so-called, who also have been in our internment camps. Do we want them in our homes? The Department of Justice thinks otherwise.
Not less disloyal than these greater figures are thousands and hundreds of thousands of minor figures, paid or unpaid propagandists of Germany in this country during the war, pro-Germans, hyphenates, silent or outspoken, who are not Americans at all. Do we want them in our citizenship? If we cannot get rid of them, ought we to import any more of them?
Already Americans stir uneasily under the revelations of treachery within our gates. They ask of themselves,—Since these things were true but now, what guarantee have we for the future? How can America protect herself against the future treachery of so large an element of her population?