Foreigners Everywhere
As to the ubiquity of the foreigner all will agree. "Any foreigners in your neighborhood?" asked the writer of a friend in a remote country hamlet. "O, yes," was the reply, "we have a colony of Italians." Of all such questions asked during months past not one has been answered in the negative. Go where you will, from Atlantic to Pacific Coast, the immigrant is there. In nineteen of the northern states of our Republic the number of the foreign-born and their immediate descendants exceeds the number of the native-born. In the largest cities the number is two thirds, and even three quarters. There are more Cohens than Smiths in the New York directory. Two thirds of the laborers in our factories are foreign-born or of foreign parentage. New England is no longer Puritan but foreign. So is it in the Middle and the Central West, and not only in city and town but hamlet and valley. The farms sanctified by many a Puritan prayer are occupied to-day by French-Canadian and Italian aliens. Foreigners are running our factories, working our mines, building our railways, boring our tunnels, doing the hard manual labor in all the great constructive enterprises of the nation. They are also entering all the avenues of trade, and few other than foreign names can be seen on the business signs in our cities large or small.
Foreignism Preserved
Not only do you find the foreigner, of one race or another, everywhere, but wherever you find him in any numbers you note that the most distinctive feature is the foreignism. The immigrant readily catches the spirit of independence and makes the most of liberty. He is insistent upon his rights, but not always so careful about the rights of others. He is imitative, and absorbs the spirit of selfishness as quickly as do the native-born. He is often unkempt, uncultured, dirty, and disagreeable. He is also impressionable and changeable, responsive to kindness as he is resentful of contempt. He follows his own customs both on Sundays and week days. He knows as little about American ideas as Americans know about him. He is commonly apt to learn, and very much depends upon the kind of teaching he falls under. Much of it, unfortunately, has not been of the kind to make the American ideas and ways seem preferable to his own. Made to feel like an alien, he is likely to remain at heart an alien; whereas the very safety and welfare and Christian civilization of our country depend in no small degree upon transforming him into a true American. For upon this change hangs the answer to the question, which influence is to be strongest—ours upon the foreigner or the foreigner's upon us.
II. American Ideals
A Question for Patriots
Surely this is a question to engage the attention of Christian patriots—the influence of this vast mass of undigested if not indigestible immigration upon the national character and life. A most scholarly and valuable treatment of this subject is found in the discriminating work by Professor Mayo-Smith, one of the very best books written on the subject. The figures are out of date, but the principles so clearly enunciated are permanent, and the conclusions sane and sound. This is the way he opens up the subject we are now considering:
The Marks of a High Civilization
"The whole life of a nation is not covered by its politics and its economics. Civilization does not consist merely of free political institutions and material prosperity. The morality of a community, its observance of law and order, its freedom from vice, its intelligence, its rate of mortality and morbidity, its thrift, cleanliness, and freedom from a degrading pauperism, its observance of family ties and obligations, its humanitarian disposition and charity, and finally its social ideals and habits are just as much indices of its civilization as the trial by jury or a high rate of wages. These things are, in fact, the flower and fruit of civilization—in them consists the successful 'pursuit of happiness' which our ancestors coupled with life and liberty as the inalienable rights of a man worthy of the name.
"In order that we may take a pride in our nationality and be willing to make sacrifices for our country, it is necessary that it should satisfy in some measure our ideal of what a nation ought to be. What now are the characteristics of American state and social life which we desire to see preserved? Among the most obvious are the following: