When the exercises were over I said a parting word to our guests. One Chinese woman, carrying in her arms a beautiful little baby girl, came up to say good night. “Why, Mrs. Sun,” I exclaimed, “I did not know you had a little girl.” “Oh,” she said, “I hadn’t, but Mrs. Wu had one girl and when this baby was born she didn’t want it because one girl was enough, so she gave it to me.” This in New York on Christmas night, 1911. Can you imagine a Christian mother glad to give away her little girl? The Chinese need Christ.
The Russian needs something other than shorter hours and larger wages. Many of them are seeking the higher things. A Russian pastor told me of making an engagement with one of his hearers at a Russian open air service to discuss and explain Christianity to a Russian in his home. When the night came this Russian revolutionist had gathered a group of his fellows in his tenement quarters and there pastor and men discussed the Christian faith from 8 o’clock in the evening till midnight and would have kept the discussion up all night, could the pastor have remained. Christ and the church are needed by the Russian.
You see that some people have misrepresented our Lord and His church. We must try to right this wrong done the foreigner and we must be patient and loving in doing it. The immigrants are in need of many things—we must endeavor to supply these needs. We must do it for the sake of Christ. We must do it in the name of Christ. We must do it as if our Lord Himself sat weary and thirsty before us and it was given us to hand Him the cup of water. How glad we would be for such an honor!
Bad Neighbors
The Saloon. It is sad to see so many bright Italian boys with their fruit stands and shoe polishing chairs hard by saloon doors. They do not know how great an enemy is pretending to be their friend.
The saloon is a bad neighbor to the immigrant. It wastes his money and his time. It unfits him for work, starves his family and makes them feel ashamed of husband and father. It leads to disease and often to prison, for the saloon is the mother of innumerable crimes. It helps make weak-minded and deformed children and is an evil organization whose destruction has already been determined upon by the truest and best Christian people in our land. For the sake of the immigrant, for the sake of the fair name of America, let us unite to shut its doors and banish it from our country.
Ignorance. Ignorance keeps the immigrant un-American. One who cannot read is at a serious disadvantage. When it is remembered that of the Italians sixty out of one hundred of all those over fourteen years of age who come to America belong to this class, we see the need of the work of night schools to overcome this ignorance. The case is made still worse by the fact that the immigrants crowd together into colonies, as “Little Italy,” “Little Russia,” and “the Ghetto,” where the English language is not spoken and there are no broadening American influences.
Injurious Employment. The work in which the immigrant is generally employed helps keep him un-American. He has no opportunity to know America or to know Americans. Much of the work is wearying and disheartening. Men bound for the coal mines are packed in cars and hurried away, often through the night, to the distant coal fields; underground all day and sleeping in wretched quarters above ground at night, they have little opportunity to see or know anything of their adopted land. I stepped up to a stone house alongside a railroad excavation in the country part of Connecticut once to have a look at the occupants. There were two floors in the old tumble-down house and both were packed with mattresses and makeshifts for beds until practically the whole floor space was covered. It was a wet day and all the men were crowded indoors. A handsome young fellow lay sick on one of the mattresses. I put my head in the door and said: “Io parlo un poco Italiano ma non bene.” “I speak a little Italian, but not well.” Immediately there was a laugh, probably at the “not well,” and they rose to greet me as courteously as if all were trained gentlemen. The sick boy began to talk and the group was friendly with me in a moment.
The day will come when we shall find that these people can do something other than dig ditches and mix concrete. The Italians who are now employed as our hewers of wood and drawers of water, are of the race of painters and sculptors and silk makers of earlier days.