are recruited.
“I have found, as I need not say, much to admire and much to deplore. And it is to consider those tendencies which I deplore that I ask your attention this evening.
“Of all the dangers that threaten us as a nation, I find but two unrepresented in this city, namely, Mormonism, and the amalgamation of the white and other races. But against intemperance, licentiousness, political corruption, and all the evils incident to a vast foreign population, this city, with its numbers increasing by gigantic strides, presents a field for work scarcely exampled on the continent. Not that Chicago is a sinner above all other cities. In some respects, notably its comparative freedom from the close crowding in tenement houses which exists in New York, it is fortunate.
“But, so far as I can learn, not another great city on the continent contains so large a proportion of people of
FOREIGN PARENTAGE.
In driving through your beautiful avenues one can scarcely credit the statement that only nine per cent. of your people are of strictly native parentage; but in going through that section on the North side where your Poles and Bohemians live—in seeing the Irish, Swedes, Germans, and more recently the Italians, who are flocking to your city, one is made to realize this in a measure. It is to this point that I chiefly wish to call your attention.
“This city is growing prodigiously; it is destined to grow. More and more, as means of communication and transportation are increased, as you well know, are the people of this age flocking to the cities. One hundred years ago one in thirty lived in a city; now one in four is the number which the census gives us. Especially is it true that foreigners prefer city life. In far greater numbers proportionately to the native population do they congregate in the centre of wealth, influence, and political power, and often for the purpose of obtaining that political power which through the negligence and indifference of our better class of men is readily yielded to their demands.
“Now that the municipal government in our great cities is largely in the hands of the foreign-born, for which we have only ourselves to thank, we are beginning to awaken to the fact, and the indignant cry ‘America for Americans’ is heard. With this I cannot wholly sympathize. We have opened our doors to the world, we have invited to our highest municipal offices whoever could buy them, we have been eager to get rich, we have had no time or interest in anything beyond satisfying our imperious appetite for wealth and luxury and social position.
“We have put behind us simplicity and calmness, the plain living and high thinking which engendered all that we count best in our history, and now we cry with ever-increasing wail, ‘Let us eat our cake and have it.’ ‘Let us spend our whole life in selfish indifference to the public weal; let us turn over our most sacred trusts into the hands of ignorance and incompetence, and then let us reap what we have not sowed and garner where we have not planted.’
“No, not America for the Americans, if it be such Americans! Rather let those who have been willing slaves