They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration

by Mary Antin

This analogy, of course, is a vessel without a bottom unless the gospel of the brotherhood of man is accepted as a premise of our debate. The only logic it will hold is the logic of a practical incarnation of the theories we loudly applaud on occasions of patriotic excitement. That ought to be acceptable both to the poor men who like to parade the streets with the Stars and Stripes at the head of the column and the Marseillaise on their lips, and to the rich men who subscribe generously to soldiers’ and sailors’ monument funds, and who ransack ancient chronicles to establish their connection with the heroes of the Revolution. Let the paraders and the ancestor-worshipers unite in a practical recognition of the rights of their belated brothers who are seeking to enter the kingdom of liberty and justice, and they will have given a living shape to the sentiment they symbolically honor, each in his own way.

I am not content if the labor leaders retire from the lobby when all the mills are running full time and shop foremen are scouring the streets for “hands.” It is no proof of our sincerity that we are indifferent in times of plenty as to who it is that picks up the crumbs after we have fed. They only are true Americans who, remembering that this country was wrested from the English in the name of the common rights of humanity, resist the temptation to insure their own soup-kettles by patrolling the national pastures and granaries against the hungry from other lands. Share and share alike is the motto of brotherhood.

But who will venture to preach such devotion to principle to the starved and naked and oppressed? Why, I, even I, who refuse to believe that the American workingman is past answering the call of a difficult ideal, no matter what privations are gnawing at his vitals. I have read in the history books that when Lincoln issued his call for volunteers, they came from mills and factories and little shops as promptly as from counting-rooms and college halls. Fathers of large families that looked to him for bread kissed their babies and marched off to the war, taking an elder son or two with them. Were they all aristocrats whose names are preserved on four thousand gravestones at Gettysburg? And who were they who went barefoot in the snow and starved with Washington in Valley Forge? The common people, most of them, the toilers for daily bread, they who give all when they give aught, because they have not enough to divide.

They only mark themselves as calumniators of the poor who protest that times and men have changed since Washington’s and Lincoln’s day; who think that the breed of heroes died out with the passing of the Yankee farmer and the provincial townsman of the earlier periods. Shall not the testimony of a daughter of the slums be heard when the poor are being judged? I was reared in a tenement district of a New England metropolis, where the poor of many nations contended with each other for a scant living; and the only reason I am no longer of the slums is because a hundred heroes and heroines among my neighbors fought for my release. Not only the members of my family, but mere acquaintances put their little all at my disposal. Merely that a dreamer among them might come to the fulfillment of her dream, they fed and sheltered and nursed me and cheered me on, again and again facing the wolves of want for my sake, giving me the whole cloak if the half did not suffice to save the spark of life in my puny body.

If my knowledge of the slums counts for anything, it counts for a positive assurance that the personal devotion which is daily manifested in the life of the tenements in repeated acts of self-denial, from the sharing of a delicacy with a sick neighbor to the education of a gifted child by the year-long sacrifices of the entire family, is a spark from the smouldering embers of idealism that lie buried in the ashes of sordid existence, and await but the fanning of a great purpose to leap up into a flame of abstract devotion.

Times have changed, indeed, since the days of Washington. His was a time of beginnings, ours is a time ripe for accomplishment. And yet the seed the Fathers sowed we shall not reap, unless we consecrate ourselves to our purpose as they did,—all of us, the whole people, no man presuming to insult his neighbor by exempting him on account of apparent weakness. The common people in Washington’s time, and again in Lincoln’s time, stood up like men, because they were called as men, not as weaklings who must be coddled and spared the shock of robust moral enterprise. Not a full belly but a brimming soul made heroes out of ploughboys in ’76. The common man of to-day is capable of a like transformation if pricked with the electric needle of a lofty appeal. Those who are teaching the American workingman to demand the protection of his job against legitimate alien competition are trampling out the embers of popular idealism, instead of fanning it into a blaze that should transfigure the life of the nation.

A FRESH INFUSION OF PIONEER BLOOD

Idealism of the finest, heroism unsurpassed, are frequently displayed in the familiar episodes of the class war that is going on before our eyes, under unionistic leadership. But it is a narrowing of the vision that makes a great mass of the people adopt as the unit of human salvation the class instead of the nation. The struggle which has for its object the putting of the rapacious rich in their place does not constitute a full programme of national progress. If labor leaders think they are leading in a holy war, they should be the last to encourage disrespect of the principles of righteousness for which they are fighting. It is inconsistent, to put it mildly, to lead a demonstration against entrenched capital on one day, and the next day to head a delegation in Congress in favor of entrenched labor. Is there anything brotherly about a monopolization of the labor market? Substituting the selfishness of the poor for the selfishness of the rich will bring us no nearer the day of universal justice.

Though I should not hesitate to insist on a generous attitude toward the foreigner even if it imposed on our own people all the hardships which are alleged to be the result of immigration, I do not disdain to point out the fact that, when all is said and done, there is enough of America to go around for many a year to come. It is hard to know whether to take the restrictionists seriously when they tell us that the country is becoming overcrowded. The population of the United States is less than three times that of England, and England is only a dot on our map. In Texas alone there is room for the population of the whole world, with a homestead of half an acre for every family of five, and a patch the size of Maryland left over for a public park. A schoolboy’s geography will supply the figures for this pretty sum.