It is because the brutal method is the easiest that we are advised to confiscate the tools of industry in order to check the rate of material development. The more dignified way would be to restrain the captains of industry, by asserting our authority over our own citizens in matters affecting the welfare of the nation. An up-to-date mother, desiring that her little boy should not play with the scissors, would be ashamed to put them on a high shelf: she would train the boy not to touch them though they lay within his reach. Why should the assemblage of mothers and fathers who constitute the nation show less pride about their methods than a lone woman in the nursery?
Outside the economic field, fear of the immigrant is perhaps oftenest expressed in the sociological anxiety concerning assimilation. The question is raised whether so many different races, products of a great variety of physical and moral environments, can possibly fuse into a harmonious nation, obedient to one law, devoted to one flag. Some people see no indication of the future in the fact that race-blending has been going on here from the beginning of our history, because the elements we now get are said to differ from us more radically than the elements we assimilated in the past.
To allay our anxiety on this point, we have only to remind ourselves that none of the great nations of Europe that present such a homogeneous front to-day arose from a single stock; and the differences between peoples in the times of the political beginnings of Europe were vastly greater than the differences between East and West, North and South, to-day. Moreover, the European nations were assorted at the point of the sword, while in America the nations are coming together of their own free will; and who can doubt that the spiritual forces of common education, common interests and associations are more effective welding agents than brute force?
Doubts as to the assimilative qualities of current immigration do not exist in the minds of the workers in settlements, libraries, and schools. These people have a faith in the future of the strangers that is based on long and intimate experience with foreigners from many lands. When they are dealing with the normal product of immigration, the people who come here following some dim star of higher destiny for their children, the social missionaries are jubilantly sure of the result; and face to face with the less promising material of the labor camps, where thousands are brought together by the lure of the dollar and are kept together by the devices of economic exploitation, the missionaries are still undaunted. They have discovered that sanitation is a remedy for the filth of the camp; that a spelling-book will make inroads on the ignorance of the mob; that a lecture hall will diminish the business of the saloon and the brothel; that substituting neighborly kindness for brutal neglect will fan to a glow the divine spark in the coarsest natures. And then there is the Goethals way of managing a labor camp.
The remedy for the moral indigestion which unchecked immigration is said to induce is in enlarging the organs of digestion. More evening classes, more civic centers, more missionaries in the field, and above all more neighborly interest on the part of the whole people. If immigration were a green apple that we might take or leave, we might choose between letting the apple alone or eating it and following it up with a dose of our favorite household remedy. But immigration consists of masses of our fellow men moving upon our country in pursuit of their share of human happiness. Where human rights are involved, we have no choice. We have to eat this green apple,—the Law of the Fathers enjoins it on us,—but we have only ourselves to blame if we suffer from colic afterwards, knowing the sure remedy.
There is no lack of resources, material or spiritual, for carrying out our half of the assimilation programme. We have money enough, brains enough, inspiration enough. The only reason the mill is grinding so slowly is that the miller is overworked and the hopper is choked. We are letting a few do the work we should all be helping in. At the settlements, devoted young men and women are struggling with classes that are too large, or turning away scores of eager children, and their fathers and mothers, too, because there are not enough helpers; and between classes they spend their energies in running down subscribers, getting up exhibitions to entice the rich men of the community to come and have a look at their mission and drop something in the plate.
But why should there be a shortage of helpers at the settlement? Have not the rich men sons and daughters, as well as check-books? What are those young people doing, dancing the nights away in ballrooms and roof-gardens, season after season, year after year? They should be down on their knees washing the feet of the pilgrims to the shrine of liberty, binding up the wounds of the victims of European despotism, teaching their little foreign brothers and sisters the first steps of civilized life.
Is it preposterous to ask that those who have leisure and wealth should give of these stores when they are needed in the chief enterprise of the nation? In what does patriotism consist if not in helping our country succeed in her particular mission? Our mission—the elevation of humanity—is one in which every citizen should have a share, or he is not an American citizen in the spiritual sense. The poor must give of their little—the workingman must not seek to monopolize the labor market; and the rich must give of their plenty—their time, their culture, their wealth.
Certain texts in the restrictionist teachings are as insulting to our well-to-do citizens as is the labor-monopoly preachment to the classes who struggle for a living. The one assumes that the American workingman puts his family before his country; the other—the cry that we cannot assimilate so many strangers—implies that the country’s reservoirs of wealth and learning and unspent energy are monopolized by the well-to-do for their own selfish uses. We know what schools and lectures and neighborhood activities can do to promote assimilation. We cannot fail if we multiply these agencies as fast as the social workers call for them. The means for such extension of service are in the hands of the rich. Whoever doubts our ability to assimilate immigration doubts the devotion of our favored classes to the country’s cause.