II
JUDGES IN THE GATE
Judges and officers shalt thou make thee in all thy gates . . . and they shall judge the people with just judgment.
Deut. xvi, 18.
There is nothing so potent in a public debate as the picturesque catchwords in which leaders of thought sum up their convictions. Logic makes fewer converts in a year than a taking phrase makes in a week. For catchwords are the popular substitute for logic, and the man in the street is reduced to silence by a good round phrase of the kind that sticks.
Two classes of citizens are especially prone to fall under the tyranny of phrases: those whose horizon, through no fault of their own, is limited by the rim of an empty dinner-pail; and those whose view of the universe is obstructed by the kitchen-middens of too many dinners. There is no clear thinking on an empty stomach, and equally muddled are the thoughts of the over-full. When I hear of a public measure that is largely supported by these two classes of citizens, I know at once that the measure appeals to human prejudices rather than to divine reason.
Thus I became suspicious of the restrictionist movement when I realized that it was in greatest favor among the thoughtless poor and the thoughtless rich. I am well aware that the high-priests of the cult include some of the most conscientious thinkers that ever helped to make history, and their earnestness is attested by a considerable body of doctrine, in support of which they quote statistics and special studies and scientific investigations. But I notice that the rank and file of restrictionists do not know as much as the titles of these documents. They have not followed the argument at all; they have only caught the catchwords of restrictionism. And these catchwords are the sort that appeal to the mean spots in human nature,—the distrust of the stranger, the jealousy of possession, the cowardice of the stomach. Nothing else is expressed by such phrases as “the scum of Europe,” “the exploitation of America’s wealth,” or “taking the bread from the mouth of the American workingman.”
Even the least venomous formula of restrictionism, “immigration isn’t what it used to be,” raises such a familiar echo of foolish human nature that I am bound to challenge its veracity. Does not every generation cry that the weather isn’t what it used to be, children are not what they used to be, society is not what it used to be? “The good old times” and “the old immigration” may be twin illusions of limited human vision.
If it is true that immigration is not what it used to be, the fact will appear from a detailed comparison of the “old” and the “new” immigration. But which of the immigrant stocks of the good old times shall be taken as a standard? Woman’s wisdom urges me to go right back to the original pattern, just as I would do if I went to the shops to match samples. And the original pattern was brought to this country in the year 1620. Surely comparison with the Mayflower stock is the most searching test of the quality of our immigration that any one could propose.
The predominant virtue of the Pilgrims was idealism. The things of the spirit were more to them than the things of the flesh. May we say the like of our present immigrants? Of very many of them, yes; a thousand times yes. Of the 8,213,000 foreigners landed between the years 1899 and 1909, 990,000 were of that race which for nineteen centuries has sacrificed its flesh in the service of the spirit. It takes a hundred times as much steadfastness and endurance for a Russian Jew of to-day to remain a Jew as it took for an English Protestant in the seventeenth century to defy the established Church.
Those who think that with the Spanish Inquisition Jewish martyrdom came to an end are asked to remember that the Kishinieff affair is only eight years behind us, and that Bielostock has been heard from since Kishinieff, and Mohileff since Bielostock. And more terrible than the recurrent pogrom, which hacks and burns and tortures a few hundreds now and then, is the continuous bloodless martyrdom of the six million Jews in Russia through the operation of the anti-Semitic laws of that country. Thirty minutes spent in looking over a summary of these laws recently compiled by an English historian[(1)] will convince any reader with a spark of imagination that every Russian Jewish immigrant to-day is a fugitive from religious persecution, even as were the English immigrants of 1620.