"Proscription
is not only unjust, but it is unwise and self-destructive, with reference to the interests you wish to protect. If your apprehensions were anything but imaginary, you direct them in the wrong quarter. Ambitious politicians seek to win those classes with whom they have no natural relations. It was not Southern men, like Washington and Jefferson and Jackson, who conceded most to slavery; it was Northern men, like Pierce and Buchanan. A Protestant American demagogue—and particularly if he had once been a Know-nothing—would do things to catch votes or win popularity among a class which a Kernan, an O'Conor, or a John Kelly would reject with disdain.
"City Reformers.
"New York is a cosmopolitan city. According to the census of 1865, rather more than three-fifths of the voters were naturalized. In the other two-fifths are included the sons of naturalized citizens. How reform in municipal administration or good government in the city is to be worked out by a moral proscription of the foreign voters or of the religious belief of the most numerous class of them, it is not easy to see. Every such effort is calculated to band them together in a compact mass. Large numbers of them joined in the reform movement of 1871. If among their classes, or among Americans descended from them, spring up citizens foremost in all the community for talents and virtues and devotion to our American ideas of government and society, I would not challenge the honorable pride they awaken in those of common origin. I share that pride in such men as Kernan and O'Conor. I would not weaken any power of leadership which the natural sentiments of humanity may give them in these numerous classes. I would rather see it stronger than it is in men like these, who would never seek to create any class influence, and would never abuse any influence, but rather exercise every power as a trust for the public good. I had occasion, after the election last year, in frequent addresses on municipal reform, to lament the apathy of many of our citizens whose reproach it is that while by pecuniary independence and leisure and all the legitimate elements of a just and honorable public influence they selfishly abdicate their power of leadership in the affairs of our great metropolis. Wherever a man appears in the commonwealth who is without venality or the inferior forms of ambition, but from an elevated sense of his duty as a citizen of the commonwealth, he ought to be encouraged and his natural elements of influence respected and cherished.
"It is too late in the day to revive the spirit of the native American or Know-nothing parties. The only purely American stock which remains on this continent is the whole population of the Southern States, who are now under the carpet-bag governments, upheld by the banded masses of rogues and the influence of the Federal governments and affiliated with the Republican party. In the North we are one-third emigrants of the last twenty-five years or their children. The great migration of the last quarter of a century is the most remarkable in the world's history. It has exercised a controlling power over every important event of our national progress. In that period about seven millions of people have come to our Northern States. I had occasion some years ago to analyze the character of that immigration. I found that it contained just about twice as many male persons between the ages of 15 and 40 as our resident population in 1860. In other words, it contained the population of the virile age equal to that of fourteen millions of our average people. It is that influx which has created our great cities, which has built our railroads and furnished them business, and which has produced the immense growth of our Northern States in population, wealth, and prosperity. It is that influx which overturned the equality of influence between the North and South in the Federal government, and stimulated both sides to the measure that led to the Civil War. It is that influx which would have given the North predominance if the war had not happened, and which gave it the victory in the conflict of arms, abolished slavery, and will at last fill the South with communities like our own.
"This is the state of things. Who could alter it if he would? Who dare say that, on the whole, he would alter it if he could?
"We must, then, avoid all those civil and social revolutions, work out as best we may the problem of self-government formed on equal and universal suffrage. We can only do so on the large, liberal statesmanship on which we began, and never by going back toward the dark night of proscription and bigotry."
TILDEN TO MRS. CASSIDY
"New York, Feb'y 22, 1873.