APPENDIX C.[ToC]
Secretary Hay's Note.
Department of State, }
Washington, August 11, 1902. }
"Excellency:—In the course of an instruction recently sent to the Minister accredited to the Government of Roumania in regard to the bases of negotiation begun with that government looking to a convention of naturalization between the United States and Roumania, certain considerations were set forth for the Minister's guidance concerning the character of the emigration from that country, the causes which constrain it, and the consequences so far as they adversely affect the United States.
"It has seemed to the President appropriate that these considerations, relating as they do to the obligations entered into by the signatories of the Treaty of Berlin, of July 13, 1878, should be brought to the attention of the Governments concerned, and commended to their consideration in the hope that, if they are so fortunate as to meet the approval of the several Powers, such measures as to them may seem wise may be taken to persuade the Government of Roumania to reconsider the subject of the grievances in question.
"The United States welcomes now, as it has welcomed from the foundation of its Government, the voluntary immigration of all aliens coming hither under conditions fitting them to become merged in the body politic of this land. Our laws provide the means for them to become incorporated indistinguishably in the mass of citizens, and prescribe their absolute equality with the native born, guaranteeing to them equal civil rights at home and equal protection abroad. The conditions are few, looking to their coming as free agents, so circumstanced physically and morally as to supply the healthful and intelligent material of free citizenhood. The pauper, the criminal, the contagiously or incurably diseased are excluded from the benefits of immigration only when they are likely to become a source of danger or a burden upon the community. The voluntary character of their coming is essential; hence we shut out all immigration assisted or constrained by foreign agencies. The purpose of our generous treatment of the alien immigrant is to benefit us and him alike—not to afford to another state a field upon which to cast its own objectionable elements. The alien, coming hither voluntarily and prepared to take upon himself the preparatory and in due course the definitive obligations of citizenship, retains thereafter, in domestic and international relations, the initial character of free agency, in the full enjoyment of which it is incumbent upon his adoptive State to protect him.
"The foregoing considerations, whilst pertinent to the examination of the purpose and scope of a naturalization treaty, have a larger aim. It behooves the State to scrutinize most jealously the character of the immigration from a foreign land, and, if it be obnoxious to objection, to examine the causes which render it so. Should those causes originate in the act of another sovereign State, to the detriment of its neighbors, it is the prerogative of an injured State, to point out the evil and to make remonstrance: for with nations, as with individuals the social law holds good, that the right of each is bounded by the right of the neighbor.
"The condition of a large class of the inhabitants of Roumania has for many years been a source of grave concern to the United States. I refer to the Roumanian Jews, numbering some 400,000. Long ago, while the Danubian principalities labored under oppressive conditions, which only war and a general action of European powers sufficed to end, the persecution of the indigenous Jews under Turkish rule called forth in 1872 the strong remonstrance of the United States. The Treaty of Berlin was hailed as a cure for the wrong, in view of the express provisions of its forty-fourth article, prescribing that "in Roumania, the difference of religious creeds and confessions shall not be alleged against any person as ground for exclusion or incapacity in matters relating to the enjoyment of civil and political rights, admission to public employments, functions, and honors, or the exercise of the various professions and industries in any locality whatsoever," and stipulating freedom in the exercise of all forms of worship to Roumanian dependents and foreigners alike, as well as guaranteeing that all foreigners in Roumania shall be treated, without distinction of creed, on a footing of perfect equality.
"With the lapse of time these just prescriptions have been rendered nugatory in great part, as regards the native Jews, by the legislation and municipal regulations of Roumania. Starting from the arbitrary and controvertible premise that the native Jews of Roumania domiciled there for centuries are "aliens not subject to foreign protection," the ability of the Jew to earn even the scanty means of existence that suffice for a frugal race has been constricted by degrees, until nearly every opportunity to win a livelihood is denied; and until the helpless poverty of the Jew has constrained an exodus of such proportions as to cause general concern.