With Poor Immigrants to America

by Stephen Graham

AT THE FOUNTAIN IN THE PARK: A HOT DAY IN CHICAGO.

The strangest thing is the clamour of the Chicago crowd—it is dead-sure about everything in the world, ignorant, cocksure, mocking. It does not know it is losing, does not know that it is blind-folded, because it is the victim of destiny.

Part of the spiritual blindness of the great city is the belief it holds that there is no other place of importance but itself. And many outsiders take the city at its own estimate. But Chicago is not America, neither is New York or any other great city. If going to America meant going only to the great cities, then few but the Jews would emigrate from Europe.

The ideals of America cannot be worked out merely in the great cities. The cities are places of death, of the destruction of national tissue, and of human combustion, necessary, no doubt, as such, certainly not places where one need worry about national health. The national health is on the farms of Pennsylvania and Indiana and Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, the Dakotas, the Far West. The men range big out there; the stand-by of the people will always be found in these places and not in the cities.

And New York and Chicago, though necessary, are abnormal. They are not so much America as unassimilated Europe. The population of a city should be the natural sacrifice of the population of the country. It is often deplored that the country people are forsaking the land and flocking to the towns; but the proper people to replenish the failing stock of the cities is just those whom instinct and destiny prompt to leave the country. It is most bewildering to the student of America that her city-populations are replenished by the foreign immigrants, by people nursing, it is true, American sentiments, but not yet born into the American ideal, not made America's own. The natural place for the first generation of immigrants is on the land. If Chicago seems too large, too sudden a growth, disorderly, unanticipated, altogether out of hand, it is because of the hordes of foreigners who are there, who have not the impulse to co-operate, and who do not readily respond to the efforts of the idealist and politician. And they do not readily respond because they have not lived long enough in the true American atmosphere, have not served a quiet apprenticeship in the country, but have been dumped into an industrial wilderness served with the yellow press and "sped up."

America will have to guide the flow of the immigrants, and learn to irrigate with it and make fertile the Middle and the Far West. It is over-commercialisation and near-sightedness that clamours for more labour in the great cities. The size of a city is never too small. In the normal state of a nation the city functionises the country, and according to the strength of the people in the background the state of the great town will be busy or slack. It is good news that negotiations are being made with the trans-Atlantic shipping companies to ship immigrants to the Far Western coast via the Panama Canal, at rates not very much heavier than at present exist for shipment to Boston and Philadelphia and New York. A man and his wife planted on the land in the East are worth ten given to the greedy cities of the West.

In the matter of the colonisation of her own country America might learn a great deal from Russia, especially in the matter of railway transit. It is all to the advantage of a country that means of transit are cheap, and that there be a brisk circulation of the blood of the body-politic. As a newspaper realises that the cheaper its price the greater its success, the greater its circulation, so America might realise that the cheaper were its railway fares the more facility would there be for the mingling of the peoples, the assimilation of foreigners, and the development of the country.

In America it costs 39 dollars 60 cents to go as far as Denver, Colorado, which is about 2000 miles, and $76.20 to go to San Francisco. A comparison with the Russian rates will give an idea how much more cheaply it is possible to carry people:

Of course, the cost of working is more in America than in Russia, and the trains are twice as fast; but that is not enough to set off against the enormous differences in fares. A great profit is made out of the railway business, and the profit is at the expense of America as a whole. It is absurd to compare the prices of fares in America with the prices of fares in Great Britain. It is bad enough with us, but ours is a small territory; it does not cost much to go from end to end. But America is a vast country. It costs almost a year's wages to pay the fare of a family across it. You think twice before determining to travel even a thousand miles. The consequence is that the circulation of people is sluggish in the extreme. The East begins to get congested, and the cities are packed with people who would gladly have gone straight to the West if facilities had been granted them.