With Poor Immigrants to America

by Stephen Graham

In the development of democracy it is circulation that is important, the circulation of opinion, of sentiment, of ideals. The large circulation of interest and affection caused by the reduction of postage rates down to a penny in Britain and two cents in America has given an immense impetus to democratic development; the larger circulation of ideas and opinions caused by the reduction of the price of newspapers to a cent has also been advantageous. But how much more important than the circulation of opinions, ideas, and sentiments is the circulation of the people themselves, controlled by the price of fares on railways! How much more swiftly would the American democracy become homogeneous if it were possible to travel a thousand miles for five dollars. That would entail either nationalisation of railways or subsidisation by the Government. But it would be worth it to the American people.

Because of the heavy expense of railway travelling America is only dimly conscious of itself, geographically and ethnologically. Americans even boast of the distances between their towns and between different points of the country. Chicago, only one-third of the way across the continent, is called "The West." Indiana and Illinois and Minnesota are "out West." It is as if we referred to Berkshire or Warwickshire as the West of England.

In due course, it may be imagined, the United States Government will assume state-control of many of the railways, and ten dollars will pay your fare from New York right across. Immigrants will not be allowed to settle in great cities till they have spent ten years on the land. Such a provision would make it easier to admit all sorts and conditions of Europeans at Ellis Island; and at the corresponding Immigration stations at other ports a great deal of the White Slave trouble would be averted, and the shelter of immigrants would not absorb so much of the urban attention so urgently needed elsewhere.

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Railways have as much power to make the new American as the newspaper has. Perhaps they have more power; for the railways can afford great opportunities for social mingling. The railway can take any immigrant to a place where he will be not merely a hireling, but a living organism grafted into the vast body of America. At present the high fares deter the immigrant, and he is cooped up in districts which he would like to leave, but cannot; in districts where he must remain foreign and not American.

For there is an impulse to move and to mingle. If railway facilities were granted there would be a great deal more social and commercial intercourse over the surface of America. Each new immigrant who comes into the United States is particularly wanted somewhere; his landing is not an accident. Some village or countryside has called him, and will still call him, though he be frustrated at first, doing the wrong sort of work among the wrong group of people.

The great heterogeneous mass of peoples wants to become one nation. There is a power which works through the peoples for that end. The people are ready to mingle; they are already mingling; they are going to and fro and in twos and threes, and every step and every transaction is something essential in the making of the coming homogeneous nation.

It is a choir dance, a dance of molecules or atoms, if you will, but a dance of human atoms, and one that yields a mystic music that can be heard by the poet's ear. Leading the peoples in the involutions and evolutions of the choir dance is a masked figure, not itself one of the people. What is that figure? Not trade, I think, though it helps; not common interest, though it is perhaps a rule of the dance; not even the American idea. The masked figure that leads is a fate; it is an instinct of Destiny.

The dance is being played out on a vast stage with much scenery—the three-thousand-mile stretch of America, East to West: the Industrial East, with its hills; the corn plains and forests of the middle West; the wild West; the luxuriant and wonderful South.