With Poor Immigrants to America

by Stephen Graham

But in the New World the peoples are joined in co-operation and friendship, working out in peace and trade the synthesis of a new race. The gods look down on factory-chimneys belching smoke, on kingdoms covered with red-gold corn uncoveted by men of arms, on hurrying trains and the dancing peoples going hither and thither, with smiles and little enchantments and allurements. They look upon the Protestant pulpits where the Puritans preach, on the Roman Catholic Church and the confessionals, on the Orthodox Church, on the Baptists, on the Mormons; and on the way the varying peoples flock around temples, and in and out of church doors, carrying messages, receiving messages. They look upon many developments that we have so aptly called movements, the mysterious "woman's movement", the Romanising movement, the Socialistic movement. They look upon a million schools where the children, the second generation of the dancers, are polished and tested and clothed before they in their turn join the throng at the side and go down the middle with their partners.

It is like a kaleidoscope, and at each successive revolution the peoples change their aspects and their pattern; but there is no reverting to the original pattern, as in the kaleidoscope. The constituents of the pattern are divining what the next pattern will be, and it is always a new pattern, something nearer to the great coming unity, the new American nation. In no one particular bosom is the destiny of America; one man by himself means nothing there. It is a whole people that is living or will live. Once the foreigner parts from the waiting throngs at the side and enters the mystic dance, his own little consciousness and purpose become but a part of the much greater consciousness and purpose of the whole. It is not the development of one sort of person, but the combination of a million sorts to make one. It is not the development of a race, as is our own British progress in Great Britain, but something which seems rather novel in the history of mankind, the making of a new democracy. It is not a Gladstone or a Bismarck or an Alexander the Liberator, who is leading this development that I have called a Choir Dance, not a Lincoln or a Roosevelt or a Wilson. Men have only their parts to play in the making of a democracy; if they could make it all by themselves, or originate the making, or achieve the making, it would not be a democracy that they were making. As I said, it is a masked figure that leads the mystic movement—a fate. In one sense there are many fates also among the dancers and mingled with them,—a mysterious and wonderful ballet, perfect in idea and in fulfilment.

And as it is with men so it is with the rites they perform. There are myriads of rites in the movement of the dance, but not one of them is charged with absolute significance. Thus in the mazes of evolution there stands impregnable, as it would seem, the historic open Bible of America. Around it, marking time, is a massed host of Americans, now reinforced by newcomers, now diminished by secessions, swayed to this way and to that by streams of Catholics, streams of Hebrews, streams of pleasure-lovers, but as yet holding its own, and claiming in sonorous choruses that the Bible shall be the leaven of the New America.

At another point of vantage on the stage you may see the Jews proclaiming by vote that America is no longer a Christian country, and calling the intellectuals and pleasure-wanters to support, if not Judaism, at least rationalism and "intelligent" materialism.

At another point you see the menace of the half-civilised negro, the spectacle of the rapid multiplication of a people over whom there is no control, and in whose nature lies, apparently, an enormous physical power to degrade the type of the whites.

There is the phenomenon of the wholesale slaughter and sacrifice of blindfolded foreigners exploited in industrial cities; forests of men used up as the forests of wood are worn away into daily newspapers and rubbish.

You see the booths where dancers make voluntary abdication of European nationality and take the oaths of American citizenship.

You see the prizes for which, in the dance, whole crowds seem to be straining and yearning and even struggling, the prize of wealth, of even a little wealth, of a name printed in a newspaper, of a name printed in all newspapers, the prize of fame, of political position, of premiership. You see the wild political campaigns.

You see the places where the ambitious laze by the way, the baseball races where men are shouting themselves and others mad for an empty game, the halls of rag-time and trotting. You see in thousands of instances actions which seem to disgrace the name of America and to augur ill for her future,—women sold into evil, negroes burned at the stake, heinous crimes committed against children. But the destiny of the great choric dance cannot be thwarted by any of these things. Death is useful to life, darkness to brightness, sin to virtue—useful in a way which it is not necessary for the individual to penetrate. Each man fulfils his destiny, guides others according to his light, acts according to his inclination, temptation, and conscience. The whole nation takes care of itself.