"Ah well," my friend assented, "that's your kind of hope—rebelliousness, hatred of the splendid and safe machine. That's just it. We haven't your rebelliousness and quarrelsomeness. The new-come immigrant is always quarrelling with his neighbours. It is only after a while that America softens him and enriches his heart. The vastness of America, the abundance of its riches, is infectious; it makes the heart larger. The immigrant feels he has room, life is born in him."
"But," said I, "the great machine is here as in Europe. A man is known by his job here just as much as with us, isn't he? He is labelled and known, he fills a fixed place and has a definite rotation. Every man says to him 'I see what you are, I know what you are; you are just what I see and no more.' His neighbour takes him for granted thus. Out of that horrible taking-for-granted springs rebelliousness and hate of the great machine. You must be as rebellious as we are."
"No, no." My companion wouldn't have it. "We don't look at people that way in America. But you're right about looks. It's looks that make people hate. It's eyes that make them curse and swear and hate. Every day hundreds and thousands of eyes look at one. I think eyes have power to create. If thousands and thousands of people pass by a man and look at him with their eyes they almost change him into what they see. If in the course of years millions of eyes look at an individual and see in him just some little bolt in a great machine, then his tender human heart wants to turn into iron. The ego of that man has a forlorn and terrible battle to fight. He thinks he is fighting himself; he is really fighting the millions of creative eyes who by faith are changing flesh and blood into soulless machinery."
"And here?" I queried.
He laughed a moment, and then said seriously, "Here it is different. Here we are playing large. Oh, the dwarfing power, the power to make you mean, that the millions of eyes possess in a country that is playing the small game! They make you feel mean and little, and then you become mean. They kill your heart. Your dead little heart withdraws the human films and the tenderness and imaginativeness from your eyes, and you also begin to look out narrowly, dwarfingly, compellingly. You eye the people in the streets, in the cars, in the office, and they can't help becoming what you are."
"But some escape," said I.
"Yes, some go and smash windows and get sent to gaol, some become tramps, and some come to America. In Giant Despair's dungeon poor Christian exclaims, 'What a fool I am to remain here when I have in my heart a key which I am persuaded will unlock any of the doors of this castle. Strange that it has only now occurred to me that all I need to do is to lift my hand and open the door and go away.' Then poor Christian books a passage to America or Australia. He starts for the New World; and the moment he puts his foot on the vessel he begins to outgrow. He was his very smallest and meanest under the pressure of the Old World; when the pressure is removed he begins to expand. He is free. He is on his own. He is sailing to God as himself. The exception has beaten the rule. Now I hold as a personal belief that we are all exceptions, that we take our stand before God as tender human creatures of His, each unique in itself. The emigrant on the boat has the delicious feelings of convalescence, of getting to be himself again. He basks in the sun of freedom. The sun itself seems like the all-merciful Father, the Good Shepherd who cares for each one and knows each by name, leading him out to an earthly paradise."
"That paradise is America, eh?" said I rather mockingly, and then I paused and added, "But America ought to be really a paradise; it is pathetic to think of the difference between America as the Russian thinks it to be and America as it is. It is a shame that your trusts and tariffs and corrupt police should have made America a worse place to live in than the Old World. I know it is the land of opportunity, opportunity to become rich, to get on, to be famous; but for the poor immigrant it is rather the land of opportunism, a land where he himself is the opportunity, which not he but other people have the chance to seize."
My friend was scandalised. "I think it gives every one an opportunity," said he, "even the drunkard and the thief and the embezzler whom you so incharitably hand over to us. You know the saying, 'It takes an ocean to receive a muddy stream without defilement.' The ocean of American life cleanses many a muddy stream of the Old World."
"Still," said I, "not to abandon oneself utterly to ideas, is it not true that Pittsburg actually destroys thousands of Slav immigrants yearly? It utterly destroys them. They have no children who come to anything—they are just wiped out. I gather so much from your Government survey of Pittsburg."