With Poor Immigrants to America

by Stephen Graham

"Well," said he, "that survey is just part of the New America, of the new national conscience. Terrible things do happen, witness the enormous white-slave traffic. You have just come to us at the right moment to see the initiation of sweeping changes. President Wilson is like your David Lloyd George, only he has more power, because he has more people at his back. We are just beginning a great progressive era. On the other hand, America is not the place of the weak. That's why we send so many back home from Ellis Island. We've got something else to do than try and put Humpty Dumpty up on the wall again. When the weaker get past Ellis Island into our fierce national life they are bound to go to the wall. We haven't time even to be sorry, and if questioned we can only answer that we believe the sacrifice will be justified."

I recall to my mind the startling objection of Ivan Karamazof in the greatest of Russian novels. "When God's providence is fulfilled we shall understand all things; we shall see how the pain and death of, for instance, a little child could be necessary. I understand of course what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise, and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud, 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed'; but to my mind the pain of one little child were too high a price to pay." Ivan Karamazof would certainly have renounced the grand future of America bought by the exploitation of thousands of weak and helpless ones.

Still I suppose the past must take care of itself, and the America which stands to-day on the threshold of a new era has more thought and tenderness for the victims of its commercial progress. It is making up its mind to save the foreign women and their little babies. For the rest, America plays large, as my friend said. There is a spaciousness with her, there is contrast, there is life and death, virtue and sin, things to laugh over and things to cry over. The little baby buds are taken away and branches are lopped, but the mustard grows a great tree.

There is a chance in America, a chance that you may be a victim, but also a chance that you may be in at the mating of the King.

* * * * * * *

Several months later, when I had tramped some six hundred American miles, and talked to all manner of persons, I realised that America was superlatively a place of hope. I had been continually asking myself, "What is America? What is this new nation? How are they different from us at home in England?" And one morning, sitting under a bush in Indiana, the answer came to me and I wrote it down. They are fundamentally people who have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and we are stay-at-homes. They are adventurous, hopeful people. They are people who have thrown themselves on the mercy of God and Nature.

We live in a tradition; they live in an expectation. We are remedying the old state; they are building the new. We are loyal to the ideas of our predecessors, they are agape to divine the ideas of generations yet to come.

It is possible to come to Britain and see what Britain is, but if you go to America the utmost you can see is what America is becoming. And when you see the Briton you see a man steadfast at some post of duty, but the American is something to-day but God-knows-what to-morrow. Our noblest epitaph is "He knew his job"; theirs, "He sacrificed himself to a cause."