THE IMMIGRANT IN THE LIBRARY
It is very difficult to be interesting or impressive while telling people things that they already know. I won't try to do that. Any one of you sitting in this audience could tell me a great deal more about the immigrant in the library than I can possibly tell you. What I am going to do is to ask you to have in mind what you know about the immigrant, to call up the figure of the immigrant in your libraries as you have seen him daily, and test by your knowledge what I have to say.
You know better than I do in what numbers the immigrants come to your libraries, how much of their time they spend there, what books they seek there. What I want to ask you is to share your knowledge of these things with as many people as possible; tell your neighbors every time you have a chance what the immigrant does in the library. Every little while we begin anew the discussion of the immigrant—to let him in, or not to let him in—and all sorts of arguments are presented on both sides. Representatives of various organizations—capitalistic, unionistic or what-not—hurry their advocates to Congress to speak for or against, on this side and on that side. I want to ask you to see to it that the knowledge that you have of the immigrant is also widely spread on such occasions. The caricaturist is always ready with his pencil to give us pictures of the immigrant in various amusing poses—more or less true, more or less false; the interesting author of the comic paragraph is always there; the artist of the vaudeville stage, and enthusiasts of one sort and another—enemies or friends of the immigrant—are ready to speak up whenever the question comes up. You have a fund of knowledge on the subject which is very special, very different. Bring it out on every occasion! When the gentlemen in Congress want to pass a law to hold up the immigrant at the gate because he cannot read fifty lines of our Constitution, say to them, "Hold! Wait and see what the immigrant's boys and girls will read when they are let loose in a public library." Remind them that the ability to read is not in itself a test of intellectuality. You know scores, hundreds of boys and girls of educated, cultured American families who do not take such an interest in your libraries as the boys and girls of these illiterate immigrants. You know what you know. Please tell it so loudly that every one may hear. Talk about the "five-foot shelf of classics"! Is it not true that the boys and girls of the immigrants swallow it whole and make no boast about it? Why, they are saturated with the classics the minute they get a chance. The mere ability to read—what does that amount to? You know what book the immigrant calls for. Every little while I read a short paragraph in the New York papers telling that the East Side branches of the public library have the greatest circulation of the classics. I would like to see those little paragraphs enlarged, printed big and spread where everybody can see them. We need to know these things.
Please let me speak today as an American, and not as an immigrant. I wish I could efface from your memory this once the knowledge of my origin. Don't make allowances for what I say because of what I was. I am not speaking as an immigrant making an appeal for the immigrants. I am speaking to you as an American. My credentials are these: I have been with you nearly twenty years. My father was an Americanized citizen before I got here and I married a native American. Please accept me as an American today. Let me speak as one of yourselves.
We are so ready to classify people by externals—by their habits, their customs, by the way they dress, by their gestures. Why, a better test of a man than the way in which he makes a living is the way in which he spends his leisure; and to that you can testify in the case of the immigrant. To gain our bread and butter we are forced to do this, that, and the other thing. But nobody drives us into the public library if the saloon is across the way. Speak up and tell to which door the immigrant turns in his leisure hours. People of dainty habits are disgusted with the personal habits of the poor foreigners. They have noticed a smell of herring and onions in the East Side of New York. The smell of onions, my friends, can be driven out, but a mean habit of mind is harder to eradicate. Many gentlemen who feast daintily on caviar content themselves with the sensational newspaper or the trashy novel. Are they superior to the hired laborers who feast on boiled potatoes and herring and onions and have a volume of the classics propped up before them while they eat? There are people who object to the uncouth manners of the alien. It would do us good to make a study of the natural history of the personal habits of the immigrants. There is a reason for the shrug of the shoulders, for the gestures that are so easily caricatured. They have a history, way back, that it would do us good to realize.
You workers in the libraries, you see the immigrant in hundreds, you see him off guard; for a man in his hours of relaxation is not posing; you see the alien as he is at least on one side of his nature. Let your neighbors know what you know about the immigrant. Whenever testimony is being taken on the subject, let your voice be as loud as any. Almost every day you will read in your favorite paper letters to the editor, about "the immigrant peril"; how the foreigners lower our standard of life, demoralize our habits, spoil the manners of our children in the public schools. Some of these things are true, to a certain extent. But you, under whose observation the immigrant comes, and the immigrant's children, ought to be ready with an explanation of many of these things, and you ought to be ready to suggest a remedy. You know what kind of homes these immigrant children come from, and that explains a great deal. You sit there and agree with me, I can see by your faces. You nod and you smile and you turn to one another, as much as to say, "That is so." Don't tell it to me! I know it!! Tell it to those who do not know it.
A few days ago I received a delegation of boys and girls from the nearest village high school. They represented the debating clubs of their school. They were preparing a debate on the subject of immigration, and who could help them except I? We talked very earnestly for about an hour at my fireside about this perennial question, and these young people took me at my word and were very much in earnest about what I had to say and in the way in which they received what I had to say. That is all right. As a subject for discussion in the high schools that question may be made immortal, but as a subject for national agitation it ought to be laid at rest. Why is it that certain questions have been settled once and for all and others are always being reopened? Those questions are settled finally which are considered in relation to their underlying principles. Let us not confine ourselves to the superficial aspect of the immigration question.
Every once in a while, when we come to moralize about these immigrants—there are too many of them, they come from the wrong quarters of the globe, and what not—let us ask ourselves, Is that the real thing that concerns us, or is there something at the bottom of this agitation that ought to receive attention first? Are we really afraid that the immigrant is going to take the bread from our mouths? If so, let us stop and think about it. It is the law of nature that the best man shall come out ahead. Are we going to stop the immigrant by temporarily locking the door, while we have possession of the key? It will not be for long. Right to the end it is going to be a struggle between the better and the worse, and the better will get ahead. We need not be afraid that the immigrants will take the bread from our mouths if we see to it that we are equally able or better able than they to earn our bread. It is said they are taking the earth from under our feet. Not if we are strong enough to stand and hold our ground. If they are getting the better of us, it is because they are better than we, or else, if that is not so, then they can not be getting the better of us, and we need not be afraid of them.
We will never settle this question until we are willing to consider it along fundamental lines. Did our forefathers, when they launched the declaration that all men were created free and equal, refer to the few hundreds or few thousands of people who were then in this country? Why, in that case, many of you are here only as guests! Was there any thought in their minds that of all the people in the world, those who happened to get in here before they set to work to compose the Declaration of Independence were the ones who were born free and equal, and with equal opportunities, and all the rest of mankind with limitations? You heartily approve the sentiments expressed in our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence. How then can you limit the application of their principles? When did the day dawn when it was time to shut the gate? When did the hour arrive when we could say that all those of free and equal origin were already here and the rest could stay outside? I don't know at what moment immigrants begin to be immigrants and not pilgrims and voyagers for spiritual freedom.