The American Spirit in the Writings of Americans of Foreign Birth

by Unknown

Consider this in the things of the intellect. The Old World calls us an uneducated race. It is true that we have not many great scholars; the reason is that we are engaged with immediate pressing problems; we apply intelligence to living issues which in other lands is applied to the Genitive and the Accusative and the Dative cases of the Latin and Greek languages. When we look backward and consider the provision made for the intellect of the nation during the last fifty years, we claim that there is no parallel to it in any country on which the sun shines. More money has gone to found colleges and schools and universities for men and for women, open to all talent from ocean to ocean and from the Canadian border to the Gulf, than was ever dedicated to education in the same length of time in the history of mankind. Not only is there provision for the regulars, but also for the irregulars; all sorts of evening schools flourish in our cities where the first teachers of the community are available for talented and aspiring youth of slender means. Men are practicing medicine and law; they are in the ministry and in other professions, usually called learned, who never saw the inside of a college or a university, who have obtained an education in what is called an irregular way, from and by the very men who are teaching in these regular academic institutions.

Let me remind you of the abundant hospitality, the wonderful generosity of the American people toward aspiring youth. Talent which would be ignored in Great Britain, promise which would be sneered at in every continental country in Europe, is here discovered and encouraged to develop into power. This is a phenomenon of which we must never lose sight, the chance here in the United States for a man to be intellectually all that it is possible for him to be. The best teachers may often be seen here wielding the educational power of history and the arts to train the youth to whom college is an impossibility, for service requiring educated powers, in his day and generation.

There is to be noted the opportunity in the way of character and moral influence that comes to citizens of the United States. What does that mean? The chance to change and improve the law of the land, the chance for a man to change and improve the government of the United States, the chance to modify, in the line of humanity, the social feeling of the United States. And freedom is here the condition of all; every man who complains that things are not what they should be has a chance by his vote to remedy the abuse and to take another step toward the ideal.

Here again there is something new, measuring it against the whole people. We are dupes and fools when we allow ourselves to be ruled by groups in this country; we are free men, with the power in our hands. If we have moral ideals of our own, and moral character, we can so use them as to lift the character of the land in which we live.

3. Finally, there was the duty of the tribune as a Roman citizen. Paul was about to be bound and tortured, without trial, when he appealed to the chief captain, “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman and uncondemned?” This startled the man. “Tell me, art thou a Roman? Good heavens, this will never do! I am pledged to do my duty! Get off those shackles and set the man free and guard his life!” There was the man’s sense of his duty.

What is the duty of foreign-born American citizens? First to learn the English language and to prefer it to all other tongues on the face of the earth. That tongue comes in the splendor of a June day; it breaks over life like a June sunrise, with an atmosphere, tone, beauty, and power which for Americans must ever be unapproachable. Let no American citizen hug his foreign tongue, go into the closet with it and shut out the light of the great English language which carries all our ideals as Americans! The very vessel of the Lord it is, in which American freedom is carried,—the language of Shakespeare and Milton, the incomparable free man; the language of Bacon and Burke and Washington and Hamilton and Webster and Lincoln. This tongue consecrates the immigrant who would be a citizen; he never can be a citizen of the United States without that, never. This is the tongue that carries in a unique translation the literature of Israel; the Bible is the maker of free peoples.

Next, we foreign-born American citizens must read the story of the Revolution into our blood. What is the significance of the Revolution for the foreign-born American citizen? These men were Englishmen or the sons of Englishmen; they loved the British Isles better than any portion of the earth’s surface, except their own Colonies; they loved them with an inexpressible love. Yet when it came to question of principle they stood out and said, “We must be free; the Colonies, or the United States, first!” You recall Daniel Webster’s splendid eloquence here:—

“On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjection, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared,—a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drumbeat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.”

Against that power to which they were as nothing, against that lovely land of their origin they stood out when it was a question of their own independence and their own manhood.

That applies to every foreign-born American citizen to-day,—Saxon, Celt, Scandinavian, Teuton, Slav, Latin, Syrian, bond and free. Learn the lesson of the Revolution. This country will have no hands upon it, from any origin, anywhere outside of itself. Learn the lesson of the Civil War; the nation that set to work to keep its integrity as a political whole, to keep its integrity as a human whole, to fight, as it had done a foreign dominion, an evil genius inside its own border. There again is a vast lesson to all of us who are foreign-born. Once again we should store in memory and ponder in clearest conscience and intelligence the great ideas, the great political ideas of America as they are exhibited in Washington, in Hamilton the Nationalist and in Jefferson the State Rights’ patriot; and again in Webster and Calhoun, in Lincoln and the Confederate, and as they issued at last in a true conception of State freedom in a sisterhood of States that constitutes a great nation. These things should be part of the common store of knowledge of the adopted citizen. They are the great forces that have moved this country from its earliest beginning, and that have lifted it into power and renown.