Germans started out by butchering the dead of the legions of Varus; just killing didn’t satiate their blood-lust, and they still planned butchery in 1914—women and babes included.
Frenchmen frothed to indiscriminate murder in reprisals that miscarried; which is to say: their revolutions left millions of the sons and daughters of France with a grossly exaggerated idea of the importance of the individual in the mass, now expressed periodically in mercurial uprisings engineered in the main by the progeny of those who hung on Madam Defarge’s heartless words, and watched with glee the fall of guillotined heads.
Americans built to liberty as liberty never before had been framed and nailed: then they bade anti-social vandals come on over and raze the structure with tools fashioned for all forms of license. They came, they used the tools, they are using them, and they will get the job done unless Americans come out of it and postpone their social siesta.
By and large, the bulk of America’s criminals are the natural offspring of the natural foes of freedom as the forefathers sensed freedom. Instinct is far more tenacious than anything with which it may be challenged; hence it is that a bulging minority of the polyglot of the mass on continental American soil seethe, and plan, and execute, even kill, to the end that they may establish a social order diametrically opposed to constitutional diction. What is more, openly-avowed efforts to change the national course are the least fateful. Basic danger resides in the insidious undertow: in that which is given no voice, yet which is wormed patiently, indefatigably, to the foundations of American institutions.
Therefore, when you have an American-bred criminal, you usually have one, as it were, out of Pandora’s box; one to whose ancestry and whose natural instincts and predilections because of that ancestry, and to whose bringing-up you needs must possess the master-key, else betimes surely miss underlying motives.
Unquestionable observation and experiment declare for this guiding principle: in out-breeding of humans, good traits of character, from either side, may, or may not, issue; whereas bad instincts nearly always carry in emphasis from both sides. Hence, a country that recruits its citizenship from the four corners of earth, must, if it is to endure and persist for human progress, select of foreign-born units strictly on the basis of quality. Never mind either calculus or the alphabet; encourage God-fearing, law-abiding, hard-working young men and women who want to root in American soil, to do so. Then bar every individual who cannot present clean bills of health and social character. Bar him, essentially, her, at the port of egress.
Fundamentally, the immigration question is no more complex, in so far as the only rational course for the United States to pursue is concerned, than is breeding of prize cattle; it is this: eliminate all but good-mannered producers who transmit reliably to the best qualities of their breed.
Such had not to be force-fed of American patriotism. They absorbed it, out of the very American air they breathed, and they will continue to do so. Laboring over doubtfuls and undesirables is mostly waste of ammunition, in so far as the intrinsic aim of the labor is concerned. There is no moral obligation upon America to poison her blood-lines; quite to the contrary.
Give good immigrants cheer, then place them where making and owning their own nests will engage them, and they will do the rest. They may continue to roll their R’s, or to sibilate their S’s; also, they will soon learn to reverence the basic traditions of the American flag.
Since criminals will always be with us for the same reason that all-seeing Nature revokes in the matter of the quality of a certain percentage of her seedlings, humane man needs must make the best of the criminal; but the humane best does not mean that criminals shall be encouraged to breed with their kind, certainly not with standard stock; and it does not postulate waste of time and substance in impossible attempts to carry weaklings beyond their incurable congenital limitations.