It is to be noticed from this table, in the first place, that in these fifty cities, in 1870, the proportion of foreign-born to native inhabitants was almost exactly as 18 is to 38—1,800,000 to 3,808,770—while the proportion of foreign-born to native inhabitants in the entire Union was almost exactly as 5 is to 38—5,567,229 to 38,558,371. It must be confessed that on this showing there was an apparently or a really undue proportion of our foreign-born citizens congregated in the large cities. But it should be remembered that among the native-born population were the 10,892,015 persons who had been born here of parents, on one or both sides, of foreign birth, and who, to this extent, were quasi-foreign. If these be taken into account, the proportion of foreign-born and the immediate descendants of foreign-born persons to the rest of the population throughout the country in 1870 would have been as 16 to 38—16,459,239 to 38,558,371. This is really the more correct basis upon which to make the comparison; for without doubt a large proportion of the ten millions of persons born here of foreign parents were the children of the five millions of foreign-born persons; and it is perfectly natural that the parents and the children should be found living in the same localities. After giving to this consideration, however, all the weight to which it is entitled, the fact still remains that an apparently excessive proportion of our foreign-born citizens are to be found in the large cities.
Let us look still closer into the subject. The whole number of persons of Irish birth in the United States in 1870 was 1,855,827, and of these 826,398, or 44.4 per cent., were living in these fifty cities. There were 1,690,410 Germans, and 564,967 of them, or 33.4 per cent., were in the cities; 550,688 English, of whom 165,024, or nearly 30 per cent., were in the cities; 489,344 British Americans, of whom 80,728, or only 16.5 per cent., were in the cities; while 30 per cent. of the Scotch, 36.5 per cent. of the French, 36.7 per cent. of the Austrians, and 17.7 per cent. of the Belgians were in the same category. Our Irish fellow-citizens are the greatest sinners—if any are sinners in this respect—and after them, in a declining ratio, come the Austrians, French, Germans, Scotch, English, Belgians, and British Americans. The Irish, Austrians, French, and Germans are the Roman Catholic emigrants, and in the wisdom of God it has been ordained that they should be the ones most crowded into the cities. How have they performed there the work which he sent them to do?
Our cities are the centres of the intelligence, the culture, and the wealth of our country. They contain to a very large extent the brains of the republic. From them issue influences which sway, if they do not absolutely control, the thoughts and actions of the people. These influences are not, by any means, always altogether wholesome, but they are unquestionably potent. The newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals published in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans, San Francisco, and Milwaukee have a circulation exceeding that of the similar publications of all the rest of the country combined. The serial publications of one firm in New York alone reach into the millions; the aggregate annual circulation of the New York daily and weekly journals is so large that mere figures expressing it convey but a faint idea of its extent. The publisher of a magazine in New York told the writer the other day that if the copies of his publication issued each year were stacked together, the column would be three times as high as Trinity Church steeple.
The social influences of the cities upon the rural districts are also powerful. The cities not only set the fashions in dress, but in political, moral, and religious thought and custom. The sturdy independence of the bucolic mind may yet boast of its existence, but it very often yields to the sway of urban ideas. A lady who had lived all her life in a small village, in which the only Catholic population consisted of a handful of poor Irish people, destitute of a church, and visited only at long intervals by a humble priest who celebrated the divine Mysteries in an attic over a liquor-store, not long ago came to New York, and was taken by her friends into one of our magnificent Catholic churches. The grandeur and beauty of the Mass were for the first time revealed to her; for the first time she obtained an idea of what the Catholic Church was and what it taught. By the grace of God her conversion followed, and, mainly through her exertions and her influence after her return home, her village is now blessed with a church, a resident priest, and a Catholic population composed largely of converts. In very many of our rural localities all over the Union the Catholics are few and poor; in too many of them the idea of a Roman Catholic in the minds of the natives is still associated only with the idea of an ignorant fanatic, who worships images, pays half a dollar to a priest to pardon him for a crime, and believes that the Pope is God. But when the country merchant of such a locality comes to New York to make his purchases, and sees the splendid Catholic churches here, and finds, perhaps, that the great importer with whom he deals, or the wealthy banker, or the renowned lawyer to whom he is introduced, is a Roman Catholic, and not unseldom an Irishman or a German, his eyes are opened and his mind is prepared for the reception of the truth. In a word, the congregation of foreign-born emigrants, the most of whom are Catholics, in our large cities, has had the effect of making the Catholic church in these cities a noticeable and a respectable fact, and of thereby accomplishing one of the preliminaries in the work which it has yet to perform in the republic. The influence of this fact is to be perceived, also, in the changed tone of the secular press with regard to the church. Respectable journalists, with few and decreasing exceptions, have become ashamed to repeat the vulgar and senseless slanders and the worn-out calumnies concerning the church, her ministers, her dogmas, and her sacraments which were so current twenty years ago. In communities consisting in an appreciable and often in a large proportion of intelligent, wealthy, and influential Catholics, the able editors do not venture any longer to amuse their readers with arguments based on the assumption that the church is the foe of knowledge and of education, and that her mission is to degrade, enslave, and pauperize mankind. In cities where the spires of dozens and scores of Catholic churches, tipped with the emblem of our salvation, point towards heaven; where Catholic hospitals, asylums, schools, and academies abound; where many of the most enterprising and wealthy merchants, manufacturers, and bankers are Catholics; where in the front rank of all the professions Catholics are found—in these communities it is no longer a social disgrace or a mark of singularity to be a Catholic, and a convert to the faith is no longer looked upon as a person of weak intellect or a slave to a benumbing and degrading superstition. We shall show, in the subsequent pages of our article, that for all this, to a very great extent, and under what seems to have been the direct guidance of God, we are indebted to the foreign-born population of the country, and that its accomplishment was made possible, humanly speaking, by their congregating themselves in the cities instead of dispersing in small bodies throughout the agricultural regions of the country. But we shall show, also, that, the work of God having thus far been accomplished, the time has now arrived when the future emigration to the United States should be directed towards the rural districts, under conditions which, until now, were practically impossible; and we shall seek to point out in what manner this new colonization may be best directed in order to promote the welfare of the emigrants themselves, the prosperity of our country, and the greater glory of God.
ALBA’S DREAM.
BY THE AUTHOR OF “ARE YOU MY WIFE?” “A SALON IN PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” ETC.
PART I.
Once upon a time, some sixty years ago, on one of the bleakest points of the coast of Picardy, high perched like a light-house overhanging the sea, there was a building called the Fortress. You may see the ruins of it yet. It had been an abbey in olden times, and credible tales were told of a bearded abbot who “walked” at high water on the western parapet when the moon was full. One wing of the Fortress was a ruin at the time this story opens; the other had braved the stress of time and tempest, and looked out over the sea defiant as the rock on which it stood. The Caboffs lived in it. Jean Caboff was a wiry, lithe old man of seventy—a seafaring man every inch of him. His wealth was boundless, people said, and they also said that he had gained it as a pirate on the high seas. There was no proof that this was true; but every one believed it, and the belief invested Jean Caboff with a sort of wicked prestige which was not without its fascination in the eyes of the peaceful, unadventurous population of Gondriac. Caboff had a wife and three sons; the two eldest were away fighting with Bonaparte on the Rhine; Marcel, the youngest, was at home. A shy, awkward lad, he kept aloof from the village boys, never went bird’s-nesting or fishing with them, but moped like an owl up in his weather-beaten home. They were unsocial people, the Caboffs; they never asked any one inside their door; but the few who accidentally penetrated within the Fortress told wonderful stories of what they saw there; they talked of silken hangings and Persian carpets, and mirrors and pictures in golden frames, and marble men and maidens writhing and dancing in fantastic attitudes; of costly cabinets and jewelled vases, until the old corsair’s abode was believed to be a sort of enchanted castle. The stray visitors were too dazzled to notice certain things that jarred on this profuse magnificence. They did not notice that the damp had eaten away the gilded cornices, and the rats nibbled freely at the rich carpets, or that Jean Caboff smoked his pipe in a high-backed wooden chair, while Mme. Caboff cut out her home-spun linen on a stout deal table, the two forming a quaint and not unpicturesque contrast to the silken splendor of their surroundings.
Some five miles inland, beyond a wide stretch of gorse-grown moor, rose a wood, chiefly of pine-trees, and within the wood, a castle—a fine old Gothic castle where the De Gondriacs had dwelt for centuries. The castle and its owners, their grandeur and state and power, were the pride of the country, every peasant along the coast for fifty miles knew the history of the lords of Gondriac as well as, mayhap sometimes better than, he knew his catechism. The family at present consisted of Rudolf, Marquis de Gondriac, and his son Hermann. The Marquis was a hale man of sixty; Hermann a handsome lad of eighteen, who was at college now in Paris, so that M. le Marquis had no company but his books and his gun in the long autumn days. He was a silent, haughty man, who lived much alone and seldom had friends to stay with him. When Hermann was at home the aspect of the place changed; the château opened its doors with ancient hospitality, and laughter and music woke up the echoes of the old halls, and the village was astir as if a royal progress had halted on the plain; but when Hermann departed things fell back into the stagnant life he had stirred for a moment. It was natural that the young man’s holidays were eagerly looked forward to at Gondriac. But one August came, and, instead of returning home, Hermann joined a regiment that was on its way to the frontier. He went off in high-hearted courage as to the fulfilment of his boyish dreams. M. le Marquis, who had himself served in the guards of the Comte d’Artois, was proud of his son, of his soldier-like bearing and manly spirit, and kept the anguish of his own heart well out of sight as he bade the boy farewell. “I will come back a marshal of France, father,” was Hermann’s good-by.
Not long after his departure tidings were received of the death of Hugues Caboff, the old pirate’s eldest son. He had fallen gloriously on the field of battle; but glory is a sorry salve for broken hearts, and there was weeping in the Fortress that day—a mother weeping and refusing to be comforted. Old Jean Caboff bore his grief with an attempt at stoicism that went far to soften men’s hearts towards him—farther than his gold, which they said was ill-got, and his charity, which they called ostentation.
“Who may tell what will come next?” said Peltran, the host of the village inn.
“They say that M. le Marquis has been over to see the Caboffs,” said a customer, who dropped in to discuss the event. People felt for the Caboffs, but, there was no denying it, this sad news was a break in the dull monotony of Gondriac life.