Edward Alfred Steiner

“ The spirit of the pioneer cleaving the sky has become beautiful as it has ascended.
We are worrying a great deal about our lack of sensitiveness to beauty and form; we chide ourselves as being crude and unresponsive to art; we rush madly into the study of æsthetics and buy Old Masters at the price of a king’s ransom; yet we are not truly fostering America’s art sense. It ought not to come in the Old World’s way—by glorifying dogmas and creeds, by petrifying religion into buttresses and incasing our dead in tombs of beryl and onyx. ”

“ Silent are the usually vociferous Italians, whose glorious Mediterranean is blotted out by the sombre gray of the Atlantic; they shall not soon again see the full orbed moon shining upon the bay of Naples, sending from heaven to earth a path of silver upon which the blessed saints go up and down. In the silence of the moment there come to them the rattle of carts and the clatter of hoofs, the soft voice of a serenade and then the sweet scented silence of an Italian night. They all think, even if they have never thought much before ”

“ The villages grow more wretched as they climb away from the richer valley to the scant clearings in the mountains, where poverty, ignorance, superstition, and intemperance are the four walls which hem them in from the throbbing life of the century and shut them out from it. No one climbs the almost impassable highways except the Magyar gendarmes, who are the minions of the master race which has subdued the Roumanians, Ruthenians, and Germans within its borders, and is now hard at work to blot out the Slovaks, the feeble remnant of a once powerful people. ”

“ I knew that a great wrong was being practiced against the children of men, a wrong which must be righted;—above all, I had seen Slav, Magyar, Jew and Gentile, one in death, so much alike that a Jewish mother scarcely knew her own child; my wise mother talked it all over with me. “Yes, my boy, we are made of the same clay and I believe we have the same spirit in us, no matter what our race or faith.” “Then, mother,” I said, “if we are all alike, why do we hate each other and kill each other?” ”

“ Yes, it was the type one sees beneath the half-ruined porticoes of ancient palaces, where young men play the tambouritza and young maidens listen behind latticed windows; where old men dream dreams of the Ragusan Republic and its vanished glory, when it vied with Venice in maritime power, although it never gained her ascendency. Now it is dying a slow and a forgotten death, beneath shading palm trees, while its warrior sons, the bluest blood of Dalmatia, are sent to dig coal in Pennsylvania, and its guslar minstrels make music for the merry-makers at Coney Island. ”

“ How deep the American ideals have taken root among them, one cannot yet discern; how completely the second generation will come under their sway, how much of the old world spirit will disappear or remain, is difficult to determine. This is no time to be blindly optimistic nor hopelessly pessimistic; it is a time for facing the dangers and not fearing them; for this is the noontide of our day of grace. This is the time to bring into action the best there is in American ideals; for as we present ourselves to this mass of men, so it will become. ”

“ The synagogue was at its best on the eve of the Sabbath. Through the rusty iron gate came its Israel, the fathers and sons; the women being busy with the evening meal, the best of the week. Israel looked outwardly renewed. The Sabbath scrubbing was a religious duty; each boy showed its effects in his clean and glowing face, and he was clothed in his best garments.
How unconventionally Israel approaches its God, and how democratically! There is a ceremonial rigidly adhered to, but each man follows it as he pleases, without regard to harmony or order. ”

“ I drew into the conspiracy dear friends, alumni of the different institutions, who knew every blade of grass on each respective campus, over which they walked proudly and reverently. To find one university tucked away in a village, another defying the grime and noise of a growing city which crowded upon it; one still retaining its air of exclusive dignity in spite of its garish surroundings, while a fourth was nearly swamped by the culture-hungry children of immigrants, yet remained triumphantly American, was new enough and startling enough to keep my guests on the heights. ”

“ Something has so wrought upon me that in spite of the fact that I came to this country in my young manhood, I look upon America as my Fatherland. That same power is still active; still strong enough to repeat the miracle of the yesterday; for I am no better than these millions who are regarded as a menace. I came here with the same blood as theirs and the same heritage of good or ill, bequeathed by my race; yet I feel myself completely one with all which this country possesses, that is worth living for and dying for. ”

“ Yes, Signor, many have gone to America and have come back, and will go again; but, Signor, that must be a bad country, a wild country. They come home and walk carelessly up and down the Stradona, the finest street in the world, every house a palace—and they talk of it with disrespect! ”

“ I can say that in spite of the fact that my native country precipitated the conflict, I felt no thrill of patriotism when Austrian troops invaded Serbia, and frequently wonder whether I have not suffered some moral deterioration, because through all these stirring times I have remained fairly rational. I have never condoned Austria’s treatment of the Slavs, nor Germany’s invasion of Belgium; I have not gloried in their victories, but I have suffered alike for all my fellow mortals who are involved in this most disastrous conflict. I know myself always human first, and a loyal American next. ”

“ CONCLUSION WHAT has my own race bequeathed to me? What do I owe to Slav, Magyar, German and Anglo-Saxon? What has the synagogue done for me, what the church with the cross, or the church with the weather-vane?
From somewhere I have a passion for the human. Shall I say this is Jewish?
I saw that passion demonstrated in my Jewish teacher, whose grave is level with the ground in the old God’s Acre; I believe that the Slavic candy-maker—the by-product of whose trade and the remnants of whose library I purchased—possessed it. ”

“ The padre and madre were there, and a throng of brothers and sisters and relatives, who greeted the travellers with noisy and affectionate salutations.
Bessie’s madre held her at arm’s length at first, as if to be sure that this fine Signorina was really the little girl she left behind in New York twelve years ago. Ah, me! It was a love-hungry heart to which Bessie was pressed. And the boys! What pride shone on the father’s face! Any father might be proud of them, and I was prouder than the father.
“See what America does for your men!” ”

“ What a nation we should be if we would take the Hungarian’s devotion to his native land and make it burn with just such a true fire upon the altar of this country; and finally, if we would mingle all the virtues that the nations bring us with the seriousness and loftiness of the Scandinavian’s mind and heart,—if we did this through one generation, in one city of our country we would bring the Kingdom of God down upon the earth. ”

“ They were mighty spirits who came to the edges of civilization and drove the wilderness farther and farther back by drawing furrows, sowing wheat, and planting trees—those men whom heat and a relentless desert could not separate from that other ocean with its Golden Gate to the sunset and the oldest world. Determining to have and to hold it till time is no more, they proceeded to unite the two oceans in holy wedlock. A task which involved another nation in hopeless scandal and bankruptcy, they completed with as little ceremony as that which prevails at a wedding before a justice of the peace. ”

“ Hard-faced and hard-fisted men, going to the city to work and seek their fortune; women, bent nearly double by the loads upon their backs, linen and embroideries for sale among the city folk; insolent young men surrounding young girls who bravely resisted the assaults upon their purity.
I have often seen that picture since and breathed the same foul atmosphere; but never again has it been as terrible as it was that night. The mixed train for Vienna came, and when we tried to board it without tickets we were arrested as vagrants, and thrown into the town jail. ”

“ I am not at all concerned regarding the inability of the Protestant church to adjust other men to her creeds or to adjust herself to theirs; but I am deeply concerned with her inability or unwillingness to make good her professions of democracy, and to relate herself in some vital way to these new citizens who are satiated by creeds, but are hungry for brotherhood; upon whom, like a curse, rest the damp and mould of tombs and chapels, but who have been untouched by the power of the living, redeeming Christ, as He has incarnated Himself in His followers. ”

“ Coming from a country which has been at war for centuries, and in which to-day a fierce struggle between different nationalities is disrupting a great empire, and clogging the wheels of popular government, he is apt to be quarrelsome, suspicious, jealous, clannish and yet factious; he hates quickly and long, and is unreasoning in his prejudices; yet that for which a people is hated, and which we call characteristic of race or nation, soon disappears under new environment, and the miracle which America works upon the Bohemians is more remarkable than any other of our national achievements. ”

“ There came a time, however, when, in spite of my cosmopolitan nature, I felt pride of race—felt the spirit of Israel within me; and this feeling was awakened by one who, like myself, had struggled against the current, but made for himself a permanent place in the history of the Jewish race.
When first I saw this prince among men, Theodore Herzl, he stood head and shoulders above his brethren, like Saul among the sons of Kish. Around him surged a mass of enthusiastic men who hailed him as the New Moses to lead them out of their manifold captivities. ”

“ Even the constant inflow of new and more varied human material has not weakened us but indeed the sense of national unity has grown stronger. I have watched with joy the processes by which this alien element was becoming one with us, the fading away of animosities and inherited prejudices, and the making of a new people out of the world’s conglomerate.
The war has brought about a retardation of this process, and we shall have great cause for gratitude if no permanent damage is done to our nation’s spirit, a loss for which no possible gain in any direction could compensate. ”

“ Need I mention Giotto, the builder, Raphael, the painter, a Dante, a Petrarch, a Savonarola—a hundred masters of the chisel and the brush, of rhythmic rhyme and stately prose, all reared in that Garden of Europe, Italy?
Will the Jew learn to appreciate that culture, the best of which was created by his sires? For the glory of our American culture lies in the quality of its manhood and womanhood and that at its best is patterned after men and women whose names would debar them from certain clubs and hotels to-day. ”

“ When Protestantism becomes rabbinical, and when it holds or withholds the keys of Heaven, I shall feel myself as much a stranger to it as I felt to the synagogue or the cathedral. In its cry for righteousness and personal purity, in its emphasis upon a Christian democracy, in its demand for rational self-sacrifice to achieve great, social ends, it appeals to me and claims my allegiance. ”

“ They are caught by the contagious enthusiasm of our patriotism, and will outdo us; for they love America as no native can love it. Neither do I fear that they will fail us in fighting our greater battles against injustice and against corruption in high places. What I fear is that they will fight, that they will become one with the tumultuous mob, which may at any time arise and blindly demand its long deferred dividends for its share of labour, toil and suffering. ”

“ I am never ashamed to take my friends into the tenement houses, except as I am ashamed that they exist at all, with their stenches and the dearly bought space with twenty-four hours of darkness and no free access of air. Of the people who live within I am never ashamed, for they are the brave ones, to whom labor is prayer, and living a sacrifice. I like best to show off the East Side of New York on Sunday, for here it is most welcomed with its respite from labor, its chance at clean clothes, its opportunity to visit and be again something more than a machine. ”

“ THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE
BACK of Warsaw, Vienna, Naples and Palermo, with no place on the world’s map to mark their existence, are small market towns to which the peasants come from their hidden villages. They come not as is their wont on feast and fast days, with song and music, but solemnly; the women bent beneath their burdens, carried on head or back, and the men who walk beside them, less conscious than usual of their superiority. ”

“ I remember distinctly the feeling which came over me when I held that poor little waif in my arms and carried it as far as the loft in which Shimek was domiciled, while he led the goose girl who was too weak to walk alone. I then felt for the first time what I have since felt a thousand times when holding children in my arms: a joyous sense of relationship which no one can dispute and the children cannot repudiate. I hovered around that stable many a day and heard with aching heart the crying of the baby. ”

“ There were missionaries who came back from the ends of the earth where they had started centers of education, places of healing and temples of hope.
They listened to stirring messages from pulpit and platform, to the young dreams of minor poets who sang the lay of their class; to historians who reviewed the four college years as a great epoch closed; to prophets who predicted failure and success, and a golden day of jubilee to the whole weary world, when this particular class got back of it. ”

“ I have not yet seen a village in Hungary, Russia or Italy, to which any number of men has returned even after a short sojourn in America, without that community’s gaining in some ways at least. Better houses certainly were built, with more or less sanitary improvements according to the conditions under which the men or women have lived in America. It makes a vast difference whether the men have lived in mining camps or in the cities. Undoubtedly the peasant who has lived in a small American city where he could easily feel and touch its life brings home the greatest spirit of progress. ”

“ It is easy to glorify those who already wear a halo, and I felt all the emotions which one is likely to experience in the presence of one’s ideal; but the final, distinct impression which remained, strengthened rather than weakened by renewed acquaintanceship, was that I had met a man—not a Russian Count or the peasant he tried to be; not a cosmopolitan who has a touch of culture borrowed from the capitals of the world—but a man who had thrown off all antagonisms and prejudices, and was able to meet all human beings upon a high and common level. ”

“ Ten years before it was nothing except a railroad station, miles of sage-brush, rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. Now there are business blocks, embryonic sky-scrapers, a pillared post-office, a hundred-thousand-dollar hotel, a Grand Opera House, neither big enough nor good enough to boast of, numerous churches and this schoolhouse. It is not only a place in which boys and girls learn the “three R’s,” but has a finely equipped gymnasium, a chemical laboratory and a Domestic Science department. It is a center of education and recreation, not only for that town, but for the surrounding country. ”

“ The Italian is sick and sore because the Church which has so long been his physician, acknowledges no error, and even its humble Pope will not persuade it that it must radically change its treatment; this not only for the sake of Italy but for the sake of America also. The most dangerous element which can come to us from any country, is that which comes smarting under real or fancied wrongs, committed by those who should have been its helpers and healers. Such an element Italy furnishes in a remarkably great degree, and I have no hesitation in saying that it is our most dangerous element. ”

“ The Protestants marched like soldiers, their heavy psalm-books clasped to their breasts. Thus fortified, as if by gun or bayonet, they went to the house of God, erect and defiant. Although the generation that I knew never fought for its right to worship according to the dictates of its conscience, its forefathers fought, killed and were killed; while the weather-vane turned on its rusty hinges to face the storms that raged. ”

“ I like to take my friends to the East Side of New York City. I glory in its self-respect, its brave struggle against poverty and disease, its bright children filling all the available space and asserting their childhood by playing in the busy street, defying its noisy traffic. They make of each hurdy-gurdy the center of a great festival, dancing as the elves are said to dance, because it is their nature to. ”

“ Future generations will wonder at the process and will say: “A new gigantic race was being born between the Atlantic and the Pacific; a race born to build or to destroy, to cry to the world, ‘Ground Arms,’ or cast it into the hell of war; a race in which are welded all kindreds of the people of the earth, or a race which will destroy itself by mutual hate.” ”

“ I cannot give up the name “Christian,” I cannot return to Judaism, although it betray weakness or even cowardice.
I feel myself born again, and I cannot undo so vital an experience unless I am overwhelmed by some great moral catastrophe.
Christianity is to me the real internationalism in which all the races and nations are one or are growing into oneness. In it the individual casts off that which is specific to his race, he becomes one with all men, and therefore one with the divine in them. ”

“ Yes, even to-day I can say with no less pride than usual that I believe in the American Spirit, in its sense of fairness and its love of justice, and while I trust that this country may be kept from so great a catastrophe as war, and I be kept from so severe a trial of my loyalty as having to choose on which side to fight, I know I would freely and unhesitatingly be on the side of my country, the United States of America. ”