Henry Pratt Fairchild

“ Not only is it an error to suppose that all immigrants are filthy, but it is also untrue that all immigrants who are filthy are so from choice. While the standards of decency and cleanliness of many of our immigrant races are undoubtedly much below those of the natives, there are many alien families who would gladly live in a different manner, did not the very conditions of their existence seem to thrust this one upon them, or the hardship and sordidness of their daily life quench whatever native ambition for better things they might originally have had. ”

“ Assistance to emigrants is often furnished, not by well-disposed friends and relatives, but by loan-sharks, whose motives are wholly selfish, and whose sole aim is to secure usurious rates of interest for sums advanced, which are amply protected by mortgages.
As a result of this complex of motives and forces, America has become a household word even to the remote corners of Europe, and he who wishes, for any reason, to stir up emigration from any region finds a fertile field already prepared for him. It is amazing to find how much an ignorant Greek peasant knows about conditions in America. ”

“ If the American workman happens to be a foreigner, it is just as important for the welfare of the nation, and of humanity, that he be properly housed, fed, clothed, 309educated, and amused as if he were a native. We would still have to face the fact of a standard continually retarded by accessions of newcomers, representing ever lower economic strata. Can we afford, as a nation, to allow the standard of living of the workman, whoever he is, to suffer in this way? ”

“ A conquest is almost the reverse of an invasion. In this case the people of higher culture take the aggressive. It is an overflow of civilization, of manners, of organization, of government,—not to any great extent, of population. Conquest occurs when a well-developed state, full of vigor, sends its armies over the territory of less advanced peoples, imposing its political system upon 15them, and laying them under tribute, but not slaying the people or destroying their wealth any more than is necessary to secure subjection. ”

“ To cut off, therefore, or to discourage its influx, will be to check the current from which our very life is drawn. The better course is evidently to welcome and provide for this tide of immigration, rather than to oppose and turn it away; to cherish the good influence it brings, and regulate the bad, rather than to trample them both under foot. What, though the population which is annually cast upon American shores is all of the filthiest and most degraded kind! ”

“ It would be foolhardy to deny that, at the present time, there are immense unassimilated elements in our population,—immigrants of the first or second generation, possibly even of the third. Every foreign-American society, be it Irish, German, Italian, Slovak, or any other, whatever its aims and purposes, is a standing evidence of a group of people who recognize certain affiliations or loyalties which are foreign to the out-and-out American. ”

“ It is hard to see how in a nation the majority of whose citizens are healthy and intelligent there can be any real shortage of labor. What there can be, is a shortage of labor at a given wage. In a prosperous community there may be industries into which a sufficient number of laborers will not go, at the wages which the promoters are originally willing to pay. But if there is an actual social need for those industries, wages will rise to a point high enough to attract a sufficient number of workers, however irksome or disagreeable the employment. ”

“ To assert that the children of foreign parents, brought up in a home made by foreigners though located in the United States, are in the end equally American with children born of native parents, and reared in a home upon which the American type is indelibly stamped, is to claim that heredity is of no account whatever, and that the only environment which has weight is that rather vague environment of “country.” It is to say that a man’s character is solely the result of the region in which he lives, without reference to either birth or breeding. ”

“ The one great assimilative agency, which is continually cited as the hope of the coming generation of the foreign-born, is the American public school. It certainly is a tremendous force in the right direction, and its possibilities are immeasurable. Yet even the public school is not a panacea for all ills. It cannot take the place of both birth and home training. During the hours that the pupils are in school, a wise and tactful teacher can instill many of the principles of Americanism into their minds. ”

“ The limits of the family group are not now determined by the amount of bare necessaries which are essential for the preservation of life—probably they never were absolutely—but rather by the amount of advantages which are required to keep the family in the social stratum to which it belongs or to which the parents aspire, either for themselves or for their children. Particularly is this true in a democratic country like the United States, where social position depends not so much on rank or birth, as on wealth and education, both of which are attainable by effort and sacrifice. ”

“ The life of man is closely bound up with his environment, and a change of environment is a momentous event. As a result, there is a marked inertia, a resistance to pressure, among human beings, and the presumption is that people will stay where they are, unless some positive force causes them to move. And no trivial occasion will suffice.
This force, which results in movement, may be a very complex one, but in general it must present one of two aspects—it must be either attractive or repellent. Men are either drawn or driven to break the ties which bind them to their native locality. ”

“ Here, of all places, eternal vigilance on the part of the better classes of society is the price of safety. Descriptions of the homes of the foreign-born are full of accounts of dark and absolutely unventilated bedrooms, houses unprovided with any water supply, filthy outdoor closets and privy vaults, toilets used by ten or twelve families conjointly, buildings covering the entire lot, dooryards flooded with stagnant water and refuse, basements half filled with water, domestic animals sharing the limited accommodations with the family, and a host of other horrors. ”

“ It will not do to assume, as is sometimes done apparently, that mere residence in the United States is enough to make Americans of foreign immigrants or their children. America is something more than merely a section of the earth’s surface. It is a set of standards, customs, ideals, institutions, mores, embodied and personified in a group of people. ”