Howard B. Grose

“ The supine bowing of the native element in our political parties to this foreign, domineering, un-American and denationalizing opposition to the state control of the education of the child for citizenship is in itself a menace. When we hear of public schools in America taught in German and Polish, instead of the language of Emerson and Longfellow, Lincoln and Grant, one feels like taking, not Diogenes' lantern, but an Edison searchlight, and going about our streets to see if there be in all our cities a patriot. ”

“ It is not a question as to whether the aliens will come. They have come, millions of them; they are now coming, at the rate of a million a year. They come from every clime, country, and condition; and they are of every sort: good, bad, and indifferent, literate and illiterate, virtuous and vicious, ambitious and aimless, strong and weak, skilled and unskilled, married and single, old and young, Christian and infidel, Jew and pagan. They form to-day the raw material of the American citizenship of to-morrow. ”

“ And why are these helpless children thus engaged and enslaved, stunted, crippled, and corrupted, deprived of education and a fair chance in life? Simply because their labor is cheap. Mr. Hunter speaks none too strongly when he calls this "murder, cannibalism, destruction of soul and body." And it is the children of the immigrants who are thus sacrificed to Mammon, the pitiless god of greed. Shall our Christian young people have no voice in righting this wrong? Within a generation they can put an end to it, if they will. ”

“ First impressions count tremendously, and happy is it for the immigrant who gets this initial impression from contact with a Christian missionary instead of a street sharper. Once put the touch of human kindness upon the immigrant and he is not likely to forget it. The hour of homesickness, of strangeness in a strange land, of perplexity and trouble, is the hour of hours when sympathy and help come most gratefully. The missionaries are on hand at this critical juncture. Thousands of immigrants are saved from falling into bad hands and evil associations through their zealous efforts. ”

“ Nothing is so perilous in a democracy as ignorance and indifference. It is far better for men to disagree thoughtfully than to agree thoughtlessly. What all patriotic and Christian men seek is the best good of this country, which means so much to the whole world as the supreme experiment of self-government. That the people are awakening was shown by the Immigration Conference in New York in December of 1905, when five hundred men, most of them appointed by their state governors, gathered under the auspices of the National Civic Federation to discuss the whole question of immigration. ”

“ No parents are more ambitious for their children, or more devotedly attached to them, than are the Italian immigrants who have brought over their families, and no children in our schools are brighter or more attentive. There is good blood in the Italian strain. They are an art and music-loving people, and in this respect the southern Italians take the lead. They come from a land of beauty and fame, song and sunshine, and bring a sunny temperament not easily soured by hardship or disappointment. Otherwise the tenement and labor-camp experiences in America would soon spoil them. ”

“ If the hope which this country holds out to the human race of permanent and stable government is to be impaired by the enormous and unregulated inroad of poverty and ignorance, which changed conditions of transportation have brought upon us, then for the sake of Europe, as well as for the sake of America, the coming of these people should be checked and regulated until we can handle the problems that are already facing us.—Phillips Brooks. ”

“ Children become American to the extent that they do not like to have it known that they have foreign parents. One little girl of German parentage said of her teacher: "She's a lady—she can't speak German at all." Where assimilation is slow, it is quite as likely to be the fault of the natives as of the immigrants, much more likely, indeed. How can he learn American ways who is carefully and rudely excluded from them? We build a Chinese wall of exclusiveness around ourselves, our churches, and communities, and then blame the foreigner for not forcing his way within. ”

“ As to the economic effects of unrestricted immigration, the stock argument that it costs a foreign country a thousand dollars to raise a man, and that, therefore, every immigrant is that much clear money gain to this country, simply begs the question of the usefulness of the immigrant and the country's need of him. Many immigrants are not worth what it cost to raise them, to their native land or any other; and at any rate, a man is only of value where he can fit into the community life and do something it needs to have done. ”

“ American prosperity has been feeding and paying taxes for millions of people who owe far more to our government than to their own, and foreign governments have been reaping the benefit. The United States has a small standing army of its own, but through the gold sent abroad by the alien wage earners here we have been helping maintain the vast armaments of Europe. The letters and the money sent by immigrants to the home folks awaken the desires and dreams that mean more immigrants. The United States Post-office is a marvelous immigration agent in Europe. ”

“ At last the voyage is done, your steamship lies at her pier, and you are thrust into the midst of distractions. Families are trying to keep together; the din is indescribable; crying babies add to the general confusion of tongues; all sorts of people with all sorts of baggage are making ready for the landing, which seems a long time off as you wait for the customs officers to get through with the first-class passengers. At last word is given to go ashore, and the procession or pushing movement rather begins. You are hurried along, up a companionway, lugging your hand baggage ”

“ Think of it, young people of Christian America! In the twentieth century, in the country we like to think the most enlightened in the world, after all our boasted advancements in civilization, child slavery—more pitiful in some respects than African slavery ever was—has its grip on the nation's childhood. ”

“ These are the words of a Russian Jew; and that Russian is a better American, that Jew is a better Christian, than many a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers.
In this country every man is an American who has American ideals, the American spirit, American conceptions of life, American habits. A man is foreign not because he was born in a foreign land, but because he clings to foreign customs and ideas.
I do not fear foreigners half so much as I fear Americans who impose on them and brutally abuse them. ”

“ You will see the Italian gangs cleaning the streets, the Irish will control the motor of your trolley-car and collect your fares, the policeman will be Irish or German, the waiters where you dine will be French or German, Italian or English, the clerks in the vast majority of the shopping places will be foreign, the people you meet will constantly remind you of the rarity of the native American stock. You are ready to believe the statement that there are in New York more persons of German descent than of native descent, and more Germans than in any city of Germany except Berlin. ”

“ When we permit such an environment to exist, and practically force the immigrant into it because we do not want him for a next-door neighbor, we can hardly condemn him for forming foreign colonies which maintain foreign customs and are impervious to American influences. It has too long been the common practice to lay everything to the foreigner. Would it not be fairer and more Christian to distribute the blame, and assume that part of it which belongs to us. ”

“ What will he learn of our free institutions—in the tenement slums or labor camps or from the "bosses" who treat him as cattle—that will teach him to prize American citizenship, desire religious liberty, or lead a sober, respectable life? If we are in earnest about the evangelization of the immigrant we must put ourselves in his place occasionally and get his point of view. When we think fairly and rightly of the immigrant, and treat him in real Christian wise, he will soon come to think of us that our religion is real, and this will be a long step toward the change we desire him to undergo. ”

“ American patriotism must steadily and resolutely resist every Roman Catholic attack, open or covert, upon our public schools, every attempt to divert public moneys to sectarian purposes. This is vital to the preservation of our civil and religious liberty. For the immigrant children the public schools are the sluiceways into Americanism. When the stream of alien childhood flows through them, it will issue into the reservoirs of national life with the Old World taints filtered out, and the qualities retained that make for loyalty and good citizenship. ”

“ To believe that this makes no particular difference so far as the development of our national life is concerned is to shut one's eyes to obvious facts. As such an impartial and intelligent student of our institutions as Mr. James Bryce has pointed out, the conspicuous failure of democracy in America thus far is seen in the bad government of our great cities. And it is in these centers that the mass of the immigrants learn their first and often last lessons of American life. ”

“ It has been forever established that foreigners are as convertible as our own people, that in many instances their faith is more pure and evangelical than the American type, that their lives are transformed by its power to an extent that sometimes puts the American Christian to shame, that their children are easily gathered into Sunday-schools, their young people into Endeavor Societies, and their men and women into prayer-meetings, where in many different tongues they yet speak and pray in the language of Canaan. The immigration problem is not the same menace that it was. ”

“ There is a growing conviction that something ought to be done to check the present enormous inflow of immigrants. But when it comes to what that something is, difficulties at once arise. There are so many foreigners already in America, and so many children of foreign-born parents, that it is impossible to touch the stream at any point without protest from some source. As some one says, "You do not have to go very far back in the family line of any of us to find an immigrant. Scratch an American and you find a foreigner." ”

“ The subject of immigration is the most far-reaching in importance of all those with which this government has to deal. The history of the world offers no precedent for our guidance, since no such peaceful invasion of alien peoples has ever before occurred. It must have great and largely unforeseen effects upon our form of civilization, our social and political institutions, and, above all, upon the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of our people. ”

“ To the immigrants the city is a magnet. Here they find colonies of their own people, and prize companionship more than comfort. "Folks is more company than stumps," said an old woman in the slums to Dr. Schauffler. In the great cities the immigrants are massed, and this constitutes a most perplexing problem. If tens of thousands of foreigners could somehow be gotten out of New York, Boston, Chicago, and other cities, and be distributed where they are needed and could find work and homes, immigration would cause far less anxiety. ”