Mary Antin

“ The class of men who are lured across the ocean by the golden promises of labor agents are not of the same moral order as those who are spurred to the great adventure by a desire to share in our American civilization. When we restrain the runners, we rid ourselves automatically of the least desirable element of immigration,—the hordes of irresponsible job-hunters without family who do not ask to be steered into the current of American life, and whose mission here is accomplished when they have saved up a petty fortune with which to dazzle the eyes of peasant sweethearts at home. ”

“ The early New England farmer used to carry his rifle with him in the fields, to be ready for prowling Indians, and the gutter-merchant of New York to-day is obliged to carry about the whole armory of his wits, to avert the tomahawk of competition. No less cruel than Indian chiefs to their white captives is the greedy industrial boss to the laborers whom poverty puts at his mercy; and how could you better match the wolves and foxes that prowled about the forest clearings of our ancestors than by the pack of sharpers and misinformers who infest the immigrant quarters of our cities? ”

“ Having taken half a continent in the name of humanity, shall we hold it in the name of a few millions? Not as jealous lords of a rich domain, but as priests of a noble cult shall we best acquit ourselves of the task our Fathers set us. And it is the duty of a priest to minister to as many souls as he can reach. The most revered of our living teachers has passed this word:—
It is the mission of the United States to spread freedom throughout the world by teaching as many men and women as possible in freedom’s largest home how to use freedom rightly through practice in liberty under law. ”

“ For I perceive that here, in the trial at Ellis Island, we are put to the test of the fiery furnace. It was easy to preach democracy when the privileges we claimed for ourselves no alien hordes sought to divide with us. But to-day, when humanity asks us to render up again that which we took from the English in the name of humanity, do we dare to stand by our confession of faith? Those who honor the golden images of self-interest and materialism threaten us with fearful penalties in case we persist in our championship of universal brotherhood. ”

“ In the beginning of political history, every city was a world unto itself, and labored at its own salvation behind fortified walls that shut out the rest of the world. Presently cities were merged into states, states united into confederacies, confederacies into empires. Peoples at first unknown to each other even by name came to pass in and out of each other’s territories, merging their interests, their cultures, their bloods. ”

“ If the Jewish spirit of freedom leaps from the grave of Barkochla to the hovels of the Russian ghetto, half across the world and half across the civilized era, shall we not look for similar prodigies from the more recent graves of Kosciuszko and Garibaldi? If the hook-nosed tailor can turn hero on occasion, why not the grinning organ-grinder, and the surly miner, and the husky lumber-jack? ”

“ The stench of the slums is nothing to the stench of the child-labor iniquity. If the foreigners are taking the bread out of the mouth of the American workingman, it is by the maimed fingers of their fainting little ones.
And if we want to know whether the immigrant parents are the promoters or the victims of the child labor system, we turn to the cotton mills, where forty thousand native American children between seven and sixteen years of age toil between ten and twelve hours a day, while the fathers rot in the degradation of idleness. ”

“ If it is good for the soul of this nation that we should walk in the difficult path our Fathers trod, harkening only to the inner voice, never pausing to hear the counsels of cold prudence, then assuredly it is good for us to lift up the burdens of welcoming and caring for our brothers from other lands, thus putting into fuller use the instrument of democracy the Fathers invented,—our Republic, founded to promote liberty and justice among men. ”

“ If we settle the immigration question selfishly, we shall surely pay the penalty for selfishness. And the rod will smite not our own shoulders, but the shoulders of countless innocents of our begetting.
The law that the hungry shall feed where there is plenty is not the only one which we defy when we turn away the strangers now at our gates. A narrow immigration policy is in opposition also to a primary law of evolution, the law of continuous development along a given line until a climax is reached. Now the evolution of society has been from small isolated groups to larger intermingling ones. ”

“ Week by week, month by month, year by year, the teachers pick out the brightest pupils and fasten the medals of honor on their breasts; and a startling discovery brings a cry to their lips: the children of the foreigners outclass our own! They who begin handicapped, and labor against obstacles, leave our own children far behind on the road to scholarly achievement. In the business world the same strange phenomenon is observed: conditions of life and work that would prostrate our own boys and girls, these others use as a block from which to vault to the back of prancing Fortune. ”

“ Never was the bread of freedom more keenly relished than it is to-day, by the very people of whom it is said that they covet only the golden platter on which it is served up. We may not say that immigration to our country has ceased to be a quest of the ideal as long as the immigrants lay so much stress on the spiritual accompaniment of economic elevation in America. Nobly built upon the dreams of the Fathers, the house of our Republic is nobly tenanted by those who cherish similar dreams. ”

“ Fearful questions, these, to make us pause in the work of redeeming mankind! If our Fathers did not foresee the whole future, shall we therefore be blind to the light of our own day? If they had left us a mere sketch of their idea, could we do less than fill in the outlines? Since they left us not a sketch, but a finished model, the least we can do is to go on copying it on an ever larger scale. Neither shall we falter because the execution of the enlarged copy entails much labor on us and on our children. ”

“ The more dignified way would be to restrain the captains of industry, by asserting our authority over our own citizens in matters affecting the welfare of the nation. An up-to-date mother, desiring that her little boy should not play with the scissors, would be ashamed to put them on a high shelf: she would train the boy not to touch them though they lay within his reach. Why should the assemblage of mothers and fathers who constitute the nation show less pride about their methods than a lone woman in the nursery? ”

“ Let it be understood that the men and women of exceptional intellect, who have surveyed the situation from philosophical heights, are not trumpeting forth their own high dreams alone. If they have won the ear of the American nation and shamed the indifferent and silenced the cynical, it is because they voiced the feeling of the inarticulate mob that welters in the foreign quarters of our cities. I am never so clear as to the basis of my faith in America as when I have been talking with the ungroomed mothers of the East Side. ”

“ But what is there in all this that bears on the right of free men to choose their place of residence? Granted that Sicilians are not Scotchmen, how does that affect the right of a Sicilian to travel in pursuit of happiness? Strip the alien down to his anatomy, you still find a man, a creature made in the image of God; and concerning such a one we have definite instructions from the founders of the Republic. And what purpose was served by the bloody tide of the Civil War if it did not wash away the last lingering doubts as to the brotherhood of men of different races? ”

“ They should be down on their knees washing the feet of the pilgrims to the shrine of liberty, binding up the wounds of the victims of European despotism, teaching their little foreign brothers and sisters the first steps of civilized life.
Is it preposterous to ask that those who have leisure and wealth should give of these stores when they are needed in the chief enterprise of the nation? In what does patriotism consist if not in helping our country succeed in her particular mission? ”

“ I doubt, in the first place, if it is reasonable to expect a young nation with half a continent to explore to restrain its activity, as long as there are herculean tasks in sight, any more than we would expect a boy to walk off the diamond in the middle of the game. Or if it is thought best to slacken the speed of material progress, the brakes should be applied at Wall Street, not at Ellis Island. The foreign laborer is merely the tool in the hands of the promoter, indispensable to, but not responsible for, his activities. ”

“ Nature is behind this movement; man has no power to check it permanently. We in America may, if we choose, shut ourselves up in the midst of our plenty and gorge till we are suffocated, but that will only postpone the day of a fair division of our country’s riches. We shall grow inert from fullness, drunk with the wine of prosperity, and presently some culminating folly, such as every degenerate nation sooner or later commits, will leave us at the mercy of the first comers, and our spoils will be divided among the watchers outside our gates. ”

“ Our brains, our wealth, our ambitions flow in channels dug by the hands of immigrants. Alien hands erect our offices, rivet our bridges, and pile up the proud masonry of our monuments. Ignoring in this connection the fact that the engineer as well as the laborer is often of alien race, we owe to mere muscle a measure of recognition proportionate to our need of muscle in our boasted material progress. ”

“ In the United States, where a thousand millions can live in peace and plenty under just conditions, who gives to seventy millions the right to monopolize the territory? How few can justly own the earth, and deprive those who are landless of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? And what becomes of the rights of the excluded?
If we took our mission seriously,—as seriously, say, as the Jews take theirs,—we should live with a copy of our law at our side, and oblige every man who opened his mouth to teach us, to square his doctrine with the gospel of liberty ”

“ As little virtue is there in the Declaration of Independence if we limit its operation to any geographical sphere or historical period or material situation. How do we belittle the works of our Fathers when we talk as though they wrought for their contemporaries only! It was no great matter to shake off the rule of an absent tyrant, if that is all that the War of the Revolution did. So much had been done many times over, long before the first tree fell under the axe of a New England settler. ”