Stephen Graham

“ It is so in earnest about the future of America that it has set up what is almost an insult to Europe—the examination of Ellis Island. Any one who has gone through the ordeal of the poor emigrant, as I did, going into America with a party of poor Russians in the steerage, and has been medically examined and clerically cross-questioned about his life and ethics, knows that America is a materialist and progressive country, and that she is no longer a harbour of refuge for the weak, but a place where a nation is determined to have health and strength and prosperity. ”

“ It is not the development of a race, as is our own British progress in Great Britain, but something which seems rather novel in the history of mankind, the making of a new democracy. It is not a Gladstone or a Bismarck or an Alexander the Liberator, who is leading this development that I have called a Choir Dance, not a Lincoln or a Roosevelt or a Wilson. Men have only their parts to play in the making of a democracy; if they could make it all by themselves, or originate the making, or achieve the making, it would not be a democracy that they were making. ”

“ The enormous freight trains told their tale of the internal trade of America; on no other lines of railway in the world could you witness such processions of produce. All sorts of things flew past on these lumberous trains—cars full of hogs with hundreds of motionless black snouts poking between the bars; refrigerator cars full of ham—dead hogs, dripping and slopping water as they went along in the heat, and the sun melted the ice; cars of coal; open cars of bright glistening tin-scraps going to be molten a second time; cars of agricultural machinery ”

“ It is astonishing to witness the service of the cuspidor in a hotel, the seven or eight obese, cow-like American men, all sitting round a cuspidor and chewing tobacco; almost equally astonishing to sit in a tramcar full of American girls, and see that every jaw is moving up and down in the mastication of sweet gum.
America suffers terribly from its own success, its vastness, its great resources, its commercial scoops, its wealth, vested en masse and so vulgarly in the person of lucky or astute business men. ”

“ We know ourselves far from home, and we cannot say how far from the goal, but still very far, and there is no turning back. "Would there were," says the foolish heart. "Would I had never come away from the warm home, the mother's love, the friends who care for me, the woman who loves me, the girl who has such a lot of empty time on her hands now that I have gone away, her lover." How lonely it is on the steerage deck in the crowd of a thousand strangers, hearing a score of unknown tongues about your ears, hearing your own language so pronounced you scarce recognise it! ”

“ Close your eyes to the visible and open them to the invisible world, and you see the young man of to-day as the stem, his father as the branch, his grandfather the greater branch. You see in the shadow rising out of the earth the ancient trunk. You think of many people, and yet it is not father and grandfather, and grandfather and great-grandfather, and so on, but one tree, the name of which is the young man leafing in the world of to-day. ”

“ He basks in the sun of freedom. The sun itself seems like the all-merciful Father, the Good Shepherd who cares for each one and knows each by name, leading him out to an earthly paradise."
"That paradise is America, eh?" said I rather mockingly, and then I paused and added, "But America ought to be really a paradise; it is pathetic to think of the difference between America as the Russian thinks it to be and America as it is. It is a shame that your trusts and tariffs and corrupt police should have made America a worse place to live in than the Old World. ”

“ Russia and America are the Eastern and Western poles of thought. Russia is evolving as the greatest artistic philosophical and mystical nation of the world, and Moscow may be said already to be the literary capital of Europe. America is showing itself as the site of the New Jerusalem, the place where a nation is really in earnest in its attempt to realise the great dream of human progress. ”

“ You see in thousands of instances actions which seem to disgrace the name of America and to augur ill for her future,—women sold into evil, negroes burned at the stake, heinous crimes committed against children. But the destiny of the great choric dance cannot be thwarted by any of these things. Death is useful to life, darkness to brightness, sin to virtue—useful in a way which it is not necessary for the individual to penetrate. Each man fulfils his destiny, guides others according to his light, acts according to his inclination, temptation, and conscience. ”

“ Spending is always joyful, and Chicago is a gay city. It is full of a light-hearted people, pushing, bantering, laughing, blindfolded over their spiritual eyes. In such places as Chicago the immigrant finds a market for things he could never sell at home—his body, his nerve, his vital energy; a ready market, and he sells them and has money in his pocket and beer in plenty. Listen to the loud-voiced, God-invoking crowd in the saloons! ”

“ It surprised me to see the Sunday clothes of Sykesville, the white collars, the bright red ties, the blue serge trousers with creases, the bowler hats, and American smiles. Despite all the dirt, these new-come immigrants say Yes to American life and American hopes. But to my eyes it was a terrible place in which to live. It was an astonishing change, moreover, to pass from the magnificent loveliness of the Susquehanna gorges to this inferno of a colliery. ”

“ Every city in America has been stirring itself to get clean. Even in a remote little place like Clarion, Pa., I read on every lamp-post: "Let your slogan be 'Do it for Home, Sweet Home'—clean up!" and again in another place, "Develop your social conscience; you've got one, make the country beautiful." In New York I have handed me the following prayer, which has seemed to me like the breath of the new passion:
We pray for our sisters who are leaving the ancient shelter of the home to earn their wage in the store and shop amid the press of modern life. ”

“ What it would be like if all these foreign mercenaries were mirthless and brutal it would be loathsome to picture. But I was surprised to find such lightness, such Southern frivolity in the people. It is strange that a people, most of whom are working all day in darkness, should take life so gaily. Even when they come up to the air of the outside world it is a bad air that is theirs, vitiated by the fumes of the burning mines; for at Scranton also the coal has been on fire ten years, and the smoke rolls from the slag-coloured wastes in volumes, and diffuses itself into the general atmosphere. ”

“ There are the women who are going out to their sweethearts to be married, and the wives who are going to the husbands who have "made good"; there are the girls who have got into trouble at home and have slid away to America to hide their shame; there are girls going to be domestic servants, and girls doomed to walk the streets,—all sitting down together, equals, at a table where no grace is said but the whisper of hope which rises from each heart. ”

“ The people who are surest in instinct, though they are sympathetic to a brother-people, hate the importation of foreign uglinesses, and the substitution of foreign for local talent.
The American language is chiefly distinguished from the British by its emphatic expressive character. Britain, as I have said, lives in a tradition; America in a passion. We are laconic, accidental, inarticulate; our duty is plain, and we do it without words. But the American is affirmative, emphatic, striving; he has to find out what he's going to do next, and he has got to use strong words. ”

“ In no one particular bosom is the destiny of America; one man by himself means nothing there. It is a whole people that is living or will live. Once the foreigner parts from the waiting throngs at the side and enters the mystic dance, his own little consciousness and purpose become but a part of the much greater consciousness and purpose of the whole. ”

“ It is most bewildering to the student of America that her city-populations are replenished by the foreign immigrants, by people nursing, it is true, American sentiments, but not yet born into the American ideal, not made America's own. The natural place for the first generation of immigrants is on the land. If Chicago seems too large, too sudden a growth, disorderly, unanticipated, altogether out of hand, it is because of the hordes of foreigners who are there, who have not the impulse to co-operate, and who do not readily respond to the efforts of the idealist and politician. ”

“ In America the Americans slave; they slave for dollars, for more business, for advancement, but in the end for dollars only, I suppose. They will fill up any odd moment with some work that will bring in money. They will make others work, and take the last ounce of energy out of their employees. The machine itself is the size of America, and only in little nooks and corners can anything spring up that is not of the machine. Even millionaires know nothing more to do than to go on making millions. ”

“ America are disillusioned sooner or later, but they re-catch their dreams and illusions, and gild their memories when they set sail upon the Atlantic once more. They have become Americans, and have a stake in America, and are ready to back the New World against anything in the Old. ”

“ It has great promise for the America of the future, the America which the sons and daughters of the immigrants will inherit. The America of the future is to be one of artistically imagined cities and proud, responsible citizens. Even now, despite the unlovely state of New York and Chicago and the reputation for devastating ugliness which America has in Europe, there are clear signs of the commencement of an era of grace and order. Already the parks of the American cities are the finest in the world, and are worth much study in themselves. ”

“ But the good American young man, "the greatest asset of the town," believes this gospel, and he gives his body and mind to the great machine, and fills the gap between two otherwise disconnected mechanisms. If he has been brought up "well," he just fits the gap and is standard size. He feels in his soul every throb of the engines, and registers in his integuments every rhythm and rhyme of the great, accurate, definite, circulating, oscillating machine. He behaves like a machine in his leisure hours. ”

“ Negresses and their beaux are flirting in corners and on doorsteps. Darky boys and girls are skirling in the roadway. Smartly dressed young men, carrying canes, come giggling and pushing one another on the pavement, crying out music-hall catches—"Who was you with last night?" and the like.
You know the habitat of the Jew by the abundance of junk-shops, old-clothes shops, and offices of counsellors-at-law. It seems the Jews are very litigious, and even the poorest families go to law for their rights. You find windows full of boxing-gloves, for the Jews are great boxers in America. ”

“ There are waiting throngs cooped up in cities and at temporary standing-places.
The welter of negroes and Spaniards and half-castes in the South, in the black pale; the Swedes and Norwegians and Finns in the Middle West; the million Jews in New York; the millions of them elsewhere, saying, as Mary Antin, that America and not Judea is the Promised Land, the place where the tribes will be gathered together again and form a nation; the great Anglo-Saxon stock of America, who would feel themselves to be the leaven, the ruling principle in the choir dance; the Dutch-Americans of Pennsylvania ”

“ I had been continually asking myself, "What is America? What is this new nation? How are they different from us at home in England?" And one morning, sitting under a bush in Indiana, the answer came to me and I wrote it down. They are fundamentally people who have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and we are stay-at-homes. They are adventurous, hopeful people. They are people who have thrown themselves on the mercy of God and Nature. ”