Year: 1896
Source: Quoted in "The Railroad Trainman", Volume 30
It is not necessary to enter into a discussion of the economic side of the general policy of restricting immigration. In this direction the argument is unanswerable. If we have any regard for the welfare, the wages, or the standard life of American workingmen, we should take immediate steps to restrict foreign immigration. There is no danger, at present to all events, to our workingmen from the coming of skilled mechanics or trained and educated men with a settled occupation or pursuit, for immigration of this class will never seek to lower the American standard of life and wages. On the contrary, they desire the same standard for themselves. But there is an appalling danger to the American wage-earner from the flood of low, unskilled, ignorant foreign labor which has poured into the country for some years past, and which not only takes lower wages, but accepts a standard of life and living so low that the American workingman cannot compete with it.
The injury of unrestricted immigration to American wages and American standards of living is sufficiently plain and is bad enough, but the danger which this immigration threatens to the quality of our citizenship is far worse. That which it concerns us to know and that which is more vital to us as a people than all possible questions of tariff or currency is whether the quality of our citizenship is endangered by the present course and character of immigration to the United States. To determine this question we must look into the history of our race.
How, then, has the English-speaking race, which today controls so large a part of the earth's surface, been formed? Great Britain and Ireland at the time of the Roman conquest were populated by Celtic tribes. After the downfall of the Roman empire these tribes remained in possession of the islands with probably but very slight infusion of Latin blood. Then came what is commonly known as the Saxon invasion. Certain North German tribes, own brothers to those other tribes which swept southward and westward over the whole Roman empire, crossed the English Channel and landed in the corner of England known as the Isle of Thanet. They were hard fighters, pagans and adventurers. They swept over the whole of England and the lowlands of Scotland. A few British words like basket, relating to domestic employments, indicate that only women of the conquered race, and not many of those, were spared. The extermination was fierce and thorough. The native Celts were driven back into the highlands of Scotland and to the edge of the sea in Cornwall and Wales, while all the rest of the land became Saxon.
The conquerors established themselves in their new country, were converted to Christianity, and began to advance in civilization. Then came a fresh wave from the Germanic tribes. This time it was the Danes. They were of the same blood as the Saxons, and the two kindred races fought hard for the possession of England until the last comers prevailed and their chiefs reached the throne. Then in 1066 there was another invasion, this time from the shores of France. But the new invaders and conquerors were not Frenchmen. As Carlyle says, they were only Saxons who spoke English. A hundred years before, these Normans, or Northmen, northernmost of all the Germanic tribes, had descended on Europe. They were the most remarkable of all the people who poured out of the Germanic forests. They came upon Europe in their long, low ships, a set of fighting pirates and buccaneers, and yet these same pirates brought with them out of the darkness and cold of the north a remarkable literature and a strange and poetic mythology. Wherever they went they conquered, and wherever they stopped they set up for themselves dukedoms, principalities, and kingdoms.
To them we owe the marvels of Gothic architecture, for it was they who were the great builders and architects of medieval Europe. They were great military engineers as well and revived the art of fortified defense, which had been lost to the world. They were great statesmen and great generals, and they had only been in Normandy about a hundred years when they crossed the English Channel, conquered the country, and gave to England for many generations to come her kings and nobles. But the Normans in their turn were absorbed or blended with the great mass of the Danes and the still earlier Saxons. They had different names and spoke different dialects, but their characteristics were the same. And so this Germanic people, assimilating more or less and absorbing to a greater or less degree their neighbors of the northern and western Celtic fringe, with an occasional fresh infusion from their own brethren who dwelt in the low sea-girt lands at the mouths of the Scheldt and Rhine. In the course of the centuries these people were welded together and had made a new speech and a new race, with strong and well-defined qualities, both mental and moral.
When the Reformation came this work was pretty nearly done, and after that great movement had struck off the shackles from the human mind the English-speaking people were ready to come forward and begin to play their part in a world where the despotism of the church had been broken, and where political despotism was about to enter on its great struggle against the forces of freedom.
This period, when the work of centuries which had resulted in the making of the English people was complete, and when they were entering upon their career of world conquest, is of peculiar interest to us. Then it was that from the England of Shakespeare, and Bacon, and Raleigh, and later from the England of Pym, and Hampden, and Cromwell, and Milton, Englishmen fared north across the great ocean to the North American continent. The first Englishmen to come and to remain here settled on the James river, and there laid the foundation of the great state of Virginia. The next landed much farther to the north.
At the period of these two English settlements, and just about the same time, the Dutch settled at the mouth of the Hudson and the Swedes upon the Delaware. Both, be it remembered, were of the same original race stock as the English settlers of Virginia and New England, who were destined to be so predominant in the North American colonies. At the close of the seventeenth century and during the eighteenth there came to America three other migrations of people sufficiently numerous to be considered in estimating the races from which the colonists were derived. These were the Scotch-Irish, the Germans, and the French Huguenots. The Scotch-Irish, as they are commonly called with us, were immigrants from the north of Ireland.
They were chiefly descendants of Cromwell's soldiers, who had been settled in Ulster and of the Lowland Scotch, who had come to the same region. They were the men who made the famous defense of Londonderry against James II., and differed in no essential respect either of race or language from the English, who had preceded them in America. Some of them settled in New Hampshire, but most of them in the western part of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. They were found in all the colonies in a greater or less degree, and were a vigorous body of men, who have contributed very largely to the upbuilding of the United States and played a great part in our history.
The German immigrants were the Protestants of the Palatinate, and they settled in large numbers in western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. The Huguenots, although not very numerous, were a singularly fine body of people. They had shown the highest moral qualities in their long struggle for religious freedom. They had faced war, massacre, and had never wavered in their constancy to the creed in which they believed. Harried and driven out of France by Louis XIV., they had sought refuge in Holland and England, and in the new world. They were to be found in this country in all our colonies, and everywhere they became a most valuable addition to our population.
Such, then, briefly, were the people composing the colonies when we faced England in the war for independence. It will be observed that with the exception of the Huguenot French, who formed but a small percentage of the total population, the people of the 13 colonies were all of the same original race stocks. The Dutch, the Swedes, and the Germans simply blended again with the English-speaking tribes whom Caesar fought and Tacitus described.
During the present century down to 1875, there have been three large migrations to this country in addition to the always steady stream from Great Britain; one came from Ireland about the middle of the century, and somewhat later one from Germany and one from Scandinavia, in which is included Sweden, Denmark and Norway. The Irish, although of a different race stock originally, have been closely associated with the English-speaking people for nearly a thousand years. They speak the same language, and during that long period the two races have lived side by side, and to some extent intermarried.
The Germans and Scandinavians are again people of the same race stock as the English who founded and built up the colonies. During this century, down to 1875, then, as in the two which preceded it, there had been scarcely any immigration to this country, except from kindred or allied races and no other, which was sufficiently numerous to have produced any effect on the national characteristics, or to be taken into account here. Since 1875, however, there has been a great change. While the people who for 250 years have been migrating to America have continued to furnish large numbers of immigrants to the United States, other races of totally different race origin, with whom the English-speaking people have never hitherto been assimilated or brought in contact, have suddenly begun to immigrate to the United States in large numbers. Russians, Hungarians, Poles, Bohemians, Italians, Greeks, and even Asiatics, whose immigration to America was almost unknown 20 years ago, have during the last 20 years poured in in steadily increasing numbers, until now they nearly equal the immigration of those races kindred by whom the United States has hitherto been built up and the American people formed.
This momentous fact is the one which confronts us today, and if continued, it carries with it future consequences far deeper than any other event of our times. It involves, in a word, nothing less than the possibility of a great and perilous change in the very fabric of our race. The English-speaking race, as I have shown, has been made slowly during the centuries. Nothing has happened thus far radically to change it here. In the United States, after allowing for the variations produced by new climatic influences and changed conditions of life and of political institutions, it is still in the great essentials fundamentally the same race.
The additions in this country until the present time have been from kindred people from those with whom we have been long allied and who speak the same language. By those who look at this question superficially we hear it often said that the English-speaking people, especially in America, are a mixture of races. Analysis shows that the actual mixture in the English-speaking race is very small, and that while the English-speaking people are derived through different channels, no doubt, there is among them none the less an overwhelming preponderance of the same race stock, that of the great Germanic tribes who reached from Norway to the Alps. They have been welded together by more than 1,000 years of wars, conquests, migrations, and struggles, both at home and abroad, and in so doing they have attained a fixity and definiteness of national character unknown to any other people.
Let me quote on this point a disinterested witness of another race and another language, M. Gustave Le Bon, a distinguished French writer of the highest scientific training and attainments, who says in his very remarkable book on the "Evolution of Races":
"Most of the historic races of Europe are still in process of formation, and it is important to realize this fact in order to understand their history. The English alone represent a race almost entirely fixed. In them the ancient Briton, the Saxon and the Norman have been effaced to form a new and very homogeneous type."
It being admitted, therefore, that a historic race of fixed type has been developed, it remains to consider what this means, what a race is, and what a change would portend. That which identifies a race and sets it apart from others is not to be found merely or ultimately in its physical appearance, its institutions, its law, its literature, or even its language. These are in the last analysis only the expression of the evidence of the race.
The achievements of the intellect pass easily from land to land and from people to people. The telephone, invented but yesterday, is used today in China, in Australia, or in South Africa as freely as in the United States. The book which the press today gives to the world in English is scattered tomorrow throughout the earth in every tongue, and the thoughts of the writer become the property of mankind.
You can take a Hindu and give him the highest education the world can afford. He has a keen intelligence. He will absorb the learning of Oxford, he will acquire the manners and habits of England, he will sit in the British Parliament, but you can not make him an Englishman. Yet he, like his conqueror, is of the great Indo-European family. But it has taken 6,000 years and more to create the differences which exist between them. You cannot efface those differences thus made, by education in a single life, because they do not rest upon the intellect.
What, then, is the matter of race which separates the Englishman from the Hindu and the American from the Indian? It is something deeper and more fundamental than anything which concerns the intellect. We all know it instinctively, although it is so impalpable that we can scarcely define it, and yet is so deeply marked that even the physiological differences between the Negro, the Mongol, and the Caucasian are not more persistent or more obvious.
When we speak of a race, then, we do not mean its expressions in art or in language. We mean the moral and intellectual characters, which in their association represent the product of all its past, the inheritance of all its ancestors, and the motive of all its conduct. The men of each race possess an indestructible stock of ideas, traditions, sentiments, modes of thought, an unconscious inheritance from their ancestors, upon which argument has no effect. What make a race are their mental and, above all, their moral characteristics, the slow growth and accumulation of centuries of toil and conflict. These are the qualities which determine their social efficiency as a people, which make one race rise and another fall, which we draw out of a dim past through many generations of ancestors, about which we can not argue, but in which we blindly believe, and which guide us in our generation as they have guided the race itself across the centuries.
Such achievements as M. Le Bon credits us with are due to the qualities of the American people, whom he, as a man of science looking below the surface, rightly describes as homogeneous. Those qualities are moral far more than intellectual, and it is on the moral qualities of the English-speaking race that our history, our victories, and all our future rest. There is only one way in which you can lower those qualities or weaken those characteristics, and that is by breeding them out. If a lower race mixes with a higher in sufficient numbers, history teaches us that the lower race will prevail. The lower race will absorb the higher, not the higher the lower, when the two strains approach equality in numbers. In other words, there is a limit to the capacity of any race for assimilating and elevating an inferior race, and when you begin to pour in in unlimited numbers people of alien or lower races of less efficiency and less moral force, you are running the greatest risk that a people can run.
The lowering of a great race means not only its own decline but that of civilization. M. Le Bon sees no danger to us in immigration, and his reason for this view is one of the most interesting things he says. He declares that the people of the United States will never be injured by immigration, because the moment they see the peril the great race instinct will assert itself and shut the immigration out. The reports of the treasury for the last 15 years show that the peril is at hand. I trust that the prediction is true and that the unerring instinct of the race will shut the danger out, as it closed the door upon the coming of the Chinese.
That the peril is not imaginary or the offspring of race prejudice, I will prove by another disinterested witness, also a Frenchman. M. Paul Bourget, the distinguished novelist, visited this country a few years ago and wrote a book containing his impressions of what he saw. He was not content, as many travelers are, to say that our cabs were high-priced, the streets of New York noisy, the cars hot, and then feel that he had disposed of the United States and the people thereof for time and for eternity.
M. Bourget saw here a great country and a great people; in other words, a great fact in modern times. Our ways were not his ways, nor our thoughts his thoughts, and he probably liked his own country and his own ways much better, but he none the less studied us carefully and sympathetically. What most interested him was to see whether the socialistic movements, which now occupy the alarmed attention of Europe, were equally threatening here. His conclusion, which I will state in a few words, is of profound interest. He expected to find signs of a coming war of classes, and he went home believing that if any danger threatened the United States it was not from a war of classes, but a war of races.
More precious even than forms of government are the mental and moral qualities which make what we call our race. While those stand unimpaired all is safe. When those decline all is imperiled. They are exposed to but a single danger, and that is by changing the quality of our race and citizenship through the wholesale infusion of races whose traditions and inheritances, whose thoughts and whose beliefs are wholly alien to ours and with whom we have never assimilated or even been associated in the past.
The danger has begun. It is small as yet, comparatively speaking, but it is large enough to warn us to act while there is yet time and while it can be done easily and efficiently. There lies the peril at the portals of our land; there is pressing the tide of unrestricted immigration. The time has certainly come, if not to stop, at least to check, to sift and to restrict those immigrants. In careless strength, with generous hand, we have kept our gates wide open to all the world. If we do not close them, we should at least place sentinels beside them to challenge those who would pass through. The gates which admit men to the United States and to citizenship in the great republic should no longer be left unguarded.