The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and FlowSteiner, Edward Alfred
History
The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow
Steiner, Edward Alfred
United States -- Emigration and immigration
It would be an insult to my readers to try to make clear to them that
the people who come to us are not barbarians or semi-barbarians;
although as a rule they are uncultured and not yet in harmony with many
of our ideals. I would not even attempt to mention this, were it not for
the fact that it is the commonly accepted idea, that we are dealing with
the offscouring of Europe. Let me illustrate. Not very long ago, I heard
a home missionary secretary of a certain denomination say before an
audience of intelligent, Christian people, that "We are landing annually
a million paupers and criminals"; and I venture to say that nearly every
one who heard that statement believed it. Let us see who these people
are who come to us.
Slavs, Latins and other Aryan groups, such as Lithuanians, Albanians,
and Greeks; of whom the first two have fairly earned the right to be
called the oldest inhabitants of the continent of Europe. Next in order
are Finns and Magyars, from among the Ugru-Altaic races, Jews and some
smaller Semitic groups. The bulk is made up of Slavs, Latins and Semitic
peoples.
Need I question whether the Latin has in him the qualities which will
enable him to appreciate our culture? The Italian who built Florence,
whose sons built St. Peter's, painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
and carved out of Carrara marble the "Pieta" and the statue of Moses?
Need I mention Giotto, the builder, Raphael, the painter, a Dante, a
Petrarch, a Savonarola--a hundred masters of the chisel and the brush,
of rhythmic rhyme and stately prose, all reared in that Garden of
Europe, Italy?
Will the Jew learn to appreciate that culture, the best of which was
created by his sires? For the glory of our American culture lies in the
quality of its manhood and womanhood and that at its best is patterned
after men and women whose names would debar them from certain clubs and
hotels to-day. Moses, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and in all
reverence I mention Jesus and Mary, John, Paul and Peter. Strange to
say, it is sometimes necessary to call the attention of intelligent
people to the fact that these men and women were not Methodists or
Presbyterians or even Episcopalians; and that neither their sires nor
their sons came over in the _Mayflower_.
Perhaps we need to realize that as Americans we have neither invented
nor discovered education, liberty or religion. What we have accomplished
is, that we have made gifts to the many, of some of those blessings
which in the immigrants' country are the possession only of the few; and
that is no small achievement.
The problem, the real problem, is: how to feed these people on truly
vital knowledge, how to make common to all, the beautiful, the
harmonious, the ethical; how to bring to all, the knowledge of that
religion which indeed makes free from tribal pride and racial hate and
leads men into the freedom of the sons of God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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