They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration — John Shaqi
They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of ImmigrationAntin, Mary
History
They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration
Antin, Mary
Noncitizens -- United States; United States -- Emigration and immigration
This analogy, of course, is a vessel without a bottom unless the gospel
of the brotherhood of man is accepted as a premise of our debate. The
only logic it will hold is the logic of a practical incarnation of
the theories we loudly applaud on occasions of patriotic excitement.
That ought to be acceptable both to the poor men who like to parade
the streets with the Stars and Stripes at the head of the column and
the _Marseillaise_ on their lips, and to the rich men who subscribe
generously to soldiers' and sailors' monument funds, and who ransack
ancient chronicles to establish their connection with the heroes of the
Revolution. Let the paraders and the ancestor-worshipers unite in a
practical recognition of the rights of their belated brothers who are
seeking to enter the kingdom of liberty and justice, and they will have
given a living shape to the sentiment they symbolically honor, each in
his own way.
I am not content if the labor leaders retire from the lobby when all the
mills are running full time and shop foremen are scouring the streets
for "hands." It is no proof of our sincerity that we are indifferent in
times of plenty as to who it is that picks up the crumbs after we have
fed. They only are true Americans who, remembering that this country was
wrested from the English in the name of the common rights of humanity,
resist the temptation to insure their own soup-kettles by patrolling the
national pastures and granaries against the hungry from other lands.
Share and share alike is the motto of brotherhood.
But who will venture to preach such devotion to principle to the starved
and naked and oppressed? Why, I, even I, who refuse to believe that the
American workingman is past answering the call of a difficult ideal,
no matter what privations are gnawing at his vitals. I have read in
the history books that when Lincoln issued his call for volunteers,
they came from mills and factories and little shops as promptly as from
counting-rooms and college halls. Fathers of large families that looked
to him for bread kissed their babies and marched off to the war, taking
an elder son or two with them. Were they all aristocrats whose names
are preserved on four thousand gravestones at Gettysburg? And who were
they who went barefoot in the snow and starved with Washington in Valley
Forge? The common people, most of them, the toilers for daily bread,
they who give all when they give aught, because they have not enough to
divide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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