They Who Knock at Our Gates — The Law of the Fathers, part 2

A little attention to the principles involved would have convinced us long ago that an American citizen who preaches wholesale restriction of immigration is guilty of political heresy.

The Declaration of Independence accords to _all_ men an equal share in the inherent rights of humanity.

When we go contrary to that principle, we are not acting as Americans; for, by definition, an American is one who lives by the principles of the Declaration.

And we surely violate the Declaration when we attempt to exclude aliens on account of race, nationality, or economic status.

"All men" means yellow men as well as white men, men from the South of Europe as well as men from the North of Europe, men who hold kingdoms in pawn, and men who owe for their dinner.

We shall have to recall officially the Declaration of Independence before we can lawfully limit the application of its principles to this or that group of men.

Americans of refined civic conscience have always accepted our national gospel in its literal sense.

"What becomes of the rights of the excluded?"

demanded the younger Garrison, in a noble scolding administered to the restrictionists in 1896. If a nation has a right to keep out aliens, tell us how many people constitute a nation, and what geographical area they have a right to claim.

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; and him should we follow to the end who spoke to us in the name of our duties, rather than in the name of our privileges.

The sins we have been guilty of in our conduct of the immigration debate have had their roots in a misconception of our own position in the land.

We have argued the matter as though we owned the land, and were, therefore, at liberty to receive or reject the unbidden guests who came to us by thousands.

Let any man who lays claim to any portion of the territory of the United States produce his title deed.

Are not most of us squatters here, and squatters of recent date at that?

The rights of a squatter are limited to the plot he actually occupies and cultivates.

The portion of the United States territory that is covered by squatters' claims is only a fraction, albeit a respectable fraction, of the land we govern.

In the name of what moral law do we wield a watchman's club over the vast regions that are still waiting to be staked out?

The number of American citizens who can boast of ancestral acres is not sufficient to swing a presidential election.

For that matter, those whose claims are founded on ancestral tenure should be the very ones to dread an examination of titles.

For it would be shown that these few got their lands by stepping into dead men's shoes, while the majority wrenched their estates from the wilderness by the labor of their own hands.

In the face of the sturdy American preference for an aristocracy of brain and brawn, the wisest thing the man with a pedigree can do is to scrape the lichens off his family tree.

Think of having it shown that he owes the ancestral farmhouse to the deathbed favoritism of some grouchy uncle!

Or, worse still, think of tracing the family title to some canny deal with a band of unsophisticated Indians!

No, it will not do to lay claim to the land on the ground of priority of occupation, as long as there is a red man left on the Indian reservations.

If it comes to calling names, usurper is an uglier name than alien.

And a squatter is a tenant who doesn't pay any rent, while an immigrant who occupies a tenement in the slums pays his rent regularly or gets out.

We may soothe our pride with the reflection that our title to the land does not depend on the moral validity of individual claims, but on the collective right of the nation to control the land we govern.

We came into our land as other nations came into theirs: we took it as a prize of war.

Until humanity has devised a less brutal method of political acquisition, we must pass our national claim as entirely sound.

We own the land because we were strong enough to take it from England.

But the moment we hark back to the War of the Revolution, our sense of possession is profoundly modified.

We did not quarrel with the English about the possession of the colonies, but about their treatment of the colonists.

It was not a land-grab that was plotted in Independence Hall in 1776, but a pattern of human freedom.

We entered upon the war in pursuit of ideals, not in pursuit of homesteads.

We had to take the homesteads, too, because, as we have already noted, a political ideal has to have territory wherein to operate.

But we must never forget that the shining prize of that war was an immaterial thing,--the triumph of an idea.

Not the Treaty of Paris, but the Declaration of Independence, converted the thirteen colonies into a nation.

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.

And our ardor shall not be dampened by the reflection that perhaps the Fathers builded better than they knew.

"Do you really think they looked so far ahead?"

it is often asked.

"Did the founders of the Republic foresee the time when foreign hordes would alight on our shores, demanding a share in this goodly land that was ransomed with the blood of heroes?"

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.

When Moses told the Egyptian exiles that they should have no god but the One God, he may not have guessed that their children would be brought to the stake for refusing other gods; and yet nineteen centuries of Jewish martyrdom go to show that the followers of Moses did not make his lack of foresight an excuse for abandoning his Law.

Let the children be brought up to know that we are a people with a mission, and that mission, in the words of Dr. Eliot, to teach the uses of freedom to as many men as possible "in freedom's largest home."

Let it be taught in the public schools that the most precious piece of real estate in the whole United States is that which supports the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty; that we need not greatly care how the three million square miles remaining is divided among the people of the earth, as long as we retain that little island.

Let it further be repeated in the schools that the Liberty at our gates is the handiwork of a Frenchman; that the mountain-weight of copper in her sides and the granite mass beneath her feet were bought with the pennies of the poor;

that the verses graven on a tablet within the base are the inspiration of a poetess descended from Portuguese Jews; and all these things shall be interpreted to mean that the love of liberty unites all races and all classes of men into one close brotherhood, and that we Americans, therefore, who have the utmost of liberty that has yet been attained, owe the alien a brother's share.

* * * * * To this position we are brought by a construction of the Declaration of Independence which makes of it the law of the land, binding on American citizens individually and collectively, and in all circumstances whatever.

Out of this position there is one avenue of escape, and only one.

We may refuse to read in the Declaration a sincere expression of the faith of 1776, and construe it instead as a bombastic political manifesto, advanced by the leaders of the rebellion as an excuse for a gigantic land-grab.

Let the descendants of the Puritans take their choice of these two interpretations.

For my part, I have chosen.

I have chosen to read the story of '76 as a chapter in sacred history; to set Thomas Jefferson in a class with Moses, and Washington with Joshua; to regard the American nation as the custodian of a sacred trust, and American citizenship as a holy order, with laws and duties derived from the Declaration.

For very pride in my country I must choose thus, for the alternate view takes the meaning out of American history, reduces the War of Independence to a war of plunder, and the Colonial heroes to a band of pious hypocrites.

What, indeed, shall we teach our children to be proud of if we reject the higher interpretation of the deeds of the Fathers?

The American Revolution as a campaign of conquest is not unique in history; on the contrary, it has been more than once surpassed, both in respect to the prowess of the conquerors and to the magnificence of the prize.

Outside the physical realm, where our inventions and discoveries and the material development of a continent belong, this country has contributed nothing of moment to the world's progress, unless it is that political adaptation of the Golden Rule which is indicated in the Declaration and elaborated in the Constitution.

In the arts and sciences we sit, for the most part, at the feet of foreign masters;

in jurisprudence we have borrowed from the Romans, and the elements of liberal government we have from our next of kin, the English.

The notion of the dignity of man, which is the foundation of the gospel of democracy, is derived from Hebrew sources, as the Psalm-singing founders of New England would be the first to acknowledge.

It was not entirely due to accident nor to the exigencies of pioneer life that the meeting-house and the town hall were one in the New England settlements.

The influence of the Bible is plainly stamped on the works of the Puritans.

What, then, shall we claim as the great American achievement, our peculiar treasure in the midst of so much borrowed glory?

A magnificent espousal of humanity--that or nothing can we call our own.

Seeing that they brought nothing into the world that was all their own, our glorious dead are not glorious unless we make them so, by imputing to them the noblest motives that their case will permit, and rating their works at not less than face value.

Pride demands it, and, fortunately for our country's honor, justice supports the claims of pride.

Neither the cynics nor the enthusiasts shall have the last word in the matter.

In the writings of their contemporaries, in the casual sayings of their intimates, in the critical comments of those who came next after them, we find convincing evidence that in the minds of the leaders of '76 the most advanced political thought of the age crystallized into a mighty conviction--the conviction of the inherent nobility of humankind, which makes it treason for any man to enslave his neighbor.

That is the thought that was sent out into the world on July 4, 1776, and because that thought has shaped our history, we call it the basic law of our land, and the Declaration of Independence our final authority.

If under that authority the immigrant appears to have rights in our land parallel to our own rights, we shall not lightly deny his claims, lest we forfeit our only title to national glory.

II JUDGES IN THE GATE