They Who Knock at Our Gates — The Fiery Furnace, part 1

THE FIERY FURNACE

Nebuchadnezzar spake and said unto them, .

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Now if ye be ready that at what time ye hear the sound of the cornet .

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ye fall down and worship the image that I have made; well: but if ye worship not, ye shall be cast the same hour into the midst of a burning fiery furnace;

and who is that God that shall deliver you out of my hands?

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-nego, answered and said to the king, O, Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in this matter.

If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.

But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.

Dan.

iii, 14-18. In the discussion of the third question,--whether immigration is good for us,--more honest Americans have gone astray than in the other two divisions.

Let it be said at the outset that those who have erred have been about equally distributed between the ayes and the nays.

For the answer to this question is neither aye nor nay, but something that cannot be put into a single syllable.

If we steer our way cautiously between the opposing ranks, the light of the true answer will presently shine on us.

The arguments they severally advance in defense of their respective positions reveal an appalling number of citizens on each side of the house who have entirely disregarded the principles involved.

Those who, like the labor-union lobbyists, point to the empty dinner-pails of American workingmen as a reason for keeping out foreign labor, are no more at fault than the lobbyists of the opposite side, who offer in support of the open-door policy statistics showing the need of rough laborers in various branches of our current material development.

All of them are wrong in that they would treat our foreign brothers as pawns on the chessboard of our selfish needs.

Show me a million American workingmen out of work, and I fail to see a justification for the exclusion of a million men from other lands who are also looking for a job.

Does the mother of an impoverished family strangle half her brood in order that the other half may have enough to eat?

No; she divides the last crust equally among her starvelings, and the laws of nature do the rest.

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.

They only mark themselves as calumniators of the poor who protest that times and men have changed since Washington's and Lincoln's day; who think that the breed of heroes died out with the passing of the Yankee farmer and the provincial townsman of the earlier periods.

Shall not the testimony of a daughter of the slums be heard when the poor are being judged?

I was reared in a tenement district of a New England metropolis, where the poor of many nations contended with each other for a scant living; and the only reason I am no longer of the slums is because a hundred heroes and heroines among my neighbors fought for my release.

Not only the members of my family, but mere acquaintances put their little all at my disposal.

Merely that a dreamer among them might come to the fulfillment of her dream, they fed and sheltered and nursed me and cheered me on, again and again facing the wolves of want for my sake, giving me the whole cloak if the half did not suffice to save the spark of life in my puny body.

If my knowledge of the slums counts for anything, it counts for a positive assurance that the personal devotion which is daily manifested in the life of the tenements in repeated acts of self-denial, from the sharing of a delicacy with a sick neighbor to the education of a gifted child by the year-long sacrifices of the entire family, is a spark from the smouldering embers of idealism that lie buried in the ashes of sordid existence, and await but the fanning of a great purpose to leap up into a flame of abstract devotion.

Times have changed, indeed, since the days of Washington.

His was a time of beginnings, ours is a time ripe for accomplishment.

And yet the seed the Fathers sowed we shall not reap, unless we consecrate ourselves to our purpose as they did,--all of us, the whole people, no man presuming to insult his neighbor by exempting him on account of apparent weakness.

The common people in Washington's time, and again in Lincoln's time, stood up like men, because they were called as men, not as weaklings who must be coddled and spared the shock of robust moral enterprise.

Not a full belly but a brimming soul made heroes out of ploughboys in '76. The common man of to-day is capable of a like transformation if pricked with the electric needle of a lofty appeal.

Those who are teaching the American workingman to demand the protection of his job against legitimate alien competition are trampling out the embers of popular idealism, instead of fanning it into a blaze that should transfigure the life of the nation.

[Illustration: A FRESH INFUSION OF PIONEER BLOOD] Idealism of the finest, heroism unsurpassed, are frequently displayed in the familiar episodes of the class war that is going on before our eyes, under unionistic leadership.

But it is a narrowing of the vision that makes a great mass of the people adopt as the unit of human salvation the class instead of the nation.

The struggle which has for its object the putting of the rapacious rich in their place does not constitute a full programme of national progress.

If labor leaders think they are leading in a holy war, they should be the last to encourage disrespect of the principles of righteousness for which they are fighting.

It is inconsistent, to put it mildly, to lead a demonstration against entrenched capital on one day, and the next day to head a delegation in Congress in favor of entrenched labor.

Is there anything brotherly about a monopolization of the labor market?

Substituting the selfishness of the poor for the selfishness of the rich will bring us no nearer the day of universal justice.

Though I should not hesitate to insist on a generous attitude toward the foreigner even if it imposed on our own people all the hardships which are alleged to be the result of immigration, I do not disdain to point out the fact that, when all is said and done, there is enough of America to go around for many a year to come.

It is hard to know whether to take the restrictionists seriously when they tell us that the country is becoming overcrowded.

The population of the United States is less than three times that of England, and England is only a dot on our map.

In Texas alone there is room for the population of the whole world, with a homestead of half an acre for every family of five, and a patch the size of Maryland left over for a public park.

A schoolboy's geography will supply the figures for this pretty sum.

The over-supply of labor is another myth of the restrictionist imagination that vanishes at one glance around the country, which shows us crops spoiling for want of harvesters, and women running to the legislature for permission to extend their legal working-day in the fields; such is the scarcity of men.

Said ex-Secretary Nagel, commenting upon the immigration bill which was so strenuously pushed by the restrictionists in the Sixty-third Congress, only to be vetoed by President Taft:-- In my judgment no sufficiently earnest and intelligent effort has been made to bring our wants and our supply together, and so far the same forces that give the chief support to this provision of the new bill [a literacy test, intended to check the influx of cheap labor] have stubbornly resisted any effort looking to an intelligent distribution of new immigration to meet the needs of our vast country.

[And] no such drastic measure [as the literacy test] should be adopted until we have at least exhausted the possibilities of a rational distribution of these new forces.

Distribution--geographical, seasonal, occupational; that should be our next watch-word, if we are bent on applying our vast resources to our needs.

It cannot be too often pointed out that a nation of our political confession is bound to try every other possible solution of her problems before resorting to a measure that encroaches on the rights of humanity.

And so far are we from exhausting the possibilities of internal reform that even the most obvious economic errors have not been corrected.

It is not good sense nor good morals to keep men at work twelve and thirteen hours a day, seven days in the week, as they do, for example, in the paper-mills.

It is bad policy to use women in the mills; it is heinous to use the children.

Every one of those over-long jobs should be cut in two; the women should be sent back to the nursery, and the children put to school, and able-bodied men set in their places.

If such a programme, consistently carried out throughout the country, still left considerable numbers unemployed, there is one more remedy we might apply.

We might chain to the benches in the city parks, where involuntary idlers now pass the day, all the agents and runners who move around Europe at the expense of steamship companies, labor contractors, and mill-owners.

We must _stop_ the importation of labor, not talk about stopping it.

To refrain from soliciting immigration is a very different thing from imposing an arbitrary check on voluntary immigration, and gives very different results.

The class of men who are lured across the ocean by the golden promises of labor agents are not of the same moral order as those who are spurred to the great adventure by a desire to share in our American civilization.

When we restrain the runners, we rid ourselves automatically of the least desirable element of immigration,--the hordes of irresponsible job-hunters without family who do not ask to be steered into the current of American life, and whose mission here is accomplished when they have saved up a petty fortune with which to dazzle the eyes of peasant sweethearts at home.

It is this class that contributes, through its ignorance and aloofness, the bulk of the deplorable phenomena which are quoted by restrictionists as arguments against immigration in general.

But we must go after them by the direct method, applying the force of the law to the agents who rout them out of their native villages.

When we attempt to weed out this one element by indirect methods, such as the oft-proposed literacy test, we are guilty of the folly of discharging a cannon into the midst of the sheepfold with the object of killing the wolf.

If through such a measure as the literacy test the desired results could be insured, we should still be loath to adopt it until every other possible method had been tried.

To hit at labor competition through a pretended fear of illiteracy is a tricky policy, and trickery is incompatible with the moral dignity of the American nation.

Are we bankrupt in statesmanship that we must pawn the jewel of national righteousness?

It required no small amount of ingenuity to find a connection between the immigrant's ability to earn a wage and his inability to read.

If the resourceful gentlemen who invented the literacy test would concentrate their talents on the problem of stopping the stimulation of immigration, we should soon hear the last of the over-supply of cheap labor.

Where there's a will there's a way, in statecraft as in other things.