Page:The web (1919).djvu/474

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

be the watchword of the native American if he hopes to survive in the terrific commercial battle now waging all over the world. . . . This sort of thing must be stopped at once or we are lost. . . . Take the half-past-seven Sunday morning train from the New York Grand Central station, and you will see at every way-station a swarm of dark, sturdy foreigners entering or quitting the train at the little towns along the way—for this is a local train and makes all the stops—and these people are thus enabled to visit their friends and acquaintances. And there appears to be no town, however small, where these foreigners have not gained some footing as laborers, farmers and small tradesmen. I should say that more than half of the Sunday railroad traffic in New York, New Jersey and New England is foreign. I took a train from New York some thirty miles into New Jersey one Sunday morning in October and the conductor told me that he did not think the native Americans constituted ten per cent of his passengers. I asked him whether that was the usual thing on Sundays, and he said, "No, not quite so bad as to-day, but we always have more foreigners than natives on Sunday." . . .

Six millions of aliens are necessary, we are told, to the development of the resources of our country. Now, it is perfectly plain that these foreign hordes are necessary to the development of the multi-millionaires, the trusts and the monopolies; but it is not so plain that they are necessary to the peace, happiness and prosperity of this country. . . . The normal increase of the native American population in the last forty years would have been amply sufficient for the proper and healthy development of this country. Had not the foreigner been called in in such hordes, we should have been forced to do our own work ourselves and would have been all the happier and richer for it. . . . There must be a check put upon immigration. Self-preservation is the first law of nature, and the time has come when we must resort to it. . . . We need time to train our children to compete with these people and during that time the foreigner must be held at bay. Immigration must be checked. The resources of this land are being too rapidly developed by means of these aliens. . . . Some radical change for the worse has taken place in the last quarter of a century in the fibre of our life, our manhood and our national character. . . . Indiscriminate and immoderate immigration is, I believe, the main cause of this deterioration. We have ceased long since to assimilate the vast hordes of heterogeneous peoples who have been