Chapter IV: Part 4

If Saint Augustine, who was punished when he was a little lad because he loved to play, could see how childish pastimes are dignified in the pedagogy of the twentieth century, he would no longer say that “playing is the business of childhood.” He would know that it is the supremely important business, the crushing responsibility of the pedagogue. Nothing is too profound, nothing too subtle to be evolved from a game or a toy. We are gravely told that “the doll with its immense educational power should be carefully introduced into the schools,” that “Pussy-in-the-Corner” is “an Ariadne clew to the labyrinth of experience,” and that a ball, tossed to the accompaniment of a song insultingly banal, will enable a child “to hold fast one high purpose amid all the vicissitudes of time and place.” If we would only make organized play a part of the school curriculum, we should have no need of camps, or drills, or military training. It is the moulder of men, the upholder of nations, the character-builder of the world.

Mr. Joseph Lee, who has written a book of five hundred pages on “Play in Education,” and Mr. Henry S. Curtis, who has written a book of three hundred and fifty pages on “Education through Play,” have treated their theme with profound and serious enthusiasm, which, in its turn, is surpassed by the fervid exaltation of their reviewers. These counsellors have so much that is good to urge upon us, and we are so ready to listen to their words, that they could have well afforded to be more convincingly moderate. There is no real use in saying that it is play which makes the world go round, because we know it isn’t. If it were, the world of the savage would go round as efficaciously as the world of the civilized man. When Mr. Lee tells us that the little boy who plays baseball “follows the ball each day further into the unexplored regions of potential character, and comes back each evening a larger moral being than he set forth,” we merely catch our breath, and read on. We have known so many boys, and we are disillusioned. When Mr. Curtis points out to us that English school-boys play more and play better than any other lads, and that their teachers advocate and encourage the love of sport because it breeds “good common sense, and resourcefulness which will enable them to meet the difficulties of life,” we ask ourselves doubtfully whether Englishmen do meet life’s difficulties with an intelligence so keen and adjusted as to prove the potency of play. The work which is demanded of French and German school-boys would seem to English and American school-boys (to say nothing of English and American parents) cruel and excessive; yet Frenchmen and Germans are not destitute of resourcefulness, and they meet the difficulties of life with a concentration of purpose which is the wonder of the world.

Even the moderate tax which is now imposed upon the leisure and freedom of American children has been declared illegal. It is possible and praiseworthy, we are assured, to spare them all “unnatural restrictions,” all uncongenial labour. There are pastimes in plenty which will impart to them information, without demanding any effort on their part. Folk-songs, and rhythmic dances, and story-telling, and observation classes, and “wholesome and helpful games,” fill up a pleasant morning for little pupils; and when they grow bigger, more stirring sports await them. Listen to Judge Lindsey’s enthusiastic description of the school-room of the future, where moving pictures will take the place of books and blackboards, where no free child will be “chained to a desk” (painful phrase!), and where “progressive educators” will make merry with their pupils all the happy day.

“Mr. Edison is coming to the rescue of Tony,” says Judge Lindsey. (Tony is a boy who does not like school as it is at present organized.) “He will take him away from me, and put him in a school that is not a school at all, but just one big game;--just one round of joy, of play, of gladness, of knowledge, of sunshine, warming the cells in Tony’s head until they all open up as the flowers do. There will be something moving, something doing at that school all the time, just as there is when Tony goes down to the tracks to see the engines.

“When I tell him about it, Tony shouts, ‘Hooray for Mr. Edison!’ right in front of the battery, just as he used to say, ‘To hell wid de cop.’”

Now this is an interesting exposition of the purely sentimental view of education. We have been leading up to it for years, ever since Froebel uttered his famous “Come, let us live with our children!” and here it is set down in black and white by a man who has the welfare of the young deeply at heart. Judge Lindsey sympathizes with Tony’s distaste for study. He points out to us that it is hard for a boy who is “the leader of a gang” to be laughed at by less enterprising children because he cannot cipher. Yet to some of us it does not seem altogether amiss that Tony should be brought to understand the existence of other standards than those of hoodlumism. Ciphering is dull work (so, at least, I have always found it), and difficult work too; but it is hardly fair to brand it as ignoble. Compared with stealing rails from a freight-car, which is Tony’s alternative for school attendance, it even has a dignity of its own; and the perception of this fact may be a salutary, if mortifying lesson. Judge Lindsey’s picturesque likening of our antiquated school system which compels children to sit at desks, with the antiquated Chinese custom which bound little girls’ feet, lacks discernment. The underlying motives are, in these instances, measurably different, the processes are dissimilar, the results have points of variance.

Nobody doubts that all our Tonys, rich and poor, lawless and law-abiding, would much prefer a school that is not a school at all, “but just one big game”; nobody doubts that a great deal of desultory information may be acquired from films. But desultory information is not, and never can be, a substitute for education; and habits of play cannot be trusted to develop habits of work. Our efforts to protect the child from doing what he does not want to do, because he does not want to do it, are kind, but unintelligent. Life is not a vapid thing. “The world,” says Emerson, “is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality.” No pleasure it can give, from the time we are seven until the time we are seventy, is comparable to the pleasure of achievement.

Dr. Münsterberg, observing with dismay the “pedagogical unrest” which pervades our communities, expresses a naïve surprise that so much sound advice, and so much sound instruction, should leave the teacher without inspiration or enthusiasm. “The pile of interesting facts which the sciences heap up for the teacher’s use grows larger and larger, but the teacher seems to stare at it with growing hopelessness.”

I should think so. A pile of heterogeneous facts--segments of segments of subjects--reduces any sane teacher to hopelessness, because he, at least, is well aware that his pupils cannot possibly absorb or digest a tithe of the material pressed upon their acceptance. Experience has taught him something which his counsellors never learn,--the need of limit, the “feasibility of performance.” Hear what one teacher, both sane and experienced, has to say concerning the riot of facts and theories, of art and nature, of science and sentiment, which the school is expected to reduce into an orderly, consistent, and practical system of education.

“It is not enough that the child should be taught to handle skilfully the tools of all learning,--reading, writing, and arithmetic. His sense of form and his æsthetic nature must be developed by drawing; his hand must be trained by manual work; his musical nature must be awakened by song; he must be brought into harmony with his external environment by means of nature lessons and the study of science; his patriotic impulses must be roused by American history and by flag-drills; temperance must be instilled into him by lessons in physiology, with special reference to the effects of alcohol on the human system; his imagination must be cultivated by the help of Greek and Norse mythology; he must gain some knowledge of the great heroes and events of general history; he must acquire a love for and an appreciation of the best literature through the plentiful reading of masterpieces, while at the same time his mind should be stocked with choice gems of prose and verse, which will be a solace to him throughout his later life.

“It might be well if, by displacing a little arithmetic or geography, he could gain some knowledge of the elements of Latin or of a modern language; in some manner there must be roused in him a love for trees, a respect for birds, an antipathy to cigarettes, and an ambition for clean streets; and somewhere, somewhere in this mad chaos he must learn to spell! Do you wonder that teachers in progressive schools confide to us that they fear their pupils are slightly bewildered? Do you wonder that pupils do not gain the habit and the power of concentrated, consecutive work?”[1]

[1] _The Existing Relations between School and College_, by Wilson Farrand.

And this irrational, irrelevant medley, this educational vaudeville, must be absorbed unconsciously, and without effort, by children roused to interest by the sustained enthusiasm of their teachers, whom may Heaven help! If the programme is not full enough, it can be varied by lectures on sex-hygiene, lessons in woodcraft (with reference to boy scouts), and pictures illustrating the domestic habits of the house-fly. These, with plenty of gymnastics, and a little barefoot dancing for girls, may bring a school measurably near the ideal proposed by Judge Lindsey,--a place where “there is something moving, something doing all the time,” and which finds its closest counterpart in the rushing of engines on their tracks.

The theory that school work must appeal to a child’s fluctuating tastes, must attract a child’s involuntary attention, does grievous wrong to the rising generation; yet it is upheld in high places, and forms the subject-matter of many addresses vouchsafed year after year to long-suffering educators. They should bring to bear the “energizing force of interest,” they should magnetize their pupils into work. Even Dr. Eliot reminds them with just a hint of reproach that, if a child is interested, he will not be disorderly; and this reiterated statement appears to be the crux of the whole difficult situation. Let us boldly suppose that a child is not interested,--and he may conceivably weary even of films,--is it then optional with him to be, or not to be, disorderly, and what is the effect of his disorder on other children whose tastes may differ from his own?

The Right Reverend Mandell Creighton, who appears to have made more addresses to the teachers of England than any other ecclesiastic of his day, repeatedly warned them that they should not attempt to teach any subject without first making clear to children why this subject should command attention. If they failed to do so, said the bishop triumphantly, the children would not attend. He was of the opinion that little pupils must not only be rationally convinced that what they are asked to do is worth their doing, but that they must enjoy every step of their progress. A teacher who could not make a child feel that it is “just as agreeable” to be in school as at play, had not begun his, or her, pedagogical career.

This is a hard saying and a false one. Every normal child prefers play to work, and the precise value of work lies in its call for renunciation. Nor has any knowledge ever been acquired and retained without endeavour. What heroic pains were taken by Montaigne’s father to spare his little son the harsh tasks of the school-boy! At what trouble and cost to the household was the child taught “the pure Latin tongue” in infancy, “without bookes, rules, or grammar, without whipping or whining”! Greek was also imparted to him in kindly fashion, “by way of sporte and recreation.” “We did tosse our declinations and conjugations to and fro, as they doe, who, by means of a certaine game at tables, learne both Arithmeticke and Geometrie.” Assuredly the elder Montaigne was a man born out of date. In our happier age he would have been a great and honoured upholder of educational novelties, experimenting with the school-rooms of the world. In the sixteenth century he was only a country gentleman, experimenting with his son,--a son who bluntly confesses that, of the Greek thus pleasantly trifled with, he had “but small understanding,” and that the Latin which had been his mother tongue was speedily “corrupted by discontinuance.”

All the boy gained by the most elaborate system ever devised for the saving of labour was that he “overskipped” the lower forms in school. What he lost was the habit of mastering his “prescript lessons,” which he seems to have disliked as heartily as any student of Guienne. Neither loss nor gain mattered much to a man of original parts. The principal result of his father’s scheme was the lingering of certain Latin words among the simple folk of Perigord, who, having painfully acquired these strange terms in order to rescue their little master from his schoolbooks, retained and made use of them all their lives.

An emphatic note of protest against our well-meant but enfeebling educational methods was struck by Professor William James in his “Talks to Teachers,” published in 1899. The phrase “Economy of Effort,” so dear to the kindly hearts of Froebel’s followers, had no meaning for Dr. James. The ingenious system by which the child’s tasks, as well as the child’s responsibilities, are shifted to the shoulders of the teacher, made no appeal to his incisive intelligence. He stoutly asserted that effort is oxygen to the lungs of youth, and that it is sheer nonsense to suppose that every step of education can possibly be made interesting. The child, like the man, must meet his difficulties, and master them. There is no lesson worth learning, no game worth playing, which does not call for exertion. Rousseau, it will be remembered, would not permit Émile to know what rivalry meant. That harassed child never even ran a race, lest the base spirit of competition should penetrate his nerveless little being. But Professor James, deaf to social sentimentalities, averred that rivalry is the spur of action, and the impelling force of civilization. “There is a noble and generous kind of rivalry as well as a spiteful and greedy kind,” he wrote truthfully, “and the noble and generous form is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the zest which they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness and magnanimity.”

I am aware that it is a dangerous thing to call kindness sentimental; but our feeling that children have a right to happiness, and our sincere effort to protect them from any approach to pain, have led imperceptibly to the elimination from their lives of many strength-giving influences. A recent volume on “Child Culture” (a phrase every whit as reprehensible as “child-material”) speaks always of naughty children as “patients,” implying that their unfortunate condition is involuntary, and must be cured from without, not from within. The “rights of children” include the doubtful privilege of freedom from restraint, and the doubtful boon of shelter from obligation. It seems sweet and kind to teach a child high principles and steadfastness of purpose by means of symbolic games rather than by any open exaction. Unconscious obedience, like indirect taxation, is supposed to be paid without strain. Our feverish fear lest we offend against the helplessness of childhood, our feverish concern lest it should be denied its full measure of content, drive us, burdened as we are with good intentions, past the border-line of wisdom. If we were

“Less winning soft, less amiably mild,”

we might see more clearly the value of standards.

Two years ago I had sent me several numbers of a Los Angeles newspaper. They contained a spirited and sympathetic account of a woman who had been arrested for stealing a child’s outfit, and who pleaded in court that she wanted the garments for her daughter, the little girl having refused to go to school, because other children had laughed at her shabby clothes. The effect of this pathetic disclosure was instantaneous and overwhelming. The woman was released, and kind-hearted people hastened to send “nicey” frocks by the “wagon-load” to the ill-used child. A picture of the heroic mother in a large plumed hat, and another of little Ellen in curls and hair-ribbons, occupied prominent places in the paper. The public mind was set at rest concerning the quality of the goods donated. “Ellen is going to school to-day,” wrote the jubilant reporter. “She is going to wear a fluffy new dress with lace, and hair-ribbons to match. And if any rude boy so far forgets himself as to tear that wondrous creation, there will be others at home to replace it. Happy, oh, so happy was the little miss, as she shook her curls over the dainty dress to-day. And the mother? Well, a faith in the inherent goodness of mankind has been rekindled in her bosom.”

Now the interesting thing about this journalistic eloquence, and the public sentiment it represented, is that while shabbiness was admittedly a burden too heavy for a child to bear, theft carried with it no shadow of disgrace. Children might jeer at a little girl in a worn frock, but a little girl in “lace and hair-ribbons” was manifestly above reproach. Her mother’s transgression had covered her with glory, not with shame. There seems to be some confusion of standards in such a verdict, some deviation from the paths of rectitude and honour. It is hard for a child to be more poorly dressed than her companions; but to convince her that dishonesty is the best policy and brings its own reward, is but a dubious kindness. Nor is it impossible to so stiffen her moral fibre that her poor dress may be worn, if not with pride, at least with sturdy self-control.

On this point I know whereof I speak, for, when I was a little girl, my convent school sheltered a number of Southern children, reduced to poverty by the Civil War, and educated (though of this no one was aware) by the boundless charity of the nuns. These children were shabby, with a pathetic shabbiness which fell far below our very moderate requirements. Their dresses (in my prehistoric days, school uniforms were worn only on Thursdays and Sundays) were strangely antiquated, as though cut down from the garments of mothers and grandmothers, their shoes were scuffed, their hats were hopeless. But the unquenchable pride with which they bore themselves invested such hardships with distinction. Their poverty was the honourable outcome of war; and this fact, added to their simple and sincere conviction that a girl born below the Mason and Dixon line must necessarily be better than a girl born above it, carried them unscathed through the valley of humiliation. Looking back now with an unbiassed mind, I am disposed to consider their claim to superiority unfounded; but, at the time, their single-mindedness carried conviction. The standards they imposed were preeminently false, but they were less ignoble than the standards imposed by wealth. No little American boy or girl can know to-day what it means to have the character set in childhood by history, by the vividness of early years lived under strange and violent conditions, by the sufferings, the triumphs, the high and sad emotions of war.

There is a story told by Sir Francis Doyle which illustrates, after the rude fashion of our forebears, the value of endurance as an element of education. Dr. Keate, the terrible head-master of Eton, encountered one winter morning a small boy crying miserably, and asked him what was the matter. The child replied that he was cold. “Cold!” roared Keate. “You must put up with cold, sir! You are not at a girls’ school.”

It is a horrid anecdote, and I am kind-hearted enough to wish that Dr. Keate, who was not without his genial moods, had taken the lad to some generous fire (presuming such a thing was to be found), and had warmed his frozen hands and feet. But it so chanced that in that little snivelling boy there lurked a spark of pride and a spark of fun, and both ignited at the rough touch of the master. He probably stopped crying, and he certainly remembered the sharp appeal to manhood. Fifteen years later he charged with the Third Dragoons at the strongly entrenched Sikhs (thirty thousand of the best fighting men of the Khalsa) on the curving banks of the Sutlej. When the word was given, he turned to his superior officer, a fellow Etonian who was scanning the stout walls and the belching guns. “As old Keate would say, this is no girls’ school,” he chuckled; and rode to his death on the battlefield of Sobraon, which gave Lahore to England.

Contemplating which incident, and many like it, we become aware that ease is not the only good in a world consecrated to the heroic business of living and of dying.

The Modest Immigrant

It is now nearly fifty years since Mr. Lowell wrote his famous essay, “On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners”; an essay in which justifiable irritation prompted the telling of plain truths, and an irrepressible sense of humour made these truths amusing. It was well for Mr. Lowell that he was seldom too angry to laugh, and he knew, as only a man of the world can know, the saving grace of laughter. Therefore, though confessedly unable to understand why foreigners should be persuaded that “by doing this country the favour of coming to it, they have laid every native thereof under an obligation,” he was willing in certain light-minded moods to acquit himself honourably of the debt. When a genteel German mendicant presented a letter, “professedly written by a benevolent American clergyman,” and certifying that the bearer thereof had long “sofered with rheumatic paints in his limps,” Mr. Lowell rightly considered that a composition so rich in the naïveté common to all Teuton mendacities was worth the money asked. When a French traveller assured him, with delightful _bon-homie_, that Englishmen became Americanized so rapidly that “they even begin to talk through their noses, just like you do,” the only comment of our representative American was that he felt ravished by this testimony to the assimilating powers of democracy.

Nevertheless, it is well in these years of grace to reread Mr. Lowell’s essay, partly because of its sturdy and dignified Americanism, and partly because we can then compare his limited experiences with our own. We can also speculate pleasantly upon his frame of mind could he have lived to hear Mrs. Amadeus Grabau (Mary Antin) say, “Lowell would agree with me,”--the point of agreement being the relative virtues of the Pilgrim Fathers and the average immigrant of to-day. When the dead are quoted in this fashion and nothing happens, then we know that, despite the assurances of Sir Oliver Lodge, the seal of silence is unbroken. Were the proud souls who have left us, able and willing to return, it would not be to reveal the whereabouts of a lost penknife, but to give the lie to the words which are spoken in their name.

The condescension which Mr. Lowell observed and analyzed was in his day the shining quality of foreigners who visit our shores. Immigrants were then less aggressive and less profoundly self-conscious than they are now, and it is the immigrant who counts. It is his arrogance, not the misapprehension of the tourist, or the innocent pride of the lecturer, which constitutes a peril to our republic. We can all of us afford to smile with Mr. Lowell at the men and women who, while accepting our hospitality, “make no secret of regarding us as the goose bound to deliver them a golden egg in return for their cackle.” That they should not hesitate to come without equipment, without experience, without even a fitness for their task, seems to us perfectly natural. Perhaps they have written books which none of us have read, or edited periodicals which none of us have seen. Perhaps they have known celebrities of whom few of us have heard. It does not matter in the least. From the days when Miss Rose Kingsley came to tell us the worth of French art (does not the ocean roll between New York and Paris?), to the days when Mrs. Pankhurst came to tell us the worth of womanhood (does not the ocean roll between Boston Common and Hyde Park?), we have listened patiently, and paid generously, and received scant courtesy for our pains. “I find it so strange,” said an Englishman to me three years ago, “to see my wife lecturing over the United States. It is a thing she would not dream of doing at home. In fact, nobody would go to hear her, you know.”

But lectures are transient things, forgiven as soon as forgotten. Even the books which are written about us make no painful bid for immortality. And though our visitors patronize us, they seldom fail to throw us a kind word now and then. Sometimes a sweet-tempered and very hurried traveller, like Mr. Arnold Bennett, is good enough to praise everything he thinks he has seen. Before August, 1914, it was not the habit of our guests to scold or threaten us. That privilege had hitherto been reserved for the alien, who, having done us the honour of accepting citizenship, wields his vote as a cudgel, bidding us beware the weapon we have amiably placed in his hands.

Signor Ferrero, an acute and friendly critic, pronounces Americans to be the mystics of the modern world, because they sacrifice their welfare to a sentiment; because they believe in the miracle of the melting-pot, which, like Medea’s magic cauldron, will turn the old and decrepit races of Europe into a young and vigorous people, new-born in soul and body. No other nation cherishes this illusion. An Englishman knows that a Russian Jew cannot in five years, or in twenty-five years, become English; that his standards and ideals are not convertible into English standards and ideals. A Frenchman does not see in a Bulgarian or a Czech the making of another Frenchman. Our immigrants may be as good as we are. Sometimes we are told they are better, that we might “learn a lesson” from the least promising among them. But no one can deny that they are different; in many instances, radically and permanently different. And to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse is just as difficult as the reverse operation. Mr. Horace Kallen has put the case into a few clear conclusive words when he says, “Only men who are alike in origin and spirit, and not abstractly, can be truly equal, and maintain that inward unanimity of action and outlook which makes a national life.”

To look for “inward unanimity” among the seething mass of immigrants who have nothing more in common with one another than they have with us, is to tax credulity too far. The utmost we can hope is that their mutual antagonisms will neutralize their voting power, and keep our necks free from an alien yoke. Those of us who have lived more than half a century have seen strange fluctuations in the fortunes of the foreign-born. In 1883, when the Brooklyn Bridge was finished, the Irishmen of New York made a formal protest against its being opened on Queen Victoria’s birthday, lest this chance occurrence should be misconstrued into a compliment to England. In 1915, a band in Saint Patrick’s parade was halted, and forbidden to play “Tipperary” before Cardinal Farley’s residence, lest these cheerful strains should be misconstrued into an insult to Germany. The Reverend Thomas Thornton, speaking to the Knights of Columbus, prophesied mournfully that the time was at hand when Catholic voters in the United States would be “reduced to the condition of tribute-paying aliens.” Men smiled when they heard this, reflecting that the Irish officeholder had not yet been consigned to oblivion; but the speaker had seen with a clear eye the marshalling of strange forces, destined to drive the first comer from authority. Some weeks later, the “Jewish Tribune” boasted that the angry protest voiced by Catholics against the sending of Signor Ernesto Nathan as commissioner to the San Francisco Fair had been “checked in its infancy” by the power of the Jewish press.

It is all very lively and interesting, but where does the American come in? What place is reserved for him in the commonwealth which his heroic toil and heroic sacrifices moulded into what Washington proudly called a “respectable nation”? The truth is contemptuously flung at us by Mary Antin, when she says that the descendants of the men who made America are not numerous enough to “swing a presidential election.” And if a negligible factor now, what depths of insignificance will be their portion in the future? I heard told with glee--the glee which expresses pure American unconcern--a story of a public school in one of our large eastern cities. A visitor of an investigating turn of mind asked the pupils of various nationalities, Germans, Polacks, Russian Jews, Italians, Armenians and Greeks, to stand up in turn. When the long list was seemingly exhausted, he bethought himself of a nation he had overlooked, and said, “Now let the American children arise!” Whereupon one lone, lorn little black boy stood up to represent the native-born.

It is hardly surprising that these foreign children, recognizing the strength of numbers, should take exception to our time-honoured methods of education. Little boys of a socialistic turn of mind refuse to salute the flag, because it is a military emblem. Little boys of a rationalistic turn of mind refuse to read the Bible,--any portion of the Bible,--because its assertions are unscientific. Little Jewish boys and girls refuse to sing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” because of its unguarded allusions to Bethlehem and Calvary. Indeed, any official recognition of the Deity offends the susceptibilities of some of our future citizens; and their perplexed teachers are bidden to eliminate from their programme “any exercises which the pupils consider objectionable.”

A few years ago I was asked to speak to a large class of immigrant working-girls, for whose benefit philanthropic women had planned evening classes, dexterously enlivened by a variety of entertainments. I was not sure whether I ranked as useful or amusing, and the number of topics I was bidden to tactfully avoid, added to my misgivings; when suddenly all doubts were dispelled by the superintendent saying sweetly, “Oh, Miss Repplier, you were asked to speak for forty minutes; but I think your address had better be cut down to twenty-five. The girls are eager for their ice-cream.”

I said I sympathized with so reasonable an impatience. Even at my advanced age, I prefer ice-cream to lectures.

“Moi, je dis que les bonbons
Valent mieux que la raison.”

But what did not flatter me was the clear understanding that my audience listened to me, or at least sat tolerantly for twenty minutes (I curtailed my already cur-tail’d cur), because their reward, in the shape of ice-cream, was near at hand. Just as some manufacturers provide baths for their employees, and then, recognizing the prejudices of the foreign-born, pay the men for taking the baths provided, so the good ladies who had served me up as a mental refreshment for their protégées, paid the girls for being so obliging as to listen to me.

Miss Addams has reproached us most unjustly for our contemptuous disregard of the immigrant; and Mrs. Percy Pennybacker, president of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, has been wrought to such a pitch of indignation over what she considers our unwarranted superciliousness, that she writes fervidly in the “Ladies’ Home Journal,” “I love my country; I adore her; but at times I hope that some great shock may cause us to drop the mantle of conceit that we so proudly wrap about us.”

This well-wisher is in a fair way to see her desires realized. We may be left naked and shivering sooner than she anticipates. If concessions to the Irish vote failed to teach us humility,--perhaps because the Irish have a winning way of overriding barriers (“What’s the Constitution between friends?”),--other immigrants are less urbane in stripping us of our pride. “A German,” said Mr. Lowell feelingly, “is not always nice in concealing his contempt”; and if this was his attitude in 1868, to what superb heights of disdain has he risen by 1916! A German ambassador has derided diplomatic conventions, and has addressed his official communication, over the head of the Administration, to German voters in the United States, sparing no pains to make his words offensive. German officials have sought to undermine our neutrality and imperil our safety. In the opening months of the war, a German professor at Harvard, who for years has received courteous and honourable treatment at the hands of Americans, threatened us insolently with the “crushing power” of the German vote; and bade us beware of the punishment which twenty-five millions of citizens, “in whose homes lives the memory of German ancestors,” would inflict upon their fellow citizens of less august and martial stock. The “Frankfurter Zeitung” published a cheering letter from an American Congressman, assuring a German correspondent that his countrymen know how to make themselves heard, and expressing hearty hopes that Germany would triumph over her “perfidious” rival.

Is it any wonder that, stimulated by these brilliant examples, the average “German-American” should wax scornful, and despise his unhyphenated fellow citizens? Is it any wonder that he should turn bully, and threaten us with his vote,--the vote which was confided to his sacred honour for the preservation of our country’s liberty? A circular distributed before the Chicago elections in 1915 stated in the plainest possible words that the German’s first allegiance was to imperial Germany, and not to the Republic he had sworn to serve:--

“Chicago has a larger German population than any city in the world, excepting Berlin and Vienna; and the German-, Austrian-, and Hungarian-Americans should, at this coming election, _set aside every other consideration_, and vote as a unit for Robert M. Sweitzer. Stand shoulder to shoulder in this election, as our countrymen in the trenches and on the high seas are fighting for the preservation of our dear Fatherland. The election of a German-American would be a fitting answer to the defamers of the Fatherland, would cause a tremendous moral effect throughout the United States, and would reëcho in Germany, Austria, and Hungary.”

The “moral effect” of this appeal was not precisely what its authors had anticipated. Men asked themselves in bewilderment and wrath what the dear Fatherland, any more than dear Dahomey or the beloved Congo, had to do with the Chicago elections? They have been putting similar questions ever since.

Some months later, the German-American Central Society of Passaic, uniting itself with the German-American National Alliance, called for assistance in these glowing words:--

“Come all of you German societies, German men, and German women, so that united offensively and defensively [_zum Schutz und Trutz verein_] with weapons of the spirit, we may help our beloved Germany onward.”

“Weapons of the spirit!” If this means prayer and supplication, the matter lies between the petitioner and his God. If it means exhortations, pamphlets, and platform oratory, the champion of Germany stands well within his rights. But the next paragraph drops all figures of speech, and states the real issue with abrupt and startling distinctness:--

“We ask for your speedy decision with respect to your acquiescence, in order to permit of an effective participation and lead in the spring campaign of 1915.”

In plain words, the spiritual weapon with which the German-American proposes to fight the battle of Germany is the American ballot. When the franchise was granted to him, or to his father, or to his grandfather (whichever did this country the honour of first accepting citizenship), a solemn oath was sworn. Allegiance to a foreign government was forever disowned; fealty to the government of the United States was vowed. He who uses his vote to further the interests of a European state is a perjured man, and that he should dare to threaten us with the power of his perjury is the height of arrogant ill-doing. That such a question as “What is the proportion of votes which the Germans of your section control?” should be asked by German agents, and answered by German newspapers, affronts our nation’s honour, soils a sacred trust by ill-usage, and tears our neutrality to rags.

When the Lusitania was sunk, and the horror of the deed shamed all Christendom, save only those strange residents of Berlin who received the news with “enthusiasm,” and “joyful pride,” the first word tactfully whispered in our ear was that, while we might regret the drowning of Americans, we were impotent to resent it. And this impotence was to be a concession to the foreign vote. God only knows of what material Germany thought we were made,--putty, or gutta-percha, or sun-baked mud? Certainly not of flesh and blood. Certainly not with hearts to bleed, or souls to burn. Every comment vouchsafed by the German press placed us in the catalogue of worms warranted not to turn.

The contempt which the German “is not always nice in concealing” shines with a chastened lustre in the words and deeds of other foreign-born citizens. They accept the vote which we enthusiastically press upon them, regarding it as an asset, sometimes of marketable value, sometimes serving a stronger and more enduring purpose, always as an esteemed protection against the military service exacted by their own governments. They do not come to us “with gifts in their hands,”--to quote Mr. Lowell. They are for the most part destitute, not only of money, but of knowledge, of useful attainments, of any serviceable mental equipment. Mr. Edward Alsworth Ross, who is not without experience, confesses ruefully that the immigrant seldom brings in his intellectual baggage anything of use to us; and that the admission into our electorate of “backward men”--men whose mental, moral, and physical standards are lower than our own--must inevitably retard our social progress, and thrust us behind the more uniformly civilized nations of the world.

Meditating on these disagreeable facts, we find ourselves confronted by sentimentalists who say that if we would only be kind and brotherly, the sloping foreheads would grow high, the narrow shoulders broad, the Pole would become peaceable, the Greek honest, the Slav clean, the Sicilian would give up murder as a pastime, the Jew would lose his “monstrous love of gain.” Enthusiastic promoters of the “National Americanization Committee”--a crusade full of promise for the future--have talked to us so much and so sternly about our duty to the immigrant, our neglect of the immigrant, our debt to the immigrant, our need of the immigrant, that we have been no less humiliated than bewildered by their eloquence. Mr. Roosevelt alone, of all their orators, has had the hardihood to say bluntly that citizenship implies service as well as protection; that the debt contracted by the citizen to the state is as binding as that contracted by the state to the citizen; that a voter who cannot speak English is an absurdity no less than a peril; and that all who seek the franchise should be compelled to accept without demur our laws, our language, our national policy, our requisitions civil and military. This is what naturalization implies.

That saving phrase, “It is the law,” which made possible the civilization of Rome, and which has been the foundation of all great civilizations before and since, has little weight or sanctity for our immigrants. They resent legal interference, especially the punishment of crime, in a very spirited fashion. When Mr. Samuel Gompers defended the McNamaras and their “social war” murders before a subcommittee of the United States Senate, he said with feeling that the mere fact that these men should have come to look upon dynamite as the only defence left them against the tyranny of capital, was a “terrible charge against society.” It was an appeal very pleasantly suggestive of the highwayman, who, having attacked and robbed Lord Derby and Mr. Grenville, said reproachfully to his victims, “What scoundrels you must be to fire at a gentleman who risks his life upon the road!”

If Cicero lowered his voice when he spoke of the Jews, fearing the enmity of this strong and clannish people, the American, who is far from enjoying Cicero’s prestige, must be doubly cautious lest he give offence. Yet surely, if there is an immigrant who owes us everything, it is the Jew. Even our spasmodic and utterly futile efforts to restrict immigration always leave him a loophole of escape, because he controls the National Liberal Immigration League.

It is our custom to assume that the Russian Jew is invariably a fugitive from religious persecution, and we liken him in this regard to the best and noblest of our early settlers. But the Puritan, the Quaker, and the Huguenot sacrificed temporal well-being for liberty of conscience. They left conditions of comfort, and the benefits of a high civilization, to develop the resources of a virgin land, and build for themselves homes in the wilderness. They practised the stern virtues of courage, fortitude, and a most splendid industry. Had the Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials; had their children been placed immediately in good free schools, and given the care of doctors, dentists, and nurses; had they found themselves in infinitely better circumstances than they had ever enjoyed in England, indulging in undreamed-of luxuries, and taught by kind-hearted philanthropists,--what pioneer virtues would they have developed, what sons would they have bred, what honours would history have accorded them? If our early settlers were masterful, they earned the right to mastery, and the price they paid for it was endurance. To the sacrifices which they made, to their high courage and heroic labours, we owe law, liberty, and well-being.

It is because the Jew has received from us so much, and given us so little, that his masterfulness affronts our sense of decency. When the Jewish Anti-Defamation League boasts--perhaps without warranty--that it has taken “the first and most important step in excluding the ‘Merchant of Venice’ from the curriculum of the grammar and high schools of this country, by having the play removed from the list of requirements laid down by the Collegiate Entrance Requirement Board,” we feel that a joke has been carried too far. Nobody can seriously associate the “Merchant of Venice” with a defamation of the Jewish character. Heaven knows, the part played by Christians in that immortal drama has never left us puffed up with pride. Nevertheless, being less thin-skinned, or perhaps more sure of ourselves, we have grown attached to the play, and should not relish its banishment by the decree of aliens.

And what if our Italian immigrants should take exception to the character of Iago, and demand that “Othello” should be excluded from the schools? What if the Sicilians should find themselves wounded in spirit by the behaviour of Leontes (compared with whom Shylock and Iago are gentlemen), and deny us the “Winter’s Tale”? What if the Bohemians (a fast-increasing body of voters) should complain that their peddlers are honest men, shamefully slandered by the rogueries of Autolycus? If all our foreign citizens become in turn as sensitive as Hebrews, we may find ourselves reduced to the fairy scenes from the “Tempest” and the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Another victory claimed by the “Jewish Tribune” is that the Associated Press has been made to feel that the words “Jew” and “Hebrew” should be avoided in connection with criminals. “The religious denomination of malefactors should not be referred to. It is now generally understood by newspapers that it is just as improper to describe a malefactor by stating that he is a Jew, as it would be to describe such a person as a Catholic or a Methodist.”

Does this mean that the Jew no longer claims any racial distinction, that he has no genealogy, no pedigree, no place in history, nothing by which he may be classified but church membership? Is the simple dictionary definition, “Jew. An Israelite; a person of the Hebrew race,” without any significance? We may call a Greek pickpocket a Greek, or a Polish rioter a Pole, or an Italian murderer an Italian; but we may not call a Jewish procurer a Jew, because that word refers only to his attendance at the synagogue. May we then speak of a scholar, a musician, a scientist, a philanthropist, as a Jew? Only--by this ruling--as we might speak of one as a Catholic or a Methodist, only in reference to his “religious denomination.” If he chances to be unsectarian, then, as he is also raceless, he cannot be called anything at all. If the word “Jew” be out of place in the police courts, it is equally out of place in colleges, learned societies, and encyclopædias.

It will be remembered that, after the publication of “Oliver Twist,” a bitter protest was raised by English Jews against the character of Fagin, or rather against the fact that the merry old gentleman is alluded to frequently as a Jew. The complainants said--what the “Jewish Tribune” now says--that the use of the word as an indicatory substantive was an insult to their creed. Dickens, who had never thought of Fagin as having any creed, who had never associated him with religious observances of any kind, was puzzled and pained at having unwittingly given offence; and strove to make clear that, when he said “Jew,” he meant an Israelite, and not a frequenter of the synagogue. Years afterward he made a peace-offering in the person of Riah, who plays the part of a good Samaritan in “Our Mutual Friend,” and who is to Fagin as skimmed milk to brandy.

It is worthy of note that whenever any strong and noble emotion grips our Jewish citizens, they speedily forget their antipathy to the word “Jew.” For years past they have objected to the use of the word by charitable associations, even when there was no hint of criminality to shame it. They have asked that visiting nurses should not report service to Jewish homes, or Jewish patients. Homes and patients should be placed upon record as Russian or Polish,--whichever the case might be. The race was specifically denied. The Semite was sunk in the Slav. But when there came a cry for help from the war-stricken Jews of Europe, the Jews of America responded with exalted enthusiasm. Jew called to Jew, and the great tie of kindred asserted itself supremely. It was not as co-religionists, but as brothers-in-blood, that New York millionaires, who had never entered a synagogue, stretched out their hands in aid. Women stripped off their jewels, and offered this glittering tribute, as they might have done in the fighting days of Israel. Young and old, rich and poor, gave with unstinted compassion. Gentiles contributed generously to the fund, and Christian churches asked the coöperation of Christian congregations. To some Jews the thought must have occurred that America had not dealt harshly by her immigrants, when they could command millions for their impoverished brethren in Europe.

Therefore it behooves the men and women who have been well received, and who have responded ably to the opportunities offered them by our country’s superb liberality, to be a little more lenient to our shortcomings. We confess them readily enough; but we feel that those whom we have befriended should not be the ones to dwell upon them with too much gusto. There are situations in the world which imperiously dictate urbanity. “Steadily as I worked to win America,” writes Mary Antin, “America advanced to lie at my feet,”--a poodle-like attitude which ought to disarm criticism. When this clever young woman tells us that she “took possession of Beacon Street” (a goodly heritage), and there “drank afternoon tea with gentle ladies whose hands were as delicate as their porcelain cups,” we feel well content at this swift recognition of energy and ability. It is not the first time such pleasant things have happened, and it will not be the last. But why should the recipient of so much attention be the one to scold us harshly, to rail at conditions she imperfectly understands, to reproach us for our ill-mannered children (whom we fear she must have met in Beacon Street), our slackness in duty, our failure to observe the precepts and fulfil the intentions of those pioneers whom she kindly, but confusedly, calls “_our_ forefathers.”

It is the hopeless old story of opposing races, of people unable to understand one another because they have no mutual standards, no common denominator. Mary Antin is perfectly sincere, and, from her point of view, justified, in bidding us remember that among the Harrison Avenue tenants, “who pitch rubbish through their windows,” was the grocer whose kindness helped to keep her at school. And she adds with sublime because unconscious egotism, “Let the City Fathers strike the balance.” But Elizabeth Robins Pennell is also sincere, and, from _her_ point of view, justified, when she says with exceeding bitterness that, if Philadelphia blossomed like the rose with Mary Antins, the city would be but ill repaid for the degradation of her noble old streets, now transformed into foul and filthy slums. Dirt is a valuable asset in the immigrant’s hands. With its help he drives away decent neighbours, and brings property down to his level and his purse. The ill-fated Philadelphian is literally pushed out of his home--the only place, sighs Mrs. Pennell, where he wants to live--by conditions which he is unable to avert, and unwilling, as well as unfitted, to endure.

It is part of the unreality of modern sentimentalism that we should have a strong sense of duty toward all the nations of the world except our own. We see plainly what we owe to the Magyar and the Levantine, but we have no concern for the Virginian or the Pennsylvanian. The capitalist and the sentimentalist play into each other’s hands, and neither takes thought of our country’s irrational present and imperilled future. We go on keeping a “civic kindergarten” for backward aliens, and we go on mutely suffering reproach for not advancing our pupils more rapidly. In the industrial town of New Britain, Connecticut, the foreign population is nine times greater than the native population, which is a hideous thing to contemplate. Twenty nationalities are represented, eighteen languages are spoken. The handful of Americans, who are supposed to leaven this heavy and heterogeneous mass, take their duties very seriously. Schools, playgrounds, clubs, night-classes, vacation classes, gymnasiums, visiting nurses, milk-stations, charitable organizations, a city mission with numerous interpreters, a free library with books and newspapers in divers tongues, all the leavening machinery is kept in active service for the hard task of civic betterment. Yet it was in New Britain that an immigrant was found who, after sixteen years’ residence in the United States, was not aware that he might, if he chose, become a citizen; and this incident, Mary Antin considers a heavy indictment against the community. “It makes a sensitive American,” she writes passionately, “choke with indignation.”

It makes an exasperated American choke with angry laughter to have the case put that way. The ballot is not necessary to safe, decent, and prosperous living. A good many millions of women have made shift to live safely, decently, and prosperously without it. If it is to be regarded as an asset to the immigrant, then his own friends, his own people, the voters of his own race, might (in the welcome absence of political bosses) be the ones to press it upon his acceptance. If it be considered as a safeguard for the Republic, we cannot but feel that this highly intelligent alien might be spared permanently from the electorate.