Chapter XIII: Part II: With the Incoming Tide (5)

Knowing how great this legacy is, and yet may be for the blessing of mankind, I am pleading for this new immigrant. If we care at all for that struggling, striving mass of men, unblessed as yet by those gifts of Heaven which have blessed us, let us prove to these people of all kindreds and races and nations, that our God is the Lord, that His law is our law and that all men are our brothers.

XXIV

FROM CHAOS TO COSMOS

While passing through a pleasure park in one of the European capitals I met, quite by accident, my fellow passenger on the Italian steamer, the Puritan rebel; she who smoked cigarettes, drank cocktails, was divorced and had gone to the Old World in search of a more congenial moral atmosphere and a husband with braid and buttons. Now she was drinking the cup of unrestrained pleasure, and having nearly drained it, it was beginning to taste bitter. Officers and attachés, Grand Opera, frivolous plays and care-free crowds, were beginning to pall upon her and she was unmistakably homesick; although she did not confess to that last fact.

"I suppose," she said, "you can't get rid of Puritanism, when once it gets into your blood. It's an hereditary disease."

"And it is contagious," I added.

"I thought," she continued, "that at home we were small and narrow and that over here I should find a larger freedom; but you can't turn around here, without finding the bars up--racially, religiously, socially and politically. The only unobstructed passage is the way to Hell."

Hers were large, black, dreamy eyes and the shadows of disappointment passed over them. Then, to shake off the gripping seriousness from her mood, she said, with a forced smile: "I am going to see the Merry Widow to-night with my Captain. They are both inane. Meeting you has made me blue, I fear; you remind me of my father."

She said this reproachfully, I thought; although she added: "Let us sit down and talk things over. My daughter and the maid are listening to the music and I have nothing to do until my Captain comes to meet me."

"Now please listen to me," I said when we were seated. "I was born over here, right in this city. My playground was this very park. I have tasted the best this city can offer a boy, as well as its worst.

"Listen," I said again; for her eyes wandered to the gay crowds. "I also know your home city, and I wouldn't give one block in Hartford, Conn., not speaking from the commercial standpoint, for this whole magnificent city, with its Cathedral, its Grand Opera, its royal castle, its officers and its Merry Widow. Do you ask why? Just watch this crowd and let me interpret it to you. Those boys now passing are Bohemians, apprentices; and they are talking Czechish to make themselves obnoxious to the Germans whom they hate and who hate them, more than your forefathers hated the devil.

"Do you see that Bosnian? Notice his smile as he sells a jack-knife to the Austrian soldier. His smile would be more genuine if he could knife this detested 'Schwab,' his enemy and the conquerer of his country.

"Those men with the needle-pointed moustaches are Magyars, and they hate the Slavs and Germans and every one else who will not speak their language.

"The officers with the red fez are Turks, as you know; just now they despise everything Austrian, and not without reason.

"The picturesque nurse maids, wheeling the babies, do not have those soldiers with them to protect Austria's 'infant industries'; they are Slovaks, aliens of the aliens, and the unprotected prey of the soldiers. The Jews here add to the chaos; for all these races hate them and they reciprocate in kind."

"We have all these people in Hartford! What of it?" My companion impatiently interrupted my explanations.

"This," I replied. "These people have lived for many hundreds of years, in chaos and confusion. Each in his little world, hemmed in by the pride of his race or the hate of other people. Each day the barriers grow taller and the hate grows stronger.

"I lived in it for a good many years, and it is an awfully little world one is locked into; yet it is as big and terrible as Hell. That being branded by the marks of your race, by the speech your ancestors have bequeathed you, by your blood or your religion, and isolated as if you were a leper, while your heart yearns for the larger fellowships--all that I have felt from my youth."

"Haven't you felt it in America, too?"

"Yes; but with a difference, a tremendous difference. There they may shut one from the social contact, but there remain the public schools, the libraries, the churches and settlements. And what schools you have in Hartford! I have been in schoolrooms there, in the first grade, where 90% of the children were of alien birth, and at a glance I knew their nationality.

"Italians, miniature old men and women, although scarcely seven years of age.

"Serious, little black-eyed Jews, with the burden of ages upon their bent backs.

"Polish boys and girls, with small foreheads, as if some tyrant had trampled upon their heads.

"Armenians, sad-looking, dark-skinned creatures, haunted by the remembrance of their village street, red from the blood of the slain.

"Syrian children, out of the very village in whose meadows the angels sang when Christ was born; but who have never known either peace or good will.

"I went to the second and third grades, and there it seemed as if the hand of a good angel had already passed over those marked and marred faces; I could almost hear the voice of the All-Father saying:

"'I will blot out the transgressions which have been transgressed against you.'

"They looked like children who were beginning to live the real life of the child in a really human world, and were having a chance to grow into the human likeness.

"I have been to your High School, and there the marks were all but obliterated; there was 'neither Jew nor Greek, neither Roman nor Barbarian'; they were all a new people."

Now, my Puritan rebel was listening attentively enough; so I continued: "In America, something happens which cannot happen here. Over there, the fiber, the tissue, that mysterious fluid which we call life or soul, the very nerve cells change, under the benign influences of the heritage left by your fathers; that heritage which you despise--you"--I repeated, and I said it angrily; "you, who expatriate yourself for the sheen of braid and buttons, for Grand Opera and Viennese waltzes! You expatriate yourself

THE ONE WHO STAID AT HOME

THE ONE WHO EMIGRATED]

from a country where there is more idealism to the square inch than in all this country, in spite of its statuary, its music and its aristocracy.

"I'd rather live in Connecticut, the wife of a humble artisan, than here, the 'consort' of a Count or Duke."

"You talk exactly like my father," she repeated.

"Do I? I'm glad of it. I told you that Puritanism is contagious. Maybe I caught it from your father, and if I were sure that I have caught it, I would be sure of more moral fiber than you will get here, if you stay a hundred years.

"That Puritanism which you despise will make cosmos out of chaos; for in spite of its narrowness, there is in it the passion for humanity. It cries for justice, for freedom, for equality, even if it too often burdens itself with theological dogmas hard to understand and harder to believe.

"After all, the best thing in your country is, not that you give the weaker a chance to grow strong, and the broken the blessing of healing--the best of it is, that those of us who are just what we are, have a chance to help in the doing. It's the work that a man or woman can do over there that counts.

"Yes, go back, crawl back, if necessary, to sober Connecticut; to its pure women and its undemonstrative men, who do not make meaningless compliments, after the fashion of your Captain; but who will at least think no evil of you and who will treat you with real courtesy, when there is need of courteous action.

"You want art? You fear you will miss it? They are doing something worth while at home, in bronze and marble; but they are doing more wonderful things in human flesh and spirit.

"I have seen wretched Italian children who came from where they make little fairies out of Carrara marble, yet they were crooked without and within; and I have seen them grow tall and beautiful and pure, by the grace of God and the passion of some noble woman. That, after all, is the supreme art.

"Music? You can have Grand Opera in New York composed of all the stars in the operatic firmament; yet I have heard music, sweeter, better and truer, sung by children in the Settlements.

"I have seen a Christmas at Hull House, in Chicago, which surpassed any Grand Opera. I am sure if angels come down to earth and care for our mundane pleasures, they must have struggled for a front seat there.

"Fifty children of nearly all the races under Heaven sang the songs of their home-land, all the way from those they used to sing under the dark pines of Norway's farthest crag, down to those sung by Sicilian children beneath the palms of their ever sunny land.

"Together they sang those Heaven-born prophecies of 'Peace on earth, good will to men'; and as I heard the blended voices of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, Greeks, Italians and Syrians, I felt that the ancient prophecies are being fulfilled, at least in spots, on our then unknown continent.

"Go home. Learn to find pleasure in that classic art of making home. Learn how to find joy in giving children a chance to live and laugh, to look towards manhood and womanhood from a mountain top and not from a cage. Catch the rhythm of that new poetry which is now in the making; which speaks in its sonnets of justice, in its epics of war against all human wrong and in its lyrics of a sublimer and a larger love."

"There comes my Captain!" said my victim, with a sigh of relief; "and I must go."

Yes, there he stood; all braid and buttons, or just braid and buttons, a waxed moustache, a waxen smile and clicking spurs.

Gracefully he bowed as he offered his arm, in such a charming manner as could not be easily reproduced by any mere American. Thus they left me to my solemn musings, while the living tide swept by me, each drop in the great current antagonistic to the other. Unbidden there arose before me the ship, laden by human freight, leaving America, carrying representatives of these same races and nationalities alien and hostile to each other: Slavs and Magyars, arch foes of centuries' standing; Northern and Southern Italians, looking with scorn at one another; Jews and Gentiles, Greeks and Bulgarians, Albanians and Montenegrins.

All of them had come out of the chaos wrought by ages of hate and centuries of warfare. But in America, many of them had learned to live together without scorn on the lip or hand on the sword-hilt.

The walls which separated them were weakened, if not broken down, and like blind men they felt for one another in the dark; sometimes missing the larger brotherhood, but often finding it.

The Pentecost of which prophets and seers have dreamt, which is to repair the ruin wrought in the human family by the building of its towers of Babel, cannot be so far away. The cosmos may yet come out of the chaos, and there is no spot of earth on which this creative act can be performed as well as in our America.

The land is vast enough and rich enough; no barrier of language divides the East from the West; the North and the South are almost one, after an internecine war; and in spite of our melting of metals and slaughter of cattle and growing of corn--in spite of souls made hard and unresponsive to anything but money--like the

"It is just like you Americans--you go to work to make your dreams come true."]

cash register we have invented; in spite of my Puritan rebel and her numerous company--in spite of all that, our land is still full of dreamers of dreams, who yet are awake and practical enough to make their dreams come true.

"It is just like you Americans," said General Riciotto Garibaldi, to my "boys," as they stood together at the foot of his father's monument in Rome; while he listened to the story of their journeyings in the immigrants' land, living in their huts in Hungary, Poland and Italy, learning their language and their ways, that they may know how to minister to their needs over here, and bind us to them and them to us. "It is just like you Americans. We Italians think about those things and make poetry; you go to work at a great dream to make it true."

My faith in the dreams of the great dreamers has never wavered. I knew that the prophet's vision was not a _Fata Morgana_, and that the words of the Son of Man came straight from the fountain of truth. Believing in them and believing in American manhood and womanhood, in their altruism and in their faith, and believing in the essential humanity of our crowding alien host--I believe that cosmos is being created and that chaos will disappear.

Finally, what we teach the immigrant by precept or by example, he will become. He will bequeath our virtues or our vices, not only to the next generation which will spring with virgin strength from his loins; but through thousands of invisible channels, he will send these blessings or curses to the ends of the earth.

The issues of the Kingdom of God in this generation are with America.