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THE
IMMIGRANT: THE STRANGER AT OUR GATE.
EMIGRANT.--Can I come in?
UNCLE SAM.--I 'spose you can; there's no law to keep you out.
DURING four hundred and more years this continent has been the melting pot for the
population of the Eastern hemisphere. For three-fourths of that time the yearly infusions
of raw metal was so slight that it was not hard to compound them with the native stock and
preserve the high character of American citizenship. But when alien immigration pours its
stream of half a million yearly, as has been frequently done during the last decade, and
when that stream is polluted with the moral sewage of the old world, including its
poverty, drunkenness, infidelity and disease, it is well to put up the bars and save
America, at least until she can purify the atmosphere of contagion which foreign invasion
has already brought. |
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