Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 March 1889 — AMERICA FOR AMERICANS [ARTICLE]

AMERICA FOR AMERICANS

THERE H&O FEAR OF AMERICA BEING O V ERCytOWDED. For We Can Find Room for All the World and to Spare—Of Ono Blood All the Nations of Rev. Dr. Talmage preached at the, Brooklyn Tabernacle last Sunday. Bub- . ject: ‘‘Shall America be Reserved for I Americans.” Text, Acts xvii., 26. He I said: . '''' I think God built this American con" tinent and orgaryzed this United States Republic to demonstrate the stupendous idea of the text. A man in Persia will always remain a Persian, a map in Switzerland will always remain a Swiss, a man in Austria will always remain an Austrian, but all foreign nationalities coming to America were intended to be Americans. This land is the qhemical laboratory where foreign bloqds are to be inextricably, mixed up and race prejudices and race, antipathies are to perish, and this sermop- is an ax -by which 1 hope to help kill them. It is not hard for me to preach such a sermon, because, glthodgn my ancestors j came to this country about two hundred and fifty years ago, some of them came from) Walesand some from Scotland and some from Holland and some from other lands, and lam a mixture of so many nationalities that I ieel at home with people from under every sky and’ . have a right to call thajp blood relations. There are < mad caps and patriotic lunatics in this country who are ever and anon crying out, . “America lor Americans.” Down with the German's! Down with the Irish! Down with the Jewel Down with the Chinese! are in some directions the popular cries, all of which vociferations I would drown out by the full organ of my text, while I pull out the stops and put my foot outlie pedal that will open the loudest fnpi-s, and run my nnjers Over all the our banks of ivory keys, playing the chant,n “God hath made of one blood all nations.” There are. not five; men in this, audience, nor live men in any audience to-day in America, except it be. dp an Indian reservation, who were not dp.-, scended from foreigners if you go fir enough back. If tke principle Amer-, ica only for Americans be carried out, then you and I have no right to be here, and we had better charter all the steamers andciippers and men-of-war and yachtsand sloops and get out of this country as quick aa possible. The Pilgrim Fathers were all immigrants, the Huguenots were all immigrants. The cradle of most one of our family was rocked on the bank of the Clyde or the Rhine or the Shannon or the Seine or the Tiber. Had the watchwc rd, ‘ America for Americans” been an early and successful cry, where now stand our cities would have stood Indian wigwams, and canoes instead of steamers would have tracked the Hudson and the Connecticut; and, instead of the Mississippi being the main artery of the continent, it would have been only a ‘rough for deer and antelope and wild pigeons to drink out of. What makes the cry of “America for Americans” the more absurd and inhuman is that some in this country, who Themselves arrived here in their boyhood or arrived here only one or two generations back are joining in the cry. Escaped from foreign despotisms themselves, they say, “Shut the door of escape for others.” Getting themselves on our shores in a life-bot from the shipwreck, saying, “Haul the boat on the beach and let the rest of the Eassengers go to the bottom!” Men who aye yet on them a Scotch qt Gentian or English or Irish brogue crying out, “America for Americans!’! What if the native inhabitants of Heaven, I mean the angels, the cherubim, the seraphim born there, should stand in the gate, and when they see us coming up at the last, should say, “Go back! Heaven for the Heavenians!” Of course, we do well not to allow foreign nations to make this country a convict colony. We would have a wall built as high as heaven and as deep’ as hell against foreign thieves, pickpockets and Anarchists. We would not let’ them wipe their feet on the map of the out side doors of Castle Garden. © In England, or Russia, or-Germany, or France send their desperadoes to get clear of them; we would have these desperadoes sent ships to the places where they came from. We will not have Americk become the dumping place for foreign vagabondism. But you build up a wall at the Narrows before New York Harbor, or at the Golden Gate before San Francisco, and forbid the coming of the industrious and hardworking and honest populations of other lands who want to breathe the air of our free institutions and get opportunity (or better livelihood, and it is only a question of time when God will tumble that wall flat on out own heads whith the red-lot thunderbolts of His omnipotent indignation. God is the Father of the human race. He has at least five sons, a North America. a South America, a European, an Asiatic and an African. The North American sniffs the breeze and he says to his four brothers and . sisters: “Let the South American stay in South America, let the European stay ,in Europe, let the Asiatic stay in. Asia, let the /African stay in Africa; but America isfor me. Lthink it is the parlor of the whole earth. I like its carpets oi grass and its upholstery of the front window, namely the American sunrise, and the upholstery of the back window, namely the American sunset. Now I want you all to stay out and keep to your places.” I am sure the Father of the whole human race would hear of it and chastisement would come and, whether by earthquake, or flood, or drought, or heavendarkening swarms of locust and grass: hopper, or destroying angel of pestilence, God would rebuke our selfishness as a nation and say to the four winds of heaven: “This world is my house, and the North American is no more my child than is the South American and the European and the Asiatic and the African. And I built this world for all the children, and the-parlor is theirs, and ail is theirs.” For, let me say, whether we Will or not, the population of other lands will come here. There are harbors all the way from Baffin’s Bay to Galveston, and if you shut fifty gates there will be other gates unguarded. And if you forbid foreigners from coming on the steamers they will take sailing vessels. And if you forbid them coming on sailing vessels they will come in boats. And if you will not let them come in boats they will corner on rafts. And if you will not allow wharfage to the raft they w 11 leave it outride Sandv Hook and swim for free America. Stop

them? Yon might M well pass a law forbidding a swarm of summer bees from lighting on the clover top, or pass a law forbidding the tides of the Atlantic to rise the moon puts under it silver grappling hooks, or a law that the noonday stin should not irradiate the atmosphere. Tney have come. Thjey are coming now. But some of this erv, America for Americans, may ariee from an’ honest fear lest this land be overcrowded. Such persons had better take the Northrrn Pacific or Union Pacific or Southern Pacific or Atlantic and Charlotte Air Line or Texas and Sante Fe, and go a long journey and find out that no more than a tenth part of this continent is fully cultivated. If a man with a hundred acres of farm land should put all his cultivation on one acre he would be’ cultivating a larger ratio of his farm titan our nation is now.occupying of the national farm. Pohr the whole human race, Europe, Asia, Africa and all the islands of the sea, into America and there would be room to spare. All the Rocky Mountain barrennesses and all the other American deserts are to be fertilized, and as Salt Lake City and much of Utah once yielded not a of grass, now, by artificial irrigation, have become gardens, so a large part of this continent that now is too poor to grow even a mullein stock or a Canada thistle, will, through artificial irrigation, like an Illinois prairie wave with wheat or litre a Wisconsin farm, rustle with corn tassels. Beside that, after perhaps a century or two more, when this continent is quite well occupied, the tides of immigration will turn the other way. Politics and governmental affairs being corrected on the other side of the voters, Ireland under different regulation*' th,rued into a garden will invite back another generation of Irishmen, and the wide wastes of Russia brought from under despotism will, with he?- own green field?, invite "bacg another generation of Russians. And there will be huh* dreds of thousands of every year si/ttling on the other cota.itientsJ And, after a number of centuries, all tne earth full and crowded, what then? Weil, at that time some night a/panther meteor wandering through the heavens will put its paw op our world z and stop it, and, putting its pantlirr tooth into tbe neck of its mountain range, will shake it lifeless as the rat-terrier a rat. So I have no mote fear of America being overcrowded than that the porpoises in the Atlantic Ocean wili become so numerous as to stop shipping. It is through mighty additions of foreign population to our native population that I think God is going to fill this land with a race of people 95 per cent, superior to any thing the world has ever seen. Intermarriage of nations is deprezting and crippling. Marriage outside of one own’s nationality and with another style of nationality is a mighty gain. What makes the Scotch-Irish second to no pedigree for brain and stamina of character, so that blood goes right up to the Supreme Court Bench and to the front rank in jurisprudence and merchandise and art? Because nothing under heaven can be more uplike than a Scotchman and an Irishman, and the descendants of these two conjoined nationalities, unless rum flings them, go right to the tip-top in every thing. Ail nationalities coming to this land the opposites will all the while be affianced, and French and German will unite, and that will stop all the quarrels between them, and one child they will call Alsace and the other Lorraine. . And hotblooded Spaniards will unite with coldblooded Polander and romantic Italian with matter of fact Norwegian, and a hundred and fifty years from npw the race occupying this land will be in stature, in purity of complexion, in liquidity of eye, in gracefulness of poise, in dome-like bro w, in taste, in intelligence and m morals so far ahead of any thing now known on either side the seas that this last quarter of the niueteeth century will seem to them like the dark ages. Oh, then how they will legislate and bargain and pray and preach and govern! This is the land where, by the mingling of the races, the race prejudice is to get its death blow. How heaven feels about it we may conclude from the fact that Christ, the Jew, and descended from a Jewess, nevertheless provided a religion for all races, and that Paul, though a Jew, becaffie the chief apostle of the Gentiles; I must confess there was a time when I entertained race prejudice, but, thanks to God, that prejudice has gone, and if I sat in church and on one side of me there was a blacteman, and on the other side of me there was an Indian, and before me was a Chinaman, and behind me a Turk, I would be as happy as I am now standing in the presence of this brilliant audience, and I am as happy now as I can be and live. The sooner we get this corpse of race prejudice buried, the healthier will be our American , atmosphere. Now, in views of this subject., I have two points blank words to utter, one suggesting what for eign era ought to do for us, and the other what we ought to do for foreigners. First, to. foreigners. Lay aside all apologetic air, apd /realize you have as much right as any- man who was not only himself bern here, but his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him. • My other word suggests what Americans ought to do for foreigners. By all possible means explain to them our institutions. Coming here the vast majority of them know about as much concerning Republican or Democratic form of government as you in the United States know about poli ics of Denmark or France, or Italy or Switzerland, namely nothing. Explain to them that liberty in this country means liberty to do right, but not liberty to do wrong. Never in their presence say anything agaijist their native land, for, no matter how much they may have been oppressed there, in that native land there are sacred places, cabins or mansions, around whose doors they played, and perhaps somewhere there is a grave into which they would like, when life’s toils are over, to be letdown, for it is mother’s grave, and it would be like going again into the loving arms that first held them and against the bosom that first pillowed them. My! my! how low down a man must have . escended to have no regard for the place where bis cradle was rocked. ? Don’t mock their brogue or their stumbling attempts at the hardest of all languages to learn, namely, tbe English .language. I warrant that they speak ’English as well as yon could talx Scandinavian. Treat them in America as vou would like to be treated, if for the sake of your honest principles or a better livelihood lor yourself or your family you had moved under the shido w of

Jun "Iran, or the Rigi, or the Giant’s CsiN-way, or the Bohemian Forest, or i FrrfiYfotii ’n Jura.. > .•* Fbe mivhtiefet defense against Euroi nmons is a wail of Europeans rt-hi-.niug all up and down the American CoiitiiK-nt, a wall of heads and bean? consecrated to free government. A - bulwark of foreign humanity heaved up all along our shores, rein- < forc'd by the Atlantic ocean, armed as it is with t-m pests and. Carrib bean whirlwinds and giant billows ready to fling.. mountains from their catapult, we need as a natiqli fear no one in tbe univerrt but God, and if found in his service we need not- fear Him. As six hundred million people will yet sit down at our national table, let God preside. To Him be dedicated the metal of our mines, the sheaves of our harvest fields, the fruits of our orchards, the fabrics of our tra >nfactories, the telescopes of our observatories, the volumes of our libra-** ries, the songsjof our churches,the affections of our hearts, and all our lakes become baptismal fonts and all our mountains altars of praise, and all our valleys amphitheaters of worship, and our country, having become fifty nations consolidated in one, may its every heart-throb be a pulsation of gratitude to Him who made “of one blood all nations” and ransomer’ that blood by the payment o» the last drop of His own. »