"I am the battle of yesterday, and the mistake of to-morrow. I am the mystery of the men who do without knowing why..

I am the clutch of an idea, and the reasoned purpose of resolution.

"I am no more than what you believe me to be and I am all that you believe I can be.

66 I am what you make me, nothing more.

I swing before your eyes as a bright gleam of color, a symbol of yourself, the pictured suggestion of that big thing which makes this nation. My stars and my stripes are your dream and your labors. They are bright with cheer, brilliant with courage, firm with faith, because you have made them so out of your hearts. For you are the makers of the flag and it is well that you glory in the making."

WHAT I SHOULD LIKE TO TELL THE

IMMIGRANT

EDWARD A. STEINER

[From his volume called From Alien to Citizen; copyrighted by F. H. Revell & Co., 1914. Reprinted by permission.]

I SHOULD like the entrance into the United States to be a poem to all who come, and not the horrible tragedy into which it often resolves itself when the first ecstasy is over. All the way across the sea I would make of every ship a school, with such fair comforts as men are entitled to, for their money.

I should like to. teach them that they may enter without fear and without uttering a lie, so that those at the gate might know that these new comers are human, and treat them as such, so long as they conduct themselves properly.

I should like to teach the strangers that there is a fair reward for hard struggle and an honest living wage for an honest day's work. That they must guard their health by abstinence from intoxicating drink, and I should like to prohibit its sale on

board of ship and everywhere else. For to the immigrants, the ignorant immigrants, alcohol is a lying curse. They believe that it strengthens and that no hard labor can be done without it. I should like to tell them also that their health will be guarded in mines and factories and that their bodies and souls have value to man and to God.

I should like to point to the Goddess of Liberty and say that she welcomes all who come in her name, that she guarantees freedom to all who obey law, that our law is always reasonable and that, if it is a burden, it falls upon the shoulders of rich and poor alike.

I should like to tell them that they have nothing to fear in this country except their own frailties, that there are no barriers here but their own clannishness and that the way to the best is open to all who walk reverently. This and more I should like to be able to teach; fragments of it I have taught, more of it than many of them will find true, I fear. But to me so much of it has been true that I should like to have all men find it so.

I have suffered much here, I have gone the whole scale of hunger, sorrow and despair; yet I say it again and again, Holy America! Holy America! And I want all men to be able to say it, as they said it with me under the lee of the land where free men live.

ON BECOMING AN AMERICAN CITIZEN

EDWARD A. STEINER

[From his volume called From Alien to Citizen; copyright, by Fleming H. Revell & Co., 1914. Reprinted by permission.]

It would be futile to try to tell of the many jubilant notes which my seminary experiences brought into the hitherto minor chords of my life in America. One epoch-making event, however, I must record. During that period I became an American citizen. On a certain never-to-be-forgotten day

I walked to the county seat, about seven miles away, to get my papers. What seemed to me should be a sacred rite proved to be an uninspiring performance. I entered a dingy office where a commonplace man, chewing tobacco, mumbled an oath which I repeated. Then he handed me a document for which I paid two dollars. When I held the long-coveted paper in my hand, the inspiring moment came, but it transpired in my own soul.

"Fellow-citizen with the saints! Fellow-citizen with the saints!" I repeated it many times all to myself.

I scarcely noticed the straight, montonous seven miles back. I was travelling a much longer road; I was reviewing my whole life. Far away across the ocean I saw the little village in the Carpathian Mountains, with its conglomerate of warring races among which I lived, a despised "Jew boy." them all, I was hated by all.

Loving

I heard the flogging of the poor Slovak peasants, the agonized cries of Jewish men and women incarcerated in their homes, while these same peasants, inflamed by alcohol but still more by prejudice, were breaking windows and burning down houses.

I saw myself growing into boyhood more and more separated from my playmates, until I lived a youth, without friends, growing into a "man without a country!"

Again I felt the desolation of that voyage on the sea, relived the sweat shop experience in New York, the hard labor in mill and mine, tramped across the plains and suffered anew all the agonies of the homeless, hungry days in Chicago. Then came the time when faith began to grow and the Christ became real. . . . After that, once more a stranger in a strange but holy place, and then a Fellow-citizen with the saints!

66

It is no wonder that strangers like myself love this country, and love it, perhaps, as the native never can. Frequently I have wished for the careless American citizen, who holds his franchise cheap, an experience like my own, that he might know the value of a freeman's birthright. It would be a glorious

experience, I am sure, to feel that transition from subject to citizen, from scarcely being permitted to say, "I," to those great collective words: "We, Fellow-citizens."

If I have preached this doctrine of fellowship in a hundred variations from one end of the country to the other and I have done it almost with a fanatic's zeal those who have read the story of my life will understand the reason. I have preached this doctrine with a passion, not only because America gave me the chance to achieve certain things, or because it has granted me certain rights and privileges, but because this country ought to be able to keep itself young and virile and vital enough, to bestow these blessings upon all who crowd our shores, filling our cities and entering daily into our inner life.

A hard and an almost impossible task it is, unless we can bring our idealistic forces to bear upon these unformed and rude elements which come to spy out the land."

More and more I realize that the right of citizenship has been too easily given, because it is too lightly held; that the time must come when homeborn and stranger shall learn to realize that it is not only a gift but a privilege which must be earned, and whose right to hold must be proved by him who holds it. The community, the church, the schools and the other new, articulated ideals which are being born in these better days, must become so aggressive and so vital, that even these unlettered folk shall know that the three electric signs on Broadway are not the symbols which dominate our life.

1

1 The three electric signs noted by a foreign traveller first walking up Broadway represented a woman winking her right eye, a large whiskey bottle, and a chariot race. "Those three signs appeared to us to represent the American spirit," said he. "The woman who seems to rule everything, the whiskey which symbolizes your love of pleasure, and the horses, the rush of trampling trade. Since that first impression, however, we have discovered that the unseen and unadvertised forces. are stronger here than we believed. We have ceased to be startled by your materialistic symbols; but each day brings its new surprises in the sphere of ideals."

They must learn that outside this illumined triangle in which the great tragedies of life take place, there is a vast, unlimited field over which broods the spirit of a noble idealism, the spirit of America. It is a cause for sincere gratitude that we are becoming more and more conscious of the power of ideals in our national life, and that these ideals bid fair to conquer.

AMERICA THE MELTING POT

SAMUEL W. MCCALL

[From the Liberty of Citizenship, a volume of public lectures delivered at Yale; Yale University Press, 1915.]

THE perils of a wilderness infested by savages and wild beasts were sufficiently formidable in reality, but they seemed even more alarming when they were looked upon from the eastern shores of the Atlantic. Such forbidding dangers could make no appeal to weaklings and cowards. They beckoned strong and brave men to meet them, and strong and brave men responded. All along the Atlantic, settlements were established by a hardy stock and the sterling seed was sown from which a great nation was destined to spring.

It came about that not merely during the periods before the Revolution, but for a half-century or more afterwards, this process of natural selection went on, and we see America in its making taking unto itself a virile, enterprising and daring body of citizens. The institutions adopted by people of such a character could not be otherwise than free. The atmosphere was charged with democracy and equality. Each man was in the eye of the law and of public opinion as good as every other and endowed with the same opportunity.

But the dangers and hardships of immigration gradually melted away. It became as safe to cross the sea in modern ships as to remain at home. The savages and wild beasts had disappeared and the wilderness had given place to fields of wheat and corn.

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