OUR FOREIGNERS A CHRONICLE OF AMERICANS IN THE MAKING BY SAMUEL P. ORTH NEW HAVEN YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS TORONTO GLASGOW, BROOK CO. LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright, 190 9 by Yale Umversizy Press CONTENTS I. OPENING THE DOOR Page I II. THE AMERICAN STOCK 21 III. THE NEGRO 45 IV. UTOPIAS IN AMERICA 66 V. THE IRISH INVASION 103 VI. THE TEUTONIC TIDE 124 VII. THE CALL OF THE LAND 147 VIII. THE CITY BUILDERS 162 IX. THE ORIENTAL 188 X. RACIAL INFILTRATION 208 XL THE GUARDED DOOR Ml BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 235 INDEX 241 vn OUR FOREIGNERS CHAPTER I OPENING THE DOOR LONG before jnen awoke to the vision of America, the Old World was the scene of many stupendous migrations. One after another, the Goths, the Huns, the Saracens, the Turks, and the Tatars, by the sheer tidal force of their numbers threatened to engulf the ancient and medieval civilization of Europe, But neither in the motives prompting them nor in the effect they produced, nor yet in the magnitude of their numbers, will such migrations bear comparison with the great exodus of European peoples which in the course of three centuries has made the United States of America. That move ment of races first across the sea and then across the land to yet another sea, which set in with the English occupation of Virginia in 1607 and which OUR FOREIGNERS has continued from that day to this an almost cease less stream of millions of human beings seeking in the New World what was denied them in the Old has no parallel in history. It was not until the seventeenth century that the door of the wilderness of North America was opened by Englishmen but, if we are interested in the cir cumstances and ideas which turned Englishmenthither, we must look back into the wonderful six teenth century and even into the fifteenth, for it was only five or six years after the great Chris tophers discovery, that the Cabots, John and Se bastian, raised the Cross of St. George on the North American coast. Two generations later, when the New World was pouring its treasure into the lap of Spain and when all England was pulsating with the new and noble life of the Elizabethan Age, the sea captains of the Great Queen challenged the Spanish monarch, defeated his Great Armada, and unfurled the English flag, symbol of a changing era, in every sea. The political and economic thought of the six teenth century was conducive to imperial expan sion. The feudal fragments of kingdoms were be ing fused into a true nationalism. It was the day of the mercantilists, when gold and silver were OPENING THE DOOR 3 given a grotesquely exaggerated place in the na tional economy and self-sufficiency was deemed to be the goal of every great nation. Freed from the restraint of rivals, the nation sought to produce its own raw material, control its own trade, and carry its own goods in its own ships to its own markets. This economic doctrine appealed with peculiar force to the people of England. England was very far from being self-sustaining. She was obliged to import salt, sugar, dried fruits, wines, silks, cotton, potash, naval stores, and many other necessary commodities. Even of the fish which formed a staple food on the English workmans table, two thirds of the supply was purchased from the Dutch. Moreover, wherever English traders sought to take the products of English industry, mostly woolen goods, they were met by handicaps tariffs, Sound dues, monopolies, exclusions, retaliations, and even persecutions. So England was eager to expand under her own flag. With the fresh courage and buoyancy of youth she fitted out ships and sent forth expedi tions. And while she shared with the rest of the Europeans the vision of India and the Orient, her gentlemen adventurers were not long in seeing the possibilities that lay concealed beyond the 4 OUR FOREIGNERS inviting harbors, the navigable rivers, and the for est-covered valleys of North America...