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traditional notions of internal and international government for the musty shams they are.

Now, these are expressions - all too rare, alas! - of that spirit of American humanity for which I have renounced the heritage of my fathers and accepted exile among you here. To this I am loyal with all the strength, not of unreasoning love, but of conviction. For this I am ready to shed my blood and to do battle against my own brothers, just as your ancestors fought against their mother country. It is my religion, my faith in a higher destiny for the race of man; and woe to him who dares attack it in the vain hope of transplanting to this new soil the seed of European discord and disaster! I may be mistaken in my faith; perhaps the splendid hope of democracy by which I lay such great store is only a foolish dream. All the same, it is the only bond of union between you and me. It is the basic principle upon which the great international society of America is built, and as long as it retains its semblance of reality, you have my whole-hearted support. As soon as you have convinced. me that that principle is menaced, you need have no doubts of my loyalty.

FROM ALIEN TO CITIZEN 1

EDWARD A. STEINER (1866- )

On a certain never-to-be-forgotten day I walked to the county seat, about seven miles away, to get my papers.

1 Mr. Steiner is a sociologist and author of distinction who migrated from Bohemia to this country after graduating from the University. He is now professor in Grinnell College, Iowa. From "From Alien to Citizen." Copyright, 1914, by Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. Used by permission of the publishers.

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

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 the voyage on the sea, relived the sweatshop 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: the reaction from a rigid theology and a distasteful, dogmatic atmosphere. After that, once more a stranger in a strange but holy place, and then a "fellow citizen with the saints!" "Fellow citizen with the saints!"

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 collective words: "We, fellow citizens."

CONFESSING THE HYPHEN1

EDWARD A. STEINER

I am in the enviable position, denied most of my kind, in which, before my peers, I can present my cause; and I plead guilty to the charge of being a hyphenated American according to Webster - not according to Roosevelt, I am proud of the fact and happy in it. . . . That I was born in another country, subject of a monarch, I was, for certain well-established reasons, unable to avoid. Το my credit be it stated that as soon as I discovered my deplorable condition I sought to make amends in the only way I knew; the way taken by millions before and after me emigrating to a country which was generous enough to admit us all.

Not only did that country admit us to her shores, she did not bar our way into her "Holy of Holies." Thus we were bound to her so closely that we became "hyphenated" before we knew it, wedded to her "for better and

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1 From 'Confessions of a Hyphenated American." Copyright, 1916, by Fleming H. Revell Company, New York. Used by permission of the publishers.

for worse, for richer and for poorer"; married to her as swiftly as marriages take place in this country, where everything is frightfully accelerated.

We were bound to her with a sense of loyalty and devotion which the native-born American cannot always feel. What she has done for us is sufficient to bind us to her "till death us do part."

Again speaking for myself, I had quite forgotten that I possessed even the innocent hyphen, as interpreted by Webster, not by Roosevelt. There was not a drop of American blood in my veins when I landed in New York scarcely thirty years ago. Yet I can say today without a bit of cant, which I always detest, and which is doubly detestable in these trying days, that if you drained every drop of my blood — and I am willing to give the last drop, if needed, if thus my words might be proved - you would find in my veins American blood only.

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I regarded myself as so thoroughly an American that I forgot the very names of the ships on which I chronically migrated and remembered only one of them, which it seemed had brought me here — the Mayflower. Whenever I returned to the land of my birth it was like going to a foreign country. When I stood before the Emperor's palace in the city of Vienna, with no great patriotic emotions stirring in my breast, I could hear the questioning voice of the poet ringing accusingly in my ears:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said

"This is my own, my native land"?

and I had to admit that I was the miserable wretch whose existence he doubted.

When my face was turned westward, and the odors of the steerage filled my nostrils, then indeed I knew that

I was going home, and the Alpine horn from the mountains, snow-crowned and glorious, had no such welcoming sound as the fog horn from the low dunes at Sandy Hook.

How often I have stood among thousands of my kind. on the great ships, out of which millions of us were born, full-grown, into this new land. Men and women were there, going back to their native land from which they thought themselves as yet unweaned. Many of them, more successful than I, were returning with small fortunes which they intended to spend in the towns and villages where they were born and where they expected to die. They soon discovered, however, that they were pilgrims and sojourners in the land of their birth and again they were seeking another country, "even an Heavenly"; or, to use the language of the street, they wanted to get back to "God's Country."

I have been a chronic immigrant, following so frequently the trail worn by millions of weary feet across this continent that it has become a sort of "White Way" for me, straighter than that on Broadway, and not so dangerous. I have visited every foreign colony between Angel Gate on the Pacific and Hell Gate on the Atlantic; and while I have found the mother tongue surviving in mutilated form among the older generation, and discovered that the most loyal part of our anatomy, the stomach, still craves for the leeks and garlics of the homeland, I have also found the Spirit of America brooding over these aliens, wooing them and winning them, while but very few do not finally yield it full allegiance.

I have guided many distinguished foreign guests who came here to study the strange ways of this country which they had called the Dollar Land. If they were discerning, and some of them were, they discovered that this

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