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. 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 country is held together by a finer metal than gold and by a nobler symbol than the eagle of our coinage. They found that although there have come here in the last twenty years some thirteen millions of aliens, broken bits, torn patches of all nationalities and races, we are being knitted to one another as a nation. At no time in our history has the sense of nationality been stronger, and never before were we more truly the United States of America than now. These students of our national life were amazed and confounded as they observed the change in the expression, bearing, and deportment of the peoples whom they knew in the Old World as sullen, rebellious, suspicious, and incapable of cohesion. AMERICA ALONE1 RUDOLPH BLANKENBURG (1843-1918) I came from foreign shores to find a home here, and I know what it is to love another land; but I want to urge upon you that you must love America first of all. With the high privilege of citizenship in this great country go responsibilities. You must dedicate yourselves from this day to America alone.. In forswearing allegiance to the potentate of the land from which you came, you must give yourself utterly to the United States. Let your motto be "America first, last, and all the time." No matter what may happen in the world at large, no matter what befalls the 1 From a speech made by Mayor Blankenburg, a distinguished reform mayor of Philadelphia, welcoming President Wilson to Philadelphia, May 10, 1915. country you love that you left behind, our first allegiance is to the country of our adoption. The motto which I accepted long ago as my own is, "Do right and fear not." Don't let any one for a moment divert you from the thought that you are an American forever and nobody's slave. Never let anybody for selfish reasons dictate what you shall do. Let no one, when age shall have come upon you as it. has upon me, point to you as one who has been an enemy to his country, who has broken his oath of allegiance! A FAR JOURNEY 1 ABRAHAM MITRIE RIHBANY It was no easy task for me on the morning of that 7th of October, 1881, to believe my senses when I first experienced that well-nigh overwhelming feeling that I was really in the great city of New York. As our little party proceeded on across Battery Park up toward Washington Street, I felt the need of new faculties to fit my new environment. A host of questions besieged my mind. Was I really in New York? Was I still my old self, or had some subtle unconscious transformation already taken place in me? Could I utter my political and religious convictions freely, unafraid of either soldier or priest? What were the opportunities of the great New World into which I had just entered? What was awaiting me 1 Mr. Rihbany is a Congregationalist minister of Boston, who came from Syria to this country as an immigrant, in 1881. From "A Far Journey." Copyright, 1914, by Abraham Mitrie Rihbany. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. Used by permission of the publishers. in America, whose life, as I had been told, was so vast, so complex, and so enlightened? Whatever the future had "of wonder or surprise," it seemed that merely being in the United States was enough of a blessing to call forth my profoundest gratitude. Nor did I have to wait very long for tangible evidence to convince me that America was the land of liberty and opportunity. On that very evening my eyes beheld a scene so strange and so delightful that I could hardly believe it was real. Sitting in the restaurant early in the evening, we heard, approaching from the direction of "uptown," band music and the heavy tread of a marching multitude which filled the street from curb to curb. Some one, looking out of the window, shouted, "It is the laborers! They are on their way to Battery Park to hold a meeting and demand their rights.” That was all that was needed for me to dash out with a few others and follow the procession to the near-by park. I had heard in a very fragmentary way of the "united laborers" in Europe and America, but, while in Syria, and as a Turkish subject, it was almost beyond me to conceive of workingmen in collective moral and political action. The procession was dotted with illuminated banners inscribed with mottoes which I could not read, and the gathering must have been that of some "trade union." Reaching the park the crowd halted, and a huge mass of eager men and a few women faced the impassioned speakers. What those speakers said was beyond my understanding. I was a stranger to the country, the English language, and the political and social activities of free men. From some fellow Syrians who understood English I learned that those workingmen were protesting against certain issues which I cannot now recall. I was intensely interested |