Speech #470030225

If the object were to destroy our political system. to render free government impossible. then it would be rational and consistent to permit the riffraff of the nations to be dumped into our streets and upon our lands without restraint. to import great hordes of servile laborers. whose competition with the free American voter will break down our social economy by the destruction of the industrial system which sustains it. to give welcome to ignorance. vice. and crime. to substitute the Temple of Joss for the Christian Church. and the worship of Chinese gods instead of the worship of the God of our fathers. These are the means which the enemies of free government might well employ. When. in the progress of unlimited immigration. this country becomes well filled with Chinese. whose scouts and spies are now in every city and town in all the States giving information to their masters who are conducting this oriental invasion. when our cities are festering with the rot of their civilization. when our towns are filled with alien thieves. and our lanes are trodden by an intermcinable line of vagabond tramps. whlen the American laborer. overwhelmed. discouraged. and disgusted. is compelled to either abandon his native land or take refuge in the hovel. too poor to send his children to school . the youth of the masses growing up in ignorance. their young lives crushed by grinding toil for the means of subsistonce. what then will be the prospect for the permanence of free government 7 History teaches no lesson with greater clearness or persistence than this: that nations once powerful have degenerated and gone into decay. generally. in consequence of. and in proportion to. the admission and incorporation into their bodiespolitic of inferior or heterogeneous races L and this we may apply with peculiar fitness to a nation like ours. whose government is a government of the people. Debase the people and you degrade your sovereign. Can it be possible that we who stand herejresh from a conflict engendered by the effects of that policy. which in the morning of our national career permitted the introduction imto this country of an alien and servile race. our memories nitrdened with the horrors of that long agony of isternecinc war. our wounds scarcely yet healed. in fall view from our windows of the graves of a hundred thousand heroic dead who fell in the struggle. the sad faces of many widows and orphan children reminding us whereverwe turn of the anguish and suffering innocent souls have been made to feel. can it be possible.