Speech #500000584

If it were otherwise. the limited extent of desirable public lands no longer adpits of further general and wholesale prodigality. nor justifies the teliptation of aliens with gifts of our last acres. and we should also bear in mind that we now have every new year. of those born in our own country. nearly a million ofyoung men who will reach their majority. to whom it will be far more for the public weal to offer free homesteads than to aliens or strangers. Provident husbandry demands that our posterity. young America. shall not be wholly deprived of its birthright. The measure introduced by me was intended more effectually to regulate immigration by a scheme so moderate as to meet general acceptance. Of course it will be referred. together with all other bills on the same subject. to the Committee on the Judiciary. and be subjected to a learned and careful revision. If the committee shall find time to look at the defects of our present laws as well as to their defective administration. it will be the only assurance asked for that they will at an early day report some measure to checkmate the gross imposition of foreign nations to which. for some years. we have been so largely subjected. Floods of immigrants. like breakers of the ocean. are daily thrown upon our shores. over five million. as I have already stated. within the last dozen years. and over forty thousand Italians within the last ten months. and the tidal wave which confounds the homogeneity of the people today is no sooner absorbed than another rushes and tumbles in tomorrow. We hold a tempting part of the world. and to those who come with clean records. seeking to escape from -the iron heels of foreign aristocracies or from the strangulation of a superabundant population. we leave our doors wide open. but shall we not refuse hospitality to all classes of alien irreclaimable maniacs. mendicants. and miscreants? And may we not refuse to become a universal almsgiver on compulsion?