Speech #540129863

The lower race will absorb the higher. not the higher the lower. when the two strains approach equality in numbers. In other words. there is a limit to the capacity of any race for assimilating and elevating an inferior race. and when you begi to pour in in unlimited numbers people of alien or lower races of less social efficiency and less moral force you are running the most frightful risk that a people can run. There lies the peril at the portals of our land. there is pressing the tide of unrestricted immigration. The time has certainly come. if not to stop. at least to check. to sift. and to restrict those immigrants. Let us see whether history bears out the Senator from Massachusetts in the statement that the lower order degenerates the higher order. That feature exists only in his imagination. a Frankenstein that is conjured up by his own fears of what may happen. without any warrant or authority for it in history. Race deterioration is an evil which works from above downward. never from below upward. There never was but one distinctive race in this land of ours affected by immigration. and that was the race which J ohn Winthrop and his followers found in 1630 when they set foot on Plymouth Rockthe American Indians"When across the ocean there came a Pilgrim bark bearing the seeds of life and death. the former were sown for us. the latter sprang up in the path of the simple native.. Two hundred years have changed the character of this continent and blotted from its face forever a whole peculiar people. Art has usurped the powers of nature. and the anointed children of education were too powerful for the tribes of the ignorant. As a race. they have withered from the land. their arrows are broken. their cabins are in the dust. and their council fires have long since gone out on our shores. Slowly and sadly they climb the distant mountains and view their doom in the setting sun. They know that there is but one remove for them. and that is to the shores of the Pacific. where they must soon hear the roar of the last wave. which shall settle over them forever." That is what immigration has done for the inferior race. No. ir. President. the lower classes never corrupt the higher. History is full of examples of socalled race deterioration where the vices of the higher in rank came to be practiced by the lowly. but never yet of an instance of the lower classes influencing the higher to their hurt. If immigration detrimental to the prosperity. character. and quality of our race should ever come to our country from over the seas. it will come in the first cabin and not in the steerage. he who shall sow the seeds of deterioration among our people will be the "peer." not the peasant. the "count." not the "coitadini." There is no danger of race deterioration here. Mr. President. Even if these immigrant laboring men were racially inferior. there is no danger for us to dread from association with them. There is a quality in the composition of the AngloSaxon which prevents any such calamity. if it really threatened. That qual.ity is perhaps the distinguishing trait of the AngloSaxon peopleI mean its power of assimilation of other peoples with itself.