Speech #550032333

If you go out in the streets of this country in our cities and come across a man with a hundred dollars you will say that he is rich. So he is rich today in comparison with the thousands and hundreds of thousands who are out of work. but if you turn a stranger loose in New York City from abroad with only $100 and with no likelihood of getting work unless he pushes some other man out of a job at a reduced price. you can characterize and classify such a man as nothing but a pauper. It is a question of the definition of "pauper." If an immigrant coming to our shores with only $100 is not a pauper. he soon will be. and if you will listen to the statistics which I shall present to you. you will find that your jails. your asylums. and your penitentiaries are today filled with this very class of men who have been admitted to our shores without any practical limitation. I asin simply asking you. my Republican friends. and asking the Democrats. to vote here to give some value to American citizenship. and as you stand here pretending that you value it. that you want to hold it up. that you want to maintain the price for it. that you do not want it to sink to the level of the pauper labor of Europe. it remains to be seen whether you will continue to allow the stream of a quarter of a million annually to pour into the American labor market. competing directly with our own people and with those foreigners who have preceded them for the work that is to be had. when there is no work here under the conditions. that exist. If you are honest protectionists and want to protect labor. you can not help but vote for this measure or something akin to -it. The mere pretense that you will restrict immigration to those who can only read and write is not sufficient. and will not go down with American laborers. It is not a question of being able -to read and write. it is whether you can handle brick and mortar and whether you can go into a factory or not. Thousands And tens of thousands of these ignorant and degraded foreigners who have come to our shores and debauch our suffrage were the main instrumentality of carrying the last Presidential election.