Speech #630384050

President. I was asking the question how long a means pedigree had to be in this country in order to entitle him to call himself an American citizen. Then I suggested that If ive went back to the time when his ancestors came to this country.. we might find that they came under the same difficulties. had the same vile habits. and were of the same low order of intellect that it is now charged afflict the presentday immigrant. I wonder if some of these American aristocrats. if they were to go back far enough. might not find that some one of their remote grandmothers was sold upon the auction block and paid for in long green tobacco? In those days. when we had the "old immigration." now so highly praised by the authors of this bill. European nations dumped their prison hordes upon these shores. Shipowners carried over indentured servants here and sold them into practical slavery. I wonder how many of the modern aristocrats. who curl their lips in fine scorn at the poor fellow who now seeks asylum. could trace their ancestry back to that kind of an immigrant? When in this Chamber I hear these people who flee from persecution in other lands denounced as vicious and bad because they are unlettered I can not forget that when some of our early immigrants. now so much lauded. landed upon these shores they came with instruments of torture in one hand and the Bible in the other and sought to find in the words of Holy Writ a warrant for religious persecution. I have in mind. the fact that some of these old immigrants whom we now so much do eulogize and love drove Roger Williams into the wilderness. and that upon the hills of Massachusetts they lighted the flames that drank up the blood of poor old women being executed for the imaginary crime of Wtitchcraft. I recall to mind that some of this original immigration and parent stock was willing with fagot and sword to exterminate an entire colony because its inhabitants worshiped Godti under a cross that now points toward the sky from every hanlet and village of our land. We are told that the ancient immigration was all good. that it was a most noble class of noble men and women. and yet. sir. this cry that is made in the Senate in the closing days of the year of our Lord. 1.914 has been upon the lips. of the proscriptionist from the days when our Republic was born. The salne charge that is being made today against certain classes of foreigners has been made against every class of foreigneis. I can duplicate every condition of horror that has been adverted to totay by the utterances of those who stood opposed to foreign immigration in the early days -of this Republic. I can cite you- to illustrious examples and to words that fell from the lips of great men. *who were sincere then as these even greater men of the present are sificere. It Is just a part of human nature. that is all.