461. Reservation of America

Reservation of America

Act_17:26 : ’93And hath made of one blood all nations.’94

That is, if for some reason general phlebotomy were ordered, and standing in a row were an American, an Englishman, a Scotchman, and an Irishman, a Frenchman, a German, a Norwegian, an Icelander, a Spaniard, an Italian, a Russian, and representatives of all other nationalities bared their right arm, and a lancet were struck into it, the blood let out would have the same characteristics, for it would be red, complex, fibrin, globulin, chlorin, and containing sulphuric acid, potassium, phosphate of magnesia, and so on; and Harvey, and Sir Astley Cooper, and Richardson, and Zimmerman, and Brown-Sequard, and all the scientific doctors, allopathic, homeopathic, hydropathic, and eclectic, would agree with Paul, as, standing on Mars Hill, his pulpit a ridge of limestone rock fifty feet high, and among the proudest, and most exclusive, and undemocratic people of the earth, he crashed into all their prejudices by declaring, in the words of my text, that God had made ’93of one blood all nations.’94 The countenance of the five races of the human family may be different as a result of climate, or education, or habits, and the Malay will have the projecting upper jaw, and the Caucasian the oval face and small mouth, and the Ethiopian the retreating forehead and large lip, and the Mongolian the flat face of olive hue, and the American Indian the copper-colored complexion, but the blood is the same, and indicates that they all had one origin, and that Adam and Eve were their ancestor and ancestress.

I think God built this American continent and organized this United States republic to demonstrate the stupendous idea of the text. A man in Persia will always remain a Persian; a man in Switzerland will always remain a Swiss; a man in Austria will always remain an Austrian, but all foreign nationalities coming to America were intended to be Americans. This land is the chemical laboratory where foreign bloods are to be inextricably mixed up and race prejudices and race antipathies are to perish; and this sermon is an ax by which I hope to help kill them. It is not hard for me to preach such a sermon, because, although my ancestors came to this country about two hundred and fifty years ago; some of them came from Wales, and some from Scotland, and some from Holland, and some from other lands, and I am a mixture or so many nationalities, that I feel at home with people from under every sky, and have a right to call them blood relations. There are madcaps and patriotic lunatics in this country who are ever and anon crying out, ’93America for Americans!’94 Down with the Germans! down with the Irish! down with the Jews! down with the Chinese! are in some directions the popular cries, all of which vociferations I would drown out by the full organ of my text, while I pull out the stops and put my foot on the pedal that will open the loudest pipes, and run my fingers over all the four banks of ivory keys, playing the chant, ’93God hath made of one blood all nations.’94 For national selfishness God has nothing but hot indignations.

There are not five men in this audience, nor five men in any audience today in America, except it be on an Indian reservation, who were not descended from foreigners, if you go far enough back. The only native Americans are the Modocs, the Shawnees, the Chippewas, the Cherokees, the Chickasaws, the Seminoles, and such like. If the principle, America only for Americans, be carried out, then you and I have no right to be here, and we had better charter all the steamers and clippers and men-of-war and yachts and sloops and get out of this country as quick as possible. The Pilgrim Fathers were all immigrants, the Huguenots all immigrants. The cradle of most every one of our families was rocked on the bank of the Clyde or the Rhine or the Shannon or the Seine or the Tiber. Had the watchword, ’93America for Americans!’94 been an early and successful cry, where now stand our cities would have stood Indian wigwams; and canoes instead of steamers would have tracked the Hudson and the Connecticut; and, instead of the Mississippi being the main artery of the continent, it would have been only a trough for deer, and antelope, and wild pigeons to drink out of. What makes the cry of ’93America for Americans!’94 the more absurd, and the more inhuman, is that some in this country, who themselves arrived here in their boyhood, or arrived here only one or two generations back, are joining in the cry. Escaped from foreign despotisms themselves, they say, ’93Shut the door of escape for others.’94 Getting themselves on our shores in a lifeboat from the shipwreck, saying, ’93Haul the boat on the beach, and let the rest of the passengers go to the bottom!’94 Men who have yet on them a Scotch or German or English or Irish brogue, crying out, ’93America for Americans!’94 What if the native inhabitants of Heaven’97I mean the angels, the cherubim, the seraphim, born there’97should stand in the gate, and when they see us coming up at last should say, ’93Go back! Heaven for the Heavenians!’94

Of course we do well not to allow foreign nations to make this country a convict colony. We would have a wall built as high as heaven and as deep as hell against foreign thieves, pickpockets, and anarchists. We would not let them wipe their feet on the mat of the outside door of Ellis Island. If England, or Russia, or Germany, or France, send here their desperadoes to get clear of them, we would have these desperadoes sent back in chains to the places where they came from. We will not have America become the dumping-place for foreign vagabondism. But you build up a wall at the Narrows before New York Harbor, or at the Golden Gate before San Francisco, and forbid the coming of the industrious and hard working and honest populations of other lands who want to breathe the air of our free institutions, and get opportunity for better livelihood; and it is only a question of time when God will tumble that wall flat on our own heads with red-hot thunderbolts of his omnipotent indignation.

You are a father, and you have five children. The parlor is the best room in your house. Your son Philip says to the other four children, ’93Now, John, you live in the small room in the end of the hall, and stay there; George, you live in the garret, and stay there; Mary, you live in the cellar, and stay there; Fanny, you live in the kitchen, and stay there. I, Philip, will take the parlor; it suits me exactly. I like the pictures on the wall; I like the lambrequins at the windows; I like the Axminster on the floor. Now, I, Philip, propose to occupy this parlor and I command you to stay out. The parlor only for Philippians.’94 You, the father, hear of this arrangement, and what will you do? You will get red in the face, and say, ’93John, come out of that small room at the end of the hall; George, come down out of the garret; Mary, come up from the cellar; Fanny, come out of the kitchen, and go into the parlor, or anywhere you choose; and, Philip, for your greediness and unbrotherly behavior, I put you for two hours in the dark closet under the stairs.’94 God is the Father of the human race. He has at least five sons’97a North American, a South American, a European, an Asiatic, and an African. The North American sniffs the breeze, and he says to his four brothers and sisters: ’93Let the South American stay in South America; let the European stay in Europe; let the Asiatic stay in Asia; let the African stay in Africa; but America Is for me. I think it is the parlor of the whole earth. I like its carpets of grass, and its upholstery of the front window, namely, the American sunrise; and the upholstery of the back window, namely, the American sunset. Now, I want you all to stay out, and keep to your places.’94 I am sure the Father of the whole human race would hear of it, and chastisement would come; and whether by earthquake, or flood, or drought, or heaven-darkening swarms of locust and grasshopper, or destroying angel of pestilence, God would rebuke our selfishness as a nation, and say to the four winds of heaven: ’93This world is my house, and the North American is no more my child than is the South American, and the European, and the Asiatic, and the African. And I built this world for all the children, and the parlor is theirs, and all is theirs.’94 For, let me say, whether we will or not, the population of other lands will come here. There are harbors all the way from Baffin’92s Bay to Galveston, and if you shut fifty gates, there will be other gates unguarded; and if you forbid foreigners from coming on the steamers, they will take sailing vessels; and if you forbid them coming on sailing vessels, they will come in boats; and if you will not let them come in boats, they will come on rafts; and if you will not allow wharfage to the raft, they will leave it outside Sandy Hook and swim for free America. Stop them? You might as well pass a law forbidding a swarm of summer bees from lighting on the clover-tops, or pass a law forbidding the tides of the Atlantic to rise when the moon puts under it silver grappling-hooks, or a law that the noonday sun should not irradiate the atmosphere. They have come; they are coming now; they will come. And if I had a voice loud enough to be heard across the seas, I would put it to the utmost tension, and cry: ’93Let them come!’94 You stingy, selfish, shriveled up, heartless souls, who sit before your silver dinner-plate piled up with breast of roast turkey incarnadined with cranberry, your fork full and your mouth full, and cramming down the superabundance till your digestive organs are terrorized, let the millions of your fellow-men have at least the wishing-bone!

But some of this cry, ’93America for Americans!’94 may arise from an honest fear lest this land be overcrowded. Such persons had better take the Northern Pacific, or Union Pacific, or Southern Pacific, or Atlantic and Charlotte air line, or Texas and Sante Fe, and go a long journey and find out that no more than a tenth part of this continent is fully cultivated. If a man with a hundred acres of farm land should put all his cultivation on one acre, he would be cultivating a larger ratio of his farm than our nation is now cultivating. Pour the whole human race, Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the islands of the sea, into America, and there would be room to spare. All the Rocky Mountain barrennesses and all the other American deserts are to be fertilized; and as Salt Lake City and much of Utah once yielded not a blade of grass, now by artificial irrigation have become gardens, so a large part of this continent that now is too poor to grow even a mullein stalk or a Canada thistle, will through artificial irrigation, like an Illinois prairie, wave with wheat, or like a Wisconsin farm rustle with corn tassels. Besides that, after perhaps a century or two more, when this continent is quite well occupied, the tides of immigration will turn the other way. Politics and governmental affairs being corrected on the other side of the waters; Ireland, under different regulation, turned into a garden, will invite back another generation of Irishmen; and the wide wastes of Russia cultivated, will, with her own green fields, invite back another generation of Russians. And there will be hundreds of thousands of Americans every year settling on the other continents. And after a number of centuries, all the earth full and crowded, what then? Well, at that time, some night, a panther meteor wandering through the heavens will put its paw on our world and stop it; and putting its panther tooth into the neck of its mountain range, will shake it lifeless, as the rat-terrier a rat. So I have no more fear of America being overcrowded than that the porpoises in the Atlantic Ocean will become so numerous as to stop shipping.

It is through mighty addition of foreign population to our native population that I think God is going to fill this land with a race of people ninety-five per cent. superior to anything the world has ever seen. Intermarriage of families and intermarriage in nations is depressing and crippling. Marriage outside of one’92s own nationality and with another style of nationality is a mighty gain. What makes the Scotch-Irish second to no pedigree for brain and stamina of character, so that such blood goes right up to Supreme Court bench, and to the front rank in jurisprudence and merchandise and art? Because nothing under heaven can be more unlike than a Scotchman and an Irishman, and the descendants of these two conjoined nationalities, unless rum flings them, go right to the tiptop in everything. All nationalities coming to this land, the opposites will all the while be affianced, and French and German will unite, and that will stop all the quarrel between them, and one child they will call Alsace, and the other Lorraine. And hot-blooded Spaniard will unite with cool-blooded Polander, and romantic Italian with matter-of-fact Norwegian, and a hundred and fifty years from now the race occupying this land will be, in stature, in purity of complexion, in liquidity of eye, in gracefulness of poise, in dome-like brow, in taste, in intelligence, and in morals, so far ahead of anything now known on either side the seas that this last quarter of the nineteenth century will seem to them like the Dark Ages. Oh, then how they will legislate and bargain and pray and preach and govern! This is the land where, by the mingling of races, the race prejudice is to get its death blow. How Heaven feels about it, we may conclude from the fact that Christ, the Jew, and descended from a Jewess, nevertheless provided a religion for all races; and that Paul, though a Jew, became the chief apostle of the Gentiles; and that recently God has allowed to burst in splendor upon the attention of the world Hirsch, the Jew, who, after giving ten million dollars to Christian churches and hospitals, has called a committee of nations, and furnished them with forty million dollars for schools to elevate his race in France and Germany and Russia to higher intelligence, and abolish, as he says, the prejudices against their race; these fifty million dollars not given in a last will and testament, and at a time when a man must leave his money anyhow, but by donation at fifty-five years of age, and in good health; utterly eclipsing all benevolence since the world was created.

I must confess there was a time when I entertained race prejudice, but, thanks to God, that prejudice has gone; and if I sat in church, and on one side of me there was a black man, and on the other side of me was an Indian, and before me was a Chinaman, and behind me a Turk, I would be as happy as I am now standing in the presence of this brilliant audience; and I am as happy now as I can be and live. The sooner we get this corpse of race prejudice buried, the healthier will be our American atmosphere. Let each one fetch a spade, and let us dig its grave clear on down deeper and deeper till we get as far down as the centre of the earth and half-way to China, but no farther lest it poison those living on the other side the earth. Then into this grave let down the accursed carcase of race prejudice, and throw on it all the mean things that have ever been said and written between Jew and Gentile, between Turk and Russian, between English and French, between Mongolian and anti-Mongolian, between black and white, and put over that grave for tombstone some scorched and jagged chunk of scori’e6 spit out by some volcanic eruption, and chisel on it for epitaph: ’93Here lies the carcase of one who cursed the world. Aged near six thousand years. Departed this life for the perdition from whence it came. No peace to its ashes!’94

Now, in view of this subject, I have two point-blank words to utter, one suggesting what foreigners ought to do for us, and the other what we ought to do for foreigners. First, to foreigners: Lay aside all apologetic air, and realize you have as much right as any man who was not only himself born here, but his father and his grandfather and great-grandfather before him. Are you an Englishman? Though during the Revolutionary War your fathers treated our fathers roughly, England has more than atoned for that by giving to this country at least two denominations of Christians, the Church of England and the Methodist Church. Witness the magnificent liturgy of the one, and hear the Wesleyan hallelujahs of the other. And who shall ever pay England for what Shakespeare and John Milton and Wordsworth and a thousand other authors, have done for America? Are you a Scotchman? Thanks for John Knox’92s Presbyterianism; the balance-wheel of other denominations. And how shall Americans ever pay your native land for what Thomas Chalmers, and Macintosh, and Robert Burns, and Christopher North, and Robert McCheyne, and Candlish, and Guthrie, have done for Americans? Are you a Frenchman? We cannot forget your Lafayette, who, in the most desperate time of our American revolution, New York surrendered, and our armies flying in retreat, espoused our cause, and at Brandywine and Monmouth and Yorktown, put all America under eternal obligation. And we cannot forget the coming to the rescue of our fathers of Rochambeau and his French fleet with six thousand armed men. Are you a German? We have not forgotten the eleven wounds through which Baron De Kalb poured out his life-blood at the head of the Maryland and Delaware troops in the disastrous battle at Camden, and after we have named our streets, and our cities, and counties, after him, we have not paid a tithe of what we owe Germany for his valor and self-sacrifice. And what about Martin Luther, the giant German, who made way for religious liberty for all lands and ages? Are you a Polander? How can we forget your brilliant Count Pulaski, whose bones were laid in Savannah River after a mortal wound, gotten while in the stirrups of one of the fiercest cavalry charges of the American Revolution? But with no time to particularize, I say, ’93All hail to the men and women of other lands who come here with honest purpose!’94 Renounce all obligation to foreign despots; take the oath of American allegiance; get out your naturalization papers. Don’92t talk against our institutions, for the fact that you came here, and stay, shows that you like ours better than any other. If you do not like them, there are steamers going out of our ports almost every day, and the fare is cheap, and, lest you should be detained for parting civilities, I bid you good-by now; but if you like it here, then I charge you, at the ballot-box, in legislative hall, in churches, and everywhere, be out-and-out Americans. Do not try to establish here the loose foreign Sabbaths, or transcendentalism spun into a religion of mush and moonshine, or foreign libertinism, or that condensation of all thievery, scoundrelism, lust, murder, and perdition, which, in Russia, is called Nihilism, and in France called Communism, and in America called Anarchism. Unite with us in making, by the grace of God, the fifteen million square miles of America, on both sides the Isthmus of Panama, the paradise of virtue and religion.

My other word suggests what Americans ought to do for foreigners. By all possible means explain to them our institutions. Coming here, the vast majority of them know about as much concerning republican or democratic form of government as you in the United States know about the politics of Denmark, or France, or Italy, or Switzerland, namely, nothing. Explain to them that liberty in this country means liberty to do right, but not liberty to do wrong. Never in their presence say anything against their native land, for, no matter how much they may have been oppressed there, in that native land there are sacred places, cabins or mansions, around whose doors they played, and perhaps somewhere there is a grave into which they would like, when life’92s toils are over, to be let down, for it is mother’92s grave; and it would be like going again into the loving arms that first held them, and against the bosom that first pillowed them. My! my! how low down a man must have descended to have no regard for the place where his cradle was rocked. Do not mock their brogue, or their stumbling attempts at the hardest of all languages to learn, namely, the English language. I warrant you they speak English as well as you could speak Scandinavian. Treat them in America as you would like to be treated, if, for the sake of your honest principles or a better livelihood for yourself or your family, you had moved under the shadow of Jungfrau, or the Rigi, or the Giant’92s Causeway, or the Bohemian Forest, or the Franconian Jura. If they get homesick, as some of them are, suggest to them that God is as near to help them here as he was near them before they crossed the Atlantic, and that the soul’92s final flight is less than a second, whether from the beach of the Caspian Sea, or the banks of Lake Erie. Evangelize their adults through the churches, and their children though the schools, and let home missions, and tract societies, and the Bible, translated in all the languages of these foreign people, have full swing.

Rejoice as Christian patriots that, instead of being an element of weakness, the foreign people, thoroughly evangelized, will be our mightiest defence against all the world. The Congress of the United States built new forts all up and down our American coasts, and a new navy was projected. But let me say that three hundred million dollars expended in coast defence will not be so mighty as a vast foreign population living in America. With hundreds of thousands of Germans living in New York, Germany would as soon think of bomb-shelling Berlin as attacking us; with hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen in New York, France would as soon think of firing on Paris; with hundreds of thousands of Englishmen in New York, England would as soon think of destroying London. The mightiest defence against European nations is a wall of Europeans reaching all up and down the American continent’97a wall of heads and hearts consecrated to free government. A bulwark of foreign humanity heaved up all along our shores, reinforced by the Atlantic Ocean, armed as it is with tempests, and Caribbean whirlwinds and giant billows ready to fling mountains from their catapult, we need as a nation fear no one in the universe but God; and, if found in his service, we need not fear him. As six hundred million people will yet sit down at our national table, let God preside. To him be dedicated the metal of our mines, the sheaves of our harvest-fields, the fruits of our orchards, the fabrics of our manufactories, the telescopes of our observatories, the volumes of our libraries, the songs of our churches, the affections of our hearts, and all our lakes become baptismal fonts, and all our mountains altars of praise, and all our valleys amphitheatres of worship; and our country having become fifty nations consolidated in one, may its every heart-throb be a pulsation of gratitude to him who made ’93of one blood all nations,’94 and ransomed that blood by the payment of the last drop of his own.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage