Proclaim Liberty! Part 7

They demanded government with the consent, by the representatives, of the governed.

They cherished civil rights, respect for law, and would not tolerate any power superior to law--whether royal or military.

They wished for a minimum of civil duties, hated bureaucrats, wanted to adjust their own taxes, and were afraid of the establishment of any tyranny on nearby soil.

They wanted free trade with the rest of the world, and no restraints on commerce and industry.

They intended to be prosperous.

They considered themselves freemen and proposed to remain so.

These were the rights to which lovers of human freedom aspired in England or France; they were the practical application of Locke and Rousseau and the Encyclopedists and the Roundheads. Little in the whole list reflects the special conditions of life in the colonies; troops had been quartered in Ireland, trial by jury suspended in England, tyrants then as now created their Praetorian guard or Storm Troops and placed military above civil rights, and colonies from early time had been considered as tributaries of the Mother Country.

_The Practical "Dream"_

The American Colonists were about to break the traditions of European settlement, and with it the traditions of European government. And, with profound insight into the material conditions of their existence, they foreshadowed the entire history of our country in the one specification which had never been made before, and _could_ never have been made before:

"_He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pa.s.s others to encourage their migrations. .h.i.ther, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands._"

This amazing paragraph is placed directly after the sections on representative government; it is so important that it comes before the items on trial by jury, taxation, and trade. It is a critical factor in the history of America; if we understand it, we can go forward to understand our situation today. The other complaints point toward our systems of law, our militia, our constant rebellion against taxes, our mild appreciation of civil duties, our unswerving insistence upon the act of choosing representatives; all these are details; but this unique item indicates how the nation was to be built and what its basic social, economic, and psychological factors were to be.

This brief paragraph condemns the Crown for obstructing the two processes by which America was made:

Immigration Pioneering

With absolute clairvoyance the Declaration sets Naturalization, which means political equality, in between the two other factors.

Naturalization is the formal recognition of the deep underlying truth, the new thing in the new world, that one could _become_ what one willed and worked to become--one could, regardless of birth or race or creed, _become an American_.

So long as the colonies were held by the Crown, the process of populating the country by immigration was checked. The Colonists had no "dream" of a great American people combining racial bloods and the habits of all the European nations. They wanted only to secure their prosperity by growing; they constantly were sending agents to Westphalia and the Palatinate to induce good Germans to come to America, one colony competing with another, issuing pamphlets in Platt-Deutsch, promising not Utopia with rivers of milk and honey, not a dream, but something grander and greater--citizens.h.i.+p, equality under the law, and land. Across this traffic the King and his ministers threw the dam of Royal Prerogative; they meant to keep the colonies, and they knew they could not keep them if men from many lands came in as citizens; and they meant to keep the virgin lands from the Appalachians to the Mississippi--or as much of it as they could take from the Spaniards and the French. So as far back as 1763, the Crown took over _all_ t.i.tle to the 250,000 square miles of land which are now Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and Minnesota, the best land lying beyond the Alleghenies. Into this territory no man could enter; none could settle; no squatters' right was recognized; no common law ran. Suddenly the natural activity of America, uninterrupted since 1620, stopped. The right of Americans to move westward and to take land, the right of non-Americans to become Americans, both were denied. The outcry from the highlands and the forest clearing was loud; presently the seaboard saw that America was one country, its true prosperity lay within its own borders, not across the ocean. And to make the unity clear, the Crown which had taken the land, now took the sea; the trade of the Colonies was broken; they were cut off from Europe, forbidden to bring over its men, forbidden to send over their goods. For the first time America was isolated from Europe.

So the British Crown touched every focal spot--and bruised it. The outward movement, to and from Europe, always fruitful for America, was stopped; the inward movement, across the land, was stopped. The energies of America had always expressed themselves in movement; when an artificial brake on movements was applied, friction followed; then the explosion of forces we call the Revolution.

And nothing that happened afterward could effectively destroy what the Revolution created. The thing that people afterward chose to call "the American dream" was no dream; it was then, and it remained, the substantial fabric of American life--a systematic linking of free land, free trade, free citizens.h.i.+p, in a free society.

A grim version of our history implies that the pure idealism of the Declaration was corrupted by the rich and well-born who framed the Const.i.tution. As Charles Beard is often made the authority for this economic interpretation, his own account of the economic effects of the Declaration may be cited in evidence:

the great estates were broken up;

the hold of the first-born and of the dead-hand were equally broken;

in the New States, the property qualification was never accepted and it disappeared steadily from the old.

And the Ordnance of 1787, last great act of the Continental Congress, inspired by the Declaration, created the Northwest Territory, the heart of America for a hundred years, in a spirit of love and intelligence which the Const.i.tution in all its wisdom did not surpa.s.s.

That is what the Declaration accomplished. It set in action _all_ the forces that ultimately made America. The action rose out of the final section, in which, naming themselves for the first time as "Representatives of the United States of America", the signers declare that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States...." In this clear insight, the Declaration says that the things separating one people from another have already happened--differences in experiences, desires, habits--and that the life of the Colonies is already so independent of Britain that the purely political bond must be dissolved.

"_WE, THEREFORE, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, a.s.sembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rect.i.tude of our intentions do, in the Name, and by authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor._"

So finally, as a unity of free and independent States, the new nation arrogates to itself four specific powers:

To levy war conclude peace contract alliances establish commerce.

Only these four powers, by name; the rest were lumped together, a vast, significant et cetera; but these were so much more significant that they had to be separately written down; three of them--war--peace--alliances--are wholly international; the fourth, commerce, at least partly so. The signers of the Declaration made no mistake; they wished to be independent; and in order to remain independent, they were fighting _against_ isolation.

The error we must not make about the Declaration is to think of it as a purely domestic doc.u.ment, dealing with taxes and election of representatives and Redcoats in our midst; it is the beginning of our national, domestic life, but only because it takes the rule of our life out of English hands; and the moment this is done, the Declaration sets us up as an independent nation among other nations, and places us in relation, above all, to the nations of Europe.

At this moment our intercourse with the nations of Europe is a matter of life and death--death to the destroyer of free Europe or death to ourselves; but if we live, life for all Europe, also. Like parachute troops, our address to Europe must precede our armies; we have to know what to say to Europe, to whom to say, how to say it. And the answer was provided by the Declaration which let all Europe come to us--but held us independent of all Europe.

CHAPTER VI

"The Population of These States"

In the back of our minds we have an image labeled "the immigrant"; and it is never like ourselves. The image has changed from generation to generation, but it has never been accurate, because in each generation it is a political cartoon, an exaggeration of certain features to prove a point. We have to tear up the cartoon; then we can get back to the picture it distorts.

_English-Speaking Aliens_

The immigrant-cartoon since 1910 has been the South-European: Slavic, Jewish, Italian; usually a woman with a shawl over her head, her husband standing beside her, with slavic cheekbones or a graying beard; and eager children around them. This is not a particularly false picture of several million immigrants; among them some of the most valuable this country has had. But it erases from our mind the bare statistical fact that the largest single language group, nearly _one third of all_ the immigrants to the United States, were English-speaking. For several decades, the bulk of all immigration was from Great Britain and Ireland. If one takes the three princ.i.p.al sources of immigration for every decade between 1820 and 1930, one finds that Germany and Ireland were among the leaders for sixty years; Italy for forty; Russia only thirty; the great Scandinavian movement to the middle west lasted a single decade; but Great Britain was one of the chief sources of immigration for seventy years, and probably was the princ.i.p.al source for thirty years more--from 1790 until 1820--during which time no official figures were kept.

Out of thirty-eight million arrivals in this country, about twelve spoke the dominant tongue, and most of them were aware of the tradition of Anglo-Saxon self-government; some had suffered from British domination, more had enjoyed the fruits of liberty; but all knew what liberty and respect for law meant. Many of these millions fled from poverty; but most were not refugees from religious or political persecution. Many millions came to relatives and friends already established; and began instantly to add to the wealth of the country; many millions were already educated. The cost of their upbringing had been borne abroad; they came here grown, trained, and willing to work. They fell quickly into the American system, without causing friction; they helped to continue the dominance of the national groups which had fought the Revolution and created the new nation.

It is important to remember that they were, none the less, immigrants; they made themselves into Americans and helped to make America; they helped to make us what we are by keeping some of their habits, by abandoning others. For this is essential: the British immigrant, even when he came to a country predominantly Anglo-Saxon, did not remain British and did not make the country Anglo-Saxon. The process of change affected the dominant group as deeply as it affected the minorities. It was a little easier for a Kentish man to become an American than it was for a Serbian; but it was just as hard for the man from Kent to remain a Briton as it was for the Serbian to remain a Serb. Both became Americans. Neither of them tried to remake America in the mold of his old country.

_Who Asked Them to Come?_

The next image in our minds is a bad one for us to hold because it makes us feel smug and benevolent. It is the image of America, the foster-mother of the world, receiving first the unfortunate and later the sc.u.m of the old world. It is true that the oppressed came to America, and that in the forty million arrivals there were criminals as well as saints. The picture is false not only in perspective, but in basic values. For in many generations, at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the great inrush of Europeans, the United States actively desired and solicited immigration.

Obviously when people were eager to emigrate, the solicitation fell off; Irish famine and German reaction sent us floods of immigrants who had not been individually urged to come. But their fathers and elder brothers had been invited. The Colonies and the States in their first years wanted settlers and, as noted, wrote their need for new citizens into the Declaration; between two eras of hard times we built the railroads of the country and imported Irish and Chinese to help the Civil War veterans lay the ties and dig the tunnels; in the gilded age and again at the turn of the century, we were enormously expanding and again agents were busy abroad, agents for land companies, agents for s.h.i.+pping, agents for great industries which required unskilled labor.

Moreover, the Congress of the United States refused to place any restrictions upon immigration. The vested interest of labor might demand restrictions; but heavy industry loved the unhappy foreigner (the nearest thing to coolie labor we would tolerate) and made it a fixed policy of the United States not to discourage immigration. The only restriction was a technical one about contract labor. It did not lower the totals.

_America Was Fulfilment!_

The moment we have corrected the cartoon we can go back to fact without self-righteousness. The fact is that arrival in America was the end toward which whole generations of Europeans aspired. It did not mean instant wealth and high position; but it did mean an end to the only poverty which is degrading--the poverty which is accepted as permanent and inevitable. The shock of reality in the strike-ridden mills around Pittsburgh, on the blizzard-swept plains of the Dakotas, brought dismay to many after the gaudy promises made by steams.h.i.+p agents and labor bosses. But in one thing America never failed its immigrants--the promise and hope of better things for their children.

America was not only promises; America was fulfilment.

No one has measured the exact dollar-and-cents value of believing that the next generation will have a chance to live better, in greater comfort and freedom. In America this belief in the future was only a projection of the parallel belief in the present; it was a reaction against the European habit of a.s.suming that the children would, with luck, be able to live where their parents lived, on the same income, in the same way. The elder son was fairly a.s.sured of this; war and disease and colonies and luck would have to take care of the others.

The less fortunate, the oppressed, could not even hope for this much.

At various times the Jew in Russia, the liberal in Germany, the Sicilian sulphur-miner, the landless Irish, and families in a dozen other countries could only expect a worse lot for their children; they had to uproot themselves and if they themselves did not stand transplanting, they were sure their children would take root in the new world.

And this confidence--which was always justified--became as much a part of the atmosphere of America as our inherited parliamentary system, our original town-meetings, our casual belief in civil freedom, our pa.s.sion for wealth, our habits of movement, and all the other essential qualities which describe and define us and set us apart from all other nations.