will have a chance to try them for
themselves. The working man is not troubling himself greatly about a
just allotment of these blessings; so that the greater part go to those
who do not work with their hands he will not consider too curiously any
person's claim to exemption. It would perhaps better harmonize with his
sense of the fitness of things (as it would, no doubt, with that of the
angels) if the advantages of the transitional period fell mostly to the
share of such star-spangled impostors as Andrew Carnegie; but almost any
distribution that is sufficiently objectionable as a whole to the other
side will be acceptable to the distributor. In the mean time it is to be
wished that the moralize, and homilizers who prate of "principles" may
have a little damnation dealt out to them on account. The head that
is unable to entertain a philosophical view of the situation would be
notably advantaged by removal.

III.

It is the immigration of "the oppressed of all nations" that has made
this country one of the worst on the face of the earth. The change from
good to bad took place within a generation--so quickly that few of us
have had the nimbleness of apprehension to "get it through our heads."
We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of triumph that we
were taught at our fathers' knees before the eagle became a buzzard.
America is still "an asylum for the oppressed;" and still, as always and
everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon those
who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddest
thing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anything
but to be oppressed--makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, their
saviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energetic
oppressors. The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly,
but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief without
a pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have his
nose above the surface with another gentleman underfoot.

All languages are spoken in Hell, but chiefly those of Southeastern
Europe. I do not say that a man fresh from the fields or the factories
of Europe--even of Southeastern Europe--may not be a good man; I say
only that, as a matter of fact, he commonly is not. In nine instances in
ten he is a brute whom it would be God's mercy to drown on his arrival,
for he is constitutionally unhappy.

Let us not