she wrote, when her father lay dead: "The
little scamps of the street have been positively pathetic; they have
made such shy, boyish attempts at friendliness; one little chap offered
to let me hold his top while it was spinning, in token of
affection,"--when I read that, I have not the heart to shut anybody out.

Except, of course, the unfit, the criminal, and the pauper, cast off by
their own, and the man brought over here merely to put money into the
pockets of the steamship agent, the padrone, and the mine owner. We have
laws to bar these out. Suppose we begin by being honest with ourselves
and the immigrant, and respecting our own laws. The door that is to be
shut is over yonder, at the port where they take ship. There is where
the scrutiny is to be made, to be effective. When the door has been shut
and locked against the man who left his country for his country's good,
whether by its "assistance" or not, and when trafficking in the
immigrant for private profit has been stopped, then, perhaps, we shall
be better able to decide what degree of ignorance in him constitutes
unfitness for citizenship and cause for shutting him out. Perchance
then, also, we shall hear less of the cant about his being a peril to
the republic. Doubtless ignorance is a peril, but the selfishness that
trades upon ignorance is a much greater. He came to us without a
country, ready to adopt such a standard of patriotism as he found, at
its face value, and we gave him the rear tenement and slum politics. If
he accepted the standard, whose fault was it? His being in such a hurry
to vote that he could not wait till the law made him a citizen was no
worse, to my mind, than the treachery of the "upper class" native, who
refuses to go to the polls for fear he may rub up against him there.
This last let us settle with first, and see what remains of our problem.
We can approach it honestly, then, at all events.

I came into town on the Pennsylvania Railroad the other day just when
the emigrant lighter had tied up at the wharf to discharge its
west-bound cargo. For a full hour I stood watching the stream of them,
thousands upon thousands, carrying knapsacks and trunks, odd in speech
and ways, but all of them with hopeful faces set toward the great
country where they were to win their own way. So they answered the query
of the eagle at the island gate. Scarce an hour within the gate, they
were no longer a problem. The country needs these men of strong a