Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/232

Counter-Currents own—must inevitably retard our social progress, and thrust us behind the more uniformly civilized nations of the world.

Meditating on these disagreeable facts, we find ourselves confronted by sentimentalists who say that if we would only be kind and brotherly, the sloping foreheads would grow high, the narrow shoulders broad, the Pole would become peaceable, the Greek honest, the Slav clean, the Sicilian would give up murder as a pastime, the Jew would lose his "monstrous love of gain." Enthusiastic promoters of the "National Americanization Committee"—a crusade full of promise for the future—have talked to us so much and so sternly about our duty to the immigrant, our neglect of the immigrant, our debt to the immigrant, our need of the immigrant, that we have been no less humiliated than bewildered by their eloquence. Mr. Roosevelt alone, of all their orators, has had the hardihood to say bluntly that citizenship implies 216