Page:The web (1919).djvu/463

 foreign—New York most of all; that the Bolsheviki abound in the mines of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Montana, where coal and copper and iron are found; that Southern Europe has not yet moved its center of population west of the Mississippi; that the Scandinavian and German element occupies Wisconsin, Minnesota and parts of upper Iowa. And the American—where is he?

Would to God that the chameleon record, that fatally accurate census map, could show us the American hue spreading decade after decade, and not these other colors of the map of America, showing the extension of the foreign-born! It is time now, old as we are, that we should seek a far more normal balance of the increase of our foreign-born.

Something is wrong. The census map shows that it is time to put up the bars at Ellis Island. They ought to go up for ten years at least. Twenty—thirty—lo! Then this would be America, and all inside our gates would be Americans. The gates ought never to go down as they have in the past. We ought to pick and select our foreign-born population. If we have not the courage to do that, we are lost.

Give us a generation of selected immigration; deport the un-Americans who divide their loyalty; revoke the naturalization of every man interned in this war and of every other disloyal man,—every adherent to the law of violence and destruction,—and then, and then only, the result may be an American population and a real America.

The best possible news for America would be that of the deportation of more than 300,000 false and foresworn citizens who have acted as German spies in America during this war. Send that many away from America, and those remaining soon would learn that the hyphen must go for all time. If not, let them also go. We do not need Germans now. The world is done with Germans. We want Americans now.

It is by no means impossible that some such action will be taken very soon. In his last annual report, the Attorney General of the United States recommends that all aliens who were interned during the war should be deported and that Congress shall pass a law to that effect. This would deprive us at once of a select society, estimated to number