Such men believe in better things--have the will to try to get
those better things.
Thus, the American Republic is an absorbent of the optimism of the
world. We attract to ourselves the children of faith and hope among
the common people of other nations. And these are the types we are
after. They are the most vital, the least exhausted. I should not want
"the flower" of other nations to immigrate to our shores. Nature is
through with them, and they must be renewed from below. Do not object
to human raw material for our citizenship. One or two generations will
produce the finished product.
What says Emerson:
"The lord is the peasant that was,
The peasant the lord that shall be.
The lord is hay, the peasant grass,
One dry and one the living tree."
The purpose of our institutions is to manufacture manhood.
Make it impossible for the criminal and diseased, the vicious and the
decadent, to come to us; bar out those who seek our country merely
because they cannot subsist in their own, and you will find that the
remainder of our immigrants are valuable additions to our populations.
Don't despise these common people who come to us from other lands.
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