A SPECIAL NATIONAL DANGER.
This country rightfully boasts of being the asylum and home of the oppressed of all climes, and works up its liberality and catholicity into rapidly-accumulating stores of wealth. The strangers who come to our shores are the bone and sinew of labor, which is only another name for the property it creates. But it must never be forgotten that, if the country gets this new population, the new population also gets the country; the acquisition is mutual. We do not simply receive so much innocent and enriching labor, and give homes and plenty to oppressed men and women. The problem in that form would be quite harmless. The truth is, that the stranger and foreigner of to-day is the citizen and voter of to-morrow. He no sooner touches our soil than he feels himself to be a neophyte, in training to shape, perhaps, to remodel, the State. Without meaning to make illiberal or imperious distinctions between citizens of foreign birth and those born on American soil; without wishing to deny the excellent character in all respects of great numbers of adopted citizens, we are not called on, nevertheless, to shut our eyes to great and significant facts. If all foreigners were like the best of them, all would be well. Indeed, it is easy to go still further, and to say that vast numbers of natives are dangerous to the country, by reason of their ignorance and vice. But for these it may be said, in mitigation, except when they have been reared under the shadow of a foreign spirit, in our cities and large towns, that they are not enemies to the essentials of our civilization. Their life and prejudices are American, in the historical sense of the word. With vast masses of our foreign population it is quite otherwise; they are inimical to much which we regard as essential to the stability of republican government. We need not refer to the fact that our Government, at its very foundation, was based upon Protestant Christianity. This was its life; and yet it was soon found to be broad enough to tolerate all forms of faith. It is not the less true, however, that the nation was born Protestant Christian, that its inner constitution, its inherent bias, its profoundest life, its persistent energy, were all according to this beginning. There was a deep conviction in the hearts of the people that the Bible was the rock of national strength. It was felt that we were only secure of our liberties while public virtue lasted, and that public virtue could only endure while evangelical religion flourished. The churches must be kept open and filled, our schools must be Christian, and a constant stream, deep and wide, of divine instruction must continually pour forth from the churches over the country. Prominent among the means by which the nation was to be kept Christian, was the Christian Sabbath. It was clearly seen that a sacred Sunday was the holy school-time of the Republic; that if that seventh of the year became common, the Christian education of the nation would soon cease. What would be the use of the churches if the people never enter them, and what time have they for church except Sunday? Let the patriotic reader think of the moral power brought to bear on the country, Sunday after Sunday, in our thousands, and thousands of Christian churches; and let him calculate, if he can, the disastrous effects of destroying that power. True morality can only have a sound basis in Christianity. If Sunday is spent in dissipation, morality dies of contempt for the gospel and the church. In the light of these thoughts let the reader look at the tendencies of our public life. Only a year ago the Saengerfest of the Germans was held in Philadelphia. Its time included a Sabbath. By the law of the State every drinking establishment of the city was required to be closed on Sunday, but the law, as well as the moral sense of the community, was disregarded, and the lager-beer establishments were boldly kept open under the very eye of the police. Nay, more, the functionaries of the city government, officiating at the reception of the musicians, were weak enough to hear speeches in derision of Sunday laws, not only without rebuke, but without even the gentlest defense of the abused “Puritans.”
The danger in such cases is twofold: First, the example is corrupting, and, secondly, these Germans, combined in their societies, whether as sharpshooters, as gymnasts, or as singers, have a political significance. What city or State government can resist the will of thirty thousand voters?—the number said to have been in attendance at one time at the sharpshooters’ show in Jones’ Wood. We know it may plausibly be replied that the party in power, whichever it may be, regards its retention of place as essential to the national well-being, and thinks it must yield something, even, of public morality, in order not to be beaten. But see whither this tends. Most of these associations are notoriously made up of free-thinkers, who deride Christianity as priestcraft, and have faith in liberty only for the sake of its license. They mean to follow the lead of no party, but to sell out to any for the largest price. They are from countries where Christianity exists by State support, and their remembrance of oppression is associated with the church and the clergy as political powers. They live, to a large extent, in separate quarters of our cities, still further separated by a distinct vernacular from the national life. The feeling that springs from American history is foreign to them. They appreciate our liberties simply on the surface, but are utter strangers to the life, far back, from which they sprang. These organizations, on the basis of foreign nationalities, for the perpetuation of the life and feeling of “fatherland,” and, in resistance of the true and original American spirit, can not fail to be dangerous. We may boast of the nation’s power to absorb, but that power must have a limit. We must not forget that what is absorbed carries its qualities into the absorbing body, and that the process may go on until the foreign accretions may outweigh the original material, the once living wood may become a petrification. These cautions are not uttered in the spirit of exclusiveness; they are not akin, or at least not meant to be akin, to the spirit of sect, either in politics or religion. They are only the frank expression of a fear for the national safety. The freest government can rest only upon the largest amount of intelligent virtue. American liberty, at its historical root, is imbedded in Christianity, the Christianity of an open Bible, of a living, evangelical church. Out of this soil is, and must be, its normal development; the attempt to change it by new modes of culture and superabundant grafting may succeed, but if it does it will only give us the dead and shadeless tree of despotism in the place of the old “vine and fig-tree” of the fathers.—Methodist.