Give me the immigrant on board of ship, and I will distinguish without hesitation the Bulgarian from the Servian, the Slovak from the Russian, and the Northern Italian from the Sicilian; but as I have said, I often have the greatest difficulty in accomplishing such a feat, two or three years after the men have landed. It is true that in the first generation, the old racial marks still lie in the foreground, and that even in the second generation, the blood will speak out here and there; but it will require a very sharp scrutiny to detect this, and in the most cases there will be no hint of the past.
In Chicago, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, St. Louis and St. Paul I have addressed audiences composed of Slavs and of native Americans; and I have vainly tried to distinguish them one from the other in the mass, although of course when I had a very close and long look, I could make my differentiation. These racial marks are most tenacious among certain Orientals where strange strains of blood have accentuated the difference; but I have seen some Armenians, people bearing the mark of their race most strongly, who after ten years of life in America, had lost the peculiar sharpness of their features and were in that stage of transition where the American image was being imprinted upon them.
Scarcely a foreigner returns home after a long sojourn in America without hearing at every step that he looks different. The Jew on board of ship, to whom I have previously referred, who was warned not to wear an American flag because it might cost him money in Europe, was right when he said: “They will see it in mine face that I am from America.”
I do not wish to be as dogmatic in my assertions as Mr. Prescott F. Hall, the Secretary of the Restriction Immigration League is in his. He believes that we shall be the inheritors of all the disagreeable racial characteristics which the immigrant brings with him. It is still too early to foretell; the new American has not been long enough with us, and moreover the whole question of racial characteristics is still an open one.
Nevertheless in face of the undisputed fact that these outward racial marks disappear, may we not also believe that with them go the peculiar racial qualities which mark and mar the life of the stranger?