Nevertheless, we need to restrict and regulate more systematically, and with more rigor than we ever did it before. Of course we have the right to refuse absolutely undesirable immigrants. No one can deny this with any show of reason, and if we would fight to maintain this principle no nation could blame us. But we also have the right to deny citizenship to workmen coming from any portion of the world, until we are satisfied that they intend to become citizens, and that they will be desirable acquisitions. We are quite competent to keep up our own supply of idiots, and paupers and criminals. No nation has a monopoly of that sort of thing, and we do quite as well in that way as could be expected of us, and far better than suits our tax-payers. For the freedom of mind and body, and the prospects of founding homes for all of his posterity, an honest man should be willing to remain in this country a long time before claiming full rights of citizenship. There never were any complaints under the old rule, which required a very long term of probation, and there would be none under the new. Property rights of aliens are respected quite as much as those of natives, and there is no other right in which our laws distinguish between the native and the foreigner. A chance tourist arriving here and getting into legal difficulty of any kind has quite as good a chance of obtaining justice as the richest man in the nation. This is not an American idea, for foreigners themselves have said the same. Intelligent foreigners, makers of opinion on the other side of the water, have marvelled again and again in speech and in print at the carelessness with which America admitted all classes of foreign-born persons to the rights of citizenship, and have declared that were citizenship rights to be delayed until the second generation came of adult age, there would be nothing in the law or customs of the country which would give a foreign-born resident any reason for complaint.
Unless we restrict immigration there is nothing to prevent any foreign nation, desiring to pick a quarrel with us so as to steal some of our property, or have some of her own troublesome inhabitants disposed of by bullet wounds, or “to weld the people together” when they are pulling every which way, from sending a few carefully selected men here for the express purpose of fitting out a pretended dynamite expedition or something of the kind, for which the United States would be called to account. But that is only part of what they can do. At the present day every German and Frenchman under middle age has received a military training. There is nothing to prevent a few thousand picked soldiers, with their officers, being sent here in small parties in the guise of ordinary immigrants, to rally and rise at a given signal, seize some of our cities, forts and navy-yards, overcome our make-believe army and establish a reign of terror, from which we could not release ourselves speedily without ransom. They could find arms and munitions of war without the slightest trouble, for such things are on sale to every purchaser in every village in the land, and when desired in large quantities they can be purchased from any of our large manufacturers without the purchaser first undergoing the formality of answering unpleasant questions. As for commissariat, they could live on the land. There is no portion of it from which a body of armed men could not obtain all they need in the way of food and clothing. There would be no difference between such a movement and the insurrections by which almost all of the older nations have suffered from time to time--insurrections some of which have been dignified by success to the rank of revolutions. The mobs which started the French revolution had a large army to oppose them, and they had little opportunity for arming and organizing themselves, nevertheless they succeeded in overturning one of the oldest monarchies in the world, and apparently one of the strongest.