After them came Slavic women with no finery except their homespun, rough, tough and clean; carrying upon their backs piles of feather-beds and household utensils. Strong limbed men followed them in the picturesque garb of their native villages; Slovaks, Poles, Roumanians, Ruthenians, Italians, and finally, Russian Jews; but lo, and behold! no smells ascended to our nostrils, and no horrors were disclosed.
Taking a group of delegates down among them, we found that they were wholesome looking people, not devoid of intelligence, and when the barrier between us was broken down by the sound of their native speech, they were communicative, at ease, and very human. The first time I entered New York was at Castle Garden, from the steamer _Fulda_, twenty years ago; and having watched the tide of immigration ever since, I can say that I never have seen, at any time, a ship-load of better human beings disembark than those which came from the steamer _Wilhelm II_, on December 7, 1905. And of the many who came on this ship, it is just possible that those who wore neither fashionable hats nor trailing skirts, and who were not politely treated,--it is just possible that they may after all, make the best members of this democratic society.
A gentleman from Ohio, a member of the Conference on Immigration said on the floor, in open debate, and he said it with menacing gesture: “We don’t want you to send none of them yellow worms from Southern Europe to our state, we got too many of them now.” No doubt the gentleman from Ohio and the delegate from Rhode Island who said: “We don’t want no more iv thim durrty furriners in this grand and glorious counthry of ourn,” voiced the common prejudice which rests itself entirely upon its ignorance.
It is true that many criminals come, especially from Italy. Many weak, impoverished and poorly developed creatures come from among Polish and Russian Jews, but they are only the tares in the wheat. The stock as a whole is physically sound; it is crude, common peasant stock, not the dregs of society, but its basis. Its blood is not blue, but it is red, wholesomely red, which is more to the purpose. Blue blood we also receive--thin, worn-out blood, bought at a high price for the daughters of some of our multi-millionaires; but no one can claim that either they or we have been specially blessed by it.