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Virginia. They were first-class families. Especially do we trace back with pride that glorious genius for liberty, for intelligence, for devotion manifested by those heroic men and women who, amid the desolations of a terrific winter landed on a barren rock to transform a vast wilderness, through which the wild man roamed, into a garden wherein should grow the flowers and the fruits of freedom.
We sometimes deprecate the cosmopolitan character of our population. It is a fact, however, that the best blood of the old world came to us until within ten years--not the decrepit, not the maimed, not the aged; for over fifty per cent. of those who came were between fifteen and thirty, and have grown up to be honorable citizens in the composition of our constitutional society. They came not as paupers. Many of them came, each bringing seventy dollars, some $180 dollars, and in the aggregate they brought millions of dollars.
There has been, however, a change, a manifest change, in the character of those from foreign shores within the last decade. The time was when we welcomed everybody that might immigrate to this country; when we threw our gates wide open; when in our Fourth of July orations, we proclaimed this to be the asylum of the oppressed, the home of the down-trodden. But in the process of time this great opportunity afforded the nations of the old world came to be abused, and to-day is the largest source of our national danger. We are now bound to call a halt all along the line of immigration; to say to those peoples of the old world that this is not a new Africa, nor a new Ireland, nor a new Germany, nor a new Italy, nor a new England, nor a new Russia; that this is not a brothel for the Mormon, a fetich for the negro, a country for the ticket-of-leave-men; not a place for the criminals and paupers of Europe; but this country is for man--man in his intelligence, man in his morality, man in his love of liberty, man, whosoever he is, whencesoever he cometh. [Cries of amen, followed by applause.]
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