Some wise and witty wag once said, "The American Republic is always going to the dogs, but never getting there." There threatened canine catastrophes are as old as our nation, as various as it's political, industrial and social changes and usually find both their source and peril only in the bark of the calamity howlers. For months past, the Century Magazine which effects to be a periodical of esthetic, culture, scholarship and fairness, has devoted much space to a series of articles reeking with race prejudice and religious rancor, seeking to prove that foreign immigration will soon over-throw our institutions and blight the hope of Democracy unless speedily and completely checked. The author of these articles is one, Edward Alsworth Ross, professor of sociology in the University of Wisconsin, a public institution supported by taxation of thousands of the people whom he so uncharitably and unjustifiably attacks.

All impartial publicists and thinkers on the subject agree that our foreign immigration needs strict inspection, supervision and regulation to keep out the criminal, the diseased and the depraved; and that probably our laws should be amended so as to place our inspectors in foreign ports so as to turn back the unfit there, instead of from this side of the ocean, thereby overcoming the abuse of our laws, and the rights of poor emigrants by steamship companies and their agents, and as 98 per cent, all of our immigrations comes from 18 ports, this would seem reasonable and practicable.

Professor Ross however seems to argue in favor of complete exclusion of immigration, especially from southern and eastern Europe, and in support of his theory he descends to depths of racial prejudice, religious bigotry and palpable misrepresentation to show him to be wholly unfit for the public position which he holds.

Edmund Burke, the great philosophic statesman, said that you cannot indict a whole people. The reckless writer finds no difficulty in indicting many people and in seeking to support his indictment with charges that range from the ridiculous to the malicious. He is especially unfair to the Italians, the Jews, the Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, the Greeks and all of the people of the Slovenian race. He scoffs at their mentality, their morals, their religions, "their coarse present philosophy of sex," their willingness "to take jobs requiring nothing but brawn" and lack of style, and contemptuously says that their souls" burn with the dull, smoky flame of the pineknot stuck to the soil. Has he not borrowed this vocabulary of snobbish scorn from what those other college professors said of Abraham Lincoln sixty years ago? He slanders the Jewish people by saying that "obedience to parents seems to be dying out among the Jews." and that this laxity of home and family life "results in a great number of Jewish girls going astray."

Nothing could be farther than the truth. The loyalty of the Jews to home and kindred is proverbial and the chastity of their womanhood is the brightest gem in the diadem of Hebraism. He violates truth and decency also in speaking of the Italian people who he says are infected with spiritual hookworm." This is a foul slander on a people whose present faith and spirituality have made their country the hub of Christiandom for thousands of years and give their music, art, architecture, poetry and philosophy a touch of the divine. His condemnation of the Poles, Hungarians, Bohemians, and other Slavonian people, is equally incharitable and untrue. He condemns those people as dirty, ignorant, superstitious and says, "they simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collars, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the great ice age.

These ox-like men are descendents of those who always stay behind. Anyone who has mingled along and done business with those great people know how unwarranted is this wholesale condemnation. How much truer is the estimate of these people given by John Cowyer Towys, the renouned Cambridge lecturer, who sees in them the qualities of a virile manhood and virtuous womanhood that is destined to be one of the greatest factors in the replenishing and developing of advancing Democracy.

Prof. Ross even fears that the second and subsequent generations of these foreigners on American soil will be worse than the original aliens, and says that they will develop " a degenerate class, such as been fully developed among the Irish."

If the achievements of the exiles of Erin and their descendants in America is what he calls degeneracy, God grant that we may have more of it. He condemns especially the Germans and Bohemians of Chicago, "marshalled in the United Charities, which he says is merely a corrupt machine" through which the brewers and liquor dealers may sway a foreign vote not only in defense of liquor, but also in defense of other corrupt and afflicted interests. "He calls from a list of candidates for offices in Chicago, the following names: Kelly, Cassidy, Slattery, Alschuler, Phaelzer, Bartzen, Umback, Anderson, Romano, Knitchoff, Deneen, Hogue, Burres, Short, and says of these men who include many of the finest types of progressive, public spirited citizens in American life," the humor of calling Anglo-Saxon the kind of government these men will give is obvious. We would like to ask this pedigogical Anglo maniac why an "Anglo-Saxon" is necessary or even desirable in this country. He objects to America being the broad melting pot of vigorous humanity, but is willing to have it remain a mere jack-pot for British capital.

The same arguments were made by his predecessors of the "Know Nothing Party," just prior to the Civil War. It slumped into infamy when our flag needed defenders and it's croakings were hushed by the Huzzars of 300,000 Germans and a quarter of a million Irish men and hundreds of thousands of brave men of other lands who answered Father Abraham and the bugle calls of duty. They said then, as he says now, that America is crowded and must close it's doors. It is not so. As a college professor he should know that Germany with an area not as large or fertile as Texas, supports in comfort 70,000,000 of the most prosperous and progressive people on earth. Political economists have estimated that the United States alone, under just and equitable laws, is capable of supporting comfortably within it's borders two thousand million people and then it would not be as congested as Belgium, whose people matches any in the world in prosperity, peace, morality, intelligence and culture.

Civilization, like trees wither and die at the top and are nourished and replenished from the bottom through the common soil. Balzac was right when he said that the stairways of progress are always resounding to the clatter of wooden shoes going up, and the rustle of silken shirts and patent leather coming down. America, like England, through the teaching of such as Professor Ross, is mildewed over with materialism and a decadence of high ideals and spirituality. It needs the spiritual, emotional and vital elements that are being brought hither by the rugged emigrants as much as these emigrants need America.

Winnowing out the unworthy, let us still welcome the honest, healthy and thrifty of all these people with full faith in the prophesies of democracy that in the mysteries alembic of God the manhood metals of these mighty people may be mingled and out of the transfusion of composite America, the superman of tomorrow.