THE UNCLEANLY IMMIGRANT

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1745, 16 August 1905, Page 13

THE UNCLEANLY IMMIGRANT

“Come along gents, turn out o’ there. We roll over on our hard mattresses. The stewards’ shouts are heard along the corridor, doors bang, a bell rings insistently, a sickening whiff of oil floats np from the engines, grunt© and ejaculations can be heard through the thin partitions which separate the cabin©, and an intolerable, penetrating stench of garlic indicates to us that our Italian fellow passengers have awakened to another day. We are in the trough of the Atlantic, half way from Sandy Hook to the Lizard. Some of IX9 are returning from America to revisit our homes; others, rejected by the immigration authorities at the port of New York, are being dumped down in England. We may be divided roughly into four equal parts, consisting of AngloAmericans and Scandinavians, Poles, Italians and “assorted,” moral pithecanthropoi. witnesses to Darwin, whom the hospitable [Republic of America has declined to welcome to her expansive fields, which ar© continually crying out for more labourers. There are neither Germans nor Irishmen among us, for men of these nations, though they crowd the lower decks of each outgoing steamer, generally return by state cabin, having made their fortunes respectively out of saloon-keep-ing and politic®. The Poles wash their hands to the wrist, and even the Italians perform a sort of irrigation at intervale. The others howevep, become progressively darker during the voyage. If the washing facilities on this line are primitive, the food is excellent of its kind. An unlimited supply of bread and butter is provided at each meal, with coffee or tea, and invariably a dish of meat and vegetables. There is a piano in the large saloon, where all day long the passengers fight over packs of filthy cards, nation by nation. These immigrant© exist in the Middle Ages. _ For them geography is non-exist-ent, time has no value, persons, not laws, control events, and steam and electricity are so many mysterious agencies which transport them, from one inhospitable country to another over a strange world. “I go to Ahannishag,” said an elderly Hebrew with a patriarchal beard, apparently nearly SO years of age, who had asked me to indite a letter for him. to St. Louis.

“Johannesburg?” I hazarded. ‘‘Yes. How many day®?” He knew Southampton was on the way to South Africa, but had imagined that the ship touched at it and then continued east; south or north until she reached the port of Johannesburg. “Is my trade good there, peddling the fruit?” he asked. “Yes, but it is in the hands of the Greeks.” “Ah! I undersell.”

Then he told the story of his life. About the age of 70, which hie regarded as early manhood, he had betaken himself from Russia to the Klondyke, where he peddled needles at a shilling apiece and amassed several hundred dollars. Thence lie went to St. Louis, opened a fruit store, failed, and now, eager a® a young man to see the world, was bound for the gold fields, where he hoped to peddle fruit.

“And if I do not like it,” he said, “after t'ree, four years, I go to Owstralie. And if I do not like that I go to Fort Arthur, or perhaps Siberie. Who knows? Plenty of time, plenty of time.” We had passengers of ridiculous race®, whose names are hardly known to-day. There were Lithuanians, Slovak®, Kurds, Ruthenians, filthy Levantines, men from Bagdad, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians, the outpourings of Western Asia, who should have perished out of the world with the aepyornis and the plesiosaurus. “Get off the face of the earth,” exclaimed an American, looking after them in measureless contempt. These men, replacing the old, free settlers of America, have drifted thither in increasing numbers during the past fifteen years. To-day the immigration into the ports of the United States reaches a million per annum. The immense gulf which separates them from the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Teuton and Frenchman seems almost unbridgeable.

These were the men who were coming to England. They pour in from the Continent; some stay, some go through to America—• but the worst of these, cast out by the republic, stream back to the English ports. If I were an immigrant official with large powers I would ■ make the test of admission, to England not one of wealth—for that would exclude the artisan, the best type of citizen —nor yet of education, wMch -would let in the Anarchist and forger. I would make it, more than anytihing, one of cleanliness.—M., in the ‘‘Daily Mail.”