“Nellie,” said I, “you are a woman and my sister. I’m very sorry, but I don’t believe it.”
“I thought you wouldn’t,” said she. Women always will have the last word.
III
The blue shore line of one’s own land always brings a thrill of the heart; to me, buried exile as I had been, the heart-leap was choking.
Ours was a slow steamer, and we did not stop at Montauk where the mail and the swiftest travelers landed, nor in Jamaica Harbor with the immigrants.
As we swept along the sunny, level spaces of the South Shore, Nellie told me how Long Island was now the “reception room” of our country, instead of poor, brutal little Ellis Island.
“The shores are still mostly summer places,” she said. “One of the most convincing of our early lines of advance was started on the South Shore; and there are plenty of country clubs, home parks and things like that; but the bulk of the island toward the western end is an experiment station in applied sociology.”
I was watching the bright shore hungrily. With a glass I could see many large buildings, not too closely set.
“I should think it would spoil the place for homes,” I said.
Nellie had a way of listening to my remarks, kindly and pleasantly, but as if I were somehow a long way off and she was trying to grasp what I said.
“In a way it did—at first;” she explained presently, “but even then it meant just as many homes for other people, and now it means so much more!”
She hesitated a moment and then plunged in resolutely.
“You’re in for a steady course of instructive remarks from now on. Everybody will be explaining things and bragging about them. We haven’t outgrown some of the smaller vices, you see. As to this ‘immigration problem’—we woke up to this fact among others, that the ‘reintegration of peoples’ as Ward called it, was a sociological process not possible to stop, but quite possible to assist and to guide to great advantage. And here in America we recognized our own special place—‘the melting pot,’ you know?”
Yes, I remembered the phrase, I never liked it. Our family were pure English stock, and rightly proud of their descent.
“I begin to see, my dear sister, that while receiving the torrent of instructive remarks you foretell, the way of wisdom for me is steadfastly to withhold my own opinions.”
Nellie laughed appreciatively.
“You always had a long head, John. Well, whether you like it or not, our people saw their place and power at last and rose to it. We refuse no one. We have discovered as many ways of utilizing human waste as we used to have for the waste products of coal tar.”
“You don’t mean to say idiots and criminals?” I protested.
“Idiots, hopeless ones, we don’t keep any more,” she answered gently. “They are very rare now. The grade of average humanity is steadily rising; and we have the proud satisfaction of knowing we have helped it rise. We organized a permanent ‘reception committee’ for the whole country, one station here and one in California. Anybody could come—but they had to submit to our handling when they did come.”
“We used to have physical examination, didn’t we?”
“A rudimentary one. What we have now is compulsory socialization.”
I stared at her.
“Yes, I know! You are thinking of that geological kind of evolution people used to talk about, and ‘you can’t alter human nature.’ In the first place, we can. In the second place, we do. In the third place, there isn’t so much alteration needed as we used to think. Human nature is a pretty good thing. No immigrant is turned loose on the community till he or she is up to a certain standard, and the children we educate.”
“We always did, didn’t we?”
“Always did? Why Brother, we didn’t know what the word meant in your time.”
“I shall be glad to follow that up,” I assured her. “Education was improving even in the old days, I remember. I shall be glad to see the schools.”
“Some of them you won’t know when you do see them,” said Nellie. “On Long Island we have agricultural and industrial stations like—like—I think we had something like it in some of our Western colleges, which it was the fashion to look down upon. We have a graded series of dwellings where the use of modern conveniences is taught to all newcomers.”
“Suppose they won’t learn? They used to prefer to live like hogs, as I remember.”
Again Nellie looked at me as if I were speaking to her from a distance.
“We used to say so—and I suppose we used to think so—some of us. But we know better now. These people are not compelled to come to our country, but if they come they know what they have to do—and they do it. You may have noticed that we have no ‘steerage.’ ”
I had noticed it.
“They have decent surroundings from the first step. They have to be antiseptically clean, they and all their belongings, before entering the ship.”
“But what an awful expense!” I ventured.
“Suppose you keep cattle, John, and knew how to fatten and improve them; and suppose your ranch was surrounded by strays—mavericks—anxious to come in. Would you call it ‘an expense’ to add to your herd?”
“You can’t sell people.”
“No, but you can profit by their labor.”
“That sounds like the same old game. I should think your socialism would have put an end to that.”
“Socialism, did not alter the fact that wealth comes by labor,” she replied. “All these people work. We provide the opportunity for them, we train them to higher efficiency, especially the children. The very best and wisest of us are proud to serve there—as women used to be proud when they were invited ‘to help receive’ some personage. We receive humanity—and introduce it to America. What they produce is used to cover the expense of their training, and also to lay up a surplus for themselves.”
“They must produce more than they
