A man told me the old tale of a crowd of Russian immigrants who at a big
fire in a city 'verted to the ancestral type, and blocked the streets
yelling, 'Down with the Czar!' That is another type. A few days later I
was shown a wire stating that a community of Doukhobors - Russians
again - had, not for the first time, undressed themselves, and were
fleeing up the track to meet the Messiah before the snow fell. Police
were pursuing them with warm underclothing, and trains would please
take care not to run over them.
So there you have three sort of steam-borne unfitness - soft, savage, and
mad. There is a fourth brand, which may be either home-grown or
imported, but democracies do not recognise it, of downright bad
folk - grown, healthy men and women who honestly rejoice in doing evil.
These four classes acting together might conceivably produce a rather
pernicious democracy; alien hysteria, blood-craze, and the like,
reinforcing local ignorance, sloth, and arrogance. For example, I read a
letter in a paper sympathising with these same Doukhobors. The writer
knew a community of excellent people in England (you see where the rot
starts!) who lived barefoot, paid no taxes, ate nuts, and were above
marriage. They were a soulful folk, living pure lives. The Doukhobors
were also pure and soulful, entitled in a free country to live their own
lives, and not to be oppressed, etc. etc. (Imported soft, observe,
playing up to Imported mad.) Meantime, disgusted police were chasing the
Doukhobors into flannels that they might live to produce children fit to
consort with the sons of the man who wrote that letter and the daughters
of the crowd that lost their heads at the fire.
'All of which,' men and women answered, 'we admit. But what can we do?
We want people.' And they showed vast and well-equipped schools, where
the children of Slav immigrants are taught English and the songs of
Canada. 'When they grow up,' people said, 'you can't tell them from
Canadians.' It was a wonderful work. The teacher holds up pens, reels,
and so forth, giving the name in English; the children repeating Chinese
fashion. Presently when they have enough words they can bridge back to
the knowledge they learned in their own country, so that a boy of
twelve, at, say, the end of a year, will produce a well-written English
account of his journey from Russia, how much his mother paid for food by
the way, and where his father got his first job. He will also lay his
hand on his heart, and say, 'I - am - a - Canadian.' This gratifies the
Canadian, who naturally purrs over an emigrant owing everything to the
land which adopted him and set him on his feet. The Lady Bountiful of an
English village takes the same interest in a child she has helped on in
the world.
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