Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Book and heart: essays on literature and life

No test, no classification, can do very much to limit this supply. We have already laws to sift out criminals and paupers. But the most dangerous criminals are those who are not yet publicly known as such; and the most perilous paupers are those who arrive with no money of their own, but with some that has been plundered from other people. Moreover, those who are appalled by the aspect of the latest arrivals are apt to forget the looks of some that preceded them. Those early squalid crowds have simply vanished in their descendants. Who that sees the vast and well-dressed congregations that come and go to our Roman Catholic churches can recall the advance-guard of the Irish immigration as it came among us sixty years ago-“poor Paddy, whose country is his wheelbarrow,” as Emerson says, whose first act on arrival was to dig himself an earthen shanty, and live in it? Who that sees the equally prosperous French Canadian congregations pouring out of the great Roman Catholic churches of Fall River, Massachusetts, or Woonsocket, Rhode Island, can recall the Canadian families that used to cross the frontier forty or fifty years ago — a man, a woman, twelve children, and a large bundle? Each of those early migrations was a step in progress;