to all but close entirely the gates of asylum
which have always been open to those who could find nowhere else the
right and opportunity of constitutional agitation for what they
conceived to be the natural and inalienable rights of men; and it
excludes those to whom the opportunities of elementary education have
been denied, without regard to their character, their purposes, or their
natural capacity.

Restrictions like these, adopted earlier in our history as a Nation,
would very materially have altered the course and cooled the humane
ardors of our politics. The right of political asylum has brought to
this country many a man of noble character and elevated purpose who was
marked as an outlaw in his own less fortunate land, and who has yet
become an ornament to our citizenship and to our public councils. The
children and the compatriots of these illustrious Americans must stand
amazed to see the representatives of their Nation now resolved, in the
fullness of our national strength and at the maturity of our great
institutions, to risk turning such men back from our shores without test
of quality or purpose. It is difficult for me to believe that the full
effect of this feature of the bill was realized when it was framed and
adopted, and it is impossible for me to assent to it in the form in
which it is here cast.

The literacy test and the tests and restrictions which accompany it
constitute an even more radical change in the policy of the Nation.
Hitherto we have generously kept our doors open to all who were not
unfitted by reason of disease or incapacity for self-support or such
personal records and antecedents as were likely to make them a menace to
our peace and order or to the wholesome and essential relationships of
life. In this bill it is proposed to turn away from tests of character
and of quality and impose tests which exclude and restrict; for the new
tests here embodied are not tests of quality or of character or of
personal fitness, but tests of opportunity. Those who come seeking
opportunity are not to be admitted unless they have already had one of
the chief of the opportunities they seek, the opportunity of education.
The object of such provisions is restriction, not selection.

If the people of this country have made up their minds to limit the
number of immigrants by arbitrary tests and so reverse the policy of all
the generations of Americans that have gone before them, it is their
right to do