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On the whole, then, the position of an alien cannot be a very pleasant one, unless one has a good deal of money and a rich vein of transferable patriotism. To be despised as dirty--foreigners are all dirty by classification--even by those who would regard a hot bath as no better than a pneumonia-trap, is the smallest part of the alien's burden.
To be an alien is also to be looked on with suspicion as a moral outcast. Aliens are supposed to be capable of all the tricks and treacheries that were once imputed to Jesuits. We surely pay them an unintentional compliment, however, in looking on them as people of superhuman cunning and at the same time of superhuman readiness to sacrifice themselves for the country they have deserted. They may be old men of eighty; they may have had sons and grandsons fighting in France on the side of the Allies; their thoughts may not have ranged for half a century beyond the walls of a barber's shop in a back street; they may care as little for the Kaiser as for Alexander the Great; they may have abandoned their country with the ease with which thousands of men of all races abandon their country. To the anti-alien, however, they--at least it was so with the Germans in England during the war--are all alike partners in a gigantic conspiracy. "Once a German always a German," we were told, and this apparently means that the German is cursed with an indelible patriotism above men of all other nations even to the third or fourth generation. Not only this, but to have been a German subject against one's will leaves one, it seems, with a German taint; and so we note the paradox that while Mr. Ronald MacNeill, M.P., the famous loyalist, was anxious to shed blood in order to free Alsatians from German rule, meanwhile he was equally eager to put Alsatians into English internment camps. On the whole, if one were a member of an oppressed nationality, one would prefer a slightly less demonstrative friend than Mr. MacNeill. At the same time, Mr. MacNeill was logical. He had the good sense to realise that, if the Germans had agents in England, the latter were not likely to be Germans. They were far more likely to be neutrals. "If we are to intern anybody," said an embittered Englishman to me at the time, "we should begin with the neutrals; and, if we do not find our suspicions cooling down as a result of this, we may go a step further and intern members of the Allied nations. If even then we still suffer from nightmares of espionage, we had better look for victims nearer home and intern our own people. When once we have the whole human race behind barbed wire, we ought to be able to sleep the sleep of the just." And nothing short of this was the logic of the internment policy, as it was advocated by the extremists. They were willing to do an immense wrong in order to eliminate a little risk. Every reasonable man knows it is impossible entirely to eliminate risk. Herod made a courageous attempt, but even he failed. It is better to run a small risk than to be cruel or mean or cowardly. There is a risk in allowing one's son to grow to manhood; there have been such things as parricides. It may be admitted that espionage is a commoner crime than parricide, but the proper way to counter it is by an efficient secret service, and not by running campaigns against aliens in sensational papers. These merely rekindle the old anti-foreign feeling which is already vehement enough in most of us, and which must be tamed into moderation if the world is to be civilised. The world can never be made one place so long as men continue to hate foreigners simply because they are foreigners. I remember, during the war, hearing a lady, who considered herself rather patriotic, denouncing in turn the French, the Belgians, the Welsh, the Irish, the Russians, and the Americans. The only people in whom she had any faith were the English, and at least half of these she regarded as traitors. She had only one foreign hero—Sir Edward Carson. I fancy she looked on the war as a second-rate war, because there were so many foreigners fighting on the same side as England. Her ideal war, no doubt, would be a war in which England and Sir Edward Carson would march out against the rest of the human race and scatter it with the jaw-bone of the editor of the Morning Post
Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/On-Being-An-Alien-By-Robert-Lynd_2.htm
Source: http://grammar.about.com/od/classicessays/a/On-Being-An-Alien-By-Robert-Lynd_2.htm