Sees Bigger Peril Than The Japanese.

New York Times 100 years ago today, June 5, 1913:
Bishop Brent Decries the Immigration from Southern Europe.
STUDIED IT FIRST HAND
Missionary Bishop Made a Trip in Steerage to Find Types and Now Sounds Warning.
    That the United States is in far greater danger from the quality of immigration that comes from Southern Europe than from any peril that could come by Japanese ownership of lands in California, or from Asiatic immigration as controlled by our laws, was asserted yesterday by the Right Rev. Charles H. Brent, Protestant Episcopal Missionary Bishop to the Philippines. The Bishop believes that the American Government, in order to protect itself against what he considers a highly undesirable class of persons who are coming to this country in hordes, will soon have to make strong representations to certain European governments, or else make rules establishing much more stringent standards for admission. Bishop Brent was much annoyed when he arrived here the other day on the Carmania that the fact that he had made the voyage from Liverpool in the steerage had become public property. He had traveled in that fashion to make certain investigations, one of which was to study the type of of Europeans who are being brought over here by the hundreds of thousands, and not with the idea of producing an effect. He came from Washington yesterday, on his way to Lake Mohonk, where next Sunday he will preach before the Students' Federation, and he was interviewed while hurrying from the Church Mission House, on Fourth Avenue, to the ferry.
    "While I should pronounce the people from Northern Europe, whom I met in the steerage of the Carmania, desirable material for American citizens," said the Bishop, "I am convinced that there is peril for our standards in the class that we are getting from Southeastern Europe. On their account, there is apt to be some day a worse mix-up than can possibly happen from the admission, of Japanese subjects. We don't have to assimilate Japanese; but those five hundred  Continentals that came over in the Carmania steerage are the very kind of people that do have to be assimilated here.
    "This Government ought to make a careful investigation into the subject of immigration from Europe. As an American citizen, I do not see why we are called upon by backward nations to do work they are capable of doing and which they should do. They should at least make the people that they send us clean. I cannot explain more clearly what I mean than to say that it is a case of animal filth; that is all. I talked with many of the other steerage passengers, and I found that a lot of them thought the same way as I did. The Scandinavian and English passengers were disgusted. "The morning after we left Queenstown, a young Irish lad came up to me as I stood by the rail. He was a bright healthy-looking young chap, from County Down.
    "' I can't stand this.' he said. 'I will never travel among people like that again.'
    "I made my trip in the steerage for the purpose of investigating, and I had to be very careful as to the questions I asked, because, if my fellow-travelers had got the idea that I was traveling as an investigator, they would not have given me their confidence. I may add that I shall respect the confidences they gave me.
    "But, I repeat, there is a great deal more difficulty to be faced in the question of immigration from Southeastern Europe than could possibly arise fro, the Japanese question which has so exercised California."