Read "Industrial Discontent" by Ambrose Bierce online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It is the immigration of "the oppressed of all nations" that has made this country one of the worst on the face of the earth. The change from good to bad took place within a generation -- so quickly that few of us have had the nimbleness of apprehension to "get it through our heads." We go on screaming our eagle in the self-same note of triumph that we were taught at our fathers' knees before the eagle became a buzzard. America is still "an asylum for the oppressed;" and still, as always and everywhere, the oppressed are unworthy of asylum, avenging upon those who give them sanctuary the wrongs from which they fled. The saddest thing about oppression is that it makes its victims unfit for anything but to be oppressed -- makes them dangerous alike to their tyrants, their saviors and themselves. In the end they turn out to be fairly energetic oppressors.
The gentleman in the cesspool invites compassion, certainly, but we may be very well assured, before undertaking his relief without a pole, that his conception of a prosperous life is merely to have his nose above the surface with another gentleman underfoot.