Daily Inspiration Quote by Josiah Strong

Strong is doing math with a pulpit agenda: turn immigration into a demographic alarm bell. The precision of 39.3 and 45.8 percent looks like neutral census realism, but the rhetoric is unmistakably moral-political. By spotlighting Germans and Irish in “principal cities,” he frames urban America as an ethnic concentrate, a place where “foreign” bodies gather densely enough to feel like a takeover even when the national share remains smaller. The punchline is in the contrast: “only nine per cent” of the population lives in the ten largest cities, “but 23 per cent of the foreign.” “Only…but” is the hinge that converts statistics into suspicion.

Context matters. Strong wrote during the high-tide decades of mass immigration, rapid industrialization, and Protestant anxiety over Catholic political power and machine politics. Germans and Irish weren’t random examples; they were coded signifiers in a nativist imagination: the Irish as Catholic, urban, and supposedly beholden to ward bosses; Germans as culturally distinct and, in temperance debates, associated with beer gardens and “foreign” habits. As a clergyman linked to the Social Gospel, Strong could present social reform as benevolence while smuggling in a civilizational hierarchy: the city as mission field, immigrants as both souls to save and problems to manage.

The intent isn’t to describe immigrants so much as to locate them. By tying “foreign” to the metropolis, he builds an argument for intervention - political, religious, even coercive - while implying that the “real” America lives elsewhere, diluted and therefore safe. The decimals are there to make fear sound responsible.