"As much as complaints of unassimilability grew more commonplace in the 1850s, however, the view that a large portion of immigrants were indelibly stamped by nature as alien to the American character had not yet taken hold among a broad swath of the American public, and failed to shape federal immigration and naturalization policy. Indeed, even writers who in one breath condemned immigrants' corrosive effect on the quality of American citizenship could, in the next, affirm their faith in assimilation. The renowned clergyman and author Edward Everett Hale, for example, described with alarm the "Celtic Exodus," and consequent "annual invasion" of the United States by "a horde of discouraged, starved, beaten men and women" whose "inferiority as a race compels them to go to the bottom."' Within a few pages, however, Hale pivoted sharply, adopting a markedly more optimistic vision of assimilation."[T]he country [is] richer for the coming of the foreigner," he declared, and "to attain the full use of this gift, the emigrant must be cared for." Rather than throwing up obstacles to immigration, Hale insisted, the nation "must open its hand to receive the offering of Europe." Once here, the immigrant should be welcomed warmly into the American political fellowship, not as a gesture of national generosity, but as a spur to assimilation. "The stranger cannot serve the country while he is a stranger," Hale counseled, but "must plunge, or be plunged, into his new home." "He must, for the purpose we seek, profit by the measure of its civilization. He must be directed by its intelligence. His children must grow up in its institutions. He must be, not in a clan in a city, surrounded by his own race." Notwithstanding Hale's dark assessment of the Irish "race" pouring in on the republic, his proposed solution was a familiar one: geographical dispersion. In order to "'stimulate the [nation's] absorbents,"' Hale urged, "private action and public policy in this matter should unite ...[so] that each little duct, the country through, may drink its share, of those drops which some do not taste at all, of the perpetual Westward flood.""