Whatever shortcomings I may have found during my fifty-year period of Americanization; however America may have failed to help my transition from a foreigner into an American, I owe to her the most priceless gift that any nation can offer, and that is opportunity.
As the world stands to-day, no nation offers opportunity in the degree that America does to the foreign-born.Russia may, in the future, as Ilike to believe she will, prove a second United States of America in this respect.She has the same limitless area; her people the same potentialities.But, as things are to-day, the United States offers, as does no other nation, a limitless opportunity: here a man can go as far as his abilities will carry him.It may be that the foreign-born, as in my own case, must hold on to some of the ideals and ideas of the land of his birth; it may be that he must develop and mould his character by overcoming the habits resulting from national shortcomings.But into the best that the foreign-born can retain, America can graft such a wealth of inspiration, so high a national idealism, so great an opportunity for the highest endeavor, as to make him the fortunate man of the earth to-day.
He can go where he will: no traditions hamper him; no limitations are set except those within himself.The larger the area he chooses in which to work, the larger the vision he demonstrates, the more eager the people are to give support to his undertakings if they are convinced that he has their best welfare as his goal.There is no public confidence equal to that of the American public, once it is obtained.It is fickle, of course, as are all publics, but fickle only toward the man who cannot maintain an achieved success.
A man in America cannot complacently lean back upon victories won, as he can in the older European countries, and depend upon the glamour of the past to sustain him or the momentum of success to carry him.Probably the most alert public in the world, it requires of its leaders that they be alert.Its appetite for variety is insatiable, but its appreciation, when given, is fullhanded and whole-hearted.The American public never holds back from the man to whom it gives; it never bestows in a niggardly way; it gives all or nothing.
What is not generally understood of the American people is their wonderful idealism.Nothing so completely surprises the foreign-born as the discovery of this trait in the American character.The impression is current in European countries-perhaps less generally since the war--that America is given over solely to a worship of the American dollar.While between nations as between individuals, comparisons are valueless, it may not be amiss to say, from personal knowledge, that the Dutch worship the gulden infinitely more than do the Americans the dollar.
I do not claim that the American is always conscious of this idealism;often he is not.But let a great convulsion touching moral questions occur, and the result always shows how close to the surface is his idealism.And the fact that so frequently he puts over it a thick veneer of materialism does not affect its quality.The truest approach, the only approach in fact, to the American character is, as Viscount Bryce has so well said, through its idealism.
It is this quality which gives the truest inspiration to the foreign-born in his endeavor to serve the people of his adopted country.
He is mentally sluggish, indeed, who does not discover that America will make good with him if he makes good with her.
But he must play fair.It is essentially the straight game that the true American plays, and he insists that you shall play it too.Evidence there is, of course, to the contrary in American life, experiences that seem to give ground for the belief that the man succeeds who is not scrupulous in playing his cards.But never is this true in the long run.
Sooner or later--sometimes, unfortunately, later than sooner--the public discovers the trickery.In no other country in the world is the moral conception so clear and true as in America, and no people will give a larger and more permanent reward to the man whose effort for that public has its roots in honor and truth.
"The sky is the limit" to the foreign-born who comes to America endowed with honest endeavor, ceaseless industry, and the ability to carry through.In any honest endeavor, the way is wide open to the will to succeed.Every path beckons, every vista invites, every talent is called forth, and every efficient effort finds its due reward.In no land is the way so clear and so free.
