ing I gathered up the coal thus swept away,
and during the course of a week I collected a scuttleful. The first time
my mother saw the garbage pail of a family almost as poor as our own,
with the wife and husband constantly complaining that they could not get
along, she could scarcely believe her eyes. A half pan of hominy of the
preceding day's breakfast lay in the pail next to a third of a loaf of
bread. In later years, when I saw, daily, a scow loaded with the garbage
of Brooklyn householders being towed through New York harbor out to sea,
it was an easy calculation that what was thrown away in a week's time
from Brooklyn homes would feed the poor of the Netherlands.

At school, I quickly learned that to "save money" was to be "stingy"; as
a young man, I soon found that the American disliked the word "economy,"
and on every hand as plenty grew spending grew. There was literally
nothing in American life to teach me thrift or economy; everything to
teach me to spend and to waste.

I saw men who had earned good salaries in their prime, reach the years
of incapacity as dependents. I saw families on every hand either living
quite up to their means or beyond them; rarely within them. The more a
man earned, the more he--or his wife--spent. I saw fathers and mothers
and their children dressed beyond their incomes. The proportion of
families who ran into debt was far greater than those who saved. When a
panic came, the families "pulled in"; when the panic was over, they "let
out." But the end of one year found them precisely where they were at
the close of the previous year, unless they were deeper in debt.

It was in this atmosphere of prodigal expenditure and culpable waste
that I was to practise thrift: a fundamental in life! And it is into
this atmosphere that the foreign-born comes now, with every inducement
to spend and no encouragement to save. For as it was in the days of my
boyhood, so it is to-day--only worse. One need only go over the
experiences of the past two years, to compare the receipts of merchants
who cater to the working-classes and the statements of savings-banks
throughout the country, to read the story of how the foreign-born are
learning the habit of criminal wastefulness as taught them by the
American.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this, one of the essentials in life and
in all success, America fell short with me, as it is continuing to fall
short with every foreign-born who comes to its shores?