stilling into the mind of the
foreign-born the highest respect for American institutions.

After the Conference he asked me whether he could see me that afternoon
at my hotel; he wanted to talk about contributing to the magazine. When
he came, before approaching the object of his talk, he launched out on a
tirade against the President of the United States; the weakness of the
Cabinet, the inefficiency of the Congress, and the stupidity of the
Senate. If words could have killed, there would have not remained a
single living member of the Administration at Washington.

After fifteen minutes of this, I reminded him of his speech and the
emphasis which he had placed upon the necessity of inculcating in the
foreign-born respect for American institutions.

Yet this man was a power in his community, a strong influence upon
others; he believed he could Americanize others, when he himself,
according to his own statements, lacked the fundamental principle of
Americanization. What is true of this man is, in lesser or greater
degree, true of hundreds of others. Their Americanization consists of
lip-service; the real spirit, the only factor which counts in the
successful teaching of any doctrine, is absolutely missing. We certainly
cannot teach anything approaching a true Americanism until we ourselves
feel and believe and practise in our own lives what we are teaching to
others. No law, no lip-service, no effort, however well-intentioned,
will amount to anything worth while in inculcating the true American
spirit in our foreign-born citizens until we are sure that the American
spirit is understood by ourselves and is warp and woof of our own being.

To the American, part and parcel of his country, these particulars in
which his country falls short with the foreign-born are, perhaps, not so
evident; they may even seem not so very important. But to the
foreign-born they seem distinct lacks; they loom large; they form
serious handicaps which, in many cases, are never surmounted; they are a
menace to that Americanization which is, to-day, more than ever our
fondest dream, and which we now realize more keenly than before is our
most vital need.

It is for this reason that I have put them down here as a concrete
instance of where and how America fell short in my own Americanization,
and, what is far more serious to me, where she is falling short in her
Americanization of thousands of other foreign-born.

"Yet you succeeded," it wil