, quantity! And into this atmosphere of almost utter disregard
for quality I brought my ideas of Dutch thoroughness and my conviction
that doing well whatever I did was to count as a cardinal principle in
life.

During my years of editorship, save in one or two conspicuous
instances, I was never able to assign to an American writer, work which
called for painstaking research. In every instance, the work came back
to me either incorrect in statement, or otherwise obviously lacking in
careful preparation.

One of the most successful departments I ever conducted in _The Ladies'
Home Journal_ called for infinite reading and patient digging, with the
actual results sometimes almost negligible. I made a study of my
associates by turning the department over to one after another, and
always with the same result: absolute lack of a capacity for patient
research. As one of my editors, typically American, said to me: "It
isn't worth all the trouble that you put into it." Yet no single
department ever repaid the searcher more for his pains. Save for
assistance derived from a single person, I had to do the work myself
for all the years that the department continued. It was apparently
impossible for the American to work with sufficient patience and care
to achieve a result.

We all have our pet notions as to the particular evil which is "the
curse of America," but I always think that Theodore Roosevelt came
closest to the real curse when he classed it as a lack of thoroughness.

Here again, in one of the most important matters in life, did America
fall short with me; and, what is more important, she is falling short
with every foreigner that comes to her shores.

In the matter of education, America fell far short in what should be
the strongest of all her institutions: the public school. A more
inadequate, incompetent method of teaching, as I look back over my
seven years of attendance at three different public schools, it is
difficult to conceive. If there is one thing that I, as a foreign-born
child, should have been carefully taught, it is the English language.
The individual effort to teach this, if effort there was, and I
remember none, was negligible. It was left for my father to teach me,
or for me to dig it out for myself. There was absolutely no indication
on the part of teacher or principal of responsibility for seeing that a
foreign-born boy should acquire the English language correctly. I was
taught as