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 will be argued.

That may be; but you, on the other hand, must admit that I did not
succeed by reason of these shortcomings: it was in spite of them, by
overcoming them--a result that all might not achieve.

CHAPTER XXII

WHAT I OWE TO AMERICA

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 I
like 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 o