pportunity 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 full-handed 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 mu