Sooner or later--sometimes, unfortunately, later than sooner--the public
discovers the trickery. In no other country in the world is the moral
conception so clear and true as in America, and no people will give a
larger and more permanent reward to the man whose effort for that public
has its roots in honor and truth.
"The sky is the limit" to the foreign-born who comes to America endowed
with honest endeavor, ceaseless industry, and the ability to carry
through. In any honest endeavor, the way is wide open to the will to
succeed. Every path beckons, every vista invites, every talent is called
forth, and every efficient effort finds its due reward. In no land is
the way so clear and so free.
How good an American has the process of Americanization made me? That I
cannot say. Who can say that of himself? But when I look around me at
the American-born I have come to know as my close friends, I wonder
whether, after all, the foreign-born does not make in some sense a
better American--whether he is not able to get a truer perspective;
whether his is not the deeper desire to see America greater; whether he
is not less content to let its faulty institutions be as they are;
whether in seeing faults more clearly he does not make a more decided
effort to have America reach those ideals or those fundamentals of his
own land which he feels are in his nature, and the best of which he is
anxious to graft into the character of his adopted land?
It is naturally with a feeling of deep satisfaction that I remember two
Presidents of the United States considered me a sufficiently typical
American to wish to send me to my native land as the accredited minister
of my adopted country.
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