AMERICA OFFERS SOMETHING BETTER THAN MONEY
I was told while in Syria that in America money could be picked up everywhere. That was not true. But I found that infinitely better things than money—knowledge, freedom, self-reliance, order, cleanliness, sovereign human rights, self-government, and all that these great accomplishments imply—can be picked up everywhere in America by whosoever earnestly seeks them. And those among Americans who are exerting the largest influence toward the solution of the “immigration problem” are, in my opinion, not those who are writing books on “good citizenship,” but those who stand before the foreigner as the embodiment of these great ideals.
The occasions on which I was made to feel that I was a foreigner—an alien—were so rare that they are not worth mentioning. My purpose in life, and the large, warm heart of America which opens to every person who aspires to be a good and useful citizen, made me forget that there was an “immigration problem” within the borders of this great Commonwealth. When I think of the thousand noble impulses which were poured into my soul in my early years in this country by good men and women in all walks of life; when I think of the many homes in which I was received with my uncomely appearance and with my crude manners, where women who were visions of elegance served me as an honored guest, of the many counsels of men of affairs which fed my strength and taught me the lasting value of personal achievements, and that America is the land of not only great privileges, but great responsibilities, I feel like saying (and I do say whenever I have the opportunity) to every foreigner, “When you really know what America is, when you are willing to share in its sorrows, as well as its joys, then you will cease to be a whining malcontent, will take your harp down from the willows, and will not call such a country ‘a strange land.’”
Of all the means of improvement other than personal associations with good men and women, the churches and the public schools gripped most strongly at the strings of my heart. Upon coming into town, the sight of the church spires rising above the houses and the trees as witnesses to man’s desire for God, always gave me inward delight. True, religion in America lacks to a certain extent the depth of Oriental mysticism; yet it is much more closely related than in the Orient to the vital issues of “the life which now is.” Often would I go and stand on the opposite side of the street from a public-school building at the hour of dismissal (and this passion still remains with me) just for the purpose of feasting my eyes on seeing the pupils pour out in squads, so clean and so orderly, and seemingly animated by all that is noblest in the life of this great nation. My soul would revel in the thought that no distinctions were made in those temples of learning between Jew and Gentile, Protestant and Catholic, the churched and the unchurched; all enjoyed the equality of privileges, shared equally in the intellectual and moral feast, and drank freely the spirit of the noblest patriotism.