If there are shreds of good in me, it is because by the grace of God (using that old phrase without cant) I have always met good people among the different races with whom my lot has been cast. I do not recall a single man, even those I have met in jails, penitentiaries, dives and gambling hells, who has retarded any progress towards the good that I cared to make. I could fill twice the number of pages I have written, recording the names and deeds of those who have inspired me to lead the better life.
Nor have I ever met a woman (and I have met women close to the bottomless pit) who ever used the art of her sex in an effort to drag me down; but I know very many women whose whole being radiates purity and in whose presence one cannot help being a man. I have never met a woman before whom I could not lift my hat in deference; and this feeling of reverence for womanhood I owe in large degree to my mother and my wife.
Within me are all possibilities of good and evil, and everything that lies between; yet these same tendencies I have found in other men of other races. Never all the good nor all the evil in any one man or any one race.
Every individual I know is an intricate and unfinished piece of curiously constructed mechanism in body and spirit; linked to the past, yet free to the shaping forces of each fleeting moment; never completed, never perfected, never, I hope, so totally ruined but that love can redeem it, and “set it again upon a rock and establish its going.”
I am a debtor to all the races that in varying degrees influenced my life during its most impressionable period.
From the Slav, I have a love for physical labour and a sense of its dignity.
The Magyar has given me a feeling for “the mere pleasure of living”; although I have never quite been able to abandon myself to it.
In the sphere of my intellect, I am Germanic. My mother tongue is German, as are my passion for intellectual freedom and my impatience with its restraint; while the inward look, which so easily leads to despair, bears the German stamp.
I came to America early enough in life to catch the passion for liberty and the love of democracy; but too late to be anything but an impractical idealist to whom “life is more than meat,” and human history more than a succession of economic facts.
I have not written an autobiography, or desired to write one; that would have been presumptuous; nor have I written a bit of purposeless fiction with which to burden the book-market; that folly I would not commit. I have honestly recorded certain influences which shaped the life of a child until youth, and I leave all deductions to my patient readers. Yet I should like to point out in which direction the most valuable lessons of my experience lie. I believe they are: