A Japanese
A Japanese says: "The desire to see America was burning in my boyish heart. The land of freedom and civilization of which I had heard so much from missionaries and the wonderful story of America I had heard from those of my race who returned from there made my longing ungovernable." A popular novel among Japanese boys, "The Adventurous Life of Tsurukichi Tanaka, Japanese Robinson Crusoe," made a strong impression upon him, and finally he decided to come to this country to receive an American education.
A Chinese
A representative Chinese business man of New York was taught in childhood that the English and Americans were foreign devils, the latter false, because having made a treaty by which they could freely come to China and Chinese as freely go to America, they had broken the treaty and shut the Chinese out. When he was sixteen, working on a farm, a man of his tribe came back from America "and took ground as large as four city blocks and made a paradise of it." He had gone away a poor boy, now he returned with unlimited wealth, "which he had obtained in the country of the American wizards. He had become a merchant in a city called Mott Street, so it was said. The wealth of this man filled my mind with the idea that I, too, would go to the country of the wizards and gain some of their wealth." Landing in San Francisco, before the exclusion act, he started in American life as a house servant, but finally became a Mott Street merchant, as he had intended from the first.
Fortune and Freedom
Thus we have gone the rounds of immigrants of various races. The two ideas—fortune and freedom—lie at the basis of immigration, although the money comes first in nearly all cases. These testimonies could be multiplied indefinitely. Ask the first immigrant you can talk with what brought him, and find out for yourself. Mr. Brandenburg says a Greek who was being deported told him that all Greece was stirred up over the matter of emigration, and that in five years the number of Greeks coming to the United States would have increased a thousand per cent.[11] The reasons are the too onerous military duties in Greece and prosperity of Greeks in America. The remittances fired the zeal of the home people to follow, and the candymakers' shops were full of apprentices, because the idea had gone abroad that candymakers could easily gain a fortune in America.
Showing only the Bright Side
From these illustrations, it can readily be seen how widespread is the knowledge of America as a desirable place. The other side is rarely told and that is the pitiful side of it. The stories that go back are always of the fortunes, not of the misfortunes, of the money and not of the misery.
V. Solicitation an Evil
Evils of Solicitation