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keenly indeed than those blessing are appreciated by many persons that have never experienced anything else. I have frequently observed the same kind of fervid American patriotism among other classes of foreign-born American citizens.
It should be—and, no doubt, largely it is—the natural desire, the highest hope, and the most earnest endeavor of such people to do the best they can towards preserving the free institutions and the beneficient opportunities to which they owe such invaluable benefactions. But as to the question how this is to be done, such people cannot be presumed to have brought much wisdom with them from their native lands. This is, after all, the main question. The freedom they find here presents with great opportunities also great temptations, and some of those temptations are of a very dangerous kind—especially dangerous at the earliest period of their presence here to just such people as the great mass of the Jewish immigrants are—quick-witted, sober, industrious, I might almost say indefatigable, and restlessly ambitious to better their condition and to rise in the world.
It is an old experience that when wild populations first come into bodily contact with civilized life they are usually inclined to adopt the vices rather than the virtues of civilization. I am, of course, very far from meaning to put the Jewish immigrants in any sense upon the same level with savage tribes. But it must be admitted that when they arrive here from Russia or Poland they enter a world which is entirely new to them; that the teaching by example to which they are exposed in such great business centres as New York is by no means in all respect what it should be; that the new-comer may easily look upon the sharp or crooked, and frequently successful, practices he observes, as the custom of the country, and that he may just as easily be seduced to adopt and follow what he has thus learned to regard as the custom of the country for his own profit. There are, unfortunately, occurrences visible in American life from which the lesson may be deduced that, as to the acquisition of wealth, the shortest way is always the best, and that it will not do to be too squeamish in the choice of means. Such teachings accompanied by seductive example are most dangerous to new-comers in distorting their moral vision and to lead them into paths discreditable not only to themselves individually, but to the class to which they belong—for it is well known as one of the most wanton and cruel forms of the injustice
