the family responds to the efforts of the Red Cross the sergeant will find a congenial household when he returns.
This awakening of the family to wider opportunities is especially important in the homes of people who have come to America from other countries. These newer citizens frequently need to be helped to adapt themselves to American ways of living in order that they may get the best that the United States has to offer, and that the United States may in turn receive the best that they have to give.
In the spring of 1912 Jacques Armot[1] arrived in one of the great cities of the United States. He had left France with the same hope of improving himself that inspired the men who came to America in the days of Captain John Smith and the Pilgrim fathers. He soon discovered, however, that starting a career was not easy in a great metropolis where he had no friends. Making a living in America is no longer the simple matter it was in the days of the first settlers when anyone who could cultivate a plot of ground and handle firearms could make a home for himself and his family. Armot was obliged to take the first kind of work that offered itself—and that was manual labor.
His wages were so low and the cost of living was so high that existence was more difficult for him than it had been in France. The neighborhood in which he could find a home within his means did not have the sort of people who were socially congenial to his wife and to him. Consequently, they withdrew within themselves and remained apart from the life about them.
- ↑ The name is, of course, fictitious.
