n, or Italian, or
Jewish immigrant works six days and saves the wages of three because the
future is vivid to his imagination. With similar necessities one is
ambitious, the other is content.

The scope and possibility of evoking ambition depend upon the
institution of private property. Property in human beings suppresses it,
unless occasionally a slave is permitted to purchase his freedom. The
wage system evokes ambition if the way is open for promotion or for
escape by becoming an owner. Tenancy is on a still higher level, but
most of all, for the masses of men, the ownership of his own small
property is the keenest spur to ambition, for it rewards the worker with
all of his product. This motive is the surest test of an individual's or
a race's future. Compare the negro and the Italian cotton grower as
tenants in the new vocation opening up to the latter. "It is always
difficult," says the observant planter, Mr. Stone,[89] "to get a negro
to plant and properly cultivate the outer edges of his field--the
extreme ends of his rows, his ditch banks, etc. The Italian is so
jealous of the use of every foot for which he pays rent that he will
cultivate with a hoe places too small to be worked with a plough, and
derive a revenue from spots to which a negro would not give a moment's
thought. I have seen them cultivate right down to the water's edge the
banks of bayous that had never been touched by the plough. I have seen
them walk through their fields and search out every skipped place in
every row and carefully put in seed to secure a perfect stand. I have
seen them make more cotton per acre than the negro on the adjoining cut,
gather it from two to four weeks earlier, and then put in the extra time
earning money by picking in the negro's field."

But ambition has its penalty. It is equivalent to an increase in the
supply of labor. As an ambitious proprietor the increase goes into his
permanent property, but the ambitious wage-earner accepts a lower rate
of pay. His fellows see the reduction and go still lower. The see-saw
continues until wages reach the level of necessities, and there is
nothing left for ambition. The Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty
paid by that ambitious race. In the Illinois coal mines the wages were
reduced one-third during twelve years of Italian and Slav immigration.
The ambitious races are the industrial races. But their ambition and
their industry bring the momentous problem of destructive c