school-boys used to go off to fight the
Indians. Some, lucky, return home in a few years with fortunes and gaudy
tales; others, succumbing to the natives, are butchered at their labour
and buried beneath the cinders of hideous and God-forsaken mining towns.
All carry the thought of escape from beginning to end; every Italian
hopes to get away with his takings as soon as possible, to enjoy them on
some hillside where life and property are reasonably safe from greed. So
with the Russian, the Scandinavian, the Balkan hillman, even the Greek
and Armenian. The picture of America that they conjure up is a picture
of a titanic and merciless struggle for gold, with the stakes high and
the contestants correspondingly ferocious. They see the American as one
to whom nothing under the sun has any value save the dollar--not truth,
or beauty, or philosophical ease, or the common decencies between man
and man.

This view, of course, is full of distortion and misunderstanding,
despite the fact that even Americans, by hearing it stated so often,
have come to allow it a good deal of soundness. The American's concept
of himself, as we have seen, is sometimes anything but accurate; in this
case he errs almost as greatly as when he venerates himself as the
prince of freemen, with gyveless wrists and flashing eyes. As for the
foreigner, what he falls into is the typically Freudian blunder of
projecting his own worst weakness into another. The fact is that it is
he, and not the native American, who is the incorrigible and
unimaginative money-grubber. He comes to the United States in search of
money, and in search of money alone, and pursuing that single purpose
without deviation he makes the mistake of assuming that the American is
at the same business, and in the same fanatical manner. From all the
complex and colourful life of the country, save only the one enterprise
of money-making, he is shut off almost hermetically, and so he concludes
that that one enterprise embraces the whole show. Here the unreliable
promptings of his sub-conscious passion are helped out by observations
that are more logical. Unfamiliar with the language, excluded from all
free social intercourse with the native, and regarded as, if actually
human at all, then at least a distinctly inferior member of the species,
he is forced into the harshest and most ill-paid labour, and so he
inevitably sees the American as a pitiless task-master and ascribes the
exploitation he