is made a victim of to a fabulous exaggeration of his
own avarice.

Moreover, the greater success and higher position of the native seem to
bear out this notion. In a struggle that is free for all and to the
death, the native grabs all the shiniest stakes. _Ergo_, he must love
money even more than the immigrant. This logic we do not defend, but
there is--and out of it grows the prevailing foreign view of America and
the Americans, for the foreigner who stays at home does not derive his
ideas from the glittering, lascivious phrases of Dr. Wilson or from the
passionate idealism of such superior Americans as Otto H. Kahn, Adolph
S. Ochs, S. Stanwood Menken, Jacob H. Schiff, Marcus Loew, Henry
Morgenthau, Abram Elkus, Samuel Goldfish, Louis D. Brandeis, Julius
Rosenwald, Paul Warburg, Judge Otto Rosalsky, Adolph Zukor, the Hon.
Julius Kahn, Simon Guggenheim, Stephen S. Wise and Barney Baruch, but
from the hair-raising tales of returned "Americans," _i.e._, fellow
peasants who, having braved the dragons, have come back to the
fatherland to enjoy their booty and exhibit their wounds.

The native, as we say, has been so far influenced by this error that he
cherishes it himself, or, more accurately, entertains it with shame.
Most of his windy idealism is no more than a reaction against it--an
evidence of an effort to confute it and live it down. He is never more
sweetly flattered than when some politician eager for votes or some
evangelist itching for a good plate tells him that he is actually a
soaring altruist, and the only real one in the world. This is the surest
way to fetch him; he never fails to swell out his chest when he hears
that buncombe. In point of fact, of course, he is no more an altruist
than any other healthy mammal. His ideals, one and all, are grounded
upon self-interest, or upon the fear that is at the bottom of it; his
benevolence always has a string tied to it; he could no more formulate a
course of action to his certain disadvantage than an Englishman could,
or a Frenchman, or an Italian, or a German. But to say that the
advantage he pursues is always, or even usually, a monetary one--to
argue that he is avaricious, or even, in these later years, a sharp
trader--is to spit directly into the eye of the truth. There is
probably, indeed, no country in the world in which mere money is held
in less esteem than in these United States. Even more than the Russian
Bolshevik the American democrat regards wealth w