to be made friends with. The result was that, as did all boys, I came to
regard the policeman on our beat as a distinct enemy. His presence meant
that we should "stiffen up"; his disappearance was the signal for us to
"let loose."

So long as one was not caught, it did not matter. I heard mothers tell
their little children that if they did not behave themselves, the
policeman would put them into a bag and carry them off, or cut their
ears off. Of course, the policeman became to them an object of terror;
the law he represented, a cruel thing that stood for punishment. Not a
note of respect did I ever hear for the law in my boyhood days. A law
was something to be broken, to be evaded, to call down upon others as a
source of punishment, but never to be regarded in the light of a
safeguard.

And as I grew into manhood, the newspapers rang on every side with
disrespect for those in authority. Under the special dispensation of the
liberty of the press, which was construed into the license of the press,
no man was too high to escape editorial vituperation if his politics did
not happen to suit the management, or if his action ran counter to what
the proprietors believed it should be. It was not criticism of his acts,
it was personal attack upon the official; whether supervisor, mayor,
governor, or president, it mattered not.

It is a very unfortunate impression that this American lack of respect
for those in authority makes upon the foreign-born mind. It is difficult
for the foreigner to square up the arrest and deportation of a man who,
through an incendiary address, seeks to overthrow governmental
authority, with the ignoring of an expression of exactly the same
sentiments by the editor of his next morning's newspaper. In other
words, the man who writes is immune, but the man who reads, imbibes, and
translates the editor's words into action is immediately marked as a
culprit, and America will not harbor him. But why harbor the original
cause? Is the man who speaks with type less dangerous than he who speaks
with his mouth or with a bomb?

At the most vital part of my life, when I was to become an American
citizen and exercise the right of suffrage, America fell entirely short.
It reached out not even the suggestion of a hand.

When the Presidential Conventions had been held in the year I reached my
legal majority, and I knew I could vote, I endeavored to find out
whether, being foreign-born, I was entitled to the suffr