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Show Our Own Generous Country. 'fiBll We do not believe that in, generosity and dis- f Hi interested effort to help, the unfortunate, any1 H! country on earth compares With our own. We In! may cite what has been donen the Philippines W$f and in Cuba, for what island, rich beyond com- mt:-pare, mt:-pare, was over before given up as we gave up , ij Cuba? Tho Dutch for many years have had pob- i m0 session of the rich islands in tho South Saag, but . ! jffil has any one ever hoard a rumoi that they are ! B over to bo surrendered back to their tswn-people, . ' Wm or ovon to Improve those people? But the whole world understands now that 111 the United States, at tremendous expense, is try- - HH ing to lit the Philippines for self-gdvernmeht, Bl But there is another work going on which few Hh even of our own pooplo have any conception of. ' Iffi We read that a million and a quarter of the poor f 1 of Europe are pouring into our country anually ? j Well, of late years most of these have come from j southern Europe. Born poor, with a poverty al- j most unknown in our country, entirely unfamiliar with our language, they are tossed upon our shores almost like tiro wreckage which the sea In 1 Its ferocity hurls upon the sands. Atoong them, too, are tens of thousands of men borne down by 1 the hardships of generation of poverty. Many : of them are. criminals and tens of thousands havo ; ! no conception of what a land of liberty moans, and are, moreover, poisoned by hereditary suspicions suspic-ions and doubtful or good faith in others. Tho j ; larger majority of those morgo with the slums ot i the great sea-coast cities. And among themj mfo thousands and tons of thousands of children. s What future is there for them? Wall, they arj j not forgotten. They are at Once registered as f, part of the school population and the public schools are opened free to them. The first struggle strug-gle is to get them to understand- enough of our I . language to begin their iBtudies. It is a tremen- dous work, but it is pursued with a patience and ' I ' -' persistency that never falters, and one of the ' j first real object lessons that these poor petqnla havo of tho beneficence of this Republic, is when ; ' , those children learn a little to read and, carrying i home tho books which are given to them, road ; 1 from them m the strange now language of this ! country and then give their own crude translation ; ;. in their native tongue of what they have r id. A See those children in a couple of years, and tuey ' w are pretty good Americans, and in the hearts of '. j their parents there gradually steals the thought H? that, after all, the old dream which they had of : 'i the unequaled blessing of this land was true. , f' We read two months ago how something more than 200,000 of these immigrants had returned I home. That showed that they had prospered here or they would hot have been able to return. But it was a natural thing to do. In the scuffle of living in th'.s land, they were dreaming of native lund, until it took on exaggerated beauties. A visit home and in a few weeks they will be disillusionized. disil-lusionized. All of us In tiro west understand that. 1 he eastern man who moves west in ninety cases out of a hundred, unless the question of health the leading one, comes to better his fortunes. There is a mortgage to satisfy, 01 a little business to bo bought, or a better home to be llxed for a pretty girl. He hao said to himself: "I will endure en-dure that west land three or four years until 1 make a little stake." Ho omes. Nothing that he sees compares in thought with the old home. Homay not be offensive, but down deep he pities the people among whom he is cast. Ho makes his little stake and goes back to his old home. After the flrBt few joyful days are passed, he cannot explain ex-plain it, but somehow things do not seem to be as they were when he was a boy. His old friends seem narrow and provincial. They are hedged around with prejudices. Their lives are in grooves which- seem to bind him around like a hoop. The chances are that he does not buy the little business, busi-ness, that, instead of lifting the mortgage, he sells the place for what he can got above the mortgage, marries his girl and returns west with altogether new idea's. So those returned emigrants will come back, and the reasons they will give will be that the great Republic is peopled by the most generous race on earth; that all the opportunities hero are open to every one of them, and that while they love the land of their forefathers, it is due to their children that they go where generous fields are open to them, where Hope is born and ' whore the poor can cast off hereditary despair. |