to run over.  The butcher’s waste filled my mother’s soul with dismay.  If I bought a scuttle of coal at the corner grocery, the coal that missed the scuttle, instead of being shovelled up and put back into the bin, was swept into the street.  My young eyes quickly saw this; in the evening I gathered up the coal thus swept away, and during the course of a week I collected a scuttleful.  The first time my mother saw the garbage pail of a family almost as poor as our own, with the wife and husband constantly complaining that they could not get along, she could scarcely believe her eyes.  A half pan of hominy of the preceding day’s breakfast lay in the pail next to a third of a loaf of bread.  In later years, when I saw, daily, a scow loaded with the garbage of Brooklyn householders being towed through New York harbor out to sea, it was an easy calculation that what was thrown away in a week’s time from Brooklyn homes would feed the poor of the Netherlands.

At school, I quickly learned that to “save money” was to be “stingy”; as a young man, I soon found that the American disliked the word “economy,” and on every hand as plenty grew spending grew.  There was literally nothing in American life to teach me thrift or economy; everything to teach me to spend and to waste.

I saw men who had earned good salaries in their prime, reach the years of incapacity as dependents.  I saw families on every hand either living quite up to their means or beyond them; rarely within them.  The more a man earned, the more he—­or his wife—­spent.  I saw fathers and mothers and their children dressed beyond their incomes.  The proportion of families who ran into debt was far greater than those who saved.  When a panic came, the families “pulled in”; when the panic was over, they “let out.”  But the end of one year found them precisely where they were at the close of the previous year, unless they were deeper in debt.

It was in this atmosphere of prodigal expenditure and culpable waste that I was to practise thrift:  a fundamental in life!  And it is into this atmosphere that the foreign-born comes now, with every inducement to spend and no encouragement to save.  For as it was in the days of my boyhood, so it is to-day—­only worse.  One need only go over the experiences of the past two years, to compare the receipts of merchants who cater to the working-classes and the statements of savings-banks throughout the country, to read the story of how the foreign-born are learning the habit of criminal wastefulness as taught them by the American.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this, one of the essentials in life and in all success, America fell short with me, as it is continuing to fall short with every foreign-born who comes to its shores?

As a Dutch boy, one of the cardinal truths taught me was that whatever was worth doing was worth doing well:  that next to honesty come thoroughness as a factor in success.  It was not enough that anything should be done:  it was not done at all if it was not done well.  I came to America to be taught exactly the opposite.  The two infernal Americanisms “That’s good enough” and “That will do” were early taught me, together with the maxim of quantity rather than quality.