But he must play fair.  It is essentially the straight game that the true American plays, and he insists that you shall play it too.  Evidence there is, of course, to the contrary in American life, experiences that seem to give ground for the belief that the man succeeds who is not scrupulous in playing his cards.  But never is this true in the long run.  Sooner or later—­sometimes, unfortunately, later than sooner—­the public discovers the trickery.  In no other country in the world is the moral conception so clear and true as in America, and no people will give a larger and more permanent reward to the man whose effort for that public has its roots in honor and truth.

“The sky is the limit” to the foreign-born who comes to America endowed with honest endeavor, ceaseless industry, and the ability to carry through.  In any honest endeavor, the way is wide open to the will to succeed.  Every path beckons, every vista invites, every talent is called forth, and every efficient effort finds its due reward.  In no land is the way so clear and so free.

How good an American has the process of Americanization made me?  That I cannot say.  Who can say that of himself?  But when I look around me at the American-born I have come to know as my close friends, I wonder whether, after all, the foreign-born does not make in some sense a better American—­whether he is not able to get a truer perspective; whether his is not the deeper desire to see America greater; whether he is not less content to let its faulty institutions be as they are; whether in seeing faults more clearly he does not make a more decided effort to have America reach those ideals or those fundamentals of his own land which he feels are in his nature, and the best of which he is anxious to graft into the character of his adopted land?

It is naturally with a feeling of deep satisfaction that I remember two Presidents of the United States considered me a sufficiently typical American to wish to send me to my native land as the accredited minister of my adopted country.  And yet when I analyze the reasons for my choice in both these instances, I derive a deeper satisfaction from the fact that my strong desire to work in America for America led me to ask to be permitted to remain here.

It is this strong impulse that my Americanization has made the driving power of my life.  And I ask no greater privilege than to be allowed to live to see my potential America become actual:  the America that I like to think of as the America of Abraham Lincoln and of Theodore Roosevelt—­not faultless, but less faulty.  It is a part in trying to shape that America, and an opportunity to work in that America when it comes, that I ask in return for what I owe to her.  A greater privilege no man could have.

  EDWARD WILLIAM BOK

  BIOGRAPHICAL DATA

  1863:  October 9:  Born at Helder, Netherlands.

  1870; September 20:  Arrived in the United States.