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.