CHAPTER XXII.
WHAT I OWE TO AMERICA Whatever shortcomings I may have found during my fifty-year period of Americanization; however America may have failed to help my transition from a foreigner into an American, I owe to her the most priceless gift that any nation can offer, and that is opportunity.
As the world stands to-day, no nation offers opportunity in the degree that America does to the foreign-born.

Russia may, in the future, as I like to believe she will, prove a second United States of America in this respect.

She has the same limitless area; her people the same potentialities.

But, as things are to-day, the United States offers, as does no other nation, a limitless opportunity: here a man can go as far as his abilities will carry him.

It may be that the foreign-born, as in my own case, must hold on to some of the ideals and ideas of the land of his birth; it may be that he must develop and mould his character by overcoming the habits resulting from national shortcomings.