The
two gradually brought over the whole family, and Joseph owns a big
flour store and Phil is a broker, while his son is in politics and the
city council, and his daughter Ann (she calls herself Antoinette now) is
engaged to a lawyer in New York. That is America's attractiveness and
opportunity and transformation in a nutshell.
[Sidenote: Foreign Mission School, Cause of Immigration]
A Syrian, born on the Lebanon range, went to an American mission school
at fifteen, learned much that his former teacher the friar had warned
him against, had his horizon broadened, gave up his idea of becoming a
Maronite monk when he learned that there were other great countries
beside Syria, and had all his old ideas overthrown by an encyclopedia
which said the United States was a larger and richer country than Syria
or even Turkey. The friar was angry and said the book told lies, and so
did the patriarch, who was scandalized to think such a book should come
to Mount Lebanon; but the American teacher said the encyclopedia was
written by men who knew, and the Syrian boy finally decided to go to the
United States, where "we had heard that poor people were not oppressed."
His mother and uncle came, too, and as the boy was a good penman he
secured work without difficulty in an Oriental goods store.
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