When he was sixteen, working on a farm, a man
of his tribe came back from America "and took ground as large as four
city blocks and made a paradise of it." He had gone away a poor boy, now
he returned with unlimited wealth, "which he had obtained in the country
of the American wizards. He had become a merchant in a city called Mott
Street, so it was said. The wealth of this man filled my mind with the
idea that I, too, would go to the country of the wizards and gain some
of their wealth." Landing in San Francisco, before the exclusion act, he
started in American life as a house servant, but finally became a Mott
Street merchant, as he had intended from the first.
[Sidenote: Fortune and Freedom]
Thus we have gone the rounds of immigrants of various races. The two
ideas--fortune and freedom--lie at the basis of immigration, although
the money comes first in nearly all cases. These testimonies could be
multiplied indefinitely. Ask the first immigrant you can talk with what
brought him, and find out for yourself. Mr. Brandenburg says a Greek who
was being deported told him that all Greece was stirred up over the
matter of emigration, and that in five years the number of Greeks coming
to the United States would have increased a thousand per cent.
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