WHAT has my own race bequeathed to me? What do I owe to Slav, Magyar, German and Anglo-Saxon? What has the synagogue done for me, what the church with the cross, or the church with the weather-vane?

From somewhere I have a passion for the human. Shall I say this is Jewish?

I saw that passion demonstrated in my Jewish teacher, whose grave is level with the ground in the old God’s Acre; I believe that the Slavic candy-maker—the by-product of whose trade and the remnants of whose library I purchased—possessed it. I believe it shone out of the face of the Pany’s sister, who kissed my blackened cheeks and put russet apples into my trousers’ pockets; the Lutheran pastor preached and lived it in his narrow environment. I have faith to believe that the Jesuit fathers and German savants had it, hidden behind pious phrases or bold rationalistic utterances.

Perhaps my race bequeathed this love of humanity to the rest of the human race; even then it proves that for which I am contending: That all a race or family can leave to its progeny which is worth inheriting, is not in the cell or nerve or blood, but is what is cast upon the waters of life, of which “whosoever will may come and drink freely.”

The sons of the prophets develop into the sons of Belial, and a poor, ignorant villager’s child ministers in the true spirit before Jehovah’s altar.

“Think not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father!” cries the indignant John. “For I say unto you that God is able out of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.” This is the great tragedy of races, nations and families; yet it is the great comfort of the outcast, the oppressed, the burdened and the heavy laden.

What else have I that is specifically Jewish? What shines from my eyes or manifests itself in gait and gesture, I do not know. Many of my characteristics, no doubt, are betrayed in these pages which are a frank revelation of my younger self.

I have no passion for barter or money; I am invariably worsted in a bargain and always accept unquestioningly the wage offered me. But even were I a Shylock, a veritable Shakespearean Jew, and worse, if that is possible, I could point to men of other races not unlike him.

I know very intimately men and women of many races who profess the Christian faith, yet love barter more than prayer and mammon more than God; who preach or teach or write, “for revenue only,” and never for the glory of God; and who tenaciously hold to the letter of their contract, even to the cutting out of the very heart of their unfortunate victims.

Perhaps one of my Jewish traits is that I cannot hide my faults. What few virtues I may possess, I trust I do not flaunt in the market-places.

I have tried to be humble in this New World environment, so garish and loud; which trumpets from the housetop the things that have been “spoken in the closet”; which “makes broad its phylacteries” and writes all about their length and breadth and cost in the society columns of our daily press.

The Christian virtue of humility is hard to practice in a land controlled by the publicist; a land in which the advertising value of a thing is regarded more highly than the thing itself.

If there are shreds of good in me, it is because by the grace of God (using that old phrase without cant) I have always met good people among the different races with whom my lot has been cast. I do not recall a single man, even those I have met in jails, penitentiaries, dives and gambling hells, who has retarded any progress towards the good that I cared to make. I could fill twice the number of pages I have written, recording the names and deeds of those who have inspired me to lead the better life.

Nor have I ever met a woman (and I have met women close to the bottomless pit) who ever used the art of her sex in an effort to drag me down; but I know very many women whose whole being radiates purity and in whose presence one cannot help being a man. I have never met a woman before whom I could not lift my hat in deference; and this feeling of reverence for womanhood I owe in large degree to my mother and my wife.

Within me are all possibilities of good and evil, and everything that lies between; yet these same tendencies I have found in other men of other races. Never all the good nor all the evil in any one man or any one race.

Every individual I know is an intricate and unfinished piece of curiously constructed mechanism in body and spirit; linked to the past, yet free to the shaping forces of each fleeting moment; never completed, never perfected, never, I hope, so totally ruined but that love can redeem it, and “set it again upon a rock and establish its going.”

I am a debtor to all the races that in varying degrees influenced my life during its most impressionable period.

From the Slav, I have a love for physical labour and a sense of its dignity.

The Magyar has given me a feeling for “the mere pleasure of living”; although I have never quite been able to abandon myself to it.

In the sphere of my intellect, I am Germanic. My mother tongue is German, as are my passion for intellectual freedom and my impatience with its restraint; while the inward look, which so easily leads to despair, bears the German stamp.

I came to America early enough in life to catch the passion for liberty and the love of democracy; but too late to be anything but an impractical idealist to whom “life is more than meat,” and human history more than a succession of economic facts.

I have not written an autobiography, or desired to write one; that would have been presumptuous; nor have I written a bit of purposeless fiction with which to burden the book-market; that folly I would not commit. I have honestly recorded certain influences which shaped the life of a child until youth, and I leave all deductions to my patient readers. Yet I should like to point out in which direction the most valuable lessons of my experience lie. I believe they are:

First, that racial characteristics are largely determined by environment.

Second, that race prejudice is an artificial product of the mind, induced by various influences.

Third, that in the highest and lowest spheres of thought and activity, all races are alike.

Fourth, that every human being, no matter what his colour, race, faith or class, has a right to earn the respect of his neighbour and his community, by virtue of what he himself is.

Fifth, that the brotherhood of man will become an established fact as soon as each man determines to live like a brother in his relation to his fellows.

Sixth, that Christianity has in its spirit the solution of class and race problems; but that in its practice it is lamentably far from solving them.

Seventh, that he who wishes to enter into fellowship with the nation or race with which he lives must free himself from all isolating practices and beliefs.

Eighth, that entrance into such a large human relationship has to be “bought with a price” and that it is a price worth paying; for there is no loftier human experience than that of becoming one with all mankind.

To those who do not consider a book worth reading, unless it “ends well,” let me say this: If a good fairy were to come from the fairy-land of my childhood (of course I had a fairy-land) and were to ask me, as she always asked the children in the stories I used to read, that I make three wishes, and she would grant them all, I could make but one wish. Not for wealth, although I could use it; not for strength, although I need it; not for wisdom, although I lack it. My one wish, and this the fairies cannot grant me, would be, that I may have grace given me to be a man to the end, and to the end, love my brother man with all the passion of my soul.