There is an old story, told in many countries through the Middle Ages, of a knight who got into trouble, and was offered pardon if within a year he brought the correct answer to the question, “What do women most desire?” At the last moment he saved himself by answering, “Their own way,” or words to that effect. This is a man’s story, and scores the man’s point in the perennial strife of wits between the sexes; but the answer needs but little modification to hold good of men and women alike. When one takes up a book like this, dealing with the lives of men who deliberately and voluntarily left the homes of their fathers to become citizens of a strange land, one naturally asks what they wanted, and equally naturally goes on to ask what men in general want most in life. Many answers have been given to the question, and none can be final, because men and circumstances differ so widely. But I should like to propose one that seems to me of more general application than most. Men want most to count among their fellows for what they are worth. This desire is more persistent than love, more universal than the thirst for wealth or power, more fundamental than the demand for pleasure. It shows itself in early childhood, it steers the ambitions of manhood, its fulfillment is the crown of old age. The degree of the chance to achieve it is the measure of the desirability of a country as a place to live in; and it is fair to say that the men whose lives are told in this book, and we others who have come to America of our own accord, have done so because we believed that these United States, above all countries of the world, give men this chance to make the most of themselves. “To count among their fellows for what they are worth”—see what this implies. First, and most superficially, it means recognition of ability and character by society. Carried to the highest point, it would mean the absence of handicaps, of privilege, of “pull”—the equality of opportunity for achieving distinction which has always been the theory of this democracy. Of course, neither here nor elsewhere is this perfect condition reached; but the biographies in this book tend to show that there has long been a large degree of it here, and our social progress has this condition frankly accepted as a goal. Secondly, it implies a basis for self-respect. Deeper than the grudge that a man has against the society which refuses him due credit for his achievement is the grudge that a man feels when he has to admit to himself that his achievement is not really creditable. The worst curse of slavery was not its external restrictions, but its effect in crushing the slave’s sense of the potential nobility of his own soul. The feeling that a man has a fair chance to be taken at his full value is an exhilarating feeling, liberating his powers, freeing him from the gnawing pains of mortified vanity, impelling him to hold his head up and look his neighbor in the eye.