There is no great nation of ancient or modern times but can tell its own story of migration. There once crossed into England a company of many thousands of splendid craftsmen bringing from France the secrets of trades that have helped make England great. What drove these Protestant families from their beloved land? There rang in their ears the solemn tolling of a great palace bell. That bell, sounding over the city of Paris, was the signal for the death of over forty thousand of the noblest Protestants of France. The St. Bartholomew massacre caused the migration. In recent years a great tide of Irish began to move across the Atlantic. In ten years this mighty tide totaled over one million and a quarter human beings. The reason they came was the failure of the potato crop. The potato was their great food staple, as bread is ours. Great armies of Germans began to come after 1848. It would be interesting for you to find the reason of their coming. How hard it must be for the Southern Italian to leave his beautiful home and exchange his blue skies and hills and mountains for a dark, ill-smelling tenement, or for toil far underground in a mine. Why does he migrate and in numbers so great as to form every year a city the size of Portland, Oregon? We may find the answer farther along in our studies. “If I were a Russian,” some one says, “I would want to leave home. The winter is so long, there is so much ice and snow, I would be glad to get to a warmer country.” But the Russian loves his winter. He drives his _sankey_ with its hoop of tinkling bells arched high over his horse’s back faster than any other horseman in Europe. In his home is a great brick oven and on top of this the family sleeps, no matter how the storm blows, as warm as a Negro boy in a Southern cotton field. The Russian does not leave his home because of the winter. WHY THEY BECOME OUR NEIGHBORS _Opportunity._ Some one says another name for America is “opportunity.” Amid weeping and “_Il Signore vi Benedica_,” “God Bless You,” Giuseppe has gone away. He has been earning as _contadino_ (farmer) 20 cents per day and is like a serf tied to the land. He earns in America $1.50 a day, or as much in one day as he earned before in seven. Giuseppe is frugal. He rises in his position to better pay, spends little money, and his bank account goes up until he has a sum that would have seemed a fortune in the little Sicilian village. Then, work slacking, he returns home. His watch and ponderous gold chain, his stylish American clothes, an exhibition of lofty independence, all make him a marked man.