Wherever you meet him on the village street, an awed, admiring group of friends is with him. He spreads the glowing tale of the New World and you may be sure the reality loses nothing in the telling. Every youthful heart is fired to a like adventure, to seek the golden, western world. As one returned immigrant said:—“It’s a land where all wear shoes, where trains shoot through the air, and shoot through the ground; even the poor ride, no one needs an umbrella, the cars pass everywhere.” It is little wonder they want to come. In America labor is dear and materials are cheap; in Italy labor is cheap and materials are expensive. There it pays a landlord to hire a man to watch his cows, rather than to build a fence, wood is so costly. In America no one would think of hiring a man for such a purpose, labor is so high. The price paid in health and suffering for the money they take back is often far more than its worth. Many a poor fellow pale and haggard with that dread disease, tuberculosis, goes home hopeful that his genial skies will cure him of the death-blow the wet and cold and exposure of America have given him. But the defeated come home in the twilight, unattended and silent, while the successful swagger in at noonday with the blare of trumpet and beat of drums. As one Italian said to me no later than yesterday, “My uncle never told me the hardships I would have to face. I was far better off in Italy than here, but I am ashamed to go back.” And yet, all who come realize that the possibilities of success are far greater here than at home. As another said, “In Italy I wanted to do but could not. In America I want to and can. I am sorry, but ‘Good-bye, Italy.’” The same opportunity for riches attracts the Chinese. He lives in a land that, labor as he will, is barely able to feed its almost half a billion human mouths. His wages at home are so meagre he can never hope for independence; two cents per day is what the farm laborer in Shantung earns. Since as a laborer he cannot legally enter the United States, he comes in under cover of darkness over the Mexican or Canadian borders, or any other way he can devise. The same hope of wealth attracts the Chinese. _Steamship Advertising._ Many come because the steamship companies are such good advertisers. These companies paint beautiful pictures of the New World, and the peasant sees great farms, busy factories, and wealthy cities. The companies never show any views of dark, unhealthful tenements. Through this steamship advertising many unfit persons sail for America, persons whom the agents might have known would be rejected, while many of the lowest class are induced to leave their country because their country is glad to get rid of them. It is said that in one small district in Austria two hundred and seventy criminals were released from prison one year and one hundred and eighty of them were in America within the next twelve months.