My wanderlust was born of the craving for more liberty and a better wage for the sweat of my face. I looked towards the United States with eyes kindled by the fire of ambition and heart quickened with new-born hope. I approached its gates with great expectation. I entered in with fine hopes. I have shouldered my burden as the American man of all work. I contribute eighty-five per cent. of all the labour in the slaughtering and meat-packing industries. I do seven-tenths of the bituminous coal mining. I do seventy-eight per cent. of all the work in the woollen mills. I contribute nine-tenths of all the labour in the cotton mills. I make nine-twentieths of all the clothing. I manufacture more than half the shoes. I build four-fifths of all the furniture. I make half of the collars, cuffs, and shirts. I turn out four-fifths of all the leather. I make half the gloves. I refine nearly nineteen-twentieths of the sugar. I make half of the tobacco and cigars. And yet, I am the great American problem. When I pour out my blood on your altar of labour, and lay down my life as a sacrifice to your god of toil, men make no more comment than at the fall of a sparrow. But my brawn is woven into the warp and woof of the fabric of your national being. My children shall be your children and your land shall be my land because my sweat and my blood will cement the foundations of the America of To-Morrow. If I can be fused into the body politic, the Melting-Pot will have stood the supreme test. Afterword I _The Melting Pot_ is the third of the writer's plays to be published in book form, though the first of the three in order of composition. But unlike _The War God_ and _The Next Religion_, which are dramatisations of the spiritual duels of our time, _The Melting Pot_ sprang directly from the author's concrete experience as President of the Emigration Regulation Department of the Jewish Territorial Organisation, which, founded shortly after the great massacres of Jews in Russia, will soon have fostered the settlement of ten thousand Russian Jews in the West of the United States.