It is just the same with lawyers and doctors; the city is simply encumbered with them; everywhere the walls and doors are covered with their signs.
Who are the ones that succeed then? The merchants employ their own children or the children of their near relatives and friends, and of the public employees ninety-nine per cent. are Americans, and they make great efforts to keep foreigners out.of these positions. European merchants succeed in America, when they have means at their disposal. They can readily obtain credit then, and establish business houses. Poor and honest young men succeed in America if they have some education, but they have to begin by sweeping the floor and running on errands and carrying customers' bundles. Little by little they become clerks, sometimes even partners, though these cases are infrequent. Workingmen of all kinds, especially machinists, stonecutters, brickmakers, masons, street and railroad laborers, carpenters, blacksmiths, all get good wages in America, and with industry and perseverance a great many of them come to be pretty well off.
People in Europe have illusions concerning America. The greater part of the young men, who can justly claim to be something, and who know nothing of the miseries of life from experience in their families, who have received a good education, do not succeed in the least. Accordingly we see very many of them, if they have the means, go back tc the old country, and that is the best thing they can do, and T tell them so every chance I get.
I presume I will have told you in Belgium that I wondered that the Belgian merchants and business houses were so slow in extending their commerce and establishing branch houses abroad, especially in the United States. The English, Germans, French are doing so and in general they succeed. Then later they can employ in such houses as this their sons or the sons of their friends, and success is reason ably certain for the latter. St. Louis has no Belgian houses.