PART I

With the Outgoing Tide

I

"THEY THAT GO OUT IN SHIPS"

"Do really nice ladies smoke cigarettes, papa?" my young daughter asked

of me perplexedly, awaiting an answer.

"No, I don't _think_ they do," I replied hesitatingly, the passing of

severe judgments not being much to my liking.

"Do really nice ladies drink whiskey?" the young interrogator continued.

This time I answered with more assurance.

"No. Really nice ladies do _not_ drink whiskey."

"But, papa dear, so many ladies in our cabin either drink or smoke, and

I think they are very nice."

My little woman is perhaps a better judge of human nature than her

Puritanized papa; for going into the smoking-room of the Italian steamer

on which we had embarked, I saw, indeed, a number of women smoking and

drinking and pretending to enjoy both, with that pharisaic air of

abandon which convinced me that they were "really nice" ladies. They

were "sailing away for a year and a day," and were celebrating their

liberation from the conventionalities of their environment by "being

quite European," as one of them expressed it.

Ladies who smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails in the smoking-room of

an ocean steamer cannot expect that the gentlemen, whose domain they

have invaded, will wait for an introduction before beginning a

conversation, and soon I was deep in the discussion of the aforesaid

cigarettes and cocktails, as pertaining to ladies who are "really nice."

One of these ladies was from "ye ancient and godly town" of Hartford,

Conn., and her revered ancestors sleep in the Center Church cemetery,

all unconscious of the fact that "The better set, to which I belong,"

quoting the descendant of the revered ancestors, "smokes and drinks and

breaks the Sabbath." "And swears?" I asked.

"No; but we do say: Dum it," she replied, inhaling the smoke as if she

were a veteran, but betraying her novitiate by the severe attack of

coughing which followed.

"Well, I am not up to it, quite," she remarked. "You see I didn't begin

till my senior year in college, and gave it up during the earlier years

of my married life."

Then I, a college professor, who has lived these many deluded years in

the belief that not even his senior boys smoked, except perhaps when no

one was looking--gasped and became speechless. Seeing me so easily

shocked, she tried to shock me more by telling tales of social

depravity, of divorces, remarriages and more divorces, of which she had

one; until my speechlessness nearly ended in vocal paralysis.

I did not find my voice again until a gentleman from Boston who "never

drank in Boston," but who, it seemed, departed from that custom to an

alarming degree on shipboard, helped me to recover my lost organ, by

launching forth into a tirade against the immigrant, that ready

scapegoat for all our national sins.

Upon the immigrant the Boston man laid the blame for the degeneration of

America and the Americans.

"What can you expect of our country with this scum of the earth coming

in by the million? Black Hands, Socialists, and Anarchists? What can you

expect?

"The Sabbath is broken down by them as if it had never been a day of

rest. They drink like fish, they live on nothing----" and he went on

with his contradictory statements until the well-known end, in which he

saw our country ruined, our flag in the dust, liberty dethroned and the

Constitution of the United States trampled under the feet of these

infuriated Black Hands, Socialists and Anarchists.

Through the open door from the steerage below came the murmur of voices

from a thousand or more passengers, crowded in their narrow space, too

narrow for even scant comforts; yet in the murmur were long, cheerful

notes.

A mixture of sounds it was. Weird snatches of songs from the Greeks, the

mandatory call of the Italian lotto players who seem never to tire of

their half innocent gambling, and the deep, guttural notes of various

Slavic groups, telling the story of the hard fight for money in the

strange country.

Above these sounds came the wailing notes of a lonely violin, played by

an Hungarian gypsy, who was artist, vagabond, business man, beggar and

thief. His playing was intended to lure pennies out of the pockets of

the poor; failing in that, he meant to help himself. It would not have

been the steerage if the voices of children had not been heard in all

their crescendos and diminuendos; nor, indeed, would it have been the

steerage if bitter cries had not come from those who could not restrain

their grief, although long ago they had ceased to be children. This ship

carried not a few such, who had left our land beaten by many stripes;

poor and sick and ready to die.

A Boston man who has once broken through his icy crust, especially if

that crust be melted by hot drink, can speak long and unctuously, and

my wrath had time to gather, and grow thick as a cloud around my brain.

Even before he had quite finished speaking, I blurted out in very

unacademic language:

"I'll bet you five dollars, that among the thousand steerage passengers

on this ship, you will not find one woman who smokes cigarettes, drinks

cocktails, has had a divorce or contemplates having one."

It was a reckless challenge to make, but my wrath was kindled.

Confusion was added to my anger, however, when the man from Boston said,

with a reproachful glance: "I am no sport and I don't bet. I am a

church-member." Then he called for another cocktail, and I sought the

lower deck, over which hung the afterglow of a sunset, rare on the

Northern Atlantic, even in June.

The noises on the steerage deck had almost ceased. Most of the children

were in their bunks, the lotto players found the light too dim to read

the numbers on their cards, the gypsy fiddler continued to wail out

lamentations on his instrument; while the Greeks squatted

unpicturesquely on the very edge of the forecastle, watching the waves.

No doubt the gentle, bluish green held some distant promise of the glory

of their Mediterranean.

As I descended the steps I looked into a sea of faces, friendly faces,

all. To my "Buon Giorno," there was a chorus of "How do you do?" from

Slavs, Latins and Greeks alike, and in but a few moments there was a

rather vital relation established between the man from the cabin and the

men in the steerage.

That is to me a perpetual wonder; this opening of their lives to the

inquisitive eyes of the stranger. Why should they so readily disclose to

me all their inmost thoughts, tell me of what they left behind, what

they carry home and what awaits them? There is no magic in this, even as

there is no effort. All I am sure of is that I want to know--not for the

mere knowing, but because somehow the disclosure of a life is to me

something so sacred, as if knowing men, I learned to know more of God.

Of all the pleasures of that journey; those starry,

never-to-be-forgotten nights, the phosphorescent path across the sea;

the moonlit way from the deeps to the eternal heights, the first dim

outlines of the mighty coasts of Portugal and Spain; Capri and Sorrento

in the setting of the Bay of Naples--above them all, is the glory of the

first opening of strange, human hearts to me, when "How do you do," from

that gentle chorus of voices answered my "Buon Giorno."

"What's your name?" I turned to a friendly Calabrian whose countrymen

had encircled me and one after another we had shaken hands.

"My name Tony."

"Have you been a long time in America?"

"Three year," he answered in fairly good English, while a friendly smile

covered his face.

"Where have you been?"

"Tshicago, Kansas, Eeleenoy, Oheeo."

In pretty nearly every place where rails had to be strung in that vast,

encircling necklace of steel; where powder blasts opened the hidden

fissures of the rocks; wherever his sinuous arm could exchange its

patient stroke for American dollars.

"Do you like America?"

"Yes!" came a chorus of voices. "Yes!" And the faces beamed.

"Why are you going back?" And I looked into the face of a man whom no

one would have taken for an Italian, but who, too, was from Calabria.

"Mia padre and madre is in Calabria. They are old. I am going home to

work in the field."

"How long have you been in America?"

"Twelve years." That accounts for the changed look.

"Where do you live?"

"In Connecticut. Among the Yankees."

"Do you like the Yankees?"

"Yes," and his smile grew broader. "Yes, good men; but they drink too

much whiskey--make head go round like wheel. Then Yankee get crazy and

swear." And he shook his head, this critic of ours, who evidently did

not believe that "really nice" ladies or even "really nice" gentlemen

should drink whiskey, overmuch.

"Why do you go back?" And this time it was a diminutive Neapolitan whom

I addressed. His face wore a beatific smile.

"Him sweetheart in Neapoli." Some one ventured the information, and

confusedly he acknowledged his guilt, while everybody laughed. He was

going home to marry Pepitta and when times grew better they would come

back to Pittsburg.

"Don't you get homesick for Neapoli in Pittsburg?"

"Nop," he replied. "Me citizen, American citizen," he repeated with

proud emphasis.

"What is your name?" I asked as I shook hands with my fellow citizen who

had foresworn his allegiance to the King of Italy and plighted it to

Uncle Sam.

Proudly he pulled out his papers. I looked at them and they almost

dropped from my fingers; for they were made out to "John Sullivan." When

he saw my astonishment he said: "I change name. Want to be an American.

My name used to be Giovanni Salvini."

At the edge of the ever-increasing circle I saw my friends, the Slavs,

and I reached out my hand to them. It was grasped a dozen times or more,

by Poles, Slovenes and "Griners," as they are called, because they come

from the Austrian province of Krain. They were less cheerful than the

Italians. They were returning home because of the hard times, many of

them with empty pockets, some of them with modest savings.

There were Croatians, a few Dalmatians and many Bulgarians and Serbs,

who for some reason are the least successful among our Slavic toilers.

They were all in rags, looked pinched and half starved and told their

hard luck story with many embellishments.

A great many stalwart young fellows were going back to join the army;

for the emperor had declared amnesty to all who had left their country

before serving their term in arms. One could well afford to be patriotic

when the king forgave and when times were hard in America.

Some of the Southern Slavs had marched up in the scale of social life;

had become machinists, petty foremen and taskmasters over their own

kinsmen. They knew English fairly well and seemed to have acquired some

better things than mere bank accounts.

An old gentleman from Lorain, Ohio, was going home to die, and to die in

poverty, because the hard times struck at the roots of his business and

he was too old to labour in the mills. Another went back to claim a

fortune, and asked me for the loan of a dollar, which he would be sure

to send back as soon as his fingers touched the waiting wealth.

The circle received constant additions, for our laughter and banter

reached down to the dreary bunks, and many of their occupants came up to

listen. Women brought their half-asleep children and I drew on my stock

of sweets. Even the more reticent women talked to "the man," and told

him things glad and sad. A Polish woman was the spokesman of her group.

"We are going back to the Stary Kray (the Old Country). America ne

dobre" (not good).

"Why is it not good?"

"The air ne dobre, the food ne dobre, the houses ne dobre."

Nothing was good.

"We came to America with red cheeks, like the cheeks of summer apples,

and now look at us. We are going back looking like cucumbers in the

autumn."

Yes, their cheeks were pale and pinched and their skin wrinkled. How

could it be otherwise? They had lived for years by the coke ovens of

Pennsylvania, breathing sulphur with every breath; their eyes had rarely

seen the full daylight and their cheeks had not often felt the warm

sunlight. America "ne dobre."

And yet something must have seemed good to them; for they wore American

clothes. Long, trailing skirts, shirt-waists with abbreviated sleeves

and belts with showy buckles. All of them had children, many children of

varying sizes, and among the children not one said: "America ne dobre."

The boys had penetrated into the mysteries of baseball vernacular, and

one of them was the short-stop on his team.

When I inquired of him just what a short-stop is, he looked at me

pityingly and said: "Say, are you a greenhorn?"

I am sure if I had told him that I was a college professor, he would

have asked for my credentials.

Some of the girls, besides having gone to our public schools, belonged

to clubs, wore pins and buttons and chewed gum most viciously. All were

loath to go to the "Stary Kray."

I surely was in my element, the human element; with babies to cuddle, to

guess their ages and their weight; to watch the boisterous, half

Americanized, mysterious youth and to ask questions and answer them

among these strong, friendly men.

There was one woman who neither smiled at me nor answered my greeting;

who held her half-clothed, puny baby close to her breast, giving him his

evening meal. Other little ones, seemingly all of one age, huddled close

to the mother, who looked like a great, frightened bird hovering over

her young.

"Her man been killed in the mine," the women said, and I found no more

questions to ask her. I could only sympathize with her in her grief; for

I knew it. I knew it because I had seen her or her kind, by the hundreds

at a time, prone on the ground beside the yawning pit, claiming some

unrecognizable form as that of husband or son; often of husband and son.

I have heard the bitter wails and lamentations of a whole hillside. Out

of each hut they came, the heart-broken cries of the living over the

dead; and in that grief, the Slovak, the Polish or the Italian women

were just like the American woman, who more silently, perhaps, grieved

over her husband, the foreman of the mine. In the radiant morning he

walked away from her and home; into the mine, his tomb.

The poor Slav woman had paid the price for her American hopes and had a

right to say: "America ne dobre"; but she did not say it.

"Lift my boy!" a rather muscular, good-looking man said, in the English

of New York's East Side. He seemed a little jealous of the attention I

had paid to these strange children.

"He's the real stuff," he continued. "A genuine Yankee boy. Born on the

East Side."

"My! But he's heavy!"

"You bet he is!" the proud father exclaimed, after my only half

successful effort to lift the youngster.

"He's going to be a prize-fighter, like his daddy;" and before I

realized it I was initiated into the technicalities of the prize-ring.

My new friend proved to be an aspirant for strange honours, especially

strange when sought by a Jew. His ambition was to be a champion.

"I was the foist one," he said, "to start the fighting business among

the Jews. There's lots of 'em now."

Why was he going over? His wife, a native of Hungary, had grown homesick

for the Magyarland. She was dying of that most dreadful of all diseases,

consumption; so her Ike and little Joe were going with her to Budapest.

"Say," Ike confided, "I don't know what that Old Country is like; but

I'll be hiking back to the good old Bowery in six weeks unless I'm

mighty much mistaken."

Little Joe, with all his weight, had nestled in my arms and grown quite

affectionate. When we parted, he called me "Uncle," and I was properly

proud of being the uncle of a future champion prize-fighter of the

world.

By the time the first bugle sounded for dinner I had tasted enough of

the joys of this new fellowship; so I said good-night in four languages.

Up to the deck and to my cabin door, I could hear little Joe calling

after me in a voice like that of a lusty young rooster, "Good-night,

uncle!"

Dinner in the first cabin was fashionably quiet; for it was our first

evening meal together, and we were measuring and scanning one another

after the manner of fashionable folk, trying to decide with whom it was

safe to speak.

We reached the point of discussing the dinner and the merits of Italian

cooking; we spoke of the weather and hoped it would remain so calm and

beautiful all the way. Some of us even went so far as to ask our

neighbour if this was the first trip over, which is a rather silly

question to ask nowadays when every one has crossed the ocean a dozen

times, except a few very extraordinary people.

After dinner, as we lounged on deck, a lady, whose face I could not see,

sat down beside me and said: "You don't approve ladies' smoking, do

you?" With that, she drew from her silver case a cigarette, and put it

to her lips.

"I don't myself," she continued; "but I smoke because my whole nature is

reacting against the Connecticut Puritanism in which I have been

steeped. I don't enjoy smoking, at least my nerves don't; but my whole

self takes pleasure in it because I have been told over and over again

that I mustn't; so now I do.

"I do everything, even drink cocktails, as you have seen. I do love to

shock people."

I told her that I had grown accustomed to shocks, that I had seen

something of the world, was fairly well acquainted with the weakness of

the flesh and the power of the devil; but that I really thought it

strange that an American woman and a mother should smoke and drink. Her

daughter, a girl of about sixteen, properly gowned and coldly

indifferent, watched her mother and listened to our conversation until

her maid came and bore her away, after she had bade her mother an

unaffectionate good-night.

I suppose it was the cigarettes that made my neighbour communicative,

perhaps it was simply because she wanted to talk, that she told me her

story--a story more lamentable than I have ever heard in the steerage.

She was graduated from a college which prides itself more than most

colleges, on being an intellectual centre. Immediately after entering

society she married a man of her own set, wealthy, cultured and a

university graduate. Now, after seventeen years of married life, she had

obtained a divorce, because, as she said, they had "had enough of each

other." He had already married, and she was going to Europe to find a

husband, a man with braid and gilt buttons; preferably some one

connected with an embassy.

Several of her friends, she said, had married into that class and were

"perfectly happy."

"Foreigners are so polite," she said. "Americans, especially American

husbands, are boors. Think of nothing but business, know nothing of

music or art, and are absorbed in football, the Board of Trade and fast

horses."

I knew that this woman was not a typical American woman, nor typical of

a large class; but she was interesting as a type of many of her class

who have grown weary of Democracy and the attendant Puritanisms of

America, have crossed the seas and recrossed them, have gambled at Monte

Carlo and flirted at Budapest and Vienna, have seen the shady side of

Paris by early morning light and have become alienated from the best

there is in America.

This particular woman had broken up her home, had left a

fourteen-year-old son with his grandparents, and was about to throw

herself away on pretty nearly anything that presented itself, if it

sported brass buttons and trimmings, and had at least a Von to its name.

She belongs to a species which I have often seen in the American

quarters of European cities; but one so frank as she, I had never met.

I thought I had known something of American homes and American husbands;

but evidently I have lived in the social backwoods, for what she told me

was indeed a revelation.

In the course of the conversation we were joined by other husbandless

women who were to live abroad, although not divorced nor yet seeking

gold braid and brass buttons; by the gentleman from Boston who had

confessed to being a church-member, and by a merchant from the West who

was eager to make up a pool on the ship's run,--and before we knew it,

we were back to my proposition about the steerage.

It was the merchant from the West who said that he noticed how much

American clothing these immigrants carried back. That the men had

celluloid collars, watches and brass-bound trunks. It was the man from

Boston who said that they carried themselves so differently from those

who came over, and it was he who began to calculate how much money they

carried back, impoverishing our country and enriching theirs.

"One thing," I ventured in reply, "you have not counted and cannot

count. How much of that which is better than money they are carrying

back. Ideals filtered into their minds, new aspirations dominating their

lives, and all found in the humblest places in America.

"The steerage, as I have said before, and now say again with still more

emphasis, carries into Europe more saving ideas than the cabin. What we

bring we have borrowed from Europe and bring back in exaggerated forms.

Neither Paris nor Berlin, nor Vienna nor Monte Carlo is being blessed by

our coming or cares for us at all, but only for our dollars."

No one contradicted me and I do not think I shall be contradicted.

"Neither Europe nor America is the better for our coming or our going,"

I continued. "And you," turning to the man from Boston, "you who say

that the immigrants are to blame for our social and religious

deterioration, ask yourself what you and your class bring back to

America after a season spent on the frayed edges of the so-called social

life of Europe, with which the average American comes in contact. As for

the money the immigrants carry back, they have earned every cent of it,

and I have no doubt that we in the cabin carry more money over to Europe

than they do, and we will spend it there; and I am not so sure that we

have earned it.

"Moreover," waving aside the man from Boston who was about to interrupt

me, but I was wound up and could not run down, "they have paid a

terrible price for the money they carry home. Shall I tell you what that

price is?" And I told the story of the Slavic widow and her orphaned

brood. Then my good neighbour, the Puritan rebel, who had heartlessly

talked of her deserted home, stretched out her hand and touching mine

said: "Please don't tell us any more. You have already made me think,

and I don't want to."

Then came four bells from the bridge, and the lonely sailor watching

from the crow's nest called out: "All's well on board!"

With a sigh my Puritan rebel rose, murmuring what I alone heard:

"Sailor, that isn't so!" Then she said: "Good-night."

After that there were more cigarettes and cocktails in the smoking-room;

but one woman wasn't there.

II

THE PRICE THEY PAY

The ship's doctor was very much like other men of his profession who

choose to be knocked about from port to port, dealing out pills and

powder, when pills and powders seem of so little consequence. He was

young, inexperienced and had not yet learned half the secret of his

calling; namely, to keep his mouth shut at the proper time. At breakfast

he told us that he had eight cases of consumption in the steerage, and

that three men were about the worst he had ever seen.

He told this with the cool air of the medical man who delights in

"cases" as such. Then he told us about one of them, a Greek, who was at

the point of death, but all the time kept calling for cheese.

"Don't you give him cheese, all the cheese he wants?" cried one of the

young ladies across the table.

"No," replied the doctor; "what's the use?"

Then I looked at the young lady and she looked at me; I whispered

something to my steward, and she gave an order; and we both had

cheese--real Greek cheese for breakfast.

In the morning the steerage looks its best. The deck has been scrubbed

and so have some of the passengers. If the day promises to be fair, the

travellers unconsciously draw upon the coming joy in large draughts.

When I went down that day, I was no more among strangers. Tony greeted

me with an unusually broad smile, John Sullivan shook hands with me so

vigorously that I thought he must be the veritable John L. and the

children gathered round me, confidently awaiting their sweets. This was

truly inspiring; but it became touching when the Slavic widow said to

her brood: "The Krist-kindel comes."

In the depths of the steerage they had heard that a man from the cabin

had come down and been good to them; that he had petted the children,

luring them with sweets. And the steerage gave up its treasure of little

ones, seemingly endless in number; so that the stock of good things had

to be replenished many a time before each child had its fair and equal

share.

Truly it is "More blessed to give than to receive," yet the blessing

brings its burdens, in the disclosure of real or pretended suffering;

and the immigrants are no exception to the rule. I know now as I have

never known before, the price they pay for the dollars so safely tucked

away, which are their wealth, their power and, I trust, their

happiness.

Here is a beggarly-looking group of Bulgarians. They left their home in

the richest district of that new Balkan czardom about a year ago. I know

their village, set in the midst of acres of roses, of poppies and of

maize. Like their forefathers they lived there contentedly until

restlessness, like a disease, crept upon them. Coming from the plains in

the West, it spread its contagion over the Alps, the Carpathians and the

Macedonian hills. The men mortgaged their homes, left their wives and

children to gather the roses, the poppies and the maize, and took

passage at Triest to gather dollars in America.

On landing, they were shipped West and farther West. They travelled by

polluted rivers, and over mountains stripped of their verdure and robbed

of the wealth of their veins. They saw the refuse of the mines left like

broken trappings of war on the battle-field. They saw the glare of a

thousand flaming ovens where coal was being baked into coke, and in

their shadows they saw besmirched and bedraggled towns, now clustering,

now trailing along, now losing themselves in the darkness, and now

glowing again in the lurid light of giant flames pouring from huge

furnaces. They saw day turned into night by smoke, and night turned into

day by unquenched fires, and they knew not whether it was day or night,

or heaven or hell to which they had come. At the end of the journey they

were led into a deep ravine through which an inky river struggled, and

over which hung a cloud as immovable as if the released elements were

forming again into solids.

Twelve men were counted by some one who led them, or drove them, or

pushed them into a hut which had once been painted some dingy colour,

but now was part of the gloom around it. Other twelve men were made to

enter another hut, and so on, until all were disposed of. By signs they

were given to understand that this was home; so they spread out their

woolen coats and went to sleep. When morning came, after a breakfast of

cheap whiskey and poor bread, they were marched into the mill of a

certain corporation. It would do no good to mention the name of this

corporation, and it would do no harm. No one would be offended; for

there is no one to offend.

I have very dear friends who own stock in that company, but they just

draw dividends--they do not control the mill. The man and the men who

run it produce the dividends; they do not own the stock, certainly not

all of it. I cannot single out that corporation; it is not the only

sinner nor the chief one, and that would be its only consolation, were

it looking for anything so unpractical.

My Bulgarians saw boiling pots of metal and red-hot ingots of metal and

men of metal, who shouted at them in an unknown tongue, and the louder

they shouted the less the men understood. Little by little, however,

they grew accustomed to the tumult, and learned to walk skillfully on

the inch plank which alone separated them from death and destruction.

They found consolation in the bulging envelope full of money which came

to them at the end of the week; for it was much money, exchanged into

their currency, more money than three months' labour brought them among

the roses, the poppies and the maize.

Two-thirds of it they sent home, and lived on the other third, eating

coarse meat and bread, and indulging in strong drink. Month after month

they toiled in the mill, and lived in the same ravine, with the

thundering, spewing, belching monsters. They lost the freshness of skin

and the elasticity of movement characteristic of their race; but were

happy in the fat, bulging envelope at the end of the week.

Of the city, with its churches and its beautiful homes they had seen

nothing; for the mill ran day and night, and night and day, and Sabbath

days and Sabbath nights as well. They cared not for cities or churches

or even for fine houses, so long as they got the envelopes.

One morning, however, they came to the mill and it was silent within, as

it was silent without, and the door was closed. One week and another

they waited; but there was no envelope with money. Their own small

change was gone and they were starving. Then came the same man who had

driven them twelve by twelve into the huts, and twelve by twelve he

drove them out; for they had no money with which to pay the rent, and

men with hearts of metal cannot feel what it means to be driven out of a

hut, even such a wretched hut, and be in the roofless street.

Half-starved, the men left their miserable shelter and marched into the

main street, past the stores and the churches; and then they saw that

the city had homes and that not all the men had hearts of metal.

Bread came in abundance, and soup and meat. Fine women were proud to

serve them, and the basement of the church became their lodging place.

On Sunday they heard above them the voices of little children, and then

deep organ tones and a man's voice speaking loud enough for them to

hear, although they could not understand. Then came a great volume of

song, and if the congregation sang: "The Church's one foundation is

Jesus Christ, her Lord," poetry never was more true to fact; for the

church seemed buttressed upon these Slavic brothers of Jesus, in whom,

as in all the needy, He incarnates Himself.

By slow stages the men found their way back to the sea, and through the

charity of their own more fortunate countrymen, they were now homeward

bound. A more forlorn looking set of men I have never seen; emaciated,

ragged, unclean and discouraged. They had paid the price.

A man groped his way towards me, his face disfigured and his eyelids

closed forever. He had money, nearly a thousand dollars, he told me.

"But what would I not give for only one eye?" he said pathetically. He

paid the price when a powder blast blotted daylight out forever.

A rather forward Jewish girl snatched from my hands goodies intended for

the children, and at a glance I knew the price she had paid, if she

carried any dollars across the sea. She belonged to an ever-increasing

number of Jewish women, who have forsaken the path of virtue or have

been pushed from it, who knows into how deep a hell?

A man came to me, the mere shadow of a man and asked for some soothing

sweet for his cough. He was a Montenegrin and had been a stalwart

soldier in the army of his prince, in whose domain the white plague is

practically unknown. He, too, carried money home; more money than any

man in his village in the Black Mountains had ever possessed. It was

earned in the iron works of an Ohio town, in a pit so full of flying

metal, ground from rough surfaces, that every breath carried destruction

to his lungs.

The sight of this man recalled the conversation at the breakfast table,

and I looked for the hospital. Two stories below the steerage deck I

found the contagious ward, and upon iron cots lay the three dying men,

mere shadows of men except the eyes. They were still the eyes of flesh,

grown larger seemingly, through suffering, which was all too real.

Nearest the door, and nearest death apparently, was the Greek. He looked

almost happy; for he had cheese, the cheese of Greece, which my opposite

neighbour at table was feeding him bit by bit. He ate and ate, and

called for more. Poor fellow! His soul had already forgotten the glory

of Athens; but his craving stomach had a long memory; it remembered the

cheese of Greece.

Stolidly looking at the iron ceiling from which hung the huge sweat

drops of the labouring ship, lay a dying Slav. The racial marks of his

face were almost obliterated, and one could with difficulty recognize

the Slav, except by his silence in suffering. My hands touched his; and

although they were mere skin and bone, the marks of heavy labour were

still upon them. His memory had not quite faded; for between panting

breaths he told me of the village in Hungary from which he had gone, a

lusty youth; of the old Matka he had left behind, of the sea voyage and

then of his work in the mines. It was "Prach, prach" (dust, dust), he

said. He was sure that when the air of the Tatra mountains filled his

lungs again, he would get well. Did he want anything? "Yes, palenka."

His native white, biting drink. Oh, if he just had palenka! "Wouldn't

whiskey do as well?" "Yes, anything that gives strength; but palenka

would be the best."

There was a third man, an Italian of the Calabrian group to which Tony

and John Sullivan belonged. There was, or there had been, a third man;

for even as we turned towards him, a rattle in his hollow chest gave

sign that he had crossed to another harbour than that for which he had

embarked. We would have lingered; but death brought the nurse and the

doctor, with much muttering and many complaints against us, and threats

of quarantine.

After all, it was good to reach the noisy deck, even the deck of the

steerage--and life.

"Tombola! Tombola!" the Calabrian peasants shouted, shaking a pasteboard

box of dice. "Tre, sette, dieci,--terno!" the lucky winner screamed,

gathering up the greasy soldi piled on the greasy deck.

In another corner the dealer was shaking a wicker basket full of the

lucky and unlucky numbers, drawing them forth one by one and calling

them out to the winners and the losers. All over the deck there were

such groups of noisy Italians, ignorant of the death of a comrade who

had drawn the unlucky number--or the lucky one; who can tell?

Unconscious of the fact that death had come in the wake of the ship and

overtaken us, all went merrily on--and no one in cabin or steerage must

be told; for the dark angel is nowhere so unwelcome as upon the

uncertain deep, where there are never more than a few planks of wood or

girders of steel between time and eternity. No one thought of death that

morning. Who could think of it with the sky so blue and the sea so calm?

Even nature seemed oblivious of the fact that one of her children had

paid the price.

Nor was the man from Boston, nor many men in Boston, with all their

inherited sensitiveness of conscience, nor the men in Pennsylvania where

conscience is blackened by coal, and hardened by steel--none of these

men, I say, was conscious or is conscious how great is the price these

European peasants pay for the dollars they carry home.

In all the industrial states, there are hundreds and thousands of

graves, marked by humble wooden crosses, beneath which sleep just such

toilers, snatched from life by "The broken wheel, the loosened cord."

They have paid the price, the greatest price, giving their lives for the

dollars, the hoarding of which we begrudged them.

No less than 10,000 of these despised aliens laid down their lives in

one year, digging coal, making steel, blasting stone and doing the

numberless dangerous drudgeries of our industrial life.

All that the Boston man saw was the money, the good clothes, the

celluloid collars of the men, and the gaudy shams that decked the women.

_I_ could see the mouths of half a dozen mines, out of which were

dragged in one year the mangled, powder-burnt, asphyxiated bodies of a

thousand once-breathing souls. I heard the cries and groans of hundreds

of women and thousands of children; for I have seen mothers embrace

bodiless limbs and limbless bodies, fragments of the sons they had

borne, and although 30,000,000 dollars and more were carried home by the

living, they too had paid a price beyond the hard labour they did. In

the suffering they endured in damp mines, by the hot metal blasts, in

cold ditches and in dark and dangerous tunnels, they paid the price,

indeed.

I wish that the man from Boston and all the men with small vision had

been on the deck of that Italian steamer, when three times during her

long voyage the engines stopped their breathing, just before sunrise. In

the steerage and in the cabin alike, men and women were asleep. The

captain, the doctor and a few of us, who knew and dared, were the only

ones astir.

From the depths of the ship the sailors carried the sail-cloth sheathed

bundles and held them over the waters. Then sharp and clear the captain

called: "Let go!" The engines breathed again, the mighty screws churned

the quiet sea to foam and the surging waves enfolded the bodies of the

men who had paid the price.

III

A MURDERER, MARY AND AN HONORARY DEGREE

Once a day the steerage was roused from its monotony. Men, women and

children, a thousand of them, pushed and crowded (good-naturedly, of

course) in the attempt to get a glimpse of a fellow passenger. There was

nothing which distinguished him from the rest of the immigrants except

that he had taken human life, and was being carried back to pay the

penalty of his crime.

The hour which he daily spent on deck was an hour of singular triumph.

Almost reverently the crowd stared at him, as if he had just dropped

from heaven or risen from his grave. I am sure that no one felt any ill

will towards him, and even the sailor who, revolver in hand, stood guard

over him, shared the distinction which the steerage felt in having a

murderer there. The fact is, he did not look like a murderer or even

like the typical bad man; neither did he seem smitten by remorse, nor

did he exhibit any kind of bravado which might have aroused resentment.

Graciously he accepted the cigar which some one gave him, and as

graciously permitted me to light it for him (his hands were in irons)

while with remarkable frankness he told me his history and the story of

his crime.

Of course he was an Italian, born in a southern town in which some

20,000 people had accepted poverty as their inheritance, and made little

or no struggle against it. They had also accepted the burden of taxation

and exploitation by government officials; although here and there some

one with the gleam of freedom in his breast felt the grievousness of it,

and secretly or openly protested.

Patriot brigands enough there were, and the stories of their exploits

fired the imagination of a number of boys, of whom Luigi (the murderer)

was one. On Sunday evenings under a clump of cedars these boys gathered,

until in imitation of their elders they organized a society, whose

patriotic purposes involved nothing less than the overthrow of monarchy,

and wiping Church, priests and Pope from the face of the earth. A rather

ambitious program for minors; but they had imbibed the "Zeit-geist" in

an exaggerated form, had begun to feel the great social wrongs of the

times, and like most youths, admired the heroic.

Luigi told me frankly that he committed thefts first from the till of

his father, a shopkeeper, who, upon the discovery of his son's

pilfering, beat him half to death and drove him out of the house. After

that the boy stole from any one and any place; because the "Society for

the Liberation of the People of Italy" needed money, first, last and all

the time, to carry on its ambitious schemes. Ultimately he was caught

and sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

I know something of the horrors of Southern Italian prisons, and I could

well believe that three such years would ripen rebellious thoughts into

desperate ones. Luigi left the prison with vengeance in his heart, slew

the judge who had sentenced him, and fled to America.

I have purposely robbed his story of all its patriotic and picturesque

elements, for I do not wish to glorify Luigi. He is just a type, perhaps

not a very fair type, of many of his countrymen whose coming to America

disturbs us and whose leaving it causes no regrets.

Luigi's further history was interesting to me because he knew some

things about America which I did not know. He had lived a number of

years in the state of New Jersey, which seems to be a sort of haven of

refuge for Trusts and Anarchists. During those years he had been in

intimate relation with our courts, jails, prisons and police. He had

plotted for them, with them and against them, and now was being sent

back in irons because (he said) his remaining in the United States would

embarrass certain officials. Luigi saw no great difference between

prisons here and in Italy; between jailers there and jailers here;

between judges on this side the water and on the other side. The only

difference that Luigi _did_ see was that over here they are much smarter

than in Italy.

There was but one good thing which Luigi experienced in America. They

had been good to his "kid." Over and over again he told me that, and

over and over again he blessed the good women of a certain New Jersey

town for being good to his "kid." Often as he cursed the police (police,

state and nation are one in the mind of Luigi and his kind) so often did

he bless two women at the edge of that New Jersey town, who had truly

revealed the heart of a nation, whose conscience had been falsely

revealed to him by the police and the petty courts.

Looking over the railing, the cabin passengers watched the murderer as

eagerly as those in the steerage, and when I returned after my interview

with him, every one clamoured for a report of the conversation. Many of

the men sneered at my suggestion that the murderer might be a victim of

circumstances.

"He ought to be shot!" was the brief but conclusive argument of several.

"We're not strict enough with them," said the man from Boston; and added

the information that shooting is too good for these Black Hands and

Anarchists. He called me an "unpractical sentimentalist." The man from

the West, however, took my part.

"You may call the professor a sentimentalist, but I guess he may be

right after all. We've got a sentimentalist as they called him, in

Denver. He took it into his head that you can bust kids of their

meanness by being good to them instead of clapping them into jail, and

he has done it. We called him a dangerous sentimentalist; but the kids

of Denver call him their friend, and he has done more for them than all

the sheriffs and judges and jailers put together."

While the man from the West was speaking, "Dirty Mary," as we called

her, looked wistfully up at me and reminded me that it was candy time in

the steerage.

Mary was positively the most hopeless little creature my eyes have ever

seen. She was about eleven years of age, and could swear as

picturesquely in English as if she were a Bowery tough; while from her

stockingless feet up to her head, which looked as if it never had been

guilty of contact with a hair-brush, she was a mass of unpicturesque

dirt.

Mary had come from Naples to Mulberry Street, and never had a chance to

be homesick, for she never had a home. Her father was in prison and her

mother had all she could do to take care of the numerous little ones,

who, at the

[Illustration: DIRTY MARY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION]

earliest moment, like the fledglings in a nest, were pushed out to shift

for themselves. Mary had slept beneath docks, in ash cans and dark

alleys, and although still a child, there was nothing left for her to

learn concerning the evils of this world.

As I was sharing my sweets with her, the Boston man called down from his

safe vantage ground: "Try your love-making on Mary!"

"What's that bloke talkin' about?" she asked, noisily chewing her candy.

"He has challenged me," I answered.

"Say," she said, looking at the generous proportions of the Boston man

and then at me, "he's got a cinch, ain't he?"

Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge.

"Mary," I began, in my gentlest and most persuasive tones, "Mary, I want

you to wash yourself."

"Ain't got no soap," was the reply.

"Will you wash yourself if I furnish the soap?"

"Nop"--very decidedly--"no soap in mine."

The preliminary skirmish was over, and I had lost; but I was not

discouraged. Probably the attack had been wrong. I left Mary, and going

to the barber's shop, I bought the most strongly scented soap he had.

Armed with this weapon I returned to the steerage, and renewed the

attack.

"Mary," I said, holding the soap close to her nose, "this will make you

smell sweet all over, if you use water with it."

Mary sniffed the musk-laden air, and the primitive spirit in her, lured

by the odour, conquered her will. She took the cake of soap and it

disappeared in the pocket of her greasy skirt. Triumphantly I went to

the upper deck and reported progress. After a remarkably short time Mary

reappeared and smilingly looked at me from below. She had used the soap,

all of it, I think; for it was liberally plastered over her face, her

hands and even her limbs. Indeed dirt and soap were pretty equally

distributed over her body.

I had never known that Mary was shy; but when she heard the laughter of

the passengers, she disappeared as quickly as a frightened deer, leaving

a strong smell of musk behind her.

"What was you all laughing about?" she demanded, when, after a long

search, I found her tucked in among the blankets of the shelf which was

her bed. Then I explained to her the uses of soap, and by the aid of a

pocket mirror showed her its effect when used with the proper proportion

of water. Mary was an apt pupil, and then and there washed herself for

the first time in many days and weeks.

"Mary, will you wear stockings if I bring them to you?"

Emphatically and briefly Mary answered: "Sure."

"And shoe-strings in your shoes?" I was growing bold; but "According to

your faith----"

The next day Mary appeared, washed clean and wearing stockings which my

own little woman had provided.

After that the shoes were laced, and before we reached Naples a

hair-brush had invaded the wilderness which crowned her head. A bright

ribbon bow was the bribe which accomplished that miracle. Her teeth even

became acquainted with a tooth-brush, although I had to use chewing-gum

as an inducement to open her tightly closed lips.

Outwardly, at least, Mary became a changed creature. I cannot tell much

about what went on in her little soul; but I trust she felt something of

that love, which, even in the imperfect way in which it was manifested

to her, had some power.

The love I have for the people in the steerage has begotten love in

them, and I have brothers and sisters innumerable; while countless

children call me "Uncle." I am quite sure that if these strangers are to

be blended into our common life, the one great power which must be used

will be this something, which practical people call sentimentalism; but

which after all, at its best, is a really practical thing, and

accomplishes what rigid law, whether good or bad, cannot accomplish. I

have seen this force at work, healing, reclaiming, redeeming; and my

faith in it is unbounded, although the practical man may ridicule it and

the scientific man may scoff at it. My faith in love as a factor, the

greatest factor in our social life, is based first of all upon my belief

in our common kinship.

I recognize no barriers of race, class or religion between myself and

any other human being that needs me. I happen to know something about

human beings; I know intimately many races and more nationalities, and I

have discovered that when one breaks through the strange speech, which

so often separates; when one closes one's eyes to what climate has

burned upon a man's skin, or what social or economic conditions have

formed or deformed--one will find in every human being a kinsman.

Those of us who know certain races most intimately have come to the

conclusion that what at first we regarded as essential differences, are

largely upon the surface; and that when we have penetrated the unusual,

we quickly reach the essentially alike.

The most interesting books and the most acceptable lectures about

strange peoples often come from those who know their subjects least.

They were not long enough among them to discover the likeness--that

which is so commonplace that one cannot write books about it or deliver

sensational lectures regarding it.

If emigration to America has done nothing else, it has proved that but

few race characteristics, if any, are fixed. Should some sceptic wish to

be convinced on this point, let him visit such towns as South Bend,

Indiana; Scranton, Pa., or Youngstown, Ohio, and look at a group of

Slavs or Italians who came here twenty years ago. Let him go among those

who have had the full advantage of our environment, of our standard of

living, of education and of an enlightening religion. He will find what

we call race characteristics almost obliterated, from the faces of even

the first generation.

The sluggish Pole has become vivacious; while the fiery Italian has had

his blood cooled to a temperature approved by even the most fastidious

of those who believe that fervour and enthusiasm are not signs of good

breeding.

My own anthropological acumen has sometimes played me sore tricks,

especially in the following case: I was the guest of a Woman's Club, in

the Middle West, to speak on the theme of Immigration. At the close of

the session, refreshments were served.

The mistress of the house--and be it known that her ancestors came to

this country when there was neither steerage nor cabin--told me that

she had an Hungarian maid whom she wished me to see. I looked about the

room and saw two young women serving the guests. One was a typical

American girl, with almost a Gibson face; the daughter of the house, I

decided. The face of the other showed some Slavic characteristics, and

mentally I placed her birthplace in the Carpathian Mountains. I was

congratulating myself on my good judgment, when the young ladies came to

serve me; then I discovered that the one with Slavic features was the

daughter of the house, while the "Gibson girl" had been born by the

river March, in Hungary.

One of the most wonderful sights from the sociological standpoint is the

main street of Scranton, Pa., and the neighbouring Court-house Square.

Scranton has a weekly corso. A vast stream of young people passes up and

down the street on Saturday afternoon, to see and to be seen; to court

and to be courted. I have watched that stream for hours, and although

fully eighty per cent. of those young people are of foreign birth or

children of the foreign born, I could only faintly trace racial

differences. Almost invariably, too, the racial marks have been most

effectually blotted out from the faces of those who have had the best

advantages; that is, the same advantages which we have had. It is

noticeable that children of the Southern Italians grow larger than

their parents, and would grow better than they, if in the changed

environment love would supply what chance or fate has denied them.

I believe in love as a factor in social redemption, not only because I

believe that we are essentially alike, but because I believe that most

human beings respond to it more or less quickly. We know that children

do, and that we ourselves rarely outgrow the response to love.

I recall once travelling westward on an immigrant train. To begin with,

the car was very much crowded, and after it became part of a slow local

train, it was invaded by native Americans, who fretted much and justly,

at having to travel in an unventilated, ill-smelling car.

At one station a mother came in, with a child about five years of age.

The little one was crying bitterly, because it had the toothache. Two

other children caught the infection and lifted up their voices, loud

enough and long enough to set every passenger on edge. The mother of the

five year old tried to comfort her by telling her that soon they would

be at the dentist's, and he would pull the naughty tooth. That remark

failed to produce the desired effect, for the little girl fairly

screamed and the two babies joined in the chorus. Then the mother,

growing angry, cried: "Jenny, if you don't keep still, I'll break your

neck!" At which Jenny, not unnaturally, ran from her. I stretched out

my arms, and catching her held the struggling form for a minute, then

lifted her gently to my knee.

"Tell me, Jenny," I said, "where does the tooth hurt?"

She pointed to her swollen cheek, and I said: "Now, dear, I'll take that

toothache away," and I lightly stroked the sore cheek.

Here let me say that I am neither a Christian Scientist nor a Faith

Healer, and that when I have a toothache, I go straightway to the

dentist. I stroked Jenny's swollen cheek for a time and then asked:

"Does it still hurt, dearie?" and Jenny answered: "Not now. Do it some

more." And I did.

"One, two, three!" I said at last. "I'll put your toothache into my

pocket." And lo! and behold! the toothache was gone.

Relieved of pain, the child soon fell asleep in my arms, and I carried

her back to her mother.

The other children were still crying--challenging my faith in love as a

soothing syrup; and I accepted the challenge.

One baby belonged to a Lithuanian woman who was going to join her

husband in the coal fields of Illinois. It required more than love to

touch that baby; it needed a good digestion as well; for the child was

so dirty that it seemed perilous to take it, from whatever point I

approached. Finally, I landed it safe. Its skin was hot and dry;

evidently it had a fever, and I knew that it would appreciate water

without and within. I applied it liberally, and before long I could

really love the child; for when the dirt was removed, it was fair to

look upon. When its cries ceased, as they did soon after I gave it a

cool drink, I laid it on a seat far from its mother, and it went to

sleep.

All this time the third baby continued its lamentations; they were the

cries of a very young baby, and went to my heart. I asked its Italian

mother to let me take it, and she, having witnessed the miracles I

wrought, had faith in me and gave me her child. As soon as it felt the

strange, muscular arm, however, it howled with renewed vigour; but I

held bravely to it, and walked up and down the car, and down and up, and

up and down again. I had to; for whenever I attempted to sit down, the

baby shrieked the louder, and as I was being eagerly watched by all the

passengers, my reputation was at stake. At last I recalled a little

Italian lullaby, one my Dalmatian nurse used to sing to me; I hummed it

as I continued my weary march, until the child's cries changed to a low

crooning. Then I sat down and number three fell asleep. Triumphantly I

carried it to its mother, and took my seat, much the worse for wear and

perspiring at every pore.

In a short time a benevolent looking lady wearing eye-glasses came to

me and said: "I beg your pardon, sir, but are you an M. D.?"

"No, madam," I replied, "I am an L. L. B."

"What is that?" she inquired.

"Lover of Little Babies," I answered.

I told this story to my fellow passengers in the cabin; not only because

I am proud of my honorary degree, but to prove my belief in the fact

that most human beings respond to love, and also that it is a specific

for many ills.

My theory may be unscientific and impractical; but my fellow voyagers

saw it successfully carried out in the steerage of that steamer.

Shall I ever forget the landing of the ship at Naples? Tony and John

Sullivan and Pietro and Guisseppi, resplendent in their American

clothes,--eager to land; yet not forgetting to shake my hand as they

bade me a smiling good-bye. I doubt that there was one of those hundreds

of men whose life's history I did not know, whose hopes for the future I

did not share and in whom my love had not awakened some kindly feeling.

I knew the women and the children; I was expected to kiss the

babies--and I did--and the children all said good-bye to their "Uncle."

After all, I may not have done them any good, but I know that they

enriched my life. Proudly I looked at Mary, no longer "Dirty Mary," and

her clean face made me happy; while her smile was worth much more than

gold. I had new brothers and sisters, nephews, nieces and children.

My orthodox friend from Boston stood beside me when they landed. "This

is like heaven," he said as he looked around.

The matchless bay, with its blue water, glittered in the light of the

sun, which made a pavement of gold fit for angels and spirits to walk

upon. It was like heaven to me also; not because I thought of golden

pavements or harps or halos, or any of the glories which the imagination

might picture to itself. To me it seemed like heaven because "The

redeemed walk there," those whom America is lifting from the steerage

into the many cabins of the Lord.

IV

REFLEX INFLUENCES

The ports of Naples, Triest and Fiume felt the full tide of returning

immigration, and although it came sweeping in with unprecedented force,

it was not regarded as a calamity. For hours at each port, noisy venders

of fruit, and "runners" for modest lodging places hung about the ship,

and every passenger who disembarked was an asset, not only to the port

in which he waited for the train or boat which would carry him to his

native place, but to the whole economic life of his nation.

There was something almost grotesquely grandiose in the air with which

each immigrant viewed the shores of his native land, and an unconscious

exaggeration of our American ways in his walk and talk, and the

prodigality with which he handled small change.

The street venders and purveyors of small pleasures recognized this, and

appealed to his newly awakened generosity by charging him twice as much

for everything as they charged when he was outward bound.

The customs officers had a sharpened vision

[Illustration: TRIEST

Austria's commercial harbor; prosperous, whether the immigrant tide ebbs

or flows.]

and did not treat his baggage with the usual disrespect. The brass-bound

trunks contained phonographs to disturb the age-long silence of some

mountain village, samples of American whiskey, "the kind that burns all

the way down," and therefore characteristic of our temper. There were

cigars, manufactured by the American Tobacco Trust, and safely

concealed; for the Austrian and Italian governments have been wise

enough to create a monopoly of their own on tobacco.

Gold trinkets, too, there were, for some Dulcinea in the Apennines or

the Carpathians--trinkets brought as tokens of faithfulness, which is

often as spurious as the metal; and ah, yes! there is something else

which they bring and no customs boundary can keep it out. It is hidden

away in the innermost being and will come to light some day, although

now the wanderer himself may be unconscious of it.

The returned immigrants scatter into thousands of villages, rousing them

from their commonplaceness by stories of adventure, boasts of mighty

deeds of valor and praise or criticism of our strange customs.

Sitting in the inn of a little Alpine village, I once overheard one of

these immigrants comparing the slow ways of the natives with our swifter

pace.

"In America the trains go so fast that they can't stop to take on

passengers; they just have hooks with which they are caught as the train

flies past.

"They have reaping machines," this candidate for the "Ananias Club"

continued, "to which a dozen horses are hitched, and the grain is cut,

threshed, ground to flour and baked, in a few minutes. All you have to

do is to touch a button and you can get bread or cake as you choose."

All this his auditors believed; but when he told them that we build

houses forty stories high, their credulity was strained to the breaking

point; although he swore by the memory of his departed mother that it

was so, and that he had seen it with his own eyes.

One reason that the returned immigrant is so quickly recognized is, that

he purposely emphasizes the difference between himself and those who

have remained at home. He does everything and wears everything which

will make him like an American, even if over here he had scarcely moved

out of his group or come in touch with our civilization. With pride the

men wear our clothing, including stiff collars and ties, and when one is

in doubt as to a man's relation to our life, a glance at his feet is

sufficient; "for by their"--shoes--"ye shall know them."

While one may deplore the loss of the picturesque in European peasant

life, there is an ethical significance in the immigrant's American

garments which is of rather vital importance.

The Polish peasant in his native environment is one of the laziest among

European labourers. Wrapped in his sheepskin coat, summer and winter,

walking barefoot the greater part of the year, and in winter putting his

feet into clumsy, heavy boots which impeded his progress, these garments

fitted his temper. They were heavy, inexpensive, never changing, and

rarely needed renewal. The American clothes he wears are a symbol of his

altered character. They mean a new standard of living even as they mean

a new standard of effort.

In America the Polish labourer loses his native laziness. The journey in

itself has shaken him out of his lethargy; the high gearing of our

industrial wheels, the pressure brought to bear upon him by the American

foreman, the general atmosphere of our life charged by an invigorating

ozone, and the absence of a leisure class, at least from the industrial

community, have, in a few years, changed what many observers regarded as

a fixed characteristic.

The whole Slavic race is inclined to lead an easy life, and immigration

is destined to have a permanent effect upon it; for the returned

immigrant acts contagiously upon his community. Unbiased landowners and

manufacturers have told me that we have trained their workmen in

industry, that we have quickened their wits and that while wages have

risen nearly 60% in almost all departments of labour, the efficiency of

the labourers has been correspondingly increased, most noticeably where

the largest number of returned immigrants has entered the home field.

The Slavic peasants both in Hungary and Poland were gradually losing

their allotted land, and were socially and physically deteriorating,

prior to the movement to America. Indolence coupled with intemperance

drove them into the hands of usurers, and they dropped into the landless

class, thus becoming dependent upon casual labour.

The returned immigrant began to buy land which the large landowners were

often forced to sell, because wages had risen abnormally and labourers

were often not to be had at any price. In the four years between 1899

and 1903, land owned by peasants increased in some districts to 418%,

and taking the immigrant districts in Austro-Hungary and Russian-Poland

together, the increase in four years reaches the incredible figure of

173%.

In three districts of Russian-Poland the peasants bought in those four

years 14,694 acres of farmland. This of course means not only that money

was brought back from America, but that the peasant at home has become

more industrious, if not always more temperate and frugal.

The little village of Kochanovce in the district of Trenczin in Hungary,

out of which but few had emigrated to America, and to which not many

families had returned, has, under this new economic impulse, bought the

land on which the villagers' forefathers were serfs and on which they

had worked during the harvest for about twenty cents a day. The peasants

bought the whole baronial estate, including the castle, giving a

mortgage for the largest part of the purchase sum; but they are now the

owners of one of the finest estates in Hungary, and the mortgage drives

them to work as they have never worked before. This same impulse has

struck the district of Nyitra in which the land had almost gone out of

the peasants' hands, lost by the same causes, intemperance and

indolence.

In the last five years the change has been so great as to seem

marvellous. Usurers have been driven out of business and the peasant's

house has ceased to be a mud hut with a straw-thatched roof. In fact,

that type of building has been condemned by law, at the initiative of

returned immigrants.

The shopkeepers throughout the whole immigrant territory rejoice. Their

stock is increased by many varieties of goods; for the peasant now wants

the best there is in the market, often useless luxuries, to be sure;

but while he may spend his money "for that which is not meat," he wants

to spend, and that means effort, than which the Slavs as a race need

nothing more for their social and political salvation.

Their advance is strikingly illustrated by the following examples.

The B. Brothers of Vienna are manufacturers of neckties. On a recent

visit to their establishment I met some buyers from Hungary, one of

whom, when the salesman showed him the class of goods which he had been

in the habit of buying, highly coloured, stiff bows of cheap cotton,

said:

"We have no use for such stuff. This is the tie we want," and he pulled

out an American tie of rather fine quality and the latest pattern.

I had to promise the head of the firm of B. Brothers to put him in touch

with an American haberdasher's journal, so that he may keep himself

informed as to our styles.

Partly to test the influence of immigration in the remotest region of

Hungary and partly to satisfy my craving for a certain kind of candy, I

visited a little village hidden away in the Carpathians, where neither

steam nor electricity has yet obtruded itself. There in a certain store,

I bought my very first sweets, and although I have since tasted the

delicacies of many civilizations, the lingering flavour of that first

candy still seems the most delicious, and its taste has never left my

palate. It was hard, highly coloured and usually exposed to flies and

dust; but it was my first love, and my first pennies were sacrificed to

it; so I was eager to revel in its delights again.

I went to that village in the spirit of one who goes on a pilgrimage,

and as one seeks one's favourite shrine so did I seek that little store.

My palate's memory led me to the very door; but in front of it, forcing

itself upon my candy-hungry gaze, was a penny in the slot machine, out

of which, in response to two Hungarian Filers, came dropping a stick of

genuine American chewing-gum. It is needless to say that my primitive,

highly-coloured candy was no more. In its place were caramels and

buttercups very much like those I had left behind me in the United

States.

Now I do not mean to imply that chewing-gum and caramels have any social

or ethical bearing upon my subject; but they do prove that the old order

changes and that the new has been brought in by the immigrant. Still

within the sphere of the economic, yet having large ethical value, is

the fact that the returned immigrant brings gold, not only in his pocket

but in his teeth. I certainly never realized the far-reaching social and

ethical value of the dentist until I saw the contrast between the

returned immigrant, especially the contrast between his wife and

daughter and the women who had remained at home.

If it ever was true that coarse fare makes strong teeth, it certainly

has not been true during the period of my observations among the peasant

people of Europe.

Where I know the bread to be coarsest and the fare simplest, as for

instance in impoverished Montenegro, there the old, toothless hags are

most numerous, and even the mouths of the young are disfigured by

decaying teeth. This is especially true of the Alpine and Carpathian

regions, out of which many of the Slavic immigrants come; there, a woman

of forty is usually an old woman because she has no teeth. She is ugly

in consequence, and therefore neglected by her husband.

The immigrant woman has discovered that gold in the teeth renews one's

youth, that it preserves one's charms and is apt to keep lovers and

husbands more loyal. Mistresses in America know how readily these

foreign servants sacrifice their wages upon the dentist's altar.

Not only does dentistry keep the women young and their lovers faithful,

it keeps the men in good health, adds to their self-respect, and into

regions hitherto untouched by their beneficent influence, it has

introduced tooth-brushes and dentifrice.

If the returned immigrant can be easily recognized

[Illustration: Before he emigrated

When the Immigrant comes home.

A CONTRAST IN HOMES]

by his shoes and by gold in his teeth, his residence can be quickly

detected from the fact that day and night his isba is blessed by fresh

air; and perhaps more significant to the world's well-being than the

American economic doctrine of the "Open Door," is its physiological

doctrine of the open window.

Pastor Holubek, of Bosacz in Hungary, when I asked him what effect the

returned immigrant had upon his parish, said:

"A good effect. The returned immigrant is a new man. He carries himself

differently, he commands the respect of his fellows, he treats his wife

better and he keeps the windows of his isba open."

The last two facts are exceedingly important, and my observations bear

out his testimony. Wherever I saw an open window in the evening, I could

with perfect assurance open the door and say: "How do you do?" and I was

certain to be greeted by a still more emphatic and cordial, "How do you

do?"

For some inexplicable reason, Europeans of all classes are averse to air

in sleeping rooms, especially at night. Night air is supposed to hold

all sorts of evils, and even the medical profession, progressive as it

is, has not yet freed itself from this terrible superstition.

Frequently I have discovered in the returned immigrant a quickening of

the moral sense, especially among the men who had come in contact with

the better class of American mechanics; and the discovery was as welcome

as unexpected. I saw this emphasized during my trip last year. It was on

a Sunday's journey among the villages of the valley of the Waag.

Picturesque groups were moving along the highway to and from the church

and into the village and out of it. The appearance of my companions and

myself always created a great sensation and never a greater one than on

Sunday when the peasants were at leisure. They took it as a special

privilege to see "genuine Americans," and those who had been over here

were quickly on the scene to air their English and to show their

familiarity with our kind.

It was a reciprocal pleasure; for it seemed like a breath from home to

hear men talk intelligently of Hazleton, Pittsburg, Scranton and

Wilkes-Barre; moreover it gave us a splendid opportunity to test the

effect of our civilization upon them.

In one village a husband with his wife and two children came out of

their isba, and we could easily imagine ourselves at home; for the whole

family looked as if it had just come from a grand bargain sale at one of

our department stores. What seemed most delightful to us was the way in

which the man spoke of his wife, and no American husband could have been

more careful of her than was he; all this in striking contrast to the

peasants to whom the woman is still an inferior being.

In conversation with them, I took the returned immigrant as my subject

and told them something of our own social order as shown in the relation

of husband and wife in America; upon which one of the peasants told a

very ugly and realistic story to illustrate what he thought of women.

Then it was that the unexpected happened. My immigrant friend

blushed--yes, blushed--just as I should expect any well-bred man to

blush under similar circumstances, and said to me: "Don't mind him. He

has a dirty mouth. He may after all have a clean heart."

The man who blushed had been five years in--Pittsburg!

The change brought about through immigration, even in a youth of the

better class, whose character had been spoiled by his early training,

was shown in a young Magyar in Budapest. That city has the unenviable

reputation of being one of the most immoral cities in Europe. The

immorality of the great cities is everywhere very much alike in certain

respects; still it seems to me that a city is more or less immoral, not

according to the size of its tenderloin district, but in how far

immorality has been accepted as the norm of life. In that respect

Budapest is considerably in the lead; for its youth is nourished in an

atmosphere of indolence, false pride and various phases of social

impurity.

The family to which this particular young man belonged boasted three

sons of whom he is the oldest. He went the road which leads to

destruction, and he went with the full knowledge of his parents, for

both were going their own gait in the same direction.

Finally he was forced to run away because he had transgressed the law.

He landed in New York penniless and fortunately without friends. He

learned all the lessons which homesickness, hunger and cold could teach

him, and as there was no other way to escape them than by labour, this

youth, who never had worked, began driving a milk wagon and ultimately

graduated into a clerkship. When I saw him among his own people in

Budapest where he was visiting, he was so changed in his physique that

not even his closest friends recognized him. Although the law had been

appeased and by the death of his father he had the opportunity to

conduct the business bequeathed him, his awakened conscience rebelled

against the conditions around him and he was eager to return to America.

It was interesting to note that his friends found him unbearable,

declaring him no longer a gentleman because he worked with his hands and

was not ashamed of it; while the young ladies decided that he had been

spoiled by his sojourn in America because he was not eternally kissing

their hands and had forgotten how to make pretty and meaningless

compliments.

Of course one does not always receive favourable replies to one's

questions as to the effect of the returned immigrant upon his community.

Manufacturers who exploited his labour, large landowners to whom he was

no more than a serf, and priests, uneasy about the effect of the

contagion, are usually very critical; but these unfavourable replies are

only a proof that the leaven is at work.

I put the question to some guests at a confirmation feast. The priest

told me that the immigrants become Atheists and Salvationists. In his

mind there was not much difference between them. The judge told me that

they become immoral; which meant that they do not pay him sufficient

revenue. The host, a wealthy landowner, said that they become Socialists

and Anarchists; which meant that they demand higher wages and better

treatment. All agreed that emigration has been of large economic value.

So far as my observation goes, I feel certain that emigration has been

of inestimable economic and ethical value to the three great monarchies

chiefly concerned, namely: Italy, Austro-Hungary and Russia. It has

withdrawn inefficient labour and has returned some of it capable of more

and better work; it has lifted the status of the peasantry to a degree

which could not have been achieved even by a revolution; it has educated

the neglected masses, lifted them to a higher standard of living and has

implanted new and vital ideals.

That there are attendant evils, no one will question. There is much more

discontent than there ever has been, more haste and less leisure; there

is less respect for authority and for established institutions; certain

social evils have been accentuated; the newly acquired wealth has proved

disastrous to some, and family ties have been strained by the absence of

the heads of many households.

Nevertheless, an Hungarian statesman, who had risen from the ranks, said

to me: "America has been a blessing to us. Had Columbus not discovered

it, all Europe would still be in servitude, and had it not been

rediscovered by our peasants, they would not have had much chance to get

their necks from under the yoke.

"America is our leaven and will yet be our salvation."

I have watched the leaven at work, and in the succeeding chapters I have

recorded some concrete instances, which clearly show that "A little

leaven, leaveneth the whole lump."

V

OUR CRITICS

The third-class waiting-room in the Oderberg station, on the Northern

Railroad of Austria, is splendid vantage ground from which to watch the

racial and national conglomerate that forms the insecure structure

called the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

Here from her East and West, her North and South, one meets those great

social currents which stream from the mountains to the plains and from

the villages to the cities. Here, also, the tides of immigration come in

and go out, and by their volume one can judge the prosperity of the

United States, or at least the condition of our labour markets.

Here the "spick and span" German, from across the border, meets his less

vigorous and more "gemuethlich" cousin, the Austrian.

Here the Moravian and the Czech touch elbows and glory in their Slavic

speech--the age-long battle for the supremacy of their language being

one of the few points which they have won in this contentious monarchy.

This is also the meeting place of Southern and Western Slavs, and here

the fierce looking Bosnians carry, in their erstwhile weapon belts,

pins, pipes, jack-knives and razors, which they sell to their Slavic

brothers of the West; they even deign to speak in broken German to the

hated "Schwabs," when driving their bargains.

Glancing around the crowded waiting-room, one sees Ruthenians and

Wallachians, in picturesque garb, travelling from their impoverished

mountain homes to the upper Danubian plain. They are harvesters, and

their backs are bent under the weight of crude cooking utensils and

primitive harvest implements.

Close to this group are fiercely moustachioed Magyars, in their

semi-Oriental, loose, white linen trousers and heavy sheepskin coats.

They are going to take charge of the flocks of sheep on some lordly

estates; they know the ways of all four-footed animals, and are

considered faithful shepherds.

In one corner stand smoothly shaven, coarse featured Slovaks, in

clothing, home-made, from their felt boots to their felt hats; primitive

folk they are, seeking labour in the industrial cities along this busy

highway.

Of course, there are Jews from the East and the West; as far removed

from each other in culture and beliefs as those two points of the

compass, yet all swayed by the same mysterious force which at its best

turns their vision towards Jehovah, and at its worst towards Mammon.

They all are divided more or less by speech, blood and faith and are

united, only by the poverty which compels them to travel third-class on

the government's railways, whose low-zone tariff encourages the

migrations of its people; thus easily relieving economic distress in

some regions and providing labour where it is needed.

When the train comes, the conductor sorts this mixture of humanity

according to his prejudices or the seeming ability of the travellers to

reward him for rescuing them from this malodorous conglomerate, by

providing a less crowded compartment. As a rule, I am willing to be thus

rescued, but not this time; for there is one element in evidence which

makes the well-known mass of people more interesting than usual; namely,

the returning immigrant. "Where thou goest, I will go," even if it was

into the thick of bag and baggage carried on the backs of men and women,

through the narrow door, into an already over-crowded compartment where

windows were hermetically sealed and where the air was not only

stiflingly hot but full of mysterious odours, much unlike those of

"Araby the blest."

There seemed no limit to the capacity of the car or to the patience of

the passengers who were being pushed about like cattle; until the

conductor attempted to thrust in a woman of unusual size, who evidently

was acquainted with our ways and certain words of our language. She let

loose upon the official the vials of her wrath, her realistic Slavic

becoming fairly lurid, reënforced as it was by English words, which,

when used in America, make even printers gasp, when they must be

printed. Were it not that such words can be indicated only by dashes, it

would prove interesting to record them here, to show what changes they

undergo upon the lips of our apt pupils.

Puffing and panting, this colossal woman forced her way through the

crowded car, looking for a seat. I gave her my place, and as she

accepted it, she asked laconically, "'Merican man?" When I nodded

assent, the point of contact was made, we shook hands and said: "How do

you do?"

Like an electric current the greeting communicated itself from bench to

bench. A woman across the aisle caught the force of it and waved her

hand over the heads of the crowd as she cried: "How do you do?" She held

up a fretful boy of five, who raised his voice in lamentation; while she

said: "Behave yourself, kid; there's an American boss on the car." But

the boy, thoroughly American, would not be frightened by threats of

boss, police, or any other bugaboo. He pulled at her skirt, clutched her

expansive hat, nearly tearing it from its insecure moorings, then rolled

the window shade up and down, suddenly letting it go with a

spring--after which, all in one breath, he peremptorily demanded candy,

water, bananas, and that his mother make the reluctant "choo-choo cars"

go at once.

This woman's husband is a merchant in Wilmerding, Pa., and she, after

many years in America, was going home to visit her people, bringing this

hopeful youngster with her to disturb the "peace of Jerusalem."

"If he were my boy," growled the unfortunate man who sat on the same

bench with him, "I'd throw him out the window;" and the woman

apologetically said: "He is an American boy, and they are all like this.

You can't tame them. Whipping does no good."

"Well," the man muttered, under his fierce moustachio, "I am glad I am

not living in America."

A young Moravian woman, who, in America, had exchanged her peasant garb

and ruggedness for our more expensive dress and gentler ways,

corroborated the mother's statement. She had worked in American homes

and testified: "Children in America are all terrible. Nothing is sacred

to them; neither the kitchen nor the church. It's because they have so

few children; they spoil them."

"Yes," agreed a young Hungarian Jew; "in America, they have the one

child system, and many women do not have even one child. They are so

sterile. You should see how thin and flat-chested they are."

Then, in his realistic way, he described the physique of our women. He

was a great talker, that young Jew. Having been unsuccessful in New

York, he was returning home a cynic and a severe critic.

"Hm!" he continued; "the women of America are the boss. Just think of

it; you can't get a woman to black your boots. That is the reason so

many men get a divorce."

He knew all about the American woman's luxuries, and talked loudly and

long of silken petticoats, lace waists, and other sartorial mysteries;

for he had worked in a tailor's shop and was acquainted with all woman's

"doings."

"The American men are to blame!" exclaimed a man who was crowded close

to me. He had returned from America some time before, and was travelling

up and down the country, buying butter and eggs. He had caught a vision

of the American man and his business methods in Chicago, where he had

worked in a large packing-house, and in a modest way, he was applying

his knowledge.

"They work like niggers," he continued, "and let their women remain in

idleness, sitting all day long in rocking-chairs, rocking, rocking"--and

he imitated the motion--"and eating candy. Just think of it! They buy

candy by the pound!"

Evidently he was not imitating the example of American men in the

treatment of his wife who was with him, sharing the hardships of the

journeys from village to village. While he was speaking, she drew their

luncheon from her ample pockets: hard rye bread and Salami, a sausage as

hard as the bread.

"No, indeed!" He had not taken her to America. "That's where they spoil

the women."

His aspiration was to ultimately control the butter and egg business in

his region, and future historians may record his name as a "Captain of

Industry," with those of Armour and Swift. He knew a little of every

language spoken in the dual monarchy, and that, together with the fact

that he spoke some English, made him a most interesting travelling

companion. The greater part of the time he preached to the peasants the

gospel of business. "You poor rascals," he said; "you work in the fields

from sunrise to sunset, eat bread-soup, and not much else, three times a

day, and carry loads heavy enough to break your backs; while the Jews,

who do the business, live in fine houses, eat the best spring geese,

which you raise for them, and send their children to college. You ought

to go to America and see business. Even the little boys of rich people

sell newspapers and lemonade in front of their fathers' palaces. Go into

business and the Jews will have to go back to Jerusalem where they came

from."

The peasants all nodded their heads and said: "Tak ye, tak ye," it is

so, it is so; but one could see in their placid, half-stupid faces, that

if they ever have the spirit which ventures, they must first go to

America.

The corpulent woman who had accepted my seat knew something about the

lot of her kind in America, and, having by this time recovered her

breath, she very emphatically gave the butter and egg man her views on

the subject.

"You say that women don't work in America, and that they are spoiled? I

just come from there; I have been there fourteen years, in McKeesport,

Pa. I have kept boarders ever since I went there, and I haven't had time

to sit in a rocking-chair, and my husband never bought me any candy.

It's true, you can't beat us women there as you can over here. Soon

after we went there, my husband beat me when he was drunk. I took it as

patiently as I did here, and he beat me again and I didn't say anything;

although I carried a black eye for a week. Then the young woman who

takes the money at the grocery store asked me how I hurt myself. I said

I didn't hurt myself, my husband did it. Then that young girl, as thin

as a rail and as meek-looking as a swallow, said: 'You tell me the next

time he hits you.'

"It wasn't long before he beat me again, and I told her and the police

came and took him by the neck and put him in the lock-up, and it cost

me twenty-five dollars to get him out. I earned that money myself and it

was no punishment to him. I told the young woman about it, and she said:

'The next time he hits you, you hit back.' I said: 'Is it allowed?' She

laughed, and said: 'If he hits you first and you kill him, nothing will

happen to you.' It wasn't long until he came home drunk and beat me

again and I gave him one with the rolling-pin and he fell, and as he was

lying there I got so angry I gave him another and another, and after

that he knew better than to beat me."

This Slavic Deborah told her story graphically and dramatically, and,

undoubtedly, her husband was not the first immigrant to learn that

marriage on the European plan is one thing, and on the American plan,

quite another matter.

"Yes," said the young Moravian woman. "When I get married, I'll get an

American husband. They don't expect a dowry, and they don't make you

work like a slave."

"In a year he'll get divorced," the young Hungarian Jew broke in. "They

do that quickly."

"And what of it?" she retorted. "I'll be still better off. He'll have to

pay me."

I do not know exactly at what point of the conversation I began to sing

the praises of the American man; his loyalty and his sense of

justice--if there is one thing that I enjoy more than singing the

praise of the American woman it is lauding the American man.

Hardly had I begun to speak, when a young Roumanian, whom I had not

previously noticed, commenced to rail at me, telling me in a mixture of

three languages to keep my mouth shut; for he knew better. From the time

he landed in New York until he left the country, he had not met a man

who did not take advantage of him or ill-treat him. In Chicago, he was

lured from the Union Station to a saloon on Canal Street, and, when he

came to himself, he was lying in an alley, penniless. He found his way

to Montana, where he herded sheep. There he tasted something of

loneliness and homesickness, seeing nothing for weeks but red hills and

blue sky--not a living thing except his sheep, or wolves to drive away.

Then one day came American men on ponies and killed every one of his

sheep, hundreds and hundreds of them, knocked him down and threatened to

riddle him with bullets if he did not turn his face towards the East and

march on without looking back. Days and days he walked, and because his

face was of a darker hue than others, and his clothes looked strange,

"No man gave unto him." He then worked in the mines of Colorado. "The

men there," he said, "shoot, drink, and gamble, and have about as much

regard for human life as for the life of sheep, and as soon as I had

money enough I made ready to go home." No more America for him, and no

praise for its men.

"That's not so, Brother," came a voice from the farther end of the car,

and I turned to see this valiant champion of ours. Had I been asked to

give the place of his nativity, I should have put it in that Middle West

of ours, which takes from her children all surplus flesh and puts in its

place bone and sinew. His complexion was sallow, and the general

expression of his face betokened sensitiveness, bordering on the

abnormal. "I have been in America twenty years, and those years in

Chicago, and I have met many good men. The good men don't shoot and

drink and gamble."

It seemed strange language to my travelling companions; but to me it

sounded familiar.

After the Chicago man had delivered his exordium, I had no difficulty in

getting his story from him, and then I knew "whence this man had this

doctrine." Emigrating in his young manhood to Chicago, he had come in

touch with Methodist missionaries, who befriended him and saved him from

a life of intemperance and infidelity. Unfortunately, his awakened,

religion-hungry soul became confused by the shibboleths of contending

sects; he travelled and travailed all the way, from striving after a

"Second Blessing," to "Soul Sleepers," "Seventh Day Adventists," and

Dowie's religious movement, which at times looked like Opera Bouffe,

but which ended in a great tragedy. I did not discover what form of

faith was now holding the allegiance of his spirit; but as he told me

that it was neither a church nor a sect, I surmised that he belonged to

some church or sect whose chief doctrine is that it is neither.

Evidently the Spirit was upon him, some spirit at least; for he told me

that he had been sent to Hungary to convert his brethren. Knowing how

much the region from which he came needed some moral and religious

quickening, I timidly offered him my hand and my good wishes; but he

declined both. He "must not lean on the arm of flesh; so the Bible

says." The odour of tobacco offended his sensitive nostrils, and,

turning to the butter and egg man, who was the chief offender, he

pointed to his pipe, saying: "Throw that devilish thing away!" But a

Slav and his pipe are not so soon parted, and the butter and egg man

held firmly to his; although he smiled, not wishing to offend this

prophet in Israel. Then the luckless man pulled his whiskey bottle out

of his pocket and offered it to the ex-Dowieite, who took it, lifted it

high in air, and made an eloquent temperance address, after which he

threw the bottle out the window.

If, as a drowning man, he had refused a life-preserver, or had thrown

diamonds into the sea, his Slavic brothers would not have thought him

more reckless or insane. Palenka, as they call it, gives strength. Black

bread and palenka have kept the hard-working Slav alive, have given him

courage and cheer, and this crazy man had thrown the precious stuff

away!

Yet he was so righteously indignant, so wrought up over his heroic task,

that the peasants who had risen to remonstrate with him or to attack

him, sank back into their seats; while over them all came a solemn

silence, broken only by the grinding and jolting of the flat car-wheels.

This was the psychological moment for the prophet to declare his mission

and preach to us all, and he did. It was a fervent message; one in which

much truth and falsehood mingled, and if Dowie's spirit hovered near,

his satisfaction at hearing one of his disciples speak of the things for

which he fought and on which he throve, would have been marred only by

the fact that, for once at least, "Elijah the Second" was outdone. All

the Dowie vernacular, translated into the realistic Slavic, was let

loose by this apostle. Now it was the voice of some Old Testament

prophet which spoke; and again it was as if a John pleaded for love's

sake. Then came a jumble of words and bitter invective, which, by

comparison, caused the imprecatory Psalms to seem like the thirteenth

chapter of First Corinthians.

No sooner had the preacher resumed his seat than the spell he had woven

about his auditors was broken. The butter and egg man rose and demanded

to be reimbursed for his wasted palenka, concluding his remarks by

asserting that in America good people do drink whiskey, that everybody

drinks, and that "they make you drink whether you want to or not."

"Tak ye," so it is, said a young man, who, as far as his clothing was

concerned, might have just stepped out of an American Jockey Club. His

voice was guttural and every sentence was punctuated by oaths.

"My father keeps a saloon in Hazleton, and the policemen and aldermen

come there and drink, and at election time the burgess comes and 'sets

'em up' for everybody."

While he spoke, he jingled the money in his pockets and kept his

audience much interested by telling about his betting on horse-races,

the intricacies of the game of poker, how much money his father made on

liquor and what a high and mighty position was that of a saloon-keeper

in Hazleton. He was going to Galicia to visit his grandparents, and he

meant to show the slow town of Przemysl what it means to have a "hot

time."

At Hodonin, in Moravia, I had to leave the train; so I bade good-bye to

the interesting company.

The woman from McKeesport said, as we shook hands, "America all right,

and you bet I'm going back just as soon as I have seen to my property."

With a contemptuous glance at the young Jew, the Moravian girl said:

"Right she is! There's nothing the matter with America, and when I go

back, I bet you I'll get an American husband!"

"Oh, yes! Of course. They are lying on the shelf waiting for you!"

sneered the object of her contempt.

The sport tried to be kind in his good-bye words; but he used so many

oaths that he became repulsive. When I remonstrated, he said:

"In America, everybody swear--no make trouble to say: good-morning

your--Highness. See a man--slap him on shoulder and say:

Hello--John--you--how dy? So long, then, you--old man, good-bye."

The butter and egg man gripped my hand mightily, and as a parting word

gave me this injunction. "Don't let your old woman boss you;" then,

glancing at our prophet, he added: "He little not all right."

The Roumanian shepherd looked out the window and made no effort to take

my proffered hand. His sallow face was drawn by pain, caused by

something I dimly divined.

We were at the station, a station famous for a certain kind of sausage,

whose odorous steam soon filled our nostrils. Taking several portions

from the tray which a waiter held towards me, I gave them to the

Roumanian peasant. Like a wild beast he fell upon the food, while into

his pain-drawn face came a ray of human joy.

The prophet had difficulty in making up his mind about me. Reluctantly

he stretched out his hand as I was leaving the car. When I grasped it,

he querulously asked: "Have you received the Blessing?" and with great

assurance I answered: "You bet."

VI

THE DOCTOR OF THE KOPANICZE

The last people to feel the sweep of the tide which carried them to the

United States and back again were the mountain folk in Eastern Europe.

The Slav is naturally a plainsman, and even in the lowlands, where he

could not very well escape the force of world currents, he resisted them

as long as possible, content to follow his plough for a meagre wage.

When at last the lure of the gold grew too strong for him to withstand

its seductive beckoning, he went first from the great highways along the

main branches of railroads, and from villages on the shores of rivers;

until the ever-rising tide, with all its volume and all its good or ill,

reached the mountains.

Where in straggling villages in the Carpathians the little mud-huts are

detached, and scattered on top of the foothills in the midst of their

stony fields, these form a Kopanicze; the individual hut is called a

Kopanicza, and the inhabitants are called Kopaniczari.

They are the poor mountain folk, isolated from church and school, far

from the highways of travel, and are among the most backward, most

primitive, and most neglected of the Slovak people. Their isolation has

often bred not only ignorance but sometimes lawlessness, and, even now,

he who has no pressing business there, avoids these settlements.

Meeting a Kopaniczar on a lonely highway gives one a queer, creepy

sensation. He is a raw-boned, clumsy creature, his body wrapped in a

sheepskin coat, his head covered by a broad, felt hat, soaked in grease,

his feet encased in woolen boots; all his garments of the most primitive

home manufacture. He looks more ferocious than he is; for unless heavily

under the influence of alcohol, which does not easily affect him, he is

a good-natured human being. His superstition and his ignorance, however,

coupled with his intemperance, make him often dangerous, as is seen by

the following incident which took place last year.

A great many fires of incendiary origin occurred in one of the

settlements, and as no satisfactory clue to the perpetrator was found,

they were supposed to be the work of evil spirits. Fire in one of these

settlements is especially disastrous; for as the huts are built of

exceedingly inflammable material, everything is consumed. Such a house

usually includes in its primitive possessions a horse or a cow, and when

these are destroyed, it spells utter ruin.

One day a tourist came into this Kopanicze, the first of his kind who

had ever ventured into that isolated region. Being a tourist, he

naturally carried a camera, and as he levelled it upon the buildings,

the peasants, conceiving the insane idea that he was marking their huts

for destruction, ran out and beat him to death.

A boyhood friend of mine was appointed district physician in the upper

Trenczin district, the most poverty stricken in Hungary, largely

populated by these Kopaniczari. He was a Jew without powerful

protection, and one way of getting rid of surplus Jewish physicians was

to put them in charge of one of these regions, in which they were sure

to be out of the way of some Gentile aspirant for a large and lucrative

medical practice.

My friend had travelled the usual long and thorny road which a poor boy

has to travel in striving after a university education. His parents, who

were poor, laboured and begged and borrowed; while he tutored and

borrowed and begged; yet he found himself still within two years of a

diploma when his parents died.

Then he did the not uncommon thing; consulted a marriage broker, who

found a marriageable maiden with a dowry, and parents willing to advance

a portion of it; so that the young man could finish his education before

he led the daughter to the altar.

In Hungary, a doctor's diploma is a splendid asset in the marriage

business, and had my friend been able to wait until he really had his,

he could have commanded twice as much dowry and a handsomer maiden.

Being poor, he shared the lot of all those unfortunates who have to make

purchases on the instalment plan, be they plush albums, life insurance,

or wives.

In spite of the materialistic way in which my doctor went about getting

a bride, he was an idealist; and, consequently, doomed to have a hard

time in this exceedingly practical world. When after his marriage he was

sent to the Trenczin district, he found that the Kopanicze had as much

use for a doctor as it had for a professor of psychology. Not that the

people were never ill; on the contrary, infants born in the wretched

huts, unless remarkably well prepared for the stifling air they had to

breathe, for the hard rye bread soaked in alcohol, which often they had

to eat, and for the poppy seed concoction which they were given to keep

them quiet while their mothers were working in the fields--such infants,

and there were many--went back into the unknown soon after they came out

of it.

If they lingered, if any one lingered, before death overtook him, the

witch was the first aid brought into requisition. To cure infantile

convulsions, she would lay the baby on the threshold and cause a female

dog to jump over it three times. A specific against typhoid fever was a

vile compound made of the heart of a black cat, juniper berries, and

alcohol; while if a child had eaten poisoned mushrooms, it was hit over

the head until it either died or recovered.

Strange to say, and yet not strange, a fair proportion of robust

infants, as well as hardened adults, survived such treatment, and even

to this day there is a witch not far from the city of Vag Ujhely, who

has some degree of national fame for her healing art.

If the witch failed to cure, the priest was sent for and the proper

saints invoked for the healing. If the priest's prayers failed to

help--"What's the use of sending for the doctor?" The undertaker was

notified, and the grave-digger did the rest.

Unselfishly my friend tried to save these people. He preached the gospel

of fresh air, and in passing through one of the settlements with him,

some five years ago, I saw him break window after window (they were not

made to open) that fresh air might at least once enter the wretched

living-rooms. The result was a riot, and that night all his windows were

broken; so that for once he had more air than he desired.

There was consumption in one settlement, and he provided sanitary

cuspidors, proscribed by law; but he saw them used for culinary purposes

instead!

Vainly, he lifted his voice against the use of alcohol; he had the

innkeepers and the State against him. The State prefers to see its

people rot from poison rather than lose its revenue.

In spite of all he did, he was regarded as the enemy of the community

and not its friend; so having meddled much in business which was not

his, he could not expect a promotion, and none came.

Five years ago he had accepted poverty, neglect, and the enmity of his

neighbours as his lot in life. He had sunk into such a hopeless attitude

that neither in dress nor in habits of living could one easily

distinguish him from his ignorant neighbours. His wife was more

disappointed than he was. Had she bestowed upon him such a dowry to live

in the Kopanicze? She had expected to be the "Highborn Mrs. Dr. M----"

and taste something of the forbidden fruits of Gentile society.

Ordinarily, the physician breaks through the cast of race and faith; but

here she was, despised even by the Kopaniczari, the lowliest of the

lowly.

I left the doctor after that last visit, vowing never to see him again;

for it was an uncomfortable experience, if not a painful one.

My studies last year carried me into this very region. Since I had left

it, hundreds of men and women had gone to America and a large number had

returned home. Here, indeed, was the proper field for observation, and

the man to help me most, was my boyhood's friend.

With difficulty I found his home; for it was new, the doctor's wife was

resplendent in fine clothing, and the doctor's office, once full of dust

and cobwebs, contained new cases with new surgical instruments, and,

wonder of wonders! a dentist's machine. I had to wait for the return of

the doctor, who was visiting a patient, and had time to catch my breath;

for having come a great distance by wheel and then finding such a

surprise, proved quite overwhelming.

"What has happened here?" I asked him when he returned.