The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow
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Title: The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow
Author: Edward Alfred Steiner
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THE IMMIGRANT TIDE
ITS EBB AND FLOW
EDWARD A. STEINER'S
Studies of Immigration
_The Broken Wall_
Stories of the Mingling Folk. Illustrated net $1.00
"A big heart and a sense of humor go a long way toward making a
good book. Dr. Edward A. Steiner has both these qualifications and
a knowledge of immigrant's traits and character."--_Outlook._
_Against the Current_
Simple Chapters from a Complex Life. 12mo, cloth, net $1.25
"As frank a bit of autobiography as has been published for many a
year. The author has for a long time made a close study of the
problems of immigration, and makes a strong appeal to the
reader."--_The Living Age._
_The Immigrant Tide--Its Ebb and Flow_ Illustrated, 8vo, cloth, net
$1.50
"May justly be called an epic of present day immigration, and is a
revelation that should set our country thinking."--_Los Angeles
Times._
_On the Trail of the Immigrant_
7th Edition. Illustrated, 12mo, cloth, net $1.50
"Deals with the character, temperaments, racial traits, aspirations
and capabilities of the immigrant himself. Cannot fail to afford
excellent material for the use of students of immigrant
problems."--_Outlook._
_The Mediator_
A Tale of the Old World and the New. Illustrated, 12mo, cloth, net $1.25
"A graphic story, splendidly told."--ROBERT WATCHORN, _Former
Commissioner of Immigration_.
_Tolstoy, the Man and His Message_
A Biographical Interpretation
_Revised and enlarged._ Illustrated, 12mo, cloth, net $1.50
[Illustration: A CZAR IN EMBRYO
Southern Slavic chief, who exchanged his symbols of authority for pick
and shovel at "Guinea Hill."]
THE
IMMIGRANT TIDE
ITS EBB AND FLOW
EDWARD A. STEINER
_Professor in Grinnell College, Iowa_
_Author of "On the Trail of the Immigrant," etc._
_ILLUSTRATED_
[Illustration: colophon]
NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO
Fleming H. Revell Company
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
Copyright, 1909, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 125 No. Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
_To
Mr. and Mrs. Bayard Henry,
Americans:
In whom blend all the nobler
strains which made the past
illustrious, and who are
awake to the peril and the
opportunities of the hour,
This book is
cordially inscribed_
PREFACE
"Put your hand on this cable," the captain said; and a dozen hands
grasped it before it sank back into the sea. Our fingers felt no thrill
or shock, for we had touched only the incasing insulation. Then the
captain told its length, stretching along the ocean's depths, its weight
and cost; but the figures falling upon our ears roused no emotions; for
they gave no idea of the cable's value to society.
On shore we were taken into a dark chamber and there saw flashes of
light, which lived but a moment; yet each spark was a letter, holding
some hidden meaning, revealing some vital truth. Here the imagination
was stirred and the mighty significance of the cable comprehended.
There are two ways in which to reveal the import of those vital
connections between the continents, as established by the immigration of
European peoples to America. One way is to record its volume, measure
its fluctuations, classify the different groups and statistically
determine the value of this movement to them; to trace the effect upon
its sources and its significance to the country which receives them.
The state of New York and the government of the United States, through
their Immigrant Commissions, have attempted to do this from the
statistical standpoint with material gathered by observers, more or less
skilled. The difficulties involved in this method are very great,
especially if the result is to furnish a test of the desirability of one
race or nationality over another, or determine its value to our
civilization. A race may be homogeneous in its historical or racial
consciousness, but heterogeneous in its cultural development. This is
true of the Slavs, the Latins and the Semitic peoples who make up the
bulk of our immigrant population.
Not only is there a number of well defined racial groups, but each group
needs to be sub-divided, and those subdivisions in turn have many
divisions; for every mountainside has its own traditions and each valley
holds different ideals. For instance: I know of one Slav village in
Hungary in which illegitimacy is unknown; yet within two or three miles
there is a village in which it is the rule rather than the exception. I
know some villages in the Carpathians, so remote from civilization that
the inhabitants have not yet learned how to make bread with yeast, and I
know other villages in the same locality in which are culinary artists
who make a cake having national fame.
A man may be a Polish peasant and be a semi-barbarian or he may be on
the same cultural level as the German "bauer" at his best.
The statistical method is of value; but it must be exceedingly
painstaking, and even then I doubt that it can serve in all cases the
purpose for which it is intended.
I have therefore chosen the second, the interpretative method. It sees
the sparks in the dark room, it interprets the flying flame and feels
the influences on both sides of the sea. It crosses and recrosses the
ocean with these human cables which bind together the continents; it
listens to their stories and records them, hesitatingly draws
conclusions and undogmatically tries to teach some lessons.
In the first part of my book I have tried to show the influences of the
returned immigrant upon his peasant home and his social and national
life. In the second part I interpret the relation of various races to
our institutions, their attitude towards them and their influence upon
them.
In all I have told, I have aspired to be an interpreter and not an
enumerator; a mediator and not a critic; I have desired to create
contacts and not divisions; to disarm prejudice and not give it new
weapons.
In this book, as in all the others I have written, I am indebted to my
wife; not only for doing all the tedious tasks such work involves, but
also for inspiration and the creation of an atmosphere in which I could
write in superlative terms of American ideals.
I wish to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors of the _Outlook_ and
the _Review of Reviews_ in permitting me to reprint portions of this
book.
I heartily thank the Y. M. C. A. of Pennsylvania and Mr. E. B. Buckalew,
its efficient State Secretary, for the opportunity to gather material in
that state and in Europe; the young men who made up the Pennsylvania
Expedition for the Study of Immigration, who were helpful, joyous
comrades, and the trustees of Grinnell College, Iowa, for a generous
leave of absence.
E. A. S.
_Grinnell, Iowa,
August, 1909._
CONTENTS
PART I
WITH THE OUTGOING TIDE
I. "THEY THAT GO OUT IN SHIPS" 15
II. THE PRICE THEY PAY 34
III. A MURDERER, MARY AND AN HONORARY DEGREE 46
IV. REFLEX INFLUENCES 62
V. OUR CRITICS 77
VI. THE DOCTOR OF THE KOPANICZE 93
VII. "MOSCHELE AMERIKANSKY" 102
VIII. "NOCH IST POLEN NICHT VERLOREN" 112
IX. THE DISCIPLES IN THE CARPATHIANS 124
X. THE GUSLAR OF RAGUSA 138
XI. WHERE THE ANGEL DROPPED THE STONES 152
XII. "THE HOLE FROM WHICH YE WERE DIGGED" 165
PART II
WITH THE INCOMING TIDE
XIII. PROBLEMS OF THE TIDE 185
XIV. THE SLAV IN THE IMMIGRANT PROBLEM 203
XV. THE SLAV IN HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY 215
XVI. FROM EPHRATA TO WHISKEY HILL 227
XVII. FROM THE LOVCZIN TO GUINEA HILL 242
XVIII. THE JEW AND THE CHRISTIAN 259
XIX. THE JEW IN THE IMMIGRANT PROBLEM 276
XX. FROM FIFTH AVENUE TO THE GHETTO 290
XXI. FROM LAKE SKUTARI TO LAKE CHAUTAUQUA 300
XXII. THE PROTESTANT CHURCH AND THE IMMIGRANT 311
XXIII. TWENTY-FIVE YEARS WITH THE NEW IMMIGRANT 329
XXIV. FROM CHAOS TO COSMOS 348
APPENDIX I (Classification of the New Immigrant Groups) 359
APPENDIX II (Net Immigration to the United States 1899-1908) 362
APPENDIX III (Industrial Depression and Immigration) 364
APPENDIX IV (Suggested Changes in Immigration Laws) 366
INDEX 368
ILLUSTRATIONS
_Facing page_
A CZAR IN EMBRYO _Title_
DIRTY MARY DURING THE PERIOD OF TRANSITION 50
TRIEST 62
A CONTRAST IN HOMES 71
THE MARKET SQUARE IN CRACOW 112
AT THE FOOT OF THE TATRA MOUNTAINS 135
COAST OF DALMATIA 138
WHERE THE ANGEL DROPPED THE STONES AND NOW DROPS DOLLARS 158
TWO TYPES OF POLES 207
RUTHENIANS 224
THE SLAVIC HOME IN HUNGARY 236
THE SLAVIC HOME ON WHISKEY HILL 236
A JEW OF THE POORER TYPE 276
A JEW OF THE FINER TYPE 276
ALBANIANS 300
FACULTY AND AMERICAN STUDENTS AT MISSIONS-HAUS, KATTOWITZ 318
SLAVIC WOMEN 352
GENERAL AND MRS. RICIOTTO GARIBALDI AT THE
FOOT OF HIS FATHER'S MONUMENT IN ROME 356
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.
"One thing at a time," he replied. "First let's have some refreshments;"
and as we drank the delicious raspberry soda which he prepared, he said:
"If I wished to tell you in one word what has happened, I could do it by
saying: Emigration.
"It seemed almost a miracle to see the first people leaving the
Kopanicze; for neither they nor their ancestors had moved away since the
great persecution in the sixteenth century brought them here from
Bohemia.
"The letters they wrote, and which I had to read to their neighbours,
contained such glowing accounts of America that others went, until
nobody was left but the women, the children, the aged, the witch, and
ourselves. We were at the point of starvation when the first money came
from America, and with it nearly every husband, who sent it, wrote: 'If
there is anything the matter with the children, send for the doctor.'
"My first case was a scarlet fever patient. The child recovered; but the
contagion had spread. The mother whose child I had saved told everybody
that the witch with her machinations made no impression upon the fever;
while the medicine helped. I was called to other cases. In most homes I
am sure that after I left the witch was called also; but I did not care
so long as the children were given my medicine.
"Soon I was called to other villages, and as the money kept coming from
America, and the peasants gained confidence in me, my services were
greatly in demand.
"Our old house, which nearly caved in over our heads, was replaced by
this one. I still owe money on it, but I am sure I can pay the rest in a
year."
"What use do you make of this?" I asked, pointing to the well-known
object found in every dentist's office in America.
"Since the men have come back," he replied, "filled teeth have become as
fashionable as red waistcoats used to be, and I have had to learn
dentistry. And there is more money in filling teeth," he added with a
shrewd smile, "than in giving pills.
"What do I think of the effect of emigration on the Kopanicze? It has
driven out the witch, it has awakened a community which had slept for
many centuries, it has done for these people in the twentieth century
what the Reformation did in the sixteenth. And as for us, it has saved
us from starvation."
As I was about to go, I heard a peasant girl in the hall say: "I kiss
your hand, Most Highborn Mrs. Dr. M----. Is the Most Mighty and
Honourable Mr. Dr. M---- at home?" And the "Most Highborn Mrs. Dr.
M----" answered triumphantly, that the Most Mighty and Honourable Mr.
Dr. M---- was at home, but busy. A gentleman from America had come to
consult him about his health; and I am sure that at that moment the
"Most Highborn Mrs. Dr. M----" felt that her dowry had been well
invested and that it was coming back with interest, through emigration
to America.
VII
"MOSCHELE AMERIKANSKY"
The Hungarian town inhabited by Magyars, does not materially differ from
the villages in which so many varieties and subjects of other races
live. Such a town is merely a larger village, and, instead of one broad
street flanked by straw thatched huts, there are at least four streets
which terminate on the "square," around which the dignitaries have built
their more pretentious dwellings. Here also are the stores, usually kept
by Jews, who are not indifferent to the economic movements of the people
whose purveyors they are.
Twenty years ago, before emigration from the district of Nyitra had
begun, the principal town in that district boasted but half a dozen
stores so called, the largest and best of which could be discovered only
by its tiny show-window, where, crowded in dire confusion, were a few
articles of general merchandise. During all the years of my comings and
goings I could never see any change in the articles displayed, nor even
by a wild flight of imagination see any indication that a duster had
lost its way among them.
It is not, however, of this store that I wish to tell, in spite of the
fact that it now has a double show-window, and contains, among many
other new things, a genuine American cash register.
The "Amerikansky Schtore" was once the meanest and smallest among all
the stores of that village. No front door led into it, no show-window
betrayed its existence, and certainly no sign-board gave a hint of what
could be purchased within. It was then owned by "Uncle Isaac," as every
one called him. He made a living out of the store; but his life came out
of the Talmud, and of course both were scanty.
Uncle Isaac's father, Reb Ephraim, studied the Talmud, and his sainted
grandfather, Reb Isaac, after whom he was named, left such a holy savour
behind him that to this day his name is reverently uttered in prayer, as
one who is surely near to God and can intercede for the children of this
generation who study less Talmud and do more business.
Uncle Isaac's forefathers, "God knows how far back," kept this same
store in the same way; for like the ring in Lessing's fable it was to be
left to the son who knew most about the Talmud, and, as a consequence,
least about the business. The Talmud had to be studied, the store ran
itself. Not that there was anything automatic about it in those days;
but Uncle Isaac, true to the traditions of his forefathers, sold only
those things which his forefathers had sold before him, namely; red
earthen pots and big green bowls which he bought from the same family in
the same town where the same peasant potteries flourished, from which
his forefathers had bought their supplies of these same red pots and
green bowls.
If a customer came to the store while the children were little and his
wife was busy caring for them (for Uncle Isaac was blessed according to
the promise made to Abraham) he had to wait until Uncle Isaac
disentangled himself from the mazes of the Talmud. Then almost
reluctantly he sold the pot or bowl, scarcely ever exchanging a word
with his customer, who was usually a peasant, and of course a Gentile
whose presence disturbed the pious atmosphere into which Uncle Isaac had
wrapped himself.
If any of the townspeople came, he was more friendly; he had to be, and
as was often the case in later days if they asked why he didn't sell
cups and saucers and wash-bowls, he would invariably shrug his shoulders
as his blessed forefathers had shrugged their shoulders before him. This
shrug was eloquent, and meant many things; but, above all, it meant:
"Have I not bother enough to remember what Rasche's (a celebrated Jewish
commentator) comment upon Rambam's (the abbreviation of another
commentator's name) comment was? How can you expect me to give my time
to such things as buying and selling wash-bowls and cups and saucers?"
His children, three boys and three girls, were nurtured in this
atmosphere. The sons began studying the Talmud when they were five years
of age, and the daughters were initiated into the mysteries of the
Kosher household before that age.
As the children grew, Uncle Isaac withdrew almost entirely from business
and gave himself more and more to the study of the holy books. The
oldest son, named after the sainted grandfather, went to Pressburg to
study for the Rabbinate, living from the charity of the faithful, by
whom the support of a pious youth is considered a great privilege.
The next son married into a rich but not pious family to whom his sacred
learning was a very welcome asset. This left the business, such as it
was, upon the shoulders of the youngest son, Moschele.
Moschele inherited less of his pious forefathers' piety and much more of
some remote ancestor's business talents, and one day he came home from a
distant market bringing with him a dozen cups and saucers and a
wash-bowl and pitcher.
Had he brought home idols made of clay he could not have hurt his father
more, and the whole town soon knew that Moschele--young Moschele whose
eyes had already rested lovingly upon the blushing faces of young
maidens--had received a beating from his father, who, in his fury, had
broken the cups and saucers, throwing the fragments at the poor,
defenseless head of the culprit. Uncle Isaac's temper was equalled only
by his piety, and the old man was beside himself.
Moschele was in the same mood, and decided to leave his old father with
his red pots and green bowls and dry Talmud. I visited Uncle Isaac's
store many a time after this event. It was less a store than ever. The
house itself was sinking into the surrounding mire, the thatched roof
was falling in on one side and sliding off on the other.
"Where is Moschele?" I asked him on one of these visits. He lifted his
weary head from the Talmud, and extricated from a pile of ancient
manuscripts an envelope printed all over with English letters, which
announced the business of Jake Greenbaum who kept the "finest General
Department Store on Avenue B." in New York. The letter in the envelope
told of Moschele's employment in the great city, and of his life there.
"Moschele, my Moschele, is in America!" And the tears began to gather in
the old man's eyes as he spoke.
"Who knows whether he eats Kosher, and whether he wears the sacred
fringes upon his breast? How I wish I could see him before I go hence!"
I promised to visit Moschele upon my return to America, and the old
man's face beamed.
"Would you mind finding out whether he eats Kosher, and whether he
wears the sacred fringes?"
I promised even that; but I did not find Moschele on Avenue B. He was up
town, on the West Side, in one of the larger department stores, where he
had entire charge of the crockery department. When I told him that I had
seen his father, he plied me with questions. I told him the condition of
affairs and urged him to return home to save his parents from utter
poverty. He promised to go if his father would attend to the Talmud and
let him attend to the business. I did not ask him if he wore the fringes
and ate Kosher, I did not need to; for we lunched together and ham
sandwich was the "pièce de résistance."
Some eight years later, my journey took me once more through Uncle
Isaac's town. The rapid changes taking place in America seemed as
nothing compared with those which I saw in this little spot in the
Carpathians. There was actually a sidewalk, a cement sidewalk, the
cement furnished by Moschele.
The old wooden pump upon which generations had expended their surplus
strength and patience to coax up the water, had given place to an air
pressure pump, sold to the town by Moschele.
In the old days, three coal-oil lamps furnished light for the miry
street (when there was no moon), and now the town had an artificial gas
plant, placed there and partly owned by Moschele. Even as in Florence,
this or that or the other is by Michael Angelo; so in this far-away
town, generations to come will remember that Moschele ushered in a new
era, if not of art, at least of civilization.
It was well worth a trip across the ocean to have looked upon Moschele
and Moschele's store. First of all was the sign in big letters,
"Amerikansky Schtore"; then the outer wall of a new building, covered by
huge illustrations of the various things sold therein--a method of
advertising made necessary because many of the peasants cannot read.
The store itself was full of all sorts of crockery and tin and
graniteware, such as had never been seen there before. And oh! the
wonder of it! Moschele had already sold one bath-tub, and carried four
patterns in stock. "I have not seen such faith, no not in Israel." He
also sold building materials, and the yard was full of everything which
could not be crowded into the store. That which especially marked the
business as American, was the fact that one price was charged to all.
Uncle Isaac had withdrawn from the world and mourned the departure of
the good old days. I found him sitting in a well-lighted, well-furnished
room, clothed in finest broadcloth; for it was the Sabbath. Everything
around him was new except the Talmud.
Was he happy? No, indeed!
"Where can a thing like this lead? Only to destruction!
"Who ever heard of such a thing as this before? Moschele rests neither
by day nor by night; he prints bills and scatters them as if money were
paper; he sleeps with an open window even in the winter, as if he wanted
to heat all outdoors, and he has even travelled on the Sabbath!"
Then the old man broke down, hid his face in the Talmud, and wept. I
think I comforted him; at least I tried to, and as I left him he
breathed a prayer for his venturesome son who had deserted the Talmud,
and the red pots and green bowls; who certainly was no longer in peril
of poverty, but in peril of his soul.
One more year passed and in visiting this town, I immediately turned my
steps towards the "Amerikansky Schtore." I found its doors closed, and
from within came sounds of bitter wailing and lamentation. I did not
need to be told that the death angel had made his sorrow-bringing
visitation, and my heart grew tender as I thought of the dear old man
who would no more bend over the Talmud and mourn the departure of the
good old times.
A Jewish house of mourning is sadder than can be described. Its
atmosphere chills one to the bone, such an air of resigned hopelessness
pervades everything. All is sackcloth and ashes; no sign of hope is
visible and but little of it lies in the hearts of the mourners.
Entering the room, where the family sat upon the ground lamenting its
dead, how great was my amazement to find that Uncle Isaac, instead of
being the one mourned for, was the centre of the group of mourners;
while the one missing was Moschele, the pillar of the household, the
founder of the "Amerikansky Schtore."
The old man stretched out both hands to me in mute welcome, and when I
sat down beside him he told me the sad story which I shall try to give
in his own words.
"Moschele is dead! What a blow! What a blow! I expected something
terrible! I knew this couldn't go on! He grew bolder and bolder, and
richer and richer. Have you seen the new store? In all Hungary there is
nothing like it. He was a genius; even his enemies admit that." Then the
old man fell into silence.
"But tell me how he died."
"He went out from among us in the morning as strong and straight as an
oak, and he was brought home felled to the ground as if struck by
lightning. God's ways are mysterious; but oh, my son, my strong, noble
son! If only he had not departed from the ways of his fathers I might
still have him.
"He went to the railroad; they had switched his car of goods where he
could not get it--he was buying goods by the carload; nothing like this
has ever been heard of before--and he wanted his car; so he helped the
men to move it. Moschele wasn't afraid of anything. The men pushed and
Moschele fell over a switch and the car went over him."
Here a paroxysm of grief silenced the old man and he swayed to and fro,
weeping piteously.
* * * * *
And again I passed through the town, and this time I went to the God's
acre with Uncle Isaac, to visit the grave of his son. In weird confusion
lay the gray and moss-grown stones. No care is bestowed upon the graves
or upon the memorials of the departed; for the body is nothing, the
spirit is everything and that is with God.
In the centre of the cemetery is a knoll, and upon its crest is a
monument such as cannot be found anywhere in Hungary. It is in the shape
of a sarcophagus, is hewn out of Vermont granite and is so heavy that it
cost over 500 kronen to bring it from the station and put it in place.
How much the stone cost no one knows except Uncle Isaac, who erected it
for his son Moschele, who wanted everything he had to come from
America--even his tombstone.
VIII
"NOCH IST POLEN NICHT VERLOREN"
It has always seemed to me wise to carry letters of introduction,
especially when travelling to the East of Europe; often, too, I have
found it still wiser to forget that I had them, for a letter of
introduction sometimes blocks avenues of investigation, particularly
when the problem in question involves the privileged or official
classes.
This time in following the immigrant tide, I carried one letter which I
was eager to deliver; it was given me by a personal friend in America
and was to be presented to his mother-in-law in Poland. Not that I was
overanxious to meet his mother-in-law, but because Polish women of the
upper class are, as a rule, so superior to the men, so ready to talk and
talk so well, that I promised myself a rather fruitful call. I did not
meet the mother-in-law yet I was not disappointed.
Cracow looks dingy even to one who, like myself, is able to illuminate
its sombre present in the light of its important if not glorious past.
Coming, as I had come, by way of industrial German-Poland, with its
glistening newness, from the
[Illustration: THE MARKET SQUARE IN CRACOW
Here Poland mourns her glorious past, and the returned immigrant assures
her of a glorious future.]
policemen's helmets to the weather-vane of the new Rathhaus; out of its
tense atmosphere of whirring wheels within wheels; out of its
geometrically correct parks and new and ever growing building additions,
Cracow looked to me as if it had fallen off this revolving planet and
settled itself "Where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are
at rest"--wherever that may be.
The only thing that had grown since last I saw the city was its hatred
of the Germans. On the doors of many stores on the Rinok were large
placards, which, literally translated, read: "The gentlemen travellers
from Germany, who wish to come in here to do business with us, are
politely requested to stay out."
Everything else looked the same, only more dingy; even the Austrian
officers who loaf around Havelik's restaurant seemed to have lost
something of their newness; for braid and buttons, two of the component
elements out of which Austrian officers are made, were tarnished and
worn.
The Jews' quarter seemed more hopeless and wretched than ever. On the
Kazimir were the same haggling crowds in the same small stores, and the
same shambling Jews in black, greasy cloaks. In front of the Jesuit
church stood the same twelve apostles, and I regret to say that they
were just as shabby-looking as their unbaptized brethren.
Cracow, the freest portion of divided Poland, is certainly as wretched
looking as Warsaw, where liberty dare not lift her head, and it cannot
compare with any of the cities of German-Poland where the Prussian
gendarme is trying, at the point of the bayonet, to cram German speech
down the unwilling throats of Polish children.
Why, I asked myself, should this shabbiness, this negligence, this
"run-down-at-the-heel" appearance prevail in all the Slavic cities from
Belgrade to St. Petersburg, and from Cracow to Irkutsk? Why should this
be so of every place, except where the German has stepped in with his
iron heel or where the Magyar or the Jew is trying to make of the Slav
what he is not and does not care to be?
I was tempted to take the first train out of Cracow, so painful to me
was this condition of affairs; for I admire the Slavs, although I think
I know their weaknesses. But the first train did not go until midnight,
and I had nearly eight long hours on my hands. Then I remembered my
letter of introduction. I found it with my passport and letter of
credit, and looked at it again, to assure myself that it was right. Yes,
it was addressed to the Countess So & So, and all the way to the house,
I pictured to myself my friend's mother-in-law. She would be rather
rotund, for Slavic women incline that way, especially during the full
moon of life. She would have gray hair, dark complexion, and a rather
pronounced down on the upper lip. That seems to be the tendency of the
Polish woman as she grows older; perhaps because of her great vitality.
Beneath the portal of a so-called palace, which was pervaded by an
incredibly strong smell of whitewash, I presented my card to the porter,
who looked somewhat contemptuously at the German name it bore. After
long waiting I was guided to the very top story of the house, through
clouds of falling mortar and showers of broken brick. The building
seemed to be in the possession of masons and plasterers, and the noise
they were making was as confusing as the dirt and dust their destructive
hands were creating.
Two surprises awaited me. The first was, that in spite of the fact that
the roof was partly torn off, and confusion reigned supreme, that top
story contained some of the most lavishly appointed apartments I have
ever seen. Pictures, statuary, and bric-à-brac, created by Polish
genius, costly vases, rare flowers, exquisite rugs and furniture; and
everything in perfect taste. If Cracow without seemed dingy and dead,
here it was brilliant and alive. Thus had I pictured my Slav at his
best--imaginative, creative, revelling in the beautiful, lavish of
colour, yet creating harmonies. Everything around me seemed to breathe
out life, and here I could understand the "Noch ist Polen nicht
Verloren," although in the street I had been ready to sing a requiem for
the nation.
A hundred questions passed through my brain; questions which I would ask
the mother-in-law when she appeared. Then came my second surprise. As I
sat there thrilled by contending emotions, the curtain opposite me was
thrown back gracefully and quickly, not at all as if a short, stout
mother-in-law were behind it--and my eyes fell upon one of the most
beautiful young women I have ever seen. This again was Poland at her
best, if not Poland typified. Her eyes were burningly eloquent, yet
showed a hidden pathos; her features looked as if chiselled by a
master's hand, yet, in the background, the crude touch was faintly
visible. The welcome accorded me was genuinely cordial, yet tinged by
the proper reserve.
"How is it," I asked, after some conversation, "that you don't look like
a mother-in-law, and that you speak English as if you came from Boston?"
"Because," she said, with the sweetest smile, "I am as yet only a
sister-in-law, and I do come from Boston. That is, I lived there for
years after my parents were exiled from Poland. I came back here after
my marriage."
This, then, was my chance to ask all manner of questions about the Slavs
in general and the Poles in particular, and have them answered in the
light of a rather unique experience.
"Why is Cracow a dead city?" This was certainly a perfectly familiar
American question, and I received a characteristic answer.
"It is dead because it is 'crying over spilt milk.' Nobody is regarded
as a patriot unless he talks about our past glory and blames some one in
general and the Germans in particular, for the loss of that glory. We
might do great things if we would just do them. We have the vision and
the talent; but we wear ourselves out, saying what a great people we are
and how superior to all other human beings; yet we accomplish nothing.
Look at this house of ours, and you see Poland in miniature. I don't
know just how old it is, my husband can tell you; but when it was built,
the work was poorly done, and every year it has to be repaired from the
bottom up. In America, it would have been torn down years ago, and a new
house built, to suit the needs of the times. Instead of that, my husband
is spending a fortune trying to make it a fit place to live in, and he
never succeeds.
"Yet that is the thing he enjoys. He can scold the workmen half the year
for dragging their task along, and the other half year he scolds them
for having done their work so poorly.
"You Americans enjoy being comfortable, we Poles enjoy being miserable.
If the Polish men had half the energy of the American men, we would
indeed be a great people, and Cracow would be a city worthy of our pride
in it."
I am not sure that I am recording the Countess' exact words, for to see
her talk was such an æsthetic pleasure, that I must have forgotten much
of what she said; but I give the substance of her words.
"See what America is doing for our peasants!" she continued.
"They go there lazy and shiftless, they come back thrifty and
industrious, and are rapidly taking the places of our decayed nobility.
When they come back, they have what we Slavs have always
lacked--initiative. I wish we could export to you all our stock of
Counts."
I suggested that she might try it as a business venture; for they would
bring a good price in our matrimonial market.
"Oh, no!" she replied. "We would want them back. They have talent and
devotion; they need only to learn to work, and America is the world's
great boss."
At this point in the conversation the Count entered the room. The
Countess had told me that her home was the type of Poland; she had not
told me what I soon discovered, that her husband was the typical Pole,
both physically and mentally.
He was a small man with unmistakable Polish features, which looked well
worn; for being a Polish nobleman, he had travelled through life swiftly
and indulgently. After scarcely five minutes' conversation, he began
talking about the sufferings of the Poles, and what they would do if it
were not for those wicked Germans.
Then followed what was as nearly a family jar as I care to witness. My
hostess opened wide her beautiful eyes, and, in most forceful Polish,
gave her liege lord a piece of her mind.
"I am tired of your tirades against the Germans. I don't admire their
methodical ways, myself; but they are doing things.
"Go out of Cracow to the border and look across, and you will see order
on that side and disorder on this. Step into a German train; it is clean
and efficiently managed, while our cars, from the first-class to the
third, are dirty and ill-lighted and the trains go by fits and starts.
"Go to the German towns, and you will find business flourishing; while
ours stagnates. They don't neglect art, either. Their music may be
slower than ours, but it is art; their paintings may not be as brilliant
as ours, but they are as artistic. Go to work! Do something worth while!
Build from the foundations! Develop some backbone, some character, do
better than the Germans, and then you may call them names!"
The sensitive nostrils of the husband grew wider and contracted again.
He was furiously angry; but facing him was his Americanized wife, and he
knew that "Discretion was the better part of valour"; so he permitted
his anger to cool while he nervously bit the ends of his moustache.
"Yes," he said, ignoring the Countess' outburst; "there is a great
future for us Slavs when we all get together. We were in Prague this
summer, at the Slavic Congress, and everything between us was so
harmonious that I have great hopes of a Slav Confederation. Then we will
crush our German oppressors. What do you think of it?"
I analyzed the situation thus: "As yet, the Slavs lack racial
consciousness. Each group, no matter how small, thinks itself different
from the other, and often superior to it. Not only are they divided by
small historic dissimilarities, but religious differences have obscured
racial unity to such a degree that I have but little hope that their
racial consciousness will soon ripen into tangible results.
"In the great game of politics, the Slav has given his soul as a pawn,
with which popes and patriarchs have gambled. Poland's national life has
been lost, not so much by corruption from within, as because the Pole
was used as a tool by the Roman Curia in the game of world politics she
was playing, and playing unscrupulously."
Ah! It was good to see the Countess' dark eyes dancing from pleasure,
while I thus analyzed the situation. I continued:
"The Slav either lacks sane pride in his race, or he has an overbearing
conceit; he is either easily crushed, or he crushes, ruthlessly. Look at
this daily paper. In Dalmatia, the Serbs break the windows of the
Italians, and tramp madly through the streets proclaiming their
superiority over the Latins. In Laibach, the Slovene does the same thing
to the Germans. Tears down German business signs, shoots, and is shot in
turn. In Prague, the Czechs are constantly bombarding the houses of the
Germans, until martial law has to be declared. All this, to the
detriment of the development of a rational, racial pride.
"And these same boisterous, roistering Slavs, to-morrow will cringe
before their Magyar and German masters.
"Another thing is in the way," I hastened to add; for I saw that my host
was eager to talk: "The Slavs lack collective wisdom. Where there are
three thinking Slavs, there are always three quarrels. People who wish
to rule must learn to act wisely together; yet in the history of the
Slavs this collective wisdom, this inability of one group to acknowledge
the equality of the other, has been their greatest lack.
"The Russian revolution failed, even as the Polish revolution failed,
and as the Czechs' will fail, because they lack collective wisdom. It
will take at least a hundred years," I concluded prophetically, "before
you Slavs will confederate."
My host laughed nervously. "You are a false prophet. It will come in a
decade. We will flow together like small rivers into a great stream. We
Poles, of course, being the most cultured, the most civilized, and the
best prepared to play the leading rôle, will be the stream into which
all these lesser rivers will flow. In the great overture of Slavic
union, the Pole will play the leading part."
To reason with such a man was futile; so I drank my tea and looked at
the beautiful lady opposite me, in whom the practical American and the
idealistic Pole were so harmoniously blended. Perhaps in her person she
was a prophecy of the great day to come.
The Count talked incessantly about Poland, its past, its powers, its
enemies; but I was not listening.
From my silence he thought he had convinced me, and as I rose to go, he
asked: "Have you not changed your mind about its taking a hundred years
to federate the Slavs?"
"Yes," I replied, "I have changed my mind. It will take two hundred
years; unless"--and I looked at my fair hostess--"you bring back many
more such Polish women from America."
IX
THE DISCIPLES IN THE CARPATHIANS
The river Waag has a broad and beautiful valley in which to indulge its
vagabond habits. Now it seeks a channel close to the Carpathian hills on
one side, and again rushes far away towards the mountain wall, close to
the Austrian border.
The Romans appropriately named the river "Waag," the vagabond river, and
it lives up to its reputation at all times of the year. One can scarcely
find fault with its wandering propensities, for both shore lines are
imposing and wildly beautiful; many of the little towns are
castle-crowned, while each town and each castle has its myth and story,
rivalling those of the Rhine in fantastic invention and equalling them
in historic interest.
The river Waag, however, is not in Germany, where everything is
prohibited, regulated, and subdued, even the turbulent rivers.
This is Hungary, the ill-mated spouse in that Austro-Hungarian alliance,
in which quarrels are continual, and divorce, with alimony or without
it, is threatened every day. Here rivers and races foam and rage; floods
of hate beat against historic walls and there are no smooth channels
for politics, education, or religion.
Struggle there is everywhere. Those who are too weak to fight, resist,
and none, however small or unimportant, is ready to surrender.
Among those people with strength enough to resist, but not enough to
fight, are the Slovaks, who live in wretched villages on both sides of
the river. The villages grow more wretched as they climb away from the
richer valley to the scant clearings in the mountains, where poverty,
ignorance, superstition, and intemperance are the four walls which hem
them in from the throbbing life of the century and shut them out from
it. No one climbs the almost impassable highways except the Magyar
gendarmes, who are the minions of the master race which has subdued the
Roumanians, Ruthenians, and Germans within its borders, and is now hard
at work to blot out the Slovaks, the feeble remnant of a once powerful
people.
These gendarmes are but stupid tools in the hands of a stupid
government. They erase the Slavic names of villages and paint over them
Magyar names, not even remotely related to the original; they prohibit
the Slovak language in the higher schools, fall savagely upon assemblies
of innocent folk and disperse them by force of arms, annoy unsuspicious
travellers and arrest nationalistic agitators and severely punish them.
Then they believe that they have changed sluggish Slovak blood into the
fiery Magyar fluid, obliterated age-long, historic memories, created in
a day a new patriotism, blotted out a vernacular spoken in related
languages and dialects by 100,000,000 of people and substituted for it
one spoken by a warlike people, numbering not more than 8,000,000, and
slowly emerging from Asiatic barbarism.
This they believe; but the fact is that no people were ever assimilated
by force. Force begets resistance, and the most stupid Slovak, shut in
by the four walls of his wretched isba, if he knows nothing else, knows
that the Magyar is his enemy, and that the Magyar speech must not lodge
in his memory and displace his mother tongue. Although he may have no
knowledge of his historic past and no idea of the significance of the
Slavic race of which he is a member, he _does_ know that he must resist
the Magyars, and resist, only where he cannot fight.
Two forces are at work which will soon turn this resistance into
fighting. One of them is the unbearable and unreasonable methods used by
the Hungarian government, and the other is that giant in the growing,
the returned immigrant.
The Slovak immigrant comes back less rugged but more agile; for he has
passed through trials by fire and by flood; he goes back less docile,
for he has had no masters except those that directed his daily task; his
mind is awakened, for he has read the uncensored news from the
Fatherland; news coloured more or less by the not always scrupulous
agitator; added to all this, the Slovak immigrant goes back conscious of
his racial inheritance, for he was one of a great Slavic brotherhood,
organized on this side the sea, carrying on, unhampered, its agitations
against the historic Magyar foe. Above all, he goes back with a bank
account, and money is power in business and politics alike.
Hat in hand, the Slovak used to wait patiently at the ticket window
until the Magyar station agent deigned to notice him and sell him his
third-class ticket; then, as if he were an ox being loaded for the
stockyards at Budapest, the Magyar conductor would push him into a car
crowded by his kind.
I have repeatedly seen Slovak men and women miss the only train that
could take them to the market town or from it, because the proud Magyar
official paid no attention to their repeated request for a ticket. Day
after day I have witnessed the incivilities and even cruelties they had
to suffer on the trains; but when the Slovak comes back, he knows that
the railroad official is only a servant, his servant, and he treats him
like one; he demands attention. Woe unto the bribe-taking conductor--and
there are no others on the Hungarian railways--who pushes him into a car
crowded to suffocation, while more than half the cars of the same class
are almost empty, with only here and there a passenger, who is politely
treated because he is a Magyar or because he has pressed into the
conductor's responsive hand the usual bribe.
The Slovak immigrant returns home somewhat of a rebel. The Hungarian
government knows this, and were it not for the fact that he brings back
money, and spends it freely, his emigration to America would be
forbidden.
Recently a special police force has been created to watch every outgoing
and incoming train, and every third-class passenger who has baggage
enough to mark him as an emigrant is detained, rigidly examined, and if
permitted to go to America at all, is sent _via_ the Hungarian port of
Fiume. On the way he is duly inoculated by the fact that he is an
Hungarian subject and that as such he must return.
The stupidity and the illiberal spirit of the Hungarian government are
nowhere more clearly manifested than in its relation to the religious
movements which are American in their origin and which have been
transplanted from the Alleghanies to the Carpathians. In the hands of a
truly liberal government this new force might become a constructive and
saving one to multitudes of people; instead, it is alienated, put on the
defensive and limited in its usefulness.
When the Y. M. C. A. expedition, of which I was the leader, reached the
valley of the Waag, to study the Slovak language and people, serious
difficulties to the carrying out of our plans presented themselves. The
towns have all become Magyarized by the gendarmes and a multitude of
officials. To speak the Slovak language marks one an inferior and
renders one an object of suspicion.
The village inns are merely dram-shops, kept and generally ill-kept by
Jews, who are under the influence of the Magyars, and consequently look
down upon the Slovaks. Even had it been possible for us to lodge in one
of these inns, our friendly attitude towards the Slovaks would have
forbidden it.
The gendarmes were alert and agitated from the moment we entered the
valley, and when they learned the nature of our errand they were
incredulous. "Who ever heard of anybody's having a disinterested concern
for the Slovaks? How could they believe that Americans, cold,
materialistic Americans, would equip an expedition to study the needs of
this downtrodden race, that it might be lifted up? Of course, we were
nationalistic agitators sent out by the Slovanic Society of America, to
arouse the half-awake Slovak into revolution."
That which confirmed them in this suspicion was the fact that the only
place where it was posible for us to lodge was the home of Jan Chorvat,
Apostle of the Christian faith in the Carpathians, and suspected of
being a revolutionary, because he preached to his countrymen in their
native tongue; preached to them a Gospel broad enough to embrace all
races and nationalities, strong enough to wean them from drink and free
enough to loose them from the bonds of superstition and ecclesiastical
tyranny.
The simple and perfect hospitality which Jan Chorvat and his wife
offered us was the product of that faith. Without hesitation they moved
into the basement and gave the upper rooms to their guests. The first
night of our sojourn with them, our hearts were cheered, and we felt as
if we were at home when we overheard their evening devotions. The words
of an English hymn, "My Faith Looks up to Thee," came in subdued tones
through the thick walls of the room below. Then Jan Chorvat prayed, as
only those can pray who walk consciously with God. The sentences which I
could translate from the strange tongue knitted us into an unbroken
friendship.
"I thank Thee, God, that Thou hast put it into the hearts of the
American people to send these dear brothers across the sea, that they
might learn to speak the tongue of my people so that they may serve them
in the far-away land and inspire them to become sober and chaste; good
citizens, good husbands, and good brothers.
"May these young brothers learn, above all, to love my people with the
passion of Jesus, so that they will be able to lead them to the source
of all redemptive power--Jesus Christ."
Jan Chorvat and his wife, in their outlook upon life, in the strength of
their convictions, in their passion for righteousness, would have fitted
easily into the church of the Puritans anywhere on this side the sea,
where Puritanism is still at its best. In his asceticism Jan Chorvat
reminded us of John the Baptist, in the sweetness of his temper of the
Beloved Disciple, and, in his zeal and passion for Christ, of the
Apostle to the Gentiles.
Here was a Slovak who spoke English almost perfectly, who wrote his
native language classically, who clung to a noble faith passionately;
yet that which bound us to him closely and I must regretfully admit,
most closely, was the fact that Jan Chorvat was what he was, because of
certain religious influences emanating from America. These influences
and ideals, which are slowly growing stronger, are being augmented and
reënforced by returning immigrants who come home with a passion for
their kinsmen, eager to redeem them from their individual and national
sins.
The centre of this religious movement is in O Tura, one of those
mountain villages isolated, but brought into the world's current by
mighty ideals; fit birthplace of a new hope.
Here a Protestant pastor ministered in the more or less stereotyped
forms of the established faith, and, when he died, left three daughters,
the "Roy Sisters," to carry on his work for the people he loved.
Hampered by a strict orthodoxy and a suspicious government, they
hungered with their people and for them, unconscious of a larger faith
and a better way; until so commonplace a thing as a religious newspaper,
published by the missionaries of the American Board at Prague, found its
way to them.
Our credulity has been so severely tested by the narratives of
missionaries who hinged mighty consequences upon trivial causes, that
here too one is assailed by doubt; until one reads Christina Roy's
little story: "How I came to the Light."
In simple yet graphic language, she tells of her life in the parsonage,
her father's struggle against adverse conditions, her own budding
ideals, and finally the important moment when for the first time she
came in touch with the vital truths of Christianity as presented in the
little Bohemian newspaper, _Bethania_. Upon so slender a thread
travelled this mighty current which gave direction to her own life,
which has enabled her to enlarge the vision of an oppressed peasantry,
and which is now encouraging her and the noble group of men and women
around her to attempt the almost hopeless struggle against
intemperance.
Whether one agrees with the type of theology which these people preach
or not, one can but feel that they are in touch with real spiritual
forces, and that, by the test of character and of work accomplished, we
who travel faster in the paths of what we call progress, are compelled
to halt and admire.
The students who were the members of my expedition were nearly all
recent college graduates and had left their schools with much of their
traditional faith unsettled. Any doubts they may have had regarding the
doctrine of the Incarnation, as it is commonly interpreted, were lost,
when they saw the spirit of Jesus dominating the lives of simple
peasants whose dull faces have become radiant, whose animal appetites
have been controlled, and whose homes have become the abodes of peace
and happiness.
To look into the faces of the "Roy Sisters," of Jan Chorvat and his
wife, and of hundreds of peasants who come to hear the Gospel preached
in true simplicity, was a better definition of the doctrine of the
Incarnation than any professor of theology can give.
The Atonement, as defined by our orthodox churches and which is such a
stumbling-block to the rationalistic mind, lost all its mystery in
watching another member of this group, John Rohac[ve]k, at work among
the gypsies; loving those whom no one loves, living with them in huts by
the wayside and trying with a divine passion to lift them out of
age-long Paganism into a wholesome relation to the doctrine: "Without
the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin."
Although John Rohac[ve]k believes with all his simple soul that "Jesus
paid it all," he is willing and eager to shed his blood for God's
despised children, those most neglected of all, the gypsies. For them he
has suffered persecution, imprisonment, hunger and thirst, in the true
apostolic spirit; and although those American students may never be able
to explain to themselves the meaning of the Atonement, they certainly
will never be able to say that they have not seen the Atonement "at
work."
Here among the Slovaks, the seed sown by the American missionary at home
and abroad has brought forth more vital fruit, perhaps, than on the home
soil. Although these Slovak disciples have gone out to save only this
one or that one, they are helping to save a nation and are lifting a
race out of degeneration.
Nominally, Jan Chorvat was a teacher in the Slovak language to our
expedition; and to learn the more effectually, my students often went
with him on his tours from village to village. As they walked, he
explained to them the grammar
[Illustration: AT THE FOOT OF THE TATRA MOUNTAINS]
and enriched their vocabulary. How much of the difficult Slovak language
they will remember when they come to their task in Pennsylvania, I do
not know; but they can never forget the lessons he taught them by his
singleness of purpose, his devotion to his people, and his fearless
approach to those who he thought needed his admonition. Those students
will surely remember that "Though they speak with the tongues of men and
of angels, and have not love, it profiteth nothing."
The last day of our stay in Hungary brought us early to a village at the
foot of the Tatra mountains, the village of Czorba. Leaving our
uncomfortable third-class carriage in which we had spent the night, we
were quickly revived by the ozone-laden mountain air, and by the
marvellous sight which greeted our eyes. Here were the giant mountains
of Hungary which she has proudly pictured highest on her escutcheon.
That which most quickened us, however, as a group of strangers, was the
greeting extended to us by three men waiting in the early dawn. They had
come many miles on foot to meet us, and carried huge loaves of rye bread
and bottles of milk for our refreshment. They were to guide us to the
top of the mountain. The three men belonged to three antagonistic races
of Hungary, and we were Americans, a conglomerate of races; Teutonic,
Semitic, and Celtic. Together we broke bread, prayed, sang, and
exchanged thoughts about the vital things of life.
The man who appeared to be the leader of the group, the brightest and
happiest of the three, the one with the largest outlook on life, was a
Slovak who had found his vision and his happiness in America. He worked
in a blacksmith's shop in Torrington, Conn. Here some one with a passion
for common men ministered to him and led him from drunkenness to
sobriety, and from his coarse animal existence into fellowship with the
divine. He returned home and is daily at his task of shoeing horses and
mending broken ploughshares; but he never forgets that what carried him
back among his people was his awakened passion for them.
At the forge, he preaches the gospel of sobriety, of industry, and of
peace; and, as he welds broken iron, so he is trying to weld into union
the three alien races that battle round the foot of the Tatra. The task
is difficult, and it will be slow.
The stupid and materialistic Hungarian government is trying to
accomplish this task by throwing people into prison, because they love
their mother tongue, or do not lightly regard their historic
inheritance.
The Slovak Christian will certainly accomplish more than the gendarmes
for the unification of these alien peoples in Hungary; for the Gospel
is more powerful than guns and bayonets.
As we parted from our new friends that last day, we sang: "Blest be the
Tie that Binds." The gendarmes, who were watching us, thought we were
singing some revolutionary "Marseillaise," and in that they were not
mistaken; for there is nothing more revolutionary than the force which
"Binds our hearts in Christian Love."
X
THE GUSLAR OF RAGUSA
It is a long time since I first saw Dalmatia, on the eastern shore of
the Adriatic. Her hills were denuded of verdure, monotonously barren and
ashen gray, with a bit of Paradise here and there along the edge of the
sea. In silence, her ancient cities mourned a turbulent past of which
they were reminded by walls and palaces which the Romans built, as only
the Romans knew how to build.
Although these walls have felt the force of Venetian battering-rams, of
French, Turkish, and Austrian cannon-balls, they still stand, silent
witnesses of a civilization which carried culture in the path of its
conquest, and brought a certain kind of liberty to its captives. The
Venetians took away these liberties, and, in exchange, gave the
Dalmatians churches, whose graceful campaniles tower over the gray and
solid Roman walls.
The French came and went; but, far as the eye can see, left nothing
behind them.
Austria brought soldiers who are still there; nesting in the forts,
commanding the mule-paths
[Illustration: COAST OF DALMATIA
From here, come virile children, of the stony soil, to mine our coal and
dig our trenches.]
and seaways and hated by the native population, which is Slavic with a
sprinkling of Italian, both races being antagonistic to the ruling
power.
That Dalmatia has been badly governed, no one denies. It has been
purposely kept out of touch with the mainland, the old motherland behind
it, Croatia. Only by the sea had it access to other peoples, to whom it
rarely went and who seldom came to it.
Of all Dalmatian cities, Ragusa is the proudest, even as it is the
poorest. Once the seat of a virile republic, she sent out armadas for
conquest, watched from her sea-girt walls the struggles between Venice
and the Ottomans, and, by force of arms, helped to decide the destinies
of nations.
Ragusa's glory was short, but memory is long; although her harbour is
choked and useless, her sea-wall in ruins, and her pavements
grass-grown; still under marble porticoes half-sunk into the ground, sit
the grandees of the city, smoking the Turkish _czibuk_ and musing over
those golden days when Ragusa called herself the "Queen of the Adria,"
and fought with Venice for its supremacy.
On the corner of the Stradona and the Piazza, there stood all day long
an old minstrel, who strummed monotonous strains on the _gusla_, while
he sang the epics inspired by centuries of conflict. As he sang, the
grandees smoked and mused; while the lesser folk cobbled _opankee_,
embroidered garments after Oriental fashion, and wove tiny strands of
silver into crude filigree.
The old _guslar_ was minstrel, poet, and historian. It was he who told
me marvellous stories of the time when in each of those palaces on the
Stradone there lived a statesman-soldier, at war politically with one
half his world and in social rivalry with the other half. The city's
gentlefolk were divided into the _Salamanchesi_ and the _Sorbonnesi_;
those who sent their sons to the University of Salamanca and those who
sent them to the Sorbonne.
These divergent cultural currents kept the nobility apart and gave ample
cause for petty quarrels; many a Ragusan Romeo's love for his Juliet has
furnished material for a romance and for a beautiful funeral.
Against these old walls and old traditions the immigrant tide has been
beating for the last ten years, carrying away the grandee's sons,
numbers of whom are now digging coal in Pennsylvania, or waiting on
table in some cheap restaurant in New York. Yet, whether he lives in a
wretched boarding-house in a Pittsburg "Patch," or accepts the modest
tip his patrons give him, the son of a Ragusan grandee never forgets his
nobility.
These immigrants, too, have gone home again, and make their presence
felt, economically and socially. They have repaired the old palaces and
brought money into circulation; but the old _guslar_, who stood on the
corner of the Stradona and the Piazza, and whom I sought out after these
ten years, had his story to tell.
"Yes, Signor, many have gone to America and have come back, and will go
again; but, Signor, that must be a bad country, a wild country. They
come home and walk carelessly up and down the Stradona, the finest
street in the world, every house a palace--and they talk of it with
disrespect!
"Why, Signor, they say that in America there are finer streets than
this, and bigger houses, and they laugh at the _Dogana_, Signor--at the
_Dogana_, where our _Principes_ and our _Consiglios_ made treaties with
the great powers, where we received the ambassadors of the Sultan and of
the Doges of Venice!
"Signor, they walk up and down the street with their heavy-soled shoes,
talking loudly, and making such a noise that the grandees cannot take
their siestas undisturbed.
"Yes, Signor, there are some of them here now. They came back a
fortnight ago, a man and his two daughters. A good-for-nothing he is,
Signor. Think of it! Ah, listen!" He paused abruptly. I listened. The
sweet, harmonious quiet was rudely broken; the air, full of the
fragrance of oleander blossoms, seemed suddenly vitiated; the Monte
Sergio and the swaying palms beneath it, which made so marvellous a
picture, seemed to drop with a crash out of their frame of sky and sea.
"Signor, listen!" And the old _guslar_ trembled from anger and pain. It
was the grinding of a phonograph which struck our ears. "Listen, Signor!
That they bring out of America! Out of your barbaric country!"
True enough; they were the painfully familiar notes of "canned ragtime"
at its worst.
"Signor, that man has come back with his two daughters. They can't speak
a word of their mother tongue; and oh, Signor! they walk up and down the
Stradona without a duenna, they look boldly at the men, and they keep
their jaws moving constantly, even when they do not speak.
"The father drinks, he drinks maraschino by the bottleful and he defiles
the pavements of our ancient streets by his polluted spittle. You want
to go to see him?" The _guslar_ looked deeply hurt. He feared that the
phonograph had lured me from him.
"No, I shan't go until you play and sing for me."
He took his _gusla_ and moved his bow gently over its single string,
while he sang of "Mustapha who came riding on a dapple gray stallion,
with thirty Pashas as his escort. He struck a glass of wine from the
hand of a Servian hero, who vowed that he would shed the black blood of
the Turk," which, after many monotonous verses, he did.
"Signor, I can't sing very well--ah, there it is again!"
While he had been singing about Mustapha, who died so many years ago,
the phonograph bawled lustily about "Tammany, Tammany," which,
unfortunately, is very much alive.
I made my peace with the _guslar_ by putting into his hand a liberal
fee; then I followed the sound of the phonograph which had been switched
from "Tammany" to the song of "A nice young man, that lives in
Kalamazoo."
On the lower floor of a house in one of the small streets which divide
the Stradona, I discovered the phonograph and its owner, a man neither
of the nobility nor noble. His knowledge of America extended as far as
Brooklyn and the Austro-Italian docks, near which he had established a
boarding-house. Of course, he had come home rich, and only for a visit.
"Who could live in Ragusa after Brooklyn?"
He told me that he made a great deal of money selling liquor, and
acknowledged that he sold it without a license. Besides that, the
sailors brought over various articles for which he found a ready market.
His case would not be worth recording were it not for the fact that he
may be looked upon as a man who has been spoiled by his sojourn with
us. I doubt, though, that there was anything to spoil; evidently, he was
a man of poor breeding and low moral standards. In America, he had found
an outlet for his evil tendencies, and a bad business which offered
opportunities for lawlessness.
His daughters were more interesting than he; for they came back perfect
strangers, into the environment which they had left as children. They
had quite forgotten Italian and spoke Serbo-Slavic very poorly; while
their English was typical.
"Golly! But Ragusa is a bum town!"
The Adriatic shore could not be compared with the sea they knew,
bordered as it was by Coney Island.
"No, sir-ree! Give me Coney Island, and you can have this two for a
cent, Gravoosa." And I suppose, the peninsula of Lapad also, circled by
palms and olives and set in a sea of turquoise blue.
When I mentioned the _guslar_, one of the girls said that he "might make
a hit at Coney Island as a side-show."
"Were there many Dalmatians in America?" I asked the father.
"You bet! They have gone from along the whole ---- coast, and there is
one ---- little town near Lucin Piccolo where there is not an able-bodied
man left. They'll all come over when they get the ---- money. The more
come the better for me."
His place was the centre to which they came and from which they
radiated.
"What do they do in America?" I asked.
"Oh! any old thing. It all depends. There is one back here now."
"He's a regular big head," interrupted one of the girls; "thinks he's
the whole cheese. He's a newspaper man. I suppose he'll be on the
Stradona to-night."
Every evening after sunset, all Ragusa wakens out of its day-dreams and
is on parade in the Stradona.
Demure maidens come out from behind latticed windows, reflecting in
their garments the sombre hues borrowed from Venice, and a riot of
Oriental colours. They are dark-eyed creatures, these maidens, and their
faces, as well as their garb, show the mixture of Latin and Slav; for
this is the battling-ground of the two races, the persistent Slav being
in the ascendency.
The youths followed at a distance; for propriety is one of the assets of
Ragusan society.
Noiselessly they walked up and down over the grass-grown pavement, and,
when one heard the heavy-soled shoe striking it, one recognized the
stranger; and by that sign I knew the Ragusan-American newspaper man. A
graceful, swarthy young fellow he was, upon whose face his new
environment had already written its story.
His eyes had lost their melancholy look, for he had escaped the thraldom
of the past and seemed like a man fully awake to the present. When we
met, he looked at my shoes, I looked at his, and the contact was made.
Interesting, indeed, his story was, beginning with his running away from
home, one of those ancient palaces on the Stradona. His assets were:
money enough to take him to Triest, third-class, a large stock of
inherited pride, and nothing else.
At that time there was no passenger service from Triest, but there were
freight steamers and a chance to serve as steward to the officer's mess.
Three weeks of life on the sea and then New York. There he served his
apprenticeship in the art of "getting along" by walking up and down
Broadway, hungry and cold, sleeping in "Sailor's Boarding Houses," and
finally in the police station.
At last came a turn in his fortunes, through getting work as a
strawberry-picker in New Jersey, then working in a restaurant in
Pennsylvania as waiter and cook. After much chance and change, he had
become the owner of an Italian newspaper, whose chief object was to
chronicle the happenings in the Fatherland, for the edification of his
countrymen.
It had been a rough road, but it was worth the struggle; for it led to
usefulness and into life. He thought that his countrymen always
experienced unusual difficulties in America.
"The masses of them are illiterate to an alarming degree; bound by
traditions, tribal in their social outlook, and serve as so much carrion
for those birds of prey, the steamship companies' agents, the _padrone_,
the boarding-house keeper, the saloon, and the venal justice of the
peace."
Our national moral character he interpreted in the light or the
experiences of his countrymen, and his judgment was not a flattering
one. Yet he admitted that America is a blessing to Dalmatia. It has
relieved bitter poverty, mentally awakened the people, and has broken
down worthless traditions.
In Dalmatia, as elsewhere, the returned immigrant has sharpened the
hunger for political liberties, and has intensified the struggle between
the oppressed and the oppressor.
Wherever the government was aided by the reactionary church, the people
left the church. This is especially true of the northern towns of the
peninsula, between Zara and Triest.
"Yes, indeed! The returned immigrant causes much trouble, and I am no
exception. I wound my parents by my democratic ways, and I have
forgotten many of the niceties of their social life.
"Yes, it was I who hurt the _guslar's_ feelings by telling him that
there are streets in New York finer than the _Stradona_, and houses
bigger than the _Dogana_. Ah, yes; the returned immigrant causes both
sorrow and annoyance. Just watch that man and his two daughters."
There they were; the man from Brooklyn, garishly attired. His daughters
walked proudly beside him, heedless of the fact that over those
pavements generations of Ragusa's great men had walked to victory or to
death.
The Brooklyn man seemed quite oblivious of the fact that these people
whom he passed so carelessly were the sons and daughters of nobles and
heroes. He did not lift his hat to them or step aside to let them pass;
his daughters occupied more than their share of space, with their
gorgeous and exaggerated hats, and smiled encouragingly on the young men
whom they met, although strangers to them.
Later, there was much discussion of these "Americans," among those who
spend the evening at the "Café Arciduca Federigo"; smoking, singing,
sipping _granite_, and talking about the good old days, those quiet,
dreamy days which they had spent on this matchless spot, watching the
sea as it encircled with its phosphorescent splendour the Island of
Lacroma, or when, beaten by the Bora, it lashed itself into fury against
the ancient walls.
The young newspaper man told me much about the pride and poverty of his
countrymen, of their love for this fair spot, of their moral standards,
and their unbroken word.
The _guslar_, standing in front of the café, began tuning his Jeremaic
instrument, looking wistfully, as he did so, at the stranger who had
given him so liberal a fee. He needed but slight encouragement to begin
his plaintive recitative. A few lines clung to my memory; for they
fitted so well into my conversation with the young Ragusan:
"Go out and sing of right and truth,
Of valour and of manly strife;
Better far, thy tongue grow mute
Than that thou sing of baser life
For common gain."
In the middle of a verse, he dropped his instrument hopelessly.
"Oh, Signor! These terrible Americans! Listen!"
The quiet of that matchless night was being assailed by the awful
refrain of: "There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night."
"Ah, me, Signor! This will be my ruin! All the young men are at that
man's house drinking like beasts; they no more care for me, or for the
heroic songs of their ancestors, and while they used to give me
_kreutzer_, they now give me _heller_, if they give me anything."
The old minstrel sighed profoundly and disappeared into the darkness,
his _gusla_ under his arm; while from the tin horn poured a medley of
songs, the climax of which was: "A nice young man that lives in
Kalamazoo."
The sorrowful old man and his grief made me feel guilty, as if I were
responsible for that terrible, torturing, unmusical outburst which
disturbed the peace of the wonderful night.
After the _guslar_ had left us, the newspaper man rowed me in his
father's _barquetta_ across the shallow harbour, as far as the shadow
cast by the gigantic palm trees on the shore. Every time his oars dipped
into the water they brought to the surface a flame of fire; yet amid all
the splendour of that night, I could think of nothing but the sad old
musician.
Many months passed and I had quite forgotten the _guslar_ of Ragusa.
Again I was at the seashore; but it was the turbulent Atlantic--not the
sunny Adriatic; Coney Island--not Lacroma.
Many confusing strains of music were in deadly conflict with one
another; myriads of glowing lights encircled grotesque buildings of all
descriptions; through streets given over to pleasure, crowded in one day
nearly as many people as there are inhabitants in all Dalmatia.
I certainly did not think of Dalmatia, until I stood before an "Oriental
Palace of Pleasure," in front of which I saw the man from Brooklyn,
resplendent in a gorgeous Oriental costume, "barking" to the multitude
the sensuous pleasures which could be enjoyed within "for the small sum
of one dime, only ten cents."
When he paused for breath, I heard peculiar, strange, and yet familiar
music. Following the sounds, I found on a balcony, in a blaze of
electric lights, the _guslar_ of Ragusa. When he finished playing, he
too cried: "Tenee cenee, onlee tenee cenee! C-o-m-e een! Only tenee
cenee!"
XI
WHERE THE ANGEL DROPPED THE STONES
Prince Nicolas of Montenegro does not remember me, and why should he? It
was many years ago, and I was one of 20,000 guests who suddenly
descended upon his little capital of 5,000 inhabitants, during its
national festivities in honour of the Prince of Bulgaria.
Cetinje's two modest hostelries, in which under normal conditions twenty
strangers might have found crude comforts, were packed from cellar to
garret with the entourage of the royal guest. The rest of us, mostly
natives and a few strangers, roving about the odd corners of Europe,
were sheltered in private homes, hospitably thrown open by Cetinje's
citizens, who still believe in hospitality as a virtue, which they
practice on all occasions.
I did not know until the morning after my arrival that my host was the
Minister to the Exterior. The Interior, being so small, needed no
minister, I suppose. His house, a rude stone structure, was only a
degree better than that of the peasant; the bed was softer than his, for
it was not the stone floor. The food was practically the same; a
monotonous diet of maize bread and mutton, the staple food of rich and
poor alike, except that the peasant eats only the bread and sells the
mutton.
To find that my boots were blacked by a relative of the Minister to the
Exterior, and that by virtue of being his guest I was also to be a guest
at the banquet given by Prince Nicolas in honour of his princely
visitor, produced in me no little feverish excitement; revealing the
fact that I was a mere mortal, and as much pleased by my aristocratic
surroundings and the prospect of royal favour, as if I were not a
student of social phenomena with a strong bias towards democracy.
It is of no consequence to chronicle these facts here, except that they
led to a passing acquaintance with the Prince and his family. His
youngest son was then a growing youth of exceedingly lovable character.
At that time the Queen of Italy was a visitor in her father's simple
home. The Prince is a writer of some ability, and I was glad to be able
to tell him that I was familiar with his contributions to Serbic
literature.
The royal favour accorded me stood me in good stead; for not only could
I watch the pageant and other festivities from a splendid vantage
ground, but it proved very helpful in my journey through the
principality, which I traversed from Nyegusi to Lake Skutari, and from
the Albanian Alps to the Herzegovina.
The country seemed like a huge eagle's nest, perched amid inhospitable
mountains. Here all men were warriors, from the time they were weaned
from their mother's breast, until they sank into their rock-hewn graves.
The women reared the young, tilled the bit of precious soil found among
a waste of boulders, and carried mutton carcases to the market at
Podgoricza or Cattaro, the largest trading town in Dalmatia. On the
return home, they brought coffee and spring water, the two luxuries of
those arid mountain heights. These poor homes, although rarely better
than stables, sheltered people full of heroism, hospitality, and
primitive social virtues; as well as a passionate hatred for the
"Schwab," their Austrian neighbour, and the Turk, their ancient foe.
The men lived in anticipation of war, not much caring whom they fought;
for peace meant a stagnant poverty, while war held glory and pillage.
It was the day of the farewell festivities for the Bulgarian Prince,
that the peasant subjects of Prince Nicolas passed in review before
their patriarch, who was the supreme judge and arbiter of their fate.
The menials kissed the hem of his coat, while the heads of different
tribes kissed his cheek. Each man in passing before his lord told his
troubles openly, and waited for the word of cheer or of judgment.
With little variation they all told of utter poverty--the kind of
poverty which meant that from the month of August until the next autumn,
there would be no bread; for the crops had failed. There was no prospect
of relief, the Prince himself being poor and in debt; and the country
had no resources.
I proposed emigration as a remedy, and rather impatiently the Prince
dismissed the suggestion, saying that every warrior was of value in this
mountain fastness; soldiers were its one asset, and they might at any
moment be needed by their godmother, Russia, if not by himself.
Soldiers we did not need, I told him; the war with Spain was over, and
even during its progress, we had soldiers to spare; but if his men would
learn to "turn their spears into" crowbars, and "their swords into"
shovels (taking liberties with a prophetic utterance) they would find
opportunity for work, if not for valour; for a good wage, but not for
pillage.
I knew they would come and they did. An apostolic band of twelve men
first; seventy and more, following; three hundred on the next steamer,
after which a temporary check. The three hundred, having violated the
contract labour law, were sent home.
Then, like a flood, too long held back, came thousands, scattering
through the Alleghanies and the Middle Western plain, as far as the
Missouri River, and into California, where a colony of many hundreds at
Los Angeles is in Paradise; although first they went through many a
purgatory.
Ten years, and ten times ten years, which in Montenegro's past were more
or less glorious, had left the country practically unchanged; except as
the present ruler had tried to root out some of its latent barbarisms.
Here Slavic traditions at their best were immovably intrenched, and here
were the bulwarks against the best and the worst in our civilization.
Neither steam nor electricity, those destroyers of archaic simplicity,
had yet entered the country, nor had our vulgarities of French dress and
morals driven out the simple virtues or the picturesque national garb,
worn by the Prince and by the peasant.
On all sides, Montenegro's neighbours, the Albanians, Bosnians,
Herzegovinians, and even her brother, Servia, in the lowlands of the old
cradle home--had all yielded, in a greater or lesser degree, to
Mohammedan influences. Montenegro alone remained an unsealed fortress,
in which the crescent never supplanted the cross; nor did the horse's
tail wave from its flag-staff, on which once and forever had been
unfurled the victorious colours--red, black, and white.
The dawn of the twentieth century found the principality still Homeric
and patriarchal, but the brief years since its opening have been
significant ones. During those years her sons for the first time left
"their crags and unsealed passes" to go out upon so base an errand as
seeking work across the Atlantic, later to return with the booty of a
bloodless conquest.
About ten years after my last visit to Montenegro, I was again
journeying towards it upon that serpentine road from whose every winding
the truly matchless bay can be seen, receding with every turn, hemmed in
more and more by the chalk cliffs which look like petrified clouds.
Almost barren of verdure they are, but full of an awful majesty; until
they blend with the bay, when one can see beyond them the blue Adriatic.
The ships upon her bosom are moved by a gentle _sirocco_, while the
islands on the Dalmatian coast, hidden in the shining green of the olive
and the yellower tints of fig leaves, make patches of colour which seem
to be floating away in the mist rising at noontime from the sea.
Suddenly one turns northward and faces gray stones, walls of stone,
fields of stone--nothing but stone--and that is Montenegro. My peasant
driver told me that when God made the earth, He saw that He had made it
good, with the exception of the stones, of which there were too many. He
called His angel Gabriel and told him to take a bag as large as the ends
of the four winds and go down to earth, pick up the surplus stones and
cast them into the sea.
The devil, who delighted in the stones and the trouble they would give
humanity, flew after the busy angel.
When Gabriel had picked up all the superfluous stones on earth, and was
about to drop them into the Adriatic, his Satanic Majesty took his
pocket knife, cut a hole in the angel's bag, and all the stones dropped
on to that part of the earth where Montenegro is situated.
The peasant's story accounts for the topsy-turvy position of the stones;
now piled high as mountains, then solid walls of stone, and, again, huge
boulders scattered about, with plenty of smaller ones between. There are
some fertile spots, especially the famous _Brda_, where flocks find
pasture; and there is an occasional field large enough for a horse to
turn with its plough. Most of the country, however, is barren, and it is
from this bleakest mountain region that the exodus to America has taken
place.
At Nyegusi, as usual, there was an hour's wait, and a chance to refresh
the inner man with cheese and coffee. In this primitive hostelry one
noticed the first evidences of the changes wrought. Nyegusi, the
birthplace of the Prince, under the shadow of the historic Lovczin, has
been more drained of its men in these times of peace than ever it was in
time of war.
[Illustration: WHERE THE ANGEL DROPPED THE STONES AND NOW DROPS DOLLARS
A typical landscape in a district of Montenegro, from which immigration
has set in.]
When last I passed through it, there stood before every one of the
wretched stone huts a giant-like figure, attired in his native costume,
which, according to Montenegrin standards, was worth a fortune, and did
indeed represent its wearer's wealth. Ancient and costly weapons
protruded from his belt, generously wound around his portly body. Thus
armed, he paraded up and down the rocky streets of Nyegusi, or lounged
in the village inn, smoking cigarettes and drinking his _raki_, if he
had the wherewithal.
At the time of which I write, the streets were deserted, save for the
women, who bent beneath their heavy burdens of wood which they bring
down from the ravines in the Lovczin mountain.
Old men sat wearily on the stone walls which surrounded their small
fields, and every one told of a son who had gone "to Amerikee."
One toothless woman could tell her age only approximately, by the number
of sons she had borne; and there were eighteen. Ten of them were in
America; the others had been killed in border warfare.
In this same town I met a mother of twenty-two sons, twenty of whom had
lost their lives in battle. The two survivors were the innkeepers of
Nyegusi. The inn itself was the same as when first I saw it, with its
beaten earth floor, and walls bare, except for the _icon_, a splendid
bit of Byzantine workmanship; but since I drank the excellent coffee
there, ten years ago, more than 5,000 braves have been under its roof,
bound for my own country or returning from it. Now the room is full of
them, all homeward bound, spending money far too freely in drinking and
gambling; two vices which, although taken with them from their
mountains, they bring back in exaggerated form.
I must confess to a sense of disappointment when I saw them beside the
Montenegrin who had remained at home. The sombre dress of our
civilization was a poor exchange for the brilliant, native costume. The
hard labour the men performed in America had robbed them of their erect
and elastic forms, and they looked like the menials of their brothers
who had been keeping watch against the "Schwab," in the shadow of the
Lovczin.
The change was not unlike that which has taken place in the American
Indian who left the war-path to repair the steel path of the railroad.
The men in the inn, nearly thirty of them, belonged to all parts of the
little realm, from Niksic in the North and Grahova on the Herzegovinian
border, to Cetinje and Podgoricza, its centre. They had gone out in
neighbourhood groups, members of one tribe; but, returning, had become
badly mixed. Some in the original group had failed, while others had
succeeded; some decided to remain in America, others were glad to come
home.
Most of those in the inn had been West, and knew only the rigorous side
of our industrial life, and to no European people could the experience
have been so trying; while none could have adjusted itself less easily
to it.
The complaints as registered in Cetinje were many, and on the whole
justified. They may be classified as follows:
Cheated by Employment Agencies 80%
Cheated by Austrian boarding-house keepers 60%
Money lost by giving bribes to Irish-American
bosses who promised jobs which were never given 36%
Rough treatment by bosses 72%
Robbed by railroad crews in Montana 80%
"Shanghaied"--made drunk and railroaded
from St. Louis to Southern Kansas 15%
Robbed of money and tickets before departure
for home 40%
This represented the dark side of the experience of the Montenegrin
immigrant. The brighter side cannot so easily be classified. As with
other groups, so with those; America meant an enlargement of their
horizon. Most of them had earned money and meant to buy land; some of
them had an eye to the undeveloped mineral wealth of their country, and
two carried home enriched lives through having attended an evening
school, where they had learned to read and write some English.
All were still loyal sons of their mountain home, and only three of the
thirty in the inn meant to try their luck again.
The innkeeper thought emigration a great boon, and it was, to him; for
the emigrants all passed through Nyegusi whether they came or went, and
that meant revenue.
Externally, Cetinje, the capital, is still the same; although there the
greatest change has taken place since my last visit. Cetinje now has a
parliament, and its post-office officials have something more to do than
smoke cigarettes. Its storekeepers are enriched by the inflow of money;
the women respond to the new spirit; for a comparatively large number is
going to America, and a few have already gone. The men, especially the
old peasants, find this new spirit most trying. One of them, in a little
stone hut at Kolasin, said: "The women come home after three years'
absence and the devil has got into them. They _sit_ in my presence and
demand to eat when I do!
"What kind of country is that anyway which encourages such things? Is it
a woman's country?"
I met one woman whose son I knew in the "States." He is one of the few
that have prospered, and he means to stay. His mother's little cottage
on the outskirts of Cetinje shows plainly the influence of America.
On the walls hang many gaudy calendars, and a crayon portrait of her
son, in an elaborate frame.
"Tell me," she said, as she pointed to a bulky newspaper printed in
Scranton, Pa., and sent by her son, as a curiosity, "how many weeks does
it take them to read it?"
Her son sends her ten dollars every month, which means fifty kronen.
"Only the good Princess has so much money of her own!" the proud mother
said; and I am not so sure that even the Princess has it.
There must be many such huts; for the postmaster told me that $30,000
came into this little rocky nest in one year; more money than passed
through the hands of that postmaster in twenty preceding years. In a
country so impoverished, this money cannot help being a blessing.
It is true, that after a brief glimpse of Montenegro I left it with
feelings decidedly mixed as to the benefits it has derived from
emigration. The Prince is less a patriarch than he was and not so
accessible to his subjects; for he has felt the force of a revolution,
small but significant.
The grand opera setting of the villages and towns is being destroyed;
men no more strut about like stage heroes, waiting for their cues. The
picturesque is going, is almost gone, and will go entirely; poverty,
extreme poverty, pinching, grinding poverty is going too, and will soon
disappear. Men drink more fiery _raki_ and gamble more; women are
beginning to lift up their heads and walk _beside_ the men, not _behind_
them. I am convinced that the relative of the Minister to the Exterior
would not now black my boots; for which I rejoice, although the old
braves complain and say: "America is a woman's country."
Montenegro, hemmed in on three sides by Austria and on the other side by
Turkey, and all around by poverty, has found an outlet and relief by way
of the sea. Progress has come slowly and from far away and she must pay
the price; yet when all is considered, she ought to be glad to pay it.
In talking to the postmaster of Cetinje, I referred to my driver's
story, about the angel's dropping the stones upon Montenegro, and said:
"It must have been a poor sort of angel; for he didn't pick them up
again."
"Ah, well! He is trying to make up for it. Look here;" and he showed me
advices from New York for 1,500 kronen.
"If that angel keeps up the good work, we will have a krone for every
stone that he dropped on our soil. Don't you say anything against our
angel!"
XII
"THE HOLE FROM WHICH YE WERE DIGGED"
It was some sort of saint's day, one of the many; this day, just before
the harvest time, served at least one useful purpose. It brought
together the _latifondisti_, the landowners, and the _contadini_, the
labourers, who, after mass, bargained with one another for the harvest
wage.
There was a time when the _padrone_ had a dozen men at his heels begging
to procure them work; but now the tables are turned, and smartly dressed
men court these rough toilers of the Abruzzi, and are happy, when, over
a bottle of wine and a hand-grasp, the bargain is sealed.
In less than twenty years wages have increased from sixteen to sixty
cents a da
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