The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow

“Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord! Praise ye the Lord!”

PART II

With the Incoming Tide

XIII

PROBLEMS OF THE TIDE

We, in the United States, have alternated between fear because so many immigrants came, and regret because so many went away; but the recent influx brought joy to all, because the coming again of so many, indicated the return of good times.

For our good or ill, for what is better than mere good times, and for worse than financial depression or economic problems, these strangers of all races and nations come and go, helping to make our history and shape our destiny.

From the beginning, our history has in a large degree been determined by the migratory movements of larger or smaller groups from the Old World, and unless we have idealized these movements overmuch, those groups which came, unconscious of the gold and the iron slumbering in our hills—which came for “conscience’ sake”—those groups have affected our history most fundamentally if not most permanently.

Pilgrims, Puritans, Huguenots, Quakers and German Pietists certainly made history. They sailed the treacherous seas and marched into the pathless wilderness, driven by something higher than the mere necessity to sustain life.

Subsequently came other Germans, the Irish, Scotch and Scandinavians. They came primarily because of economic distress in the home-land; yet even among those were many groups which came because they were dreamers of dreams, and sought “a city whose builder and maker is God.”

In one of our Western states are two large communities, one from Holland and one from Germany; both are late comers to this Western world. One of them has built itself into a rather typical Western town and the other is the one successful example of a religious community in this country. Both these groups left prosperous homes in the Old World to seek a place where they might worship God according to the dictates of their conscience; and all this happened in the latter part of the nineteenth century, at the very zenith of our material development.

Large and influential groups of these seekers after God may be found throughout the length and breadth of our country; although they may now come out of the heart of Russia, like the Molicani in Los Angeles, California, they come moved by the same impulses which drew the Pilgrims to Plymouth and the Germans to Pennsylvania, and they exhibit the same characteristics.

In these days most people believe that when the last Irishman has arrived from Dublin, the Old World will be drained of her best people, and we look upon a certain boundary line in Europe as the division between good people and bad; yet from beyond that line come pilgrim bands in much larger numbers than the casual observer knows, and they are bent upon the same holy errand as that which brought those who came generations ago. In fact the Reformation with its religious and political consequences is making itself felt at this late day in these migratory movements. Large groups driven to the plains of the Volga or the Danube are now coming to the United States; with narrow doctrines, it is true, but with deep convictions, and the churches of the Reformation feel this current in the measure in which they have kept themselves spiritually alert. Yet one must admit that the vast majority of those who come is driven by no higher motive than the economic pressure. Yet it is not always poverty which drives them from their village homes to our cities or from their quiet fields to our noisy shops.

They are no poorer to-day than they were fifty years ago when no one thought of moving even a league from the village in which he was born. They are simply obeying an impulse which is extending to the very edges of civilization; an impulse created by discontent. Everywhere men are beginning to believe that God meant them to enjoy the good things of life now, and that all men, not merely a privileged class, should be able to enjoy them.

Nothing ever quite so rudely shattered the idea of the stability of wealth as the discovery of America and the subsequent migrations there of different groups from different portions of Europe.

Wealth had been in a measure entailed, the possession of a class; and poverty was meekly accepted as the divine apportionment to the mass of men. When it was rumoured that gold lay hidden in the mountains across the sea, that no key was needed to gain access to its hiding-place, and that it would belong to any one who dared, the myth was quickly dissolved. Poor men came and got their share of gold—not so often by finding it as by toiling for it.

Further and further the truth travelled; slowly, as is the way of truth; until to-day, scarcely anywhere is the prevailing social order or economic status accepted as fixed. The greater the number of men returning from America, even with very moderate wealth, the more the discontent spreads, and men seek the place where this change may soonest be effected.

They will continue to come until the economic opportunities at home are appreciably nearer those they find in this strange land. Although at present there is no European country or province from which there has not been some emigration, there are people who have only begun to seek this adjustment; therefore, the force of the tide towards America is destined to increase rather than decrease, and an annual influx of 2,000,000, more, rather than less, may be expected during the next decade.

No matter from where the groups come, they will present an economic problem to those who, in a measure at least, have risen to a higher standard of living. Each group will fear that the younger and often cruder body may lessen its chances of maintaining that standard. The Germans, the Irish and the Norse people were not received with open arms by those who preceded them, even those of related race or nationality. This was especially true during the years when war, famine and persecution brought them in large numbers.

Now, in turn, all these look askance at the Jew, the Slav and the Italian; while they, like the rest, are ready to close the doors to the vast hordes about to move onward, and, as they believe, upward. It is also interesting to note, that among these late comers, there are decided ideas as to who are desirable immigrants, and who are not.

The Slav, if he is a Pole, would exclude his cousin, the Slovak, and both are united in thinking that the Ruthenian is a rather inferior being; while the Ruthenian would debar the Jews, Servians and Croatians from the economic benefits of the land of his adoption.

Until now there has been room for all, and they have not presented a serious economic menace, except as they have intensified the general problem of labour. Each group, driven from the lower and coarser tasks, has risen from mine to shop, from shop to store, and from the store into every avenue of business and professional life.

Thus far all have been crowded up and not many have been crowded out. No considerable groups of native Americans are bewailing the fact that they cannot find work in the mines; nor would large numbers desire to go back to them from their safer toiling places.

The Irish are not mourning because they are not working on sections, nor would they be willing to leave their beats and office chairs from which they are ruling, not only those of us who came after them, but a fair share of those who came before them. They do not care to go back to the track, the pickax and the shovel.

Without the Slav, the Italian and the Magyar, that which we call our industrial development would have been impossible. This development does not lessen the economic problem, it intensifies it; but it cannot be proved that no economic problem would exist if, instead of Slav and Latin, the Teutonic races were dominant in this movement. In that case I believe the problem would be more difficult of solution.

Let me again frankly admit that I do not regard most immigrant groups of the present type as a serious menace to the other groups, or to the whole economic life, provided they are needed to do the work for which they seem best fitted. At present this is still a matter of proper distribution and presents no such serious difficulty as is commonly supposed; for the immigrant will go wherever he is wanted and a fair wage is assured him. Nor is he quite so eager to herd in cities as we imagine, and no community need be without an adequate supply of labourers, if they are needed for hard, crude labour. There is no work so hard or so dangerous that the immigrant will not attempt it.

Like their forerunners in the migratory movement of European races, the present immigrants respond quickly to the American higher standards of living, and in many cases much more quickly than some of the older groups responded.

When we speak of the horrors of the East Side of New York, the crowded Ghetto and Mulberry Street with its Italian filth, we forget the days when the Irish possessed the land, “squatting” wherever they could, and living in wretched huts; when the American used to sing:

The pig and the goat have gone, and instead, the Irish have pianos and phonographs in their parlours; but in one generation, many Slavs and Italians, under less favourable conditions, have achieved the same results, minus the pig and goat period.

To-day, the merchants in Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Connelsville and Pittsburg regard the Slav as a great “spender”; and if the Italian is not now like his predecessors, he soon will become so imbued by the American spirit, that, like us, he will live up to his income and beyond it.

That phase of the problem so much complained of, which relates to the immigrants’ sending the bulk of their earnings to Europe, would not be half so serious if we provided a safe banking system; preferably, Postal Savings Banks. Both the Austrian and Italian governments thus safeguard every penny which is sent abroad, and one cannot blame the toiler who prefers to trust his money to a government in whose financial soundness he has absolute confidence, rather than place it in our own savings institutions, in which we ourselves have but little confidence.

The economic problem as presented by the effect of immigration upon the labour market is made less serious by the fact that large numbers of those who come, go back and forth, according to the demand for the commodity which they supply.

During our last financial crisis, the sudden withdrawal from competition of half a million toilers, certainly rendered conditions less difficult than they would have been had we drawn for our supply upon those sources in Northern and Central Europe, which have always sent us their surplus population for permanent settlement. Those aspects of the present immigrant population, which are usually pointed out as its defects, have in a large measure helped to make the economic problem less acute; although they have aggravated some phases of it. Foremost among these is the ethnic problem.

Possibly because of the bitterness of the race question in the South, the American people have become very sensitive to ethnic differences. All those primitive instincts which were at work in the childhood of the race have risen to the surface and threaten to become permanent factors in our national character.

A little more or less pigment in the skin, the shape of a nose or the slant of the eyes, produce in the average American that most primitive of antagonisms—race prejudice.

Being a primitive instinct, it defies reason, the commandments of religion and the dictates of humanity. In fact, it often becomes irrational, irreligious and inhuman.

During the recent agitation of the Japanese question on the Coast, I discovered that no matter how far removed the ordinary American may be from the seat of the difficulty, the very agitation of the question acts contagiously upon the people of the East as well as of the West. As a result, their feelings towards the Japanese have unconsciously changed for the worse, so that the question has assumed in their minds the qualities and proportions of the Negro problem.

To justify its existence, this instinct, if such it is, overemphasizes ethnic differences and minimizes the superior qualities of the race or group involved. It always applies the categoric judgment when the judgment is adverse, and admits grudgingly that in each group or race there are certain individuals who possess good qualities.

In visiting nearly every city of the United States where there are groups of Italians, I have everywhere heard it said by those who had dealings with them: “We have no bad Italians, ours are good, the bad ones are elsewhere.” In Trenton, N. J., you are told that the bad Italians are in Patterson; but when you are there, nearly every one denies the fact and consigns all the bad Italians to New York.

The truth is, that wherever men have had a chance to know the individual Italian, they have discovered that there are good Italians even as there are good Jews and good Slavs, and that there are good and bad in every race.

Naturally, when men apply the warped categoric judgment to another race, particularly when that race is in political or economic competition with them, they are likely to magnify the evil in the character of the race, and rarely even admit the good. That this categoric judgment is seldom just, that it leads to antagonisms which actualize themselves in race riots and wars, is certainly very evident.

I have watched the development of this prejudice against the Japanese, even as I am most anxiously watching it grow against certain European groups which are ethnically more or less differentiated from the native population, and I am not over confident that we shall solve the ethnic problem without much struggle and stress and strain. Indeed, the ethnic problem can be solved only if we have patience, a measure of sympathy and the sense of justice.

There is a subtle force at work, which, to a degree at least, is settling this matter for us—a force which, if we allow it full play, will complete the task whose result will be the miracle of the age.

I call it a miracle, advisedly; for the things which seemed fixed, unchangeable, deeply graven in the nature of certain European races, the products of long ages, vanish in a generation.

Race characteristics which were regarded as biological are found to be sociological; on the outside of the race, if we might so express it, and not on the inside.

The children of the Neapolitans and the Sicilians lose somewhat of their swarthiness; the features lose their sharpness, and as a rule the children grow over the heads of their parents. Indeed, the last named process takes place among natives and aliens alike.

The ethnic differences of even the most strongly marked European races will ultimately disappear; that is, if we have patience and sympathy, and, above all, if we mete out that justice which gives every man a chance, regardless of his nationality or race.

As a nation we do not possess in an abundant degree these qualities; therefore the ethnic problem is one which may yet postpone its solution until that time when indeed there shall be “Peace on Earth and Good Will to Men.”

Thus far I have touched upon two problems presented by the return of the immigrant tide: the economic and the ethnic.

Another problem presented by this influx of aliens is in that rather indefinable realm called culture.

The question is: Will these people be able to appreciate the cultural ideals of America, and make them their own?

It would be an insult to my readers to try to make clear to them that the people who come to us are not barbarians or semi-barbarians; although as a rule they are uncultured and not yet in harmony with many of our ideals. I would not even attempt to mention this, were it not for the fact that it is the commonly accepted idea, that we are dealing with the offscouring of Europe. Let me illustrate. Not very long ago, I heard a home missionary secretary of a certain denomination say before an audience of intelligent, Christian people, that “We are landing annually a million paupers and criminals”; and I venture to say that nearly every one who heard that statement believed it. Let us see who these people are who come to us.

Slavs, Latins and other Aryan groups, such as Lithuanians, Albanians, and Greeks; of whom the first two have fairly earned the right to be called the oldest inhabitants of the continent of Europe. Next in order are Finns and Magyars, from among the Ugru-Altaic races, Jews and some smaller Semitic groups. The bulk is made up of Slavs, Latins and Semitic peoples.

Need I question whether the Latin has in him the qualities which will enable him to appreciate our culture? The Italian who built Florence, whose sons built St. Peter’s, painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and carved out of Carrara marble the “Pieta” and the statue of Moses?

Need I mention Giotto, the builder, Raphael, the painter, a Dante, a Petrarch, a Savonarola—a hundred masters of the chisel and the brush, of rhythmic rhyme and stately prose, all reared in that Garden of Europe, Italy?

Will the Jew learn to appreciate that culture, the best of which was created by his sires? For the glory of our American culture lies in the quality of its manhood and womanhood and that at its best is patterned after men and women whose names would debar them from certain clubs and hotels to-day. Moses, Amos and Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and in all reverence I mention Jesus and Mary, John, Paul and Peter. Strange to say, it is sometimes necessary to call the attention of intelligent people to the fact that these men and women were not Methodists or Presbyterians or even Episcopalians; and that neither their sires nor their sons came over in the Mayflower.

Perhaps we need to realize that as Americans we have neither invented nor discovered education, liberty or religion. What we have accomplished is, that we have made gifts to the many, of some of those blessings which in the immigrants’ country are the possession only of the few; and that is no small achievement.

The problem, the real problem, is: how to feed these people on truly vital knowledge, how to make common to all, the beautiful, the harmonious, the ethical; how to bring to all, the knowledge of that religion which indeed makes free from tribal pride and racial hate and leads men into the freedom of the sons of God.

Perhaps the greatest problem still to be solved is, how to interpret to these people the one supreme gift of all these gifts which most of them never possessed—the right of citizenship.

Herein lies our real peril; not because the immigrant cannot be made to understand how to exercise this right; but because here we are least efficient, and here we, the earlier comers and their children, have most signally failed.

The Scotch-Irish of Pittsburg are not a conspicuous example of good citizenship for the Italians; the Germans of Reading and Lancaster have no overplus of civic righteousness to give the Slavs; the Quakers of Philadelphia have not been moved by the Spirit to teach the Jews how to govern a city righteously; the Yankees of Connecticut and Rhode Island have not ruled their states in such a manner that the crude Lithuanian or the Greek could in all cases follow their example; nor are the Irish of New York in a position to throw stones at the other races.

I do not know of a single case where the newer groups have failed to respond to sane, vigorous leadership in the struggle for civic righteousness; while in every large city there are conspicuous examples of many a battle won, because the immigrants have aided the cause.

In Scranton, Pa., in the fight for a clean city, the mayor’s private secretary, a Russian Jew, did valiant service; while Pittsburg’s “cleaning up” has been accomplished because a vigorous attorney of the same race was one of the captains in a campaign which may have vast consequences for the entire state.

It ought to be a matter of no little pride to the Jews of Pittsburg, that among its non-corruptible councilmen there was at least one of their race.

Prof. Graham Taylor of Chicago, whose worth and work that city does not fully appreciate, has found the Poles of his ward ready to share in the struggle for civic betterment. One of the first “clean” councilmen of the city came from that ward and was a member of the Slavic race.

The problem of citizenship is not a problem created by the immigrant, and his presence makes it more difficult of solution, only because we have not provided him with safe leaders and have not ourselves been very good examples. Indeed the primary corrupting influence in every city with which I am acquainted is either of native stock or belongs to the first or second generation of those immigrants whose coming does not disturb us and whose presence we regard as a blessing. These are either German or Irish, and largely of the latter nationality.

That phase of the struggle which is directed against the saloon, the newcomer does not understand, and as yet no one has taken pains to enlighten him. We are astonished when we find him opposing our efforts to deprive him of his liquor; but to the Slav, at least, whiskey means life and strength. He would regard being deprived of meat as more reasonable than having his vodka or palenka taken from him.

The immigrant needs leaders in whom he can have absolute confidence; leaders who possess the genius of democracy and the spirit of brotherhood; who will have patience with his slow ways.

Those of us who are not born to lead ought to realize that a good example is very contagious, and that the love of righteousness and justice is not so foreign to these strangers as some of us imagine.

It is in the hope of stimulating both leadership and good example that I have written the following chapters. In that hope I have pointed out how contagiously our example acts upon these groups and how the processes of assimilation are retarded by injustice and prejudice.

I have given special attention to the religious life of these newer groups whose interpretation I have attempted, because not only does religion play a large part in their lives; but because I believe that in the field of religion lie the largest possibilities for that kind of assimilation which can make of all these “tribes and tongues and nations” “fellow citizens with the saints”; and of all the “strangers and sojourners,” members of the “household of God.”

XIV

THE SLAV IN THE IMMIGRANT PROBLEM

The majority of Slavic people is of peasant type, and scarcely anywhere has it developed a middle class strong enough to form a bridge upon which to cross the age-long chasm between it and the upper class. This means that poverty and contempt have been accepted as the reward for hard labour, and as the divinely appointed lot of the peasant, who in but few Slavic countries has escaped serfdom, a condition of semi-slavery from which he emerged with insufficient land, or none, with many limitations as to individual ownership and with practically no limitations as to his share of the burden of government support.

The masses of the peoples of the Slavic countries have never been above economic want, and have been but slowly awakened to the more expensive demands of our civilization.

To the peasant, bread and cabbage to eat, a straw thatched isba to shelter his family, and an occasional pull at the vodka bottle, meant comfort; while to have feather beds, a crowing cock in the barn-yard and a pig killing once a year, was the realization of his wildest dreams.

Fully two-thirds of these more than 100,000,000 people do not know what it means to have enough bread to eat, and with the exception of Hungary, many of the countries in which they live do not produce enough foodstuffs to allow every man the ordinary military rations. Nevertheless, they are forced to export a fair share of their crops, in order to bring sufficient money into the country for the support of the government.

To people living under such economic conditions, emigrating to America will, for some years at least, be a going from Egypt to the Promised Land; although manna and meat have to be supplied without supernatural intervention and at the constant peril of life and limb.

As the Slav has not yet developed a compact middle class, this has had to be supplied by foreigners. Germans, Jews, Tartars, Armenians and Greeks are his merchants and mechanics, his bankers and manufacturers. This condition has fixed the social status of the peasant, placed him under exceptionally burdensome laws and marked him an inferior.

His picturesque clothing became his prison garb, and rarely did he have opportunity to exchange it for the commonplace clothing of our civilization.

To be a peasant means to be addressed by a personal pronoun which is a mark of inferiority; it means to be bound by customs which are as irksome as an “iron shirt”; it means to be the butt of the ridicule of stage fools, who, after all, only mimic the fools in real life.

Military service offered the only escape from this cast, and bravery in battle the only avenue to distinction.

Into some regions the industrial life came with its rude call to freedom, with its trumpet notes of revolution, and the half awakened Slav struck; then went to sleep again, murmuring something like a curse, before he closed his eyes.

This social disability of the Slavic peasant is being partially overcome by immigration; for the immigrant who has tasted a little of even our crude freedom with its mixed blessings, who wears our sombre clothing, whose feet are shod with our shoes—he it is of whom it might again be said, poetically and prophetically: “How beautiful are the feet of him that bringeth glad tidings of good things.”

These glad tidings will, for a long time, bring us these millions, in the hope that they too may earn the right to escape their bondage with its attendant limitations and contumely.

Economically, always at the edge of want and in the shadow of starvation, and socially always at a disadvantage, the Slavic peasant is also living under galling political conditions which he is only now beginning to feel in all their severity.

With but few exceptions, the Slav is an oppressed man; oppressed by alien rulers, who, by force, are trying to wipe out of his consciousness his national memories, and steal from his lips his mother tongue.

Where it is not the German or the Magyar who puts him under the yoke, it is some close Slav relative who is practicing on him the Golden Rule in its perverted form. When these conditions do not exist, the Slav bears the yoke of his own making, in the form of Autocracy.

It is the distinction of the Slavs that they are the only Europeans who, although not unanimously, believe that Autocracy is the form

TWO TYPES OF POLES

of government best suited to their national character.

This is certainly true of many Russians, who see in the Czar a divinely appointed autocrat; while many other Slavs of different nationalities dream of the day when they shall bear this same yoke. The Russians also rule, and most severely, their close kinsmen, the Poles, and are not noticeably liberal to the Malo Russ, the Little Russians of the South.

Every cruel, political expedient has been used by Russia to subjugate or assimilate these people, who are flesh of her flesh and bone of her bone.

One might imagine that the Poles would have learned enough in the school of political adversity to treat their own kinsmen, at least, as they would wish to be treated; but the trials the Ruthenians have endured at their hands are equalled only by what they themselves have endured at the hands of the Russians.

That the Poles suffer from the Germans, the Slovaks from the Magyars, the Slovenes and Servians from the Austrians, is only additional evidence that everywhere the Slavic peasant suffers politically, and that there is sufficient cause for the insecurity of his foothold. He realizes this the more, in the measure in which he feels the breath of welcoming freedom from across the seas, which lures him to our turbulent training school in citizenship, and no doubt will continue to lure him.

The economic, social and political conditions among the Slavs are such as will for some time in the future make their coming to America in large numbers, a certainty, and it is not out of the question that they will be the determining factor in our civilization. The Slav fits admirably into the place usually assigned the late comers among the immigrants: the bottom rung of the economic ladder. Of rugged physique and docile temper, he is regarded a valuable workman, performing the hardest tasks uncomplainingly, facing attendant dangers courageously, and enduring hardships and sufferings stolidly and without a murmur. Economically, he is never so much of a problem as the immigrant who comes to make his living by his wits; for that is a sphere likely to be crowded by the earlier, or what we might call the more advanced groups.

The Slav is docile and patient and need not be regarded as a serious economic menace by those who think that our workmen should demand a decent wage and maintain a fair standard of living. He is not temperate in his habits of either eating or drinking, his tastes in regard to clothing are crude, but not necessarily inexpensive and he squanders too much money for “that which satisfieth not.” He spends over thirty per cent. more for drink than the native workman, pays more, according to his wage, for rent, and falls behind only in that mysterious column which the social observer calls “miscellaneous.” In the Slavic groups which have been here longest and which contain households, the wife has lifted this mysterious column to a normal figure; for “Mother Vanity” has many daughters among the Slavic women.

The Slavic standard of cleanliness suffers by comparison with that of the older groups; although they are widely different in this respect and it is not safe to generalize on that point.

In judging the Slav we must take into consideration the housing conditions in America as he finds them, the fact that the men among the Slavs never do woman’s work, that many of them come without their wives and that the woman in her native environment has very little time for the finer household duties. She is her husband’s partner in all his heavy labour; but must do all her household work unaided.

Many of the Slavic groups will be slow to understand and appreciate the higher ideals of our civilization, but our civilization is not so foreign to their genius as we are apt to think. Wherever they have had the slightest opportunity, they have made valuable contribution to it. We must not forget that the Slav gave the world a Copernicus before we gave it a Newton; that he gave it a John Huss before the Germans gave it a Luther; that Comenius, one of the greatest pedagogues, lived and laboured before Froebel and Pestalozzi; and that Turgenieff, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin and Sienkiewicz stand fairly well beside our makers of literature.

I am not blind to some of the defects in the character of the Slavic peoples, in fact I know them so well that I know their source and I realize that they are not rooted in the race, but are the results of tyranny. These faults which seem so deeply fixed in the lives of the people can and will be wiped out; although the task may not be an easy one.

There is in the Slav a certain passivity of temper, a lack in sustained effort and enthusiasms, an unwillingness to take the consequences of telling the truth, a failure to confide in one another and in those who would do them good, a rather gross attitude towards sexual morality and an undeniable tendency towards Anarchy and intemperance.

They have but little collective wisdom, even as they have no genius for leadership, scant courtesy towards women, and other human weaknesses to which the whole human race is heir. To balance these failings, however, they have a deeply religious nature, a willingness to suffer hardship, a genius for self-expression in all forms of art, are usually honest in their business dealings and hospitable to strangers.

The danger is, that, in his new environment, the idealistic Slav will grow materialistic, that his phlegmatic temper will not take seriously the burdens of self-government, that in an individualistic atmosphere where “help yourself” is the watchword, latent tendencies towards Anarchy may develop, and that in our social organization which demands both the power of leadership and that of cohesion, he will be a brittle element, incapable of either.

Yet I do not fear that Slavic social or religious ideals or even racial characteristics will become dominant among us, even if the Slavs should constitute the bulk of our immigrant population. My reasons are: First: Because these ideals and characteristics are embodied in a peasant population which has little or no influence over its second generation, for it has found a higher social level. To this second generation, neither the speech nor the customs of its parents is attractive.

Second: Because the Slav is environed by city life and no matter how compact his neighbourhood may be, elements which make up the urban spirit penetrate into the most densely populated alley, make themselves felt, and become dominant.

Third: Because in his native environment the Slav has taken on the ideals of his neighbours more often than he has imposed his upon others.

In Asia, he has been influenced by his Mongol neighbours, but has himself not left any visible traces.

In Europe, the numerically weak Finn has resisted the force of the Autocratic State and the Orthodox Church; but has left the impress of his genius upon his Slavic neighbours.

After centuries of close contact with Slavic government, the Germans in the Baltic provinces of Russia are still more German than Russian.

The Czechs of Bohemia, the most virile of all the Slavic peoples, in spite of their stubborn struggle, have not metamorphosed their Germanic fellow citizens into Czechs; although they cannot easily deny the strong influence of their Teutonic neighbours upon themselves.

A mere handful of Magyars, almost at the centre of the sphere of Slavic influence, have imposed upon millions of Slavs their language and their ideals.

Whatever the causes for these conditions may be, and there are good causes, the truth is, that the Slav has nowhere become a dominant factor in the environment in which he has been placed; and we need neither hope nor fear that his ideals or his characteristics will become ours for good or ill.

Again it is true that in America this Slavic peasant population is awakened to its racial and historic heritage, and that feeling may be so artificially fostered by patriotism and religious organizations as to hinder a normal process of assimilation.

The Slav, by virtue of being among the most numerous of our new citizens, has a right to demand that the rest of us should know him; for by knowing him, we shall learn to respect him, appreciate the good qualities of his race and help him to overcome tendencies which hinder his full development.

We must give the Slav a full chance to know us, the best of us and the best in us—he usually knows the worst.

He must have our best interpreted to him in rational terms and ways, and not have it forced upon him by law or by a custom to which he yields but which he cannot understand.

I have described the Slav’s quality as brittle; perhaps stubborn would be better. You can lead him to the water and can also compel him to drink; but he will stop drinking when you are not looking, and “kick” besides.

On the other hand, once he understands and endorses an ideal, he will be loyal to it; stubbornly loyal.

Inasmuch as I believe that America’s best possessions are those ideals which spring from its religious convictions, ideals inherited from its Judaic and Christian ancestry, I also believe that its effort should be to interpret them to the Slav in practical terms of fellowship and service.

How far from these ideals or how near to them the Slav is, I have attempted to show in the next chapter; and to make the task of interpretation easier, I have put the more important Slavic groups with which we have to deal, in their own historic setting.

This will, I trust, stimulate in the further study of these people who are worth knowing for what they have suffered, for what they have done and for what they are.

XV

THE SLAV IN HISTORIC CHRISTIANITY

The Slavs then are a late product of Christian civilization; an unfinished and inharmonious product which is at its worst, where later Greek and Roman influences touched it, most turbulent where modern Western ideas have suddenly affected it, and at its best and rarest where the Slav’s own talents and resources have had a chance for rational development and adjustment.

That which complicates the problem presented to us by the Slav is the fact that in spite of his occupying practically contiguous territory, the close family bond was early broken by conquering armies, by rival missionary groups, by invading aliens who came to pillage, barter and trade, and by the influx of his neighbours, who varied all the way from Tartar and Turk to German and Magyar; from Finn and Armenian to Greek and Albanian.

When we speak of Slavs to-day we refer to Aryan people, whatever that may mean beyond the fact that they are Europeans, presenting no great ethnic variations; although there is no doubt that Mongol and Finnish blood has found its way into the veins of the Eastern Slavs. We also mean that they speak a closely related language, the Slavic; but which has become so differentiated in time that there are now literatures in Russian, Polish, Czechish, Servian and Bulgarian; each a distinct language, differing in alphabet, grammar, accent or sentence construction.

Besides these, there are other dialects, vital enough and varied enough to have created their own literature, and zealously guarded as their mother tongue by the people who speak them.

These linguistic differences have aided in complicating the religious and political problems among them. Thus, the Russians and the Poles have been made hereditary enemies, largely, because one received its Christian doctrines from Rome and the other from Constantinople; Ruthenians and Poles in Austria have been pitted against each other in an age-long struggle, by a difference in liturgies; Slovaks and Czechs, almost twin brothers, are little better than strangers to one another, because of a few hooks in the alphabet and a few variations in pronunciation.

The whole Southern Slavic group remains politically ineffective because of the dissimilarities of the Cyrilian and Latin alphabets and all that their difference is made to imply.

Even when transplanted to America, these contentions are magnified by the churches and governments concerned, which thus are effective in the continued separation of related groups.

If the Slavs may be called one race, they certainly present a kaleidoscopic conglomerate out of which emerge three groups: the Western, Eastern and Southern Slavs.

Besides their common racial bond, each group is related by language, economic environment, determined by climatic and political conditions, and above all, by religion, which is a stronger bond than even ties of racial kinship.

The entire Slavic world is living under the dominion of religion more or less clearly interpreted and understood. This manifests itself in conversation with the people. “God help you on your way!” “Go with God.” “Praised be the Lord Jesus Christ!” are common greetings as one journeys along Slavic highways and byways.

The names of the Deity and of the Saviour or the Virgin are never uttered without lifting the hat, accompanied by the words: “Slava i cast nyim budi!” Honour and praise to them!

The highways among the Western Slavs, who are largely Roman Catholic, are lined by crosses, chapels and shrines; and no matter how wretched the village, its church is well appointed and its peasants are not quite happy at the end of the year, unless its monotony was broken by a pilgrimage to some shrine where the Virgin waits, ready to bestow her blessing of good health or other rich favours supposed to be in her special keeping.

Feast days and fast days follow one another in quick succession and no season of the year or event in life is left unhallowed by religious observances.

All this is equally true of the Eastern and Southern Slavs who, with but few exceptions, belong to the Greek Orthodox church, and are cast in a religious mold as fixed as the form of the Byzantine icon, the symbol of that church.

To the Russians, the largest body among the Eastern Slavs, religion is an atmosphere in which they “live and move and have their being.” Among them also, church feasts and fasts regulate the days, while either the pleasure or the pain they bring is willingly accepted.

Sacrifices of candles and oil are freely offered and no pilgrimage is too wearisome to be undertaken. Visiting the tombs of saints and the dwelling places of hermits is a national mania, and religious ceremonies, which in their origin and meaning are wholly Pagan, take place in hut and palace alike; for no class of Russian society is quite free from gross superstitions. The peasant coachman, who drives his miserable beast over the cobblestone pavement, crosses himself before every chapel and icon; while his passenger, be he a general, a university professor or one of the common people, will do the same, with perhaps only a little less unction.

Yet, in spite of the fact that religious forms dominate the life of the masses of the Slavs, there are no people in Europe who less understand the real value of religion, whose conduct towards each other is so little affected by it or to whom it is so entirely a mere belief in the mysterious forces of Heaven and Hell which can be appeased by prayers, formulas, sacrifices and pilgrimages. Religion with them has seemingly nothing to do with sobriety, chastity, conquering the will, or the cultivation of the inner virtues.

The blame for this lies largely with the clergy, which, whether it is in Russia, Bulgaria or the countries inhabited by the different Servian nationalities, stimulates the superstition of the people and does but little to enlighten or ennoble them.

The priests nowhere occupy or deserve the place which they hold among the Western Slavs, and where the Roman Catholic minority has any fighting ground among the Southern Slavs, as in Servia,—there the Franciscans and Trappists tower above the Greek clergy as benefactors of their people and often as true saints and martyrs.

My assertion that the Slav is by nature truly religious, and that the clergy is in a great measure to blame for his hopelessly low standards, is proved by the remarkable phenomenon of the sects, which especially in Russia flourish, in spite of persecution. They grew up from within; some of them, supposedly before the Reformation, and still they are being formed and developed.

These sects range all the way from the most fanatical, whose members seek salvation in voluntary death or in some revolting form of mortification of the flesh, to large and influential bodies, kinsmen to our Quakers, Baptists and Methodists.

It is this hunger for religion which is the most hopeful characteristic of the Slavs, and one which ought to make contact with them less difficult than we usually imagine it to be.

The problem is, how to purge these movements from fanaticism when transferred to America; although in our soberer, freer and more practical atmosphere the dangerous elements are apt to be spontaneously corrected.

Protestantism, as a manifestation of historic Christianity, antedates among them the German Reformation and was contemporaneous with the earliest movements in England. History clearly shows that the Protestant spirit found kinship among the Slavs and that it is still alive. Evidences of this are the sect of the Bogumils early in the fourteenth century, which has left its traces among the Southern Slavs as far as Bosnia; the Hussite movement so vitally effective in preparing the way for Martin Luther and still a force in the national life of Bohemia—and the various sects among the Russians.

This Protestant spirit in its conventional form, as found in Bohemia, in Poland to some extent and among the Slovaks of Hungary, is unfortunately no more a factor than the Mother Church in the shaping of character, in inducing right social relations, or in determining the future of the Slavic race.

There are, however, various Protestant forces at work among these people; forces which emphasize spiritual and ethical ideals; such as the missions of the American Board, in Bohemia; the devoted and enthusiastic members of the “Gemeinschaft” in Kattowitz in Silesia, strategically situated where three great empires meet; the Baptist missions in Russia, and above all, the returned immigrant, who comes home, often enthusiastically but sanely, practically and devotedly religious, and with whom rests largely the religious and political future of at least two Slavic nationalities, the Slovaks and the Ruthenians, the latest to be awakened to the economic possibilities in America.

The Slovaks for nearly a thousand years have retained their national consciousness, in spite of the fact that long ago they were conquered by the Magyars, who have used every possible means to wean them from their language, the one strong link binding them to their historic past.

Patiently they have endured a national martyrdom; although the world at large knows nothing of their sufferings.

Whenever they have tried to speak, prison doors have enforced silence. In the struggle between race and race, the Magyars, who themselves were persecuted for freedom’s sake, have, in their treatment of the Slovaks, violated every principle of political liberty.

In a little village called Hluboka, in the midst of their well tilled acres, lives a group of Slovaks whose Lutheran pastor, John Hurban, was a man who helped to keep alive this national spirit, for which he endured imprisonment and even faced the gallows. In 1892 the people erected a modest monument over his grave, and at its unveiling they were driven from the cemetery at the muzzle of the gun.

The son of the dead pastor wrote an article in the public press protesting against this, and he was sent to prison for twelve months. An editor, Ambrosius Pietor, was incarcerated for eighteen months, for writing two articles complaining of the treatment his people received. When he returned home at the expiration of his term, his admirers met him at the railroad station and some young girls presented him with bouquets of flowers.

Twenty-one persons who took part in this reception were sent to prison for an average of a month each, and the three young girls, who betrayed their native country by handing this man bouquets of flowers, had to pay fines, aggregating 400 kronen.

In 1906, 245 Slovaks were sent to prison, and from 1906 to the present time the number is not far from 500. I have already cited the nature of the offenses for which they are punished.

I have mentioned these facts, not because I wish to throw discredit upon the Magyars, for government and people are usually two different things; but because I wish to throw light upon these Slovaks who come to us to do our most menial work and whose worth is obscured by our not knowing them. Their clannishness, the tenacity with which they cling to their native speech, and their attitude towards our Christian and national institutions, find some explanation in the miseries they have endured for the sake of preserving some kind of national or racial entity.

I consider these Slovaks among the most unspoiled of all the Slavic peoples; low in the scale of culture, it is true, but of such innate goodness and possessing so many virtues, as to make them most desirable immigrants and splendid material upon which to graft the best of our Christian civilization.

Like all Western Slavs they are largely Roman Catholic, but with enough of the Protestant element mixed with it to have given evangelical faith a grappling place.

This broader vision with its ethical element has been transferred from America to the Slovaks in Hungary and is now manifesting itself in a company of people, which, though small, is so thoroughly in earnest and ethical as to prove that they can be brought into harmony with the most vital religious ideals.

Ruthenians, or Ukranians, as they call themselves, who belong to the Eastern Slavic group,

RUTHENIANS
The most backward and oppressed of the Slavic people, whose destiny is worked out in America.

are a most unhappy people; degraded by adverse economic and religious conditions, worse if possible than those of the most debased Russians whose closest kinsmen they are. In Austria a majority belongs to the Greek Catholic church, which is a union of the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches, maintaining distinct Byzantine dogmas and acknowledging the supremacy of the Pope.

There are about 34,000,000 of these people, numerically more important than the Poles, by whom a portion is governed or ill governed and persecuted. Neither have they any chance for full development in Russia where the largest number lives; nor in Hungary, where they make their home on the eastern slopes of the Carpathians. They are now struggling for the maintenance of their national consciousness and are bearing all the unfortunate consequences.

In the United States their protest has taken form politically, in a National Ukranian Society, and religiously, in a Ruthenian Free Church, and both deserve sympathetic aid from those who believe in political and religious freedom.

The great task of religion in its ministry to the Slav, and that no matter what its ancient form or symbol, will be to make clear to him the difference between God and Cæsar; for religion and nationality, Heaven and the throne, are confused in his mind.

It must also teach him that besides its sacramental value it has service value, whose obligations rest upon priest and people alike.

Religion must wean him from his ancient enemies, intemperance and superstition, and when it has done this, it has rendered a service which may again make of the Slavs a homogeneous race; great, vital, virile and well prepared to play a leading part in the future history of Europe as well as America, where they are now, numerically at least, the most important element in the great immigrant tide.

XVI

FROM EPHRATA TO WHISKEY HILL

“Du acts wie ein stranger,” the good woman continued, taking my hand; and then, discovering that I had a right to act like a stranger, she apologized profusely. She had mistaken me for her family physician. In spite of her evident embarrassment, we began a conversation, and my ears, accustomed as they now are to our rather monotonous and uneuphonic English, refreshed themselves by listening to this new speech—Pennsylvania Dutch. It required thinking in two languages, and that in their most archaic forms.

Four generations had passed since my neighbour’s ancestors came to this country; yet her English, whenever she attempted it, smacked strongly of the Fatherland, and in an unguarded moment, when my sentences seemed to her rather involved, she said, “Du talkst a bissel zu fast.”

The trolley took us through the manufacturing centre of Reading and out into the fruitful fields of Lancaster County, and the further I travelled in that state the more I realized the difference between the old and the new Pennsylvania, even in the names called into my ears by the prosaic conductor. Philadelphia does not now suggest Bible times so much as it might; but there are Bethlehem, Nazareth, Emmaus, and Ephrata, each name suggesting at once a sacred atmosphere. Then for the new Pennsylvania are the names of Johnstown, Coalton, Scranton, and Steelton, besides those yet unplaced on the map—names like Hunkeytown, Guinea Hill, Dago Roost, and Whiskey Hill, squatted close to the mines, flanked by culm heaps and huge breakers, and cut through and through by ravines and dirt-clogged rivers. All these towns are destined to disappear long before the last lumps of coal dug there, are burned.

The trolley stopped at Ephrata, and my neighbour, who had been in Reading, “bargains zu kaufe im grosse schtore,” left the car; but not without admonishing me to be sure to see the cloister of the German Baptist Brothers, which, she said, “is a grosse sight.” I needed no admonition, for I was there on a pilgrimage. I had come, to stand face to face with a great past, to visit the old haunts of these German mystics, to lose myself in the all-pervading peace of Ephrata, after having been in the thick of the great industrial war, whose presence was attested even here by the cloud of smoke on the western horizon. This cloud of smoke, although changing into a pillar of fire by night, does not seem to be the guide out of captivity. I suppose one easily reads something into the atmosphere of a place; but I am sure that, even without the pilgrim spirit which brought me there, I should have recognized Ephrata as one of the places in which dreamers have built air castles; and these are castles which have foundations. The archæologist does not see them in the dust; but the sociologist, if he has a sensitive spirit, feels them, especially if he has come from a week’s study of Whiskey Hill.

One of the men who has written of Ephrata before me says: “There is nothing peculiar about the village itself, or its people.” He evidently had no “inner sense,” and, moreover, he had never been at Whiskey Hill. Not only is the air of Ephrata “salubrious and the outlook delightful,” the street is full of gabled houses one close upon the other. Some of them are commonplace indeed; but many of them are quaint and clean, with deep-set windows full of flower-pots, the green foliage shining through latticed panes, in rich contrast to the white snow almost up to the window-sills. And the people one sees—“commonplace”? People who for nearly two hundred years have clung tenaciously to a strange garb, in the midst of a “perverse and crooked generation,” bent upon changing the cut of its coats with every passing season? Women who wear brown bonnets and look as modest as thrushes, whom one sees in single file following the men; women who have resisted the allurements of pokes and toques and picture hats for two hundred years—such women commonplace? Such women are as remarkable as they are rare, and such there are in Ephrata.

As I watched them they were going to the modest meeting-house at the edge of the village. I did not follow them, for my way led straight down the main street which ends in the turnpike, over which a toll-gate still hangs. The gatekeeper sits in a little hut among his cronies, smoking the native weed and talking politics—and he who is acquainted with the quality of either ought to know that they are strangely alike.

“The cloisters are across the meadow,” the toll-keeper informed me. And, pointing to one of his companions, a man of uncertain age and a rather doubtful degree of cleanliness, he said: “And he lives in one of them.”

“I am not a member,” the man volunteered, apologetically. “My wife is.”

This alone proved him a modern and commonplace. I left him disgustedly, and, stepping over the stile, walked through the snow-covered meadow and along the shores of the Cocalico towards a group of rather ill-shaped, weather-beaten buildings which suggested a deserted farm more than a cloister. The momentary disappointment vanishes, however, as soon as one has a clear view of the peaked-roof buildings in which no outer beauty is visible, but which, with their low doors, narrow cells, and roped stairway, recall to him who knows, the “Chronicon Ephratense,” the groping of this Brotherhood after the blessed life here below, seeking communion with God in self-denial, in good works and pious songs. These Brothers fell into all the errors of Christendom and practiced many of its virtues in a single generation. Conrad Beisel, a German mystic, came here to live as an anchorite. His pious life drew others to him, and they progressed to monasticism.

When women found them, they all became celibates. They were close to every heresy which threatened the early Church, and were not far from worshipping Conrad Beisel as a reincarnation of Christ; while in the mystic Sophia they came close to the adoration of the Virgin. They practiced communism successfully for over half a century, and branded property as sin long before Proudhon declared it to be theft. They printed Bibles, wrote ecstatic hymns, developed to a remarkable degree the art of illuminating letters, and organized a Sunday-school in which they used some of the so-called modern methods, such as promotion cards, long before the thought came into the mind of Robert Raikes, the founder of the Sunday-school of to-day. They were chaste, frugal, and non-resistant. One of them, Peter Miller, the successor of Conrad Beisel, went to George Washington to plead for the remittance of the death penalty of a man, Michael Wildman, accused of treason. The General told Peter Miller that the severest penalty must be dealt out at a time like that.

“If it were not so, I would gladly release your friend.”

“Friend!” replied Miller; “he is the only enemy I have.”

This, it is said, made such an impression on General Washington that the pardon was granted.

I lingered in the “Saal,” the place of worship. Simple and small it is, with plain pine pews, the beamed ceiling hanging far into the room. The walls are covered by charts on which, in exquisite ornamental lettering, Scripture verses and some of the mystic poetry of the Brothers are written. There are also allegorical pictures, naively drawn by the pen, suggesting the thought that in time a new school of religious art might have been developed here.

Scarcely half a dozen worshippers, I was told by the cronies at the toll-gate, gather here on Saturday; for the sect is that of the Seventh Day Dunkards, or German Baptists, and it cannot be very long before this sanctuary will be empty and forsaken and its ruin complete.

I braved the snow-banks and waded through an unmarked path towards the cemetery where they shall all soon lie. I wandered among the graves, among those who long ago went to their rest and their reward. Here among others are the Sisters Iphigenia and Anastasia and the Brothers Daniel and Gabriel, the headstones of their graves quite covered by the snow. In the centre of the cemetery a stone sarcophagus rises above the snow. It seems to have withstood the ravaging tooth of time, for it stands squarely upon the ground. I brushed aside as best I could the snow which covered the tablet, and read: “Here rests an outgrowth of the love of God, a solitary brother, afterwards a leader, ruler, teacher of the solitary and the congregation of Christ in and around Ephrata. Born in Eberbach, in the Palatinate. Called by his worldly name, Conrad Beisel; but according to his spiritual name, ‘Friedsam,’ the peaceful one.”

The snow and the frost clung closely. I could not read it all, but I saw plainly the beautiful German letters cut deep into the stone. “Friedsam”—it was this word which took me back to Whiskey Hill.

“Friedsam.” No one could be called that on Whiskey Hill. Weather-beaten wooden buildings there are, scaffolded structures, shaken by the vibration of coal-crushing machinery within. From their third or fourth stories down, young boys sit before troughs, along which the coal rushes and rumbles and tumbles. Nine hours a day, in an atmosphere black as night from coal dust, sitting in a cramped and unnatural position, the breaker-boys pick slate from the falling coal by the light of smoky oil lamps directly under their nostrils. Nine hours of this, and many of these boys, mere children, although sworn to be the legal age, which is fourteen, walk homeward like old men. They look so weary, so old, so wizened! They surely are not “Friedsam.”

An old man climbs down the breaker. He, too, is now a breaker “boy.” Only about fifty-six years of age, unfit for the harder work in the mine, he picks slate from the larger lumps. He clings to a bit of broken fence as soon as the fresh air strikes him and coughs so violently that his paroxysm shakes the fence. The boys stand about, jeering; but when a clot of blood comes from the old man’s mouth, and another followed by a stream, the boys take to their heels.

“Prach, dust, got into my lungs,” the Slovak miner says. “It can’t last much longer.” Looking after the boys, and then pointing to himself, he adds, “The beginning and the end of the breaker-boy.”

I shall never forget the pain written on that man’s face as he told me that he came to this country, a young Slovak boy from a village by the river Waag, strong and full of health. He is giving his life-blood drop by drop, drop by drop, for our enrichment. He is unable to walk home; so I lead him. Home! This is his home. A gray, weather-beaten hut, one of thirty, standing on a slant of the hillside, surrounded by culm piles, black and forbidding. There is a street, deeply sunk in mire; for there is no sewerage, and a sickening green scum has gathered in front of every house. I say there is no sewerage—there is not even a decent ditch which might carry the foul stuff away.

The hut has three stories, the lowest one built into the hillside, with windows only to the front; the rest of the rooms are damp and cold, not even fit for the storing of vegetables. In one of these holes lives the old, consumptive breaker-boy. Surely this suggests nothing “Friedsam.”

There are thousands and tens of thousands such “homes” in Pennsylvania, all the way from Pittsburg to Whiskey Hill. Each one of them brings rich revenue to somebody, and all of them reap a rich harvest of death. Six, eight, and ten dollars’ rent a month is paid by these miners for a place in which they often die by inches.

The battle against filth is not everywhere zealously prosecuted; but I challenge any American woman to do better than some of these Slovak women on Whiskey Hill. Let me take you into one such home—and I came upon it more often than you may think. The room is freshly papered, the work done by the miner’s wife, and not ill done. The floor is scrupulously clean; gorgeous pictures of the saints hang on the wall; there is a sewing-machine, and a woman busy at her task of making shirts for her miner husband.