While on one side of Bethnal Green Road the hucksters were shouting and the crowd was busy dickering and chaffering for food and clothes, I noticed on the other side of the street a wayside preacher. I went over and listened to what he had to say, and then I noted the effect of his words upon his hearers. He had gathered about him perhaps a dozen persons, most of them, however, seeming to be his own adherents who had come out to the meeting merely to give him the benefit of their moral support. The great mass of the people who passed up and down the street did not pay the slightest attention to him. There was no doubt about the earnestness and sincerity of the man, but as I listened to what he had to say I could find in his words nothing that seemed to me to touch in any direct or definite way the lives of the people about him. In fact, I doubted whether the majority of them could really understand what he was talking about.
Somewhat later, in another part of the city, I had an opportunity to listen to another of these street preachers. In this case he was a young man, apparently fresh from college, and he was making a very genuine effort, as it seemed to me, to reach and influence in a practical way the people whom the lights of the torches and the music had attracted to the meeting. I observed that the people listened respectfully to what he had to say, and I have no doubt they were impressed, as I was, with his evident desire to help them. It was only too evident, however, that he was speaking another language than theirs; that, in fact, one might almost say he belonged to a different race of people. The gulf between them was too great.
After listening to this man I thought I could understand in a way that I had not understood before the great success which the Salvation Army at one time had among the masses of the people of East London. In its early days, at least, the Salvation Army was of the people; it picked its preachers from the streets; it appealed to the masses it was seeking to help for its support; in fact, it set the slums to work to save itself. The Salvation Army is not so popular in East London, I understand, as it used to be. One trouble with the Salvation Army, as with much of the effort that has been made to help the people of East London, is that the Salvation Army seeks to reach only those who are already down; it does not attempt to deal with the larger and deeper problem of saving those who have not yet fallen.
The problem of the man farthest down, whether he lives in America or in Europe, and whether he be black or white, is, in my opinion, not one of conversion merely, but of education as well. It is necessary, in other words, to inspire the masses in the lower strata of life with a disposition to live a sober, honest, and useful life, but it is necessary also to give them an opportunity and a preparation to live such a life after they have gained the disposition to do so.
The Negro in America, whatever his drawbacks in other directions, is not indifferent to religious influences. The Negro is not only naturally religious, but the religion he enjoys in America is his own in a sense that is not true, it seems to me, of much of the religious life and work among the people of East London.
The most powerful and influential organization among the Negroes in America to-day is the Negro church, and the Negroes support their own churches. They not only support the churches and the ministers, but they support also a large number of schools and colleges in which their children, and especially those who desire to be ministers, may get their education. These little theological seminaries are frequently poorly equipped and lacking in almost everything but good intentions; they are generally, however, as good as the people are able to make them. The Negro ministers in the backwoods districts of the South are frequently rude and ignorant and sometimes immoral, but they have this advantage, that they spring from and represent the people, and the religion which they preach is a religion which has grown up in response to the actual needs and feelings of the masses of the Negro people. In other words, the religion of the Negro in America is on a sound basis, because the Negro church has never got out of touch with the masses of the Negro people.
After leaving East London on my first Sunday in England, I drove about fifteen miles through the famous Epping Forest to Waltham Abbey, the country seat of Sir T. Fowell Buxton, a grandson of Sir T. Fowell Buxton, who succeeded Wilberforce as leader of the anti-slavery party in parliament, and who framed the bill that finally resulted in the emancipation of the slaves in the English West Indies.
There is certainly no more beautiful country to look upon than rural England. Flowering vines cover the humble cottage of the farm labourer as well as the luxurious country seats of the landowners, and lend a charm to everything the eye rests upon. I was all the more impressed with the blooming freshness of the country because I had come out of the stifling life of the crowded city. I learned, however, that rural England has for a long time past been steadily losing its population. From 1891 to 1900 it is said that the number of farm labourers in England decreased 20 per cent., and it has been estimated that the rural population of England and Wales has diminished something like 30 or 40 per cent. during the past century, at a time when the urban population has multiplied itself many times over.
There are, of course, many reasons for this decrease in the agricultural population. One is, that at the present time not more than 15 per cent. of the land in England is farmed by the people who own it. Thirty-eight thousand landowners hold four fifths of all the agricultural land in England.
A few days after my visit to Sir Fowell Buxton at Waltham Abbey I went into northern Scotland to visit Mr. Andrew Carnegie at Skibo Castle. While I was there I had opportunity to get some sort of acquaintance with farming conditions in that part of the world.
In Scotland the opportunities for the small farmer to obtain land are even less than they are in England. Some years ago, it is said, twenty-four persons in Scotland owned estates of more than 100,000 acres. The Duke of Sutherland owns a tract stretching, I was told, clear across Scotland from coast to coast.
In no country in the world is so small a portion of the population engaged in agriculture as is true in England. For instance, 68 per cent. of the population of Hungary, 59 per cent. of the population of Italy, 48 per cent. of the population of Denmark, 37.5 per cent. of the population of the United States are engaged in agriculture. In England and in Wales in 1901 only 8 per cent. were engaged in agriculture.
Not only is it true that a larger proportion of the population of England than of other countries has removed from the country to the city, but in England, also, the distance between the man in the city and the man on the soil is greater than elsewhere. For example, in Italy the distinction between the agricultural labourer and the labourer in the city may be said hardly to exist; the man who, at one part of the year, finds work in the city, is very likely to be found at work at some other time of the year in the country.
In Germany also I noticed that a great many of the manufacturing plants were located in the country, where the factory labourer had an opportunity to cultivate a small patch of land. To the extent that he has been able to raise his own food, the factory hand in Germany has made himself independent of the manufacturers and the market.
In Hungary I was told that in harvest time the public works were deserted and many of the factories were compelled to shut down, because every one went away to the country to work in the fields.
Now, the thing that interested me in observing the vast dislocation of the rural population of England, represented by this vast labouring community of East London, was the extent to which the English labourer, in moving from the country to the city, had lost his natural independence.
In losing his hold upon the soil the English labourer has made himself peculiarly dependent upon the organization of the society about him. He can, for instance, neither build his own home nor raise his own food. In the city he must pay a much larger rent than it would be necessary for him to pay in the country. He must work more steadily in order to live, and he has to depend upon some one else to give him the opportunity to work. In this respect, although the English labourer is probably better paid and better fed than any other labourer in Europe, he is less protected from the effects of competition. He is more likely to suffer from the lack of opportunity to work.
In the same way England as a whole is more dependent upon foreign countries for the sale of its manufactured products and the purchase of its food supply than is any other country in Europe. Thus it will be found that most of the great questions which are now agitating England, like most of the great questions which are agitating other countries in Europe, are more or less directly concerned with the matter of agriculture and the condition of the labourer on the land.
I said in the preceding chapter that one advantage that the Negro in the South had was the opportunity to work for the asking. The Negro in the South has opportunities in another direction that no other man in his position has, outside of America: he has the opportunity to get land. No one who has not visited Europe can understand what the opportunity to get land means to a race that has so recently gained its freedom.
No one who has not seen something of the hardships of the average workingman in a great city like London can understand the privilege that we in the Southern States have in living in the country districts, where there is independence and a living for every man, and where we have the opportunity to fix ourselves forever on the soil.
CHAPTER IV FIRST IMPRESSION OF LIFE AND LABOUR ON THE CONTINENT
One clear, cold morning, about the first of September, I took a train at Bonar Bridge, in the north of Scotland, southward bound. There was a cold wind blowing, and Bonar Bridge is about the latitude, as I learned from looking at my atlas, of northern Labrador—farther north, in fact, than I had ever in my lifetime dreamed of going.
I spent the next four or five hours looking out of a car window across the bleak, brown moors, studying the flocks of sheep and the little thatch-roofed cottages clinging to the lonesome hillsides.
Three days later I was in the beautiful mountain region below Dresden, on my way to Prague, the capital of Bohemia. In many ways conditions in the farming regions of Bohemia are quite as primitive as they are among the crofters of northern Scotland. There are, for example, a larger number of small farmers owning their own land in Bohemia than there are in Scotland, but the Scottish crofter, although he remains a tenant on a large estate, has, at the present time, a more secure position on the soil than the man who rents his land in Bohemia. In other respects the Scotch Highlanders, whose country I had just left, and the Czechs, whose country I was just entering, are, I should say, about as different as one could well imagine.
Among other things I noticed that the farming people in this part of the world do not live apart, scattered about in the open country, as they do in Scotland, and as is the case everywhere in America. On the contrary, the Bohemian farmers live huddled together in little villages, in the centre of the surrounding fields, from which they go out to their work in the morning and to which they return in the evening.
These different manners of settling on the soil are one of the marks by which the people in the north of Europe are distinguished from those in the south. The northern people settle in widely scattered homesteads, while the southern people invariably herd together in little villages, and each individual becomes, to a great extent, dependent upon the community and loses himself in the life about him. This accounts, in large measure, for the difference in character of the northern and southern people. In the north the people are more independent; in the south they are more social. The northern people have more initiative; they are natural pioneers. The southern people are more docile, and get on better under the restraints and restrictions of city life. It is said, also, that this explains why it is that the people who are now coming to America from the south of Europe, although most of them come from the land, do not go out into the country districts in America, but prefer to live in the cities, or, as seems to be the case with the Italians, colonize the suburbs of the great cities.
Another thing that interested me was the sight of women working on the land. I had not gone far on my way south from Berlin before my attention was attracted by the number of women in the fields. As I proceeded southward, the number of these women labourers steadily increased until they equalled and even outnumbered the men. One of these I had an opportunity to see close at hand; she was coarsely clad, barefoot, and carried a rake over her shoulder. I had seen pictures of something like that before, but never the real thing.
Outside of Italy I have rarely seen men going barefoot either in the country or in the city, but in southern Europe it seems to be the custom among the working women, and I took it as an indication of the lower position which women occupy among the people of southern Europe as compared with the position that they occupy in America. I saw many barefoot women later in the course of my journey, both in the field and elsewhere. I confess, however, I was surprised to meet in Vienna, Austria, as I did on several occasions while I was there, women walking barefoot on the pavements in one of the most fashionable streets of the city. One day, in speaking to a native Austrian, I expressed my surprise at what I had seen.
"Oh, well," he replied, "they are Slovaks."
How vividly this reminded me of a parallel remark with which I was familiar, "Oh, well, they are Negroes!"
It was the tone of this reply that caught my attention. It emphasized what I soon discovered to be another distinguishing feature of life in southern Europe. Everywhere I went in Austria and Hungary I found the people divided according to the race to which they belonged. There was one race at the top, another at the bottom, and then there were perhaps two or three other races which occupied positions relatively higher or lower in between. In most cases it was some section of the Slavic race, of which there are some five or six different branches in the Austrian Empire, which was at the bottom.
Several times, in my efforts to find out something about these so-called "inferior people," I made inquires about them among their more successful neighbours. In almost every case, no matter what race it happened to be to which I referred, I received the same answer. I was told that they were lazy and would not work; that they had no initiative; that they were immoral and not fitted to govern themselves. At the same time, I found them doing nearly all the really hard, disagreeable, and ill-paid labour that was being done. Usually I found, also, that with fewer opportunities than the people around them, they were making progress.
I was frequently surprised at the bitterness between the races. I have heard people talk more violently, but I do not think I have heard any one say anything worse in regard to the Negro than some of the statements that are made by members of one race in Austria in regard to members of some other.
I reached the city of Prague late at night, and awoke next morning in a world that was utterly new to me. It was not that Prague looked so different from other European cities I had seen, but the language sounded more strange than anything else I had ever heard. I do not pretend to understand German, yet it seemed to me that there was something familiar and friendly about that language as compared with Czech.
The Czechs are but one of the seventeen races of Austria-Hungary, each one of which, with the exception of the Jews, who are an exception to everything, is seeking to preserve its own language, and, if possible, compel all its neighbours to learn it. Preserving its own language is not difficult in the country districts, where each race lives apart in its own village and maintains its own peculiar customs and traditions. It is more difficult in the large cities like Vienna and Budapest, where the different nationalities come into intimate contact with each other and with the larger European world.
There is a region in northeastern Hungary where in the course of a day's ride one may pass through, one after another, villages inhabited by as many as five different races—Ruthenians, Jews, Roumanians, Hungarians, and Germans. A racial map of the Dual Empire shows districts in which one race predominates, but these same districts will very likely be dotted with villages in which the fragments of other races still survive, some of them, like the Turks, so few in number that they are not separately counted as part of the population. Under these circumstances travel in this part of the world is made interesting but not easy.
Fortunately, I had letters of introduction to Dr. Albert W. Clarke, head of the Austrian branch of the American Board of Missions at Prague, and he introduced me to some of his native assistants who spoke English, and kindly assisted me in finding what I most desired to see of the city and the people. Through him I had an opportunity to get inside of some of the tenements in which European people live, and to see some of the working people in their homes. I did not have an opportunity to explore the parts of the city in which the very poor people live; in fact, I was told that there was nothing in Prague that corresponded to the slums of our English and American cities. There is much poverty, but it is poverty of a self-respecting sort—not of those who have been defeated and gone under, but of those who have never got up.
I found the average Bohemian workman living in two rooms and working for wages considerably less than the same kind of labour would have brought in England, and very much less than the same kind of labour would have brought in America. There is, however, very little use in comparing the wages that men earn unless you are able to compare all the surrounding conditions.
During my stay in Prague I had an opportunity to see something close at hand of the life of the farming population. Under the guidance of one of Doctor Clarke's assistants I drove out one day to a little village where there were a number of people who had come under the influence of the American Mission in Prague, and where I was assured I should find a welcome.
It was not, perhaps, the best place to get an idea of what is most characteristic in Bohemian country life. I had hoped to see something of the local customs of the country people, but, though it was a holiday when I made my visit, I did not see a single peasant costume.
There are still many places in Bohemia, I understand, where the people take pride in wearing the national costumes, and there are still many parts of the Austrian Empire where relics of the older civilization linger. Indeed, I heard of places where, it is said, the peasants are still paying the old feudal dues; in other places the old unfree condition of the peasants is still continued in the form of peonage, as it may still be sometimes found in our Southern States. In this case the peasants have got themselves into debt for land. They are not allowed to work off this debt, and this serves as a pretence for keeping them bound to the soil. But education and the growth of manufacturing industries have banished the traces of the older civilization from the greater part of Bohemia.
In the village which I visited, as in most of the farming villages in this part of the world, the houses of the farmers stand in a row quite close together on either side of the street. In the rear are the quarters of the servants, the storehouses and the stables, the pig-stys and the cow-stalls, all closely connected, so that it was often a little uncertain to me where the quarters for the servants left off and those for the animals began. In fact, in some places no very definite distinction was made.
One of the most interesting places that I visited during my stay in this village was a dairy farm which was conducted by a Jew. He was evidently one of those of the lower or middle class—a type one hears much of in Europe—who, with very little knowledge or skill in the actual work of agriculture, have succeeded by their superior business skill in getting possession of the land and reducing the peasant to a position not much better than that of a serf. This man not only kept a dairy farm but he operated two or three brickyards besides, and had other extensive business interests in the village. Although he was a man of wealth and intelligence, he had his dwelling in the midst of a compound around which were grouped houses for his labourers, cow-stalls, a wheelwright and blacksmith shop, places for pigs, chickens, and dogs, the whole in a condition of indescribable disorder and filth.
The greater part of the work on the farm seemed to be done by women, most of whom were barefooted or wore wooden shoes. I do not think I have seen any one wearing wooden shoes before since the days of slavery. They had remained in my mind as the symbol of poverty and degradation; but they are worn everywhere in country districts in Europe. In fact, I remember in one instance, when I visited an agricultural school, finding one of the teachers working in the garden wearing wooden shoes. The people who worked on this farm all lived, as far as I could see, in one little ill-smelling and filthy room. There was no sign in the homes which I visited of those household industries for which Hungarian peasants are noted, and which should help to brighten and make comfortable the simplest home.
I believe there are few plantations in our Southern States where, even in the small one-room cabins, one would not find the coloured people living in more real comfort and more cleanliness than was the case here. Even in the poorest Negro cabins in the South I have found evidences that the floor was sometimes scrubbed, and usually there was a white counterpane on the bed, or some evidence of an effort to be tidy.
Prague is one of the most ancient cities in Europe. A thing that impressed me with the antiquity of the town was the fact that before the beginning of the Christian era there was a Jewish quarter in this city. Prague is also one of the most modern cities in Europe. Within a comparatively few years large manufacturing plants have multiplied throughout the country. Bohemia makes, among other things, fezzes, and sells them to Turkey; raises beans, and ships them to Boston.
What is most interesting is the fact that this progress has been, to a very large extent, made possible through the education of the masses of the people. The Bohemians are to-day among the best educated people in Europe. For example, among the immigrants who come from Europe to America, 24.2 per cent. over fourteen years of age are unable to read and write. In the case of the German immigrant not more than 5.8 per cent. are unable to read or write. In the case of the Bohemians the percentage of illiteracy is only 3 per cent. There is only one class of immigrants among whom the percentage of illiteracy is lower. Among the Danish immigrants it is 0.8 per cent.
There is no part of the Austrian Empire where education is more generally diffused or where the schools are so well adapted to the actual needs of the people. In addition to the ordinary primary schools and the gymnasia (which correspond to our high schools) there are several higher institutes of technology which prepare students for industry and commerce. Besides these state schools there are a large number of industrial schools that are maintained by cities or by private associations. Some of these are located in the small towns and are closely connected with the local industries. Sometimes they are organized by the members of the different trades and crafts as a supplement to the apprentice system. For example, in a town where the inhabitants are engaged in the clay industry, there will be found schools which give practical courses in the making of vases and crockery. In some of the larger towns commercial and industrial instruction is given in "continuation schools." In these schools girls who have learned needlework in the elementary schools will be taught sewing, dressmaking, and embroidery and lace work. There are also courses in which boys are prepared to work in the sugar-making, brewing, watchmaking, and other manufacturing industries.
In the two institutes of technology in Prague, one of which is for Bohemians and the other for Germans, courses are given which prepare students to be engineers, chemists, machinists, architects, bookkeepers, etc. In connection with these courses there are also special departments where students are prepared to be master workmen in such trades as bricklaying, carpentry, cabinet-making, and stone masonry.
There is much in the life and history of the Bohemian people that is especially interesting to a race or a people like the Negro, that is itself struggling up to a higher and freer level of life and civilization.
Up to 1848 the masses of the Bohemian people were held in a condition of serfdom. Until 1867 they were not allowed to emigrate from the country, and were thus held, as are the Russian peasants to-day, to a certain degree, prisoners in their own country. Most of the land was in the hands of the nobility, who were the descendants of foreigners who came into the country when it was conquered, a century or more before. Even to-day five families own 8 per cent. of all the land in the kingdom, and one tenth of the population owns 36 per cent. of the area of the country. The Emperor and the Catholic Church are also large landowners.
One of the effects of this new education and the new life that has come with it has been to make the land held in larger estates less productive than that which is divided into smaller holdings and cultivated by the men who own it.
It was interesting to me to learn that the Bohemians in their own country suffer from some of the same disadvantages as the Negro in the South. For example, the educational fund is divided between the races—the Germans and the Czechs—just as the money for education is divided in the South between the whites and the blacks, but, as is true in the South, it is not divided equally between the races.
For example, in the city of Prague there is one gymnasium (school) to every 62,000 Czech inhabitants, while the Germans have one gymnasium for every 6,700 inhabitants. Of what are called the real-schools, in which the education is more practical than that of the gymnasia, there is one for every 62,000 Bohemian inhabitants, while the Germans have one for every 10,000 inhabitants. For a number of years past, although the Bohemians represent 70 per cent. of the population, they have received only a little more than one half of the money appropriated for secondary education, both in the gymnasia and the real-schools. The salaries of teachers in the elementary schools range from $155 to $400 per year; in the schools in which the German language is taught, however, teachers receive an added bonus for their services.
To overcome their disadvantages in this direction the Czechs have supplemented the work of the public schools by industrial schools, which are maintained by the contributions of the people in the same way that the Negroes in many parts of the South have supplemented the work of the public schools in order to increase the terms of the school year and to introduce industrial training of various sorts.
More than this, the masses of the people in Bohemia are limited and restricted in all their movements in ways of which no one in America who has not passed through the hands of the immigration inspectors at Ellis Island has any comprehension. For example, the people of Austria have had for a number of years freedom of conscience, and, in theory at least, every one is allowed to worship according to his own inclination and convictions. Nevertheless, it seems to be as much a crime in Austria to say anything that could be construed as disrespectful to the Catholic Church as it would be to insult the name of the Emperor. I heard a story of a woman who ran a small store in which she was using copies of a Catholic newspaper with which to wrap up articles which she had sold to her customers. She was warned by the police that if she continued to use this paper for that purpose she would be liable to arrest. Afterward packages were found in her store which were wrapped in this paper; she was arrested and the case was carried to the highest court, but the sentence which had been imposed upon her stood, and she was compelled to serve a term in prison as punishment for this offence. It was only with the greatest difficulty, Doctor Clarke informed me, that he succeeded in getting permission from the Government to establish a branch of the Young Men's Christian Association in Prague.
I myself had some experience of these restrictions when I spoke before an audience composed largely of young Bohemian workmen in the rooms of this same Young Men's Christian Association. In order that I might be permitted to make this address it was necessary to announce the subject to the officers of the Government three days before I arrived in the city, and at the meeting I had the unusual experience of having my words taken down by a Government official who was present to see that I did not say anything that would disturb the public peace.
Not knowing what else I could say to this audience that would interest them, I told briefly the story of my own life and of the work that we are trying to do for our students at Tuskegee. I told them also that the institution (Hampton Institute) in which I had gained my education had been established by the same American Board of Missions which was responsible for the existence of the Young Men's Christian Association in Bohemia.
In order that my hearers might understand what I said, it was necessary for the secretary of the association, a Bohemian who spoke very good English, to translate my words sentence by sentence. In spite of these difficulties I do not think I ever spoke to an audience of labouring people who were more intelligent or more appreciative. It was a great pleasure and satisfaction to me to be able to speak to this audience. I felt, as I think they did, that we had something in common which others, perhaps, could not entirely understand, because each of us belonged to a race which, however different in other respects, was the same in this: that it was struggling upward.
CHAPTER V POLITICS AND RACES
In Prague, the capital of Bohemia, I came in contact for the first time with the advance guard, if I may use the expression, of a new race, the Slavs. I say a new race, because although the Slavic peoples claim an antiquity as great as that of any other race in Europe, the masses of the race seem just now emerging from a condition of life more primitive than that of almost any other people in Europe.
Many little things, not only what I saw with my own eyes, but what I heard from others, gave me the impression, as I travelled southward, that I was entering into a country where the masses of the people lived a simpler and more primitive existence than any I had seen elsewhere in Europe. I remember, for one thing, that I was one day startled to see, in the neighbourhood of the mining regions of Bohemia, a half-dozen women engaged in loading a coal barge—shovelling the coal into wheelbarrows and wheeling them along a narrow plank from the coal wharf to the ship alongside.
I was impressed, again, by the fact that several of the peoples of the Austrian Empire—the Moravians and Ruthenians are an illustration—still preserve their old tribal names. Certain other of these peoples still keep not only the tribal names, but many of the old tribal customs. Among most of the Slavic peoples, for example, custom still gives to the marriage ceremony the character of barter and sale. In fact, I found that in one of the large provincial towns in eastern Hungary the old "matrimonial fairs" are still kept up. On a certain day in each year hundreds of marriageable young women are brought down to this fair by their parents, where they may be seen seated on their trunks and surrounded by the cattle they expect to have for a dowry. Naturally young men come from all the surrounding country to attend this fair, and usually a lawyer sits out under a tree nearby prepared to draw up the marriage contract. In some cases as many as forty marriages are arranged in this way in a single day.
Divided into petty kingdoms or provinces, each speaking a separate language, living for the most part in the country districts, and held in some sort of political and economic subjection, sometimes by the descendants of foreign conquerors, and sometimes, as in the case of the Poles, by the nobility of their own race, the masses of the Slavic peoples in southern Europe have lived for centuries out of touch with the life of cities, and to a large extent out of touch with the world. Compared, therefore, with the peoples of western Europe, who are living in the centres of modern life and progress, the Slavic peoples are just now on the horizon.
In the course of my travels through Austria and Hungary I think I met, at one time or another, representatives of nearly every branch of the Slavic race in the empire. In Bohemia I became acquainted, as I have said, with the most progressive portion of the race, the Czechs. In Galicia I saw something of the life of the Polish people, both in the towns and in the country districts. Again, in Budapest and Vienna I learned something of the condition of the labouring and peasant classes, among whom the Slavic peoples are usually in the majority. At Fiume, the port of Hungary, from which forty thousand emigrants sail every year for the United States, I met and talked with Dalmatians, Croatians, Slovenes, Ruthenians, and Serbs—representatives, in fact, of almost every race in Hungary. In the plains of central Hungary, and again in eastern Prussia, I saw gangs of wandering labourers, made up of men and women who come to this part of the country from the Slavic countries farther south and east to take part in the harvest on the great estates.
During this time I became acquainted to some extent also with representatives of almost every type of civilization, high and low, among the peoples of southern Europe, from the Dalmatian herdsmen, who lead a rude and semi-barbarous existence on the high, barren mountains along the coast of the Adriatic, to the thrifty and energetic artisans of Bohemia and the talented Polish nobility, who are said to be among the most intellectual people in Europe.
I did not, among these classes I have mentioned, see the most primitive people of the Slavic race, nor the type of the man of that race farthest down. In fact, I have heard that in the mountain regions of southern Galicia there are people who make their homes in holes in the ground or herd together in little huts built of mud. I did not see, either, as I should like to have seen, the life of those Slavic people in southwestern Hungary who still hold their lands in common and live together in patriarchal communities, several families beneath one roof, under the rule of a "house father" and a "house mother," who are elected annually to govern the community.
What little I did see of the life of the different branches of the race gave me the impression, however, of a people of great possibilities, who, coming late into the possession of modern ideas and modern methods, were everywhere advancing, in some places rapidly and in others more slowly, but always making progress.
One thing that has hindered the advancement of the Slavs has been the difference in the languages spoken by the different branches of the race. So great an obstacle is this difference of language that some years ago, when a congress of all the Slavic peoples was held at Prague, the representatives of the different branches of the race, having no common tongue, were compelled to speak to each other in the one language that they all professed to hate—namely, German.
Another thing that has hindered the progress of the Slavs has been the inherited jealousies and the memories they cherish of ancient injuries they have inflicted on one another in times past. In general, it seems to be true of the races of Austria-Hungary that each race or branch of the race hates and despises every other, and this hatred is the more bitter the more closely they are associated. For example, there is a long-standing feud between the Polish peasants and the Polish nobility. This division is so great that the Polish peasants have frequently sided against the Polish nobility in the contests of the latter with the central government of Austria. However, this sentiment of caste which separates the two classes of the Polish people is nothing compared with the contempt with which every Pole, whether he be peasant or noble, is said to feel for every Ruthenian, a people with whom the Pole is very closely related by blood, and with whom he has long been in close political association. On the other hand, the Ruthenian in Galicia looks upon the Pole just as the Czech in Bohemia looks upon his German neighbour: as his bitterest enemy. The two peoples refuse to intermingle socially; they rarely intermarry; in many cases they maintain separate schools, and are represented separately in the Imperial Parliament, each race electing its own representatives. But all are united in hating and despising the Jew, who, although he claims for himself no separate part of the empire, and has no language to distinguish himself from the other races about him, still clings as tenaciously as any other portion of the population to his own racial traditions and customs.
The Slavic peoples, otherwise divided by language and tradition, are also divided by religion. People speaking the same language, and sharing in other respects the same traditions, are frequently just as widely separated by differences of religion as they could be by differences of race. For example, among the southern Slavs the majority of the Slovenes and the Croatians are Roman Catholics, others are Protestants. On the other hand, the majority of the Serbs, their close neighbours, are members of the Greek Orthodox Church, while others are Mohammedans. So wide is the division between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Slavs that in some cases members of the Eastern and Western branches of the Church belonging to the same nationality wear a different costume in order to emphasize the differences of religion that might otherwise be forgotten or overlooked.
In Galicia there are not only the Roman and Orthodox branches of the Church, but there are also three or four other minor branches. One of these, the Uniates, which is a compromise between the two and is intended to be a sort of link between the Eastern and Western churches, is now, it is said, just as distinct from both as any of the other branches of the Church. In this region, which has been the battleground of all the religions in Europe, religious distinctions play a much more important rôle than they do elsewhere, because the masses of the people have not yet forgotten the bitterness and the harshness of the early struggles of the sects. The result is that religious differences seem to have intensified rather than to have softened the racial animosities.
In spite of the divisions and rivalries which exist, there seems to be growing up, under the influence of the struggle against the other and dominant races in the Empire, and as a result of the political agitations to which this struggle has given rise, a sense of common purpose and interest in the different branches of the Slavic race; a sort of racial consciousness, as it is sometimes called, which seems to be one of the conditions without which a race that is down is not able to get the ambition and the courage to rise.
It is the presence of this great Slav race in western Europe, groping its way forward under the conditions and difficulties which I have described, that constitutes, as well as I am able to define it, the race problem of southern Europe.
In many respects the situation of the Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in southern Europe generally is more like that of the Negroes in the Southern States than is true of any other class or race in Europe. For one thing, the vast majority of that race are, like the Negroes, an agricultural people. For centuries they have lived and worked on the soil, where they have been the servants of the great landowners, looked down upon by the educated and higher classes as "an inferior race." Although they were not distinguished from the dominant classes, as the Negro was, by the colour of their skin, they were distinguished by the language they spoke, and this difference in language seems to have been, as far as mutual understanding and sympathy are concerned, a greater bar than the fact of colour has been in the case of the white man and the black man in the South.
Up to a comparatively few years ago an educated Slav did not ordinarily speak, at least in public, the language of the masses of the people. Doctor Clarke, the head of the Austrian Mission of the American Board in Prague, told me that as recently as thirty years ago an educated Czech did not care to speak his own language on the streets of Prague. At that time the German language was still the language of the educated classes, and all the learning of Europe was, to a very large extent, a closed book to the people who did not speak and read that language.
To-day conditions have so changed, Doctor Clarke tells me, that the people in certain quarters of Prague scowl at any one who speaks German on the street.
"When we go to visit an official of the Government," said Doctor Clarke, "we usually inquire, first of all, which language this particular official prefers to speak, German or Czech. It is wise to do this because most of the officials, particularly if they represent the central government of Vienna, speak German; but a Czech who is loyal to his race will not speak the hated German unless he has to do so."
Doctor Clarke told me, as illustrating the fanaticism of the Bohemian people in this matter of language, that his little girls, who had been educated in German schools and preferred to speak that language among themselves, had more than once been hooted at, and even stoned, by young Bohemians in the part of the town where he lives, because they spoke a language which the masses of the people had been brought up to hate.
Another way in which the situation of the Slavic people resembles, to a certain extent, that of the masses of the Negroes in the Southern States, is in the matter of their political relations to the dominant races. Both in Austria and in Hungary all the races are supposed to have the same political privileges, and, in the case of Austria at least, the Government seems to have made a real effort to secure equal rights to all. Here, again, racial and traditional prejudices, as well as the wide differences in wealth and culture of the different peoples, have kept the political power in Austria proper in the hands of the Germans, and in Hungary in the hands of the Magyars.
What makes the situation more difficult for the dominant races in these two countries is the fact that the so-called inferior peoples are increasing more rapidly than the other races in numbers, and the Germans and Magyars are every year becoming a smaller minority in the midst of the populations which they are attempting to control. The result has been that the empire seems to the one who looks on from the outside a seething mass of discontent, with nothing but the fear of being swallowed up by some of their more powerful neighbours to hold the nationalities together.
There is one respect in which the situation of the Negro in America is entirely different from the various nationalities of Austria and Hungary. The Negro is not compelled to get his education through the medium of a language that is foreign to the other people by whom he is surrounded. The black man in the South speaks the same tongue and professes the same religion as the white people. He is not seeking to set up any separate nationality for himself nor to create any interest for himself which is separate from or antagonistic to the interest of the other people of the United States. The Negro is not seeking to dominate politically, at the expense of the white population, any part of the country which he inhabits. Although he has suffered wrongs and injustices, he has not become embittered or fanatical. Competition with the white race about him has given the Negro an ambition to succeed and made him feel pride in the successes he has already achieved; but he is just as proud to be an American citizen as he is to be a Negro. He cherishes no ambitions that are opposed to the interests of the white people, but is anxious to prove himself a help rather than a hindrance to the success and prosperity of the other race.
I doubt whether there are many people in our Southern States who have considered how much more difficult the situation in the Southern States would be if the masses of the black people spoke a language different from the white people around them, and particularly if, at the same time, they cherished political and social ambitions that were antagonistic to the interests of the white man.
On the other hand, I doubt whether the Negro people realize the advantage which they have in speaking one of the great world languages, the language, in fact, that is more largely used than any other by the people who are most advanced in science, in the arts, and in all that makes the world better. English is not only a great world language, it is the language of a people and a race among whom the highest are neither afraid nor ashamed to reach down and lift up the lowest, and help them in their efforts to reach a higher and a better life.
In the south of Europe conditions are quite different. The languages spoken there, so far from helping to bring people together, are the very means by which the peoples are kept apart. Furthermore, the masses of the people of Austria speak languages which, until a hundred years ago, had almost no written literature. Up to the beginning of the last century the educated people of Hungary spoke and wrote in Latin, and down to the middle of the century Latin was still the language of the Court. Until 1848 there were almost no schools in the Czech language in Bohemia. Up to that time there were almost no newspapers, magazines, or books printed in the language spoken by the masses of the people.
It has been said that the written or literary languages of the Slavic people have been, with one or two exceptions, almost created during the past hundred years. In fact, some of the Slavs, although they have a rich oral literature, still have, I have been told, no written language of their own.
A great change has been brought about in this respect in recent years. At the present time, of the 5,000 periodicals printed in Austria-Hungary, about 2,000 are printed in German, 938 in Magyar, 582 in Czech, and the remaining 1,480 are in some five or six other languages. The Magyar language is now taught in all the schools of Hungary, whether some other language is taught at the same time or not. Outside of Hungary, in Austria proper, there are some 8,000 exclusively German schools, 5,578 Czech, and 6,632 schools in which are taught other Slav dialects, not to speak of the 645 schools in which Italian is taught, the 162 schools in which Roumanian is taught, and the 5 in which Magyar is taught.
To an outsider it seems as if the purpose of these schools must be to perpetuate the existing confusion and racial animosities in the empire. On the other side, it must be remembered that it has been an enormous advantage to the masses of the people to be able to read the language which they habitually speak. In fact, the multiplication of these different written languages, and of schools in which they are taught, seems to have been the only way of opening to the masses of the people the learning which had been before that time locked up in languages which they sometimes learned to read but rarely spoke.
As I have considered the complications and difficulties, both political and economic, which not merely Austria but Europe has to face as a consequence of the different languages spoken by the different races, I have asked myself what would probably happen in our Southern States if, as some people have suggested, large numbers of these foreign peoples were induced to settle there. I greatly fear that if these people should come in large numbers and settle in colonies outside of the cities, where they would have comparatively few educational advantages and where they would be better able and more disposed to preserve their native customs and languages, we might have a racial problem in the South more difficult and more dangerous than that which is caused by the presence of the Negro. Whatever else one may say of the Negro, he is, in everything except his colour, more like the Southern white man, more willing and able to absorb the ideas and the culture of the white man and adapt himself to existing conditions, than is true of any race which is now coming into this country.
Perhaps my attempt to compare racial conditions in southern Europe with racial conditions in the southern United States will seem to some persons a trifle strange and out of place because in the one case the races concerned are both white, while in the other case one is white and one is black. Nevertheless, I am convinced that a careful study of conditions as they exist in southern Europe will throw a great deal of light upon the situation of the races in our Southern States. More than that, strange and irrational as racial conflicts often seem, whether in Europe or in America, I suspect that at bottom they are merely the efforts of groups of people to readjust their relations under changing conditions. In short, they grow out of the efforts of the people who are at the bottom to lift themselves to a higher stage of existence.
If that be so, it seems to me there need be no fear, under a free government, where every man is given opportunity to get an education, where every man is encouraged to develop in himself and bring to the service of the community the best that is in him, that racial difficulties should not finally be adjusted, and white man and black man live, each helping rather than hindering the other.
CHAPTER VI STRIKES AND FARM LABOUR IN ITALY AND HUNGARY
There is one English word which seems to be more widely known and used in Europe than almost any other. It is the word "strike." Labour strikes, I have understood, had their origin with the factory system in England. But the people on the Continent have improved on the original English device, and have found ways of using it of which we in America, I suspect, have rarely if ever heard.
It seems to me that during my short journey in Europe I heard of more kinds of strikes, and learned more about the different ways in which this form of warfare can be used, than I ever learned before in all my life. In Europe one hears, for example, of "political" strikes, of "general" strikes, and of "agricultural" strikes—harvest strikes—which are a peculiar and interesting variety of the ordinary labour strikes. There are rent strikes, "hunger riots," strikes of students, even of legislatures, and when I was in Budapest some one called my attention to an account in one of the papers of what was called a "house strike."
This was a case in which the tenants of one of the large tenement buildings or apartment houses of the city had gone on strike to compel the landlord to reduce the rent. They had hung the landlord in effigy in the big central court around which the building is erected; decorated the walls and balconies with scurrilous placards, and then created such a disturbance by their jeers and outcries, supplemented with fish horns, that the whole neighbourhood was roused. The house strikers took this way to advertise their grievances, gain public sympathy, and secure reduction of the rent.
I had an opportunity, during my stay in Europe, to get some first-hand information in regard to these continental strikes. I was in Berlin just before and after the three days' battle between the striking coalyard men of Moabit and the police, in the course of which several of the officers and hundreds of the people were wounded. For several days one section of Berlin was practically in a state of siege. The police charged the crowd with their horses, trampled the people under foot, and cut them down with their swords. The soldiers hunted the strikers into the neighbouring houses, where they attempted to barricade themselves and replied to the attacks of the police by hurling missiles from the windows of the houses into the streets below. At night the streets were in darkness, because the strikers had cut the electric wires, thus shutting off the lights, so that the police were compelled to carry torches in order to distinguish friends from foes.
At another time, while I was in Fiume, Hungary, I had an opportunity to see for myself the manner and spirit in which these strikes are conducted, or, rather, the way in which they are put down by the police.
I had gone out one day to visit the emigrant station, which is situated on the outskirts of the city, and noticed, on my way thither, a number of policemen on the car. Then, apparently at a signal from a man in charge, they seemed to melt away. Half an hour later, while I was at the emigrant station, I was startled by loud cries outside the building. Every one rushed to the windows. The street was crowded with men, women, and children, all running helter-skelter in the direction of the city. Some of the hands in a nearby factory had gone on strike. I could not at first understand why every one seemed in such a state of terror. Very soon I learned, however, that they were running from the police, and a moment later the police themselves moved into view.
They were formed in a broad double line across the avenue, and, marching rapidly, simply swept everything before them. At their head, bearing a heavy cane, was a man in plain clothes. I do not know whether he was an officer or the proprietor of the factory, but I was struck with the haughty and contemptuous air with which he surveyed the rabble as it melted away from in front of him. In a few minutes the street was empty and, so far as I could see, the strike was over.
It was a small affair in any case. There was no bloodshed and almost no resistance on the part of the strikers, so far as I could see. It was sufficient, however, to give me a very vivid notion of the ruthless way in which the governments of these stern military powers deal with rebellious labourers. European governments seem to have the habit of interfering, in a way of which we have no conception in this country, in all the small intimate affairs of life. So it is not to be expected that they would be able, like the police in this country, to act as a neutral party or referee, so to speak, in the struggles of labour and capital. That is the reason, I suspect, why in Europe strikes almost always turn out to be a battle with the police or an insurrection against the Government.
Almost anything may be made the occasion of a strike in Europe, it seems. Sometimes in Austria and Hungary, as I learned, members of the local diets or provincial legislatures go on a strike and refuse to make any laws until certain demands have been complied with by the central government at Vienna. Sometimes the students in one or more of the national universities go on a strike because a favourite professor has been removed by the Government, or because they are opposed to some particular measure of the Government. Not infrequently, in France or Italy, labour disturbances are fomented for political or party purposes, particularly among the employees of the state railways.
Strikes are a favourite weapon of the Socialists when they are seeking to force some political measure through parliament. Until a few years ago it seemed that the "general strike," in which all the labourers of a city or several cities, by suddenly laying down their tools and refusing to return to their work, sought to force some concession by the Government, was the means by which the Socialists proposed to overturn all the existing governments in Europe. Since the failure of the revolution in Russia and of similar movements on a smaller scale in Italy and elsewhere, this form of strike seems to have fallen into disrepute.
The most novel and interesting form of labour insurrection which I found while I was in Europe was the "strike of the agricultural labourers." In both Hungary and Italy the agricultural labourers have for some years past been organized into more or less secret societies, and the outbreaks which have been fomented by these secret societies have been, I understand, the most bloody and the most far-reaching in influence of any labour strikes in Europe.
The possibility that farm hands might be organized into labour unions, and make use of this form of organization in order to compel landowners to raise wages, had never occurred to me, and I took some pains to learn the conditions in Hungary and Italy under which these organizations have grown up.
I found that while the situation of the farm hands in Hungary differs from that of the farm hands in Italy in many ways, there are two important respects in which the situation of each is the same: First, a large part of the land of both countries is held in large estates; second, farm labourers, as a rule, particularly in Hungary, do not live, as is the case in America, on the land. On the contrary, they dwell apart in villages, so that they are hardly any more attached to the soil they cultivate than the factory hand is attached to the factory in which he is employed. In Hungary, for example, it is the custom for a group of labourers to enter, during the spring and summer, into a contract with a landowner to harvest his crop in the fall. A contractor, who either represents or employs the farm hands, will look over the field and bargain with the owner to do the work for a certain per cent. of the crop. At the harvest time the contractor will arrive with his labourers just as he would come with a gang of men to build a house or dig a ditch. While the work is going on the labourers, men and women together, practically camp in the fields, sleeping sometimes in the open or in such scant shelter as they are able to find.
It happened that I was in Hungary at the harvest time, and in the course of my journey through the country I have several times seen these gangs of men and women going to their work at daybreak. In this part of the country the strangest costumes are worn by the peasant people, and the women especially, with their bright kerchiefs over their heads, their short skirts and high boots, when they were not barefoot, were quite as picturesque as anything I had read had led me to expect. The labourers go to work at early dawn, because during the harvest season the field hands work sometimes as much as fourteen to sixteen hours a day, and then throw themselves down to rest for the night on a truss of straw or under a single blanket. After the harvest is over they return again to their villages.
Working in this way in troups of wandering labourers, there was no room for any permanent human relationships between themselves and their employers; such relationships, for example, as exist, in spite of the differences of race and colour, between every white planter in the South and his Negro tenants. On the other hand, the labourers, working and living together in the way I have described, come to have a strong sense of their common interest, all the stronger, perhaps, because they are looked down upon by the rest of the population, and particularly by the small landowners with whom they were associated up to the time of their emancipation, in 1848.
About 1890 a series of bad harvests—coming on the heels of other changes which, for a number of years, had made their lives steadily harder—helped to increase the discontent of the farm hands. Thus it was that when, about this time, the Socialists turned their attention to the agricultural population of Hungary, they found the people prepared to listen to their doctrines.
What made Socialism the more popular among the lowest farming classes was the fact that it not only promised to teach the farm labourers how they might increase their wages, but declared that the state was going to take the land out of the hands of the large landowners and divide it among the people who cultivated it.
What made the situation the more difficult was the fact that the agricultural labourers, as soon as they were thoroughly organized, had the landowners, during the harvest time, at a peculiar disadvantage, because when work in the fields stopped, the standing grain ripened and spoiled and the landowner was ruined.
In the emergency created by these strikes the Government came to the rescue of the landowner by establishing recruiting stations for farm labourers in different parts of the country. Collecting labourers in those parts of the country where labour was abundant, they shipped it to other parts of the country where, because of strikes, labourers were scarce and crops were in danger. Thus, the Government had at one time a reserve force of not less than 10,000 strike-breakers with which it was at any moment able to come to the rescue of a landowner who was threatened.
In many cases the Government undertook to regulate wages between landowners and their hands. In some cases they even sent troops into the fields, and in the course of the struggle there were frequent bloody collisions between the labourers and the troops.
One effect of these disturbances was to greatly increase the amount of immigration to America. In 1904, when the struggle was at its height, no less than 100,000 persons, mostly from the country districts, emigrated from Hungary. Thousands of others left the country and moved into the cities.
Hungary is about half the size of Texas, and it has nearly five times its population. Those who remember the "Negro exodus" of thirty years ago, and the apprehension that was created when some 40,000 Negroes left the plantations in Mississippi and Louisiana, will be able to understand the effect if for a number of years the South should lose annually by emigration to the cities or to other parts of the country 100,000 of its labourers in the cotton fields.
The exodus of the farm labourer from Hungary threatened, in spite of the rapid increase of the population, to permanently check the rising prosperity of the country. It was soon found that the great landowners could not rely upon repressive measures alone to solve their labour problems. Something must be done to redress the grievances and to improve the condition of the agricultural population. As a matter of fact, a very great deal was done by the state for agriculture, and something was done for the agricultural labourers. For example, relief funds were organized in sixty-four counties and boroughs to aid temporarily disabled workmen. Public prizes and diplomas were offered to labourers who were faithful to their masters.
Something was done to brighten the monotony of the agricultural labourer's life and to strengthen the ties between the labourers and their employers. At the suggestion of the Minister of Agriculture, an attempt was made to revive the harvest feasts, which brought the farmer and his labourers together. Workingmen's clubs, libraries, friendly and coöperative societies were encouraged by the Government. A popular weekly paper, printed in seven different languages, was started for the benefit of agricultural labourers and as a means of agricultural education. A bill for insurance against accidents and old age for the benefit of agricultural labourers provided that if a labourer loses more than a week's time he shall receive, in addition to the expenses of doctor and medicine, a sum amounting to about 25 cents a day for sixty days. In case of death of an agricultural labourer, his family receives a sum amounting to something between $40 and $50.
In Italy, the Socialistic movement among the agricultural classes took a somewhat different course. For one thing, it was not confined merely to the poorest class—namely, those labourers who live in the villages and go out at certain seasons to assist in the work on the farms—but extended to the small proprietors also, and those who rented land. In many cases the large estates in Italy are not managed as in Hungary, by the proprietor, but by middlemen and overseers, who pay a certain amount of rent to the proprietor and then sublet to tenants. Sometimes, particularly in southern Italy, lands are sublet a second and third time.
In many cases the terms upon which the land was held and worked by the small farmer were terribly oppressive, even in northern Italy, where conditions are incomparably better than in the south.
Although the peasants in northern Italy were nominally given their freedom in 1793, their condition, until a few years ago, has been described by one who was himself a large land proprietor as "little better than if they were slaves." In addition to the high rents, the tenant farmer was compelled to furnish the overseer with a certain number of chickens and eggs, and a certain amount of peaches, nuts, figs, hemp and flax, in proportion to the amount of land he rented.
The overseer claimed, also, just as the overlord did in the days of feudalism, the rights to the labour of the peasant and his ox-cart for a certain part of every year. His children were expected to work as servants in his household at a nominal price. The overseer sold the crop of the tenant farmer, and, after deducting all that was coming to him for rent and for other charges, returned the remainder to the tenant farmer as his share of the year's work.
In one case where, as a result of the revolt of his tenants the middleman was driven out, the tenant farmer, under the direction of the Socialist leaders, undertook to rent the land directly from the landowners, it was found that the middleman had been appropriating not less than 48 per cent. of the profits, which, under the new arrangement, went directly into the hands of the man who tilled the soil.
For a number of years there had existed among the small farmers numerous societies for mutual aid of various kinds. After the Socialists began to turn their attention to the agricultural population they succeeded in gaining leadership in these societies and used them as a means of encouraging agricultural strikes. It was from these same societies also that they recruited the members of those organizations of farm labourers and tenants which have attempted to form large estates on a coöperative basis. By this means the small farmer has been able to do away with the middleman and still retain the advantages which result, particularly in harvesting and marketing the crops, from conducting the operations on a large scale.
In recent years coöperative organizations of all kinds have multiplied among the small farmers of northern Italy. There are societies for purchasing supplies as well as for disposing of the products of the small farmers; the most important of these societies have been, perhaps, the coöperative credit organizations, by means of which small landowners have been able to escape the burden of the heavy interest charges they were formerly compelled to pay.
I was interested to learn that both the Government and the Socialists were at different times opposed to these coöperative societies, although for different reasons. The Socialists were opposed to coöperation because by removing the causes of discontent it sapped the revolutionary spirit of the farming classes. The Government, on the other hand, was opposed to the coöperative societies because their leaders were so frequently revolutionists who were using the society to stimulate discontent and organize the movement to overthrow the Government.