Part 2
The most venturesome of the Slavs, the Bohemians, in whom the love of wandering was always alive, started this stream of emigration as early as the seventeenth century, sending us the noblest of their sons and daughters, the heroes and heroines of the reformatory wars; idealists, who like the Pilgrim Fathers, came for “Freedom to worship God.” Their descendants have long ago been blended into the common life of the people of America, scarcely conscious of the fact that they might have the same pride in ancestry which the descendants of the Pilgrims delight to exhibit. Not until the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the 70s, did the Bohemian immigrants come in large numbers and in a steady stream, bringing with them the Czechs of Moravia, a neighbouring province. Together they make some 200,000 of our population, fairly distributed throughout the country, and about equally divided between tillers of the soil and those following industrial pursuits. Nearly all Bohemian immigrants come to stay, and adjust themselves more or less easily to their environment. The economic distress which has brought them here, while never acute, threatens to become so now from the over accentuated language struggle which diverts the energies of the people and makes proper legislation impossible. The building of railroads and other governmental enterprises have been retarded by parliamentary obstructionists, to whom language is more than bread and butter. Business relations with the Germanic portions of Austria have come almost to a standstill; conditions which are bound to increase emigration from Bohemia’s industrial centres.
The Poles were the next of the Western Slavs to be drawn out of the seclusion of their villages; those from Eastern Prussia being the earliest, and those from Russian Poland the latest who have swelled the stream of emigration.
The largest number of the Polish immigrants is composed of unskilled labourers, most of them coming from villages where they worked in the fields during the summer time, and in winter went to the cities where they did the cruder work in the factories. The Poles from Germany’s part of the divided kingdom have furnished nearly their quota of immigrants, and those remaining upon their native acres will continue to remain there, if only to spite the Germans who are grievously disappointed not to see them grow less under the repressive measures of the government. They are the thorn in the Emperor’s flesh, and with social Democrats make enough trouble, to verify the saying: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” true! even with regard to that most imperial of emperors.
The Austrian Poles who have retained many of their liberties and have also gained new privileges, have had a national and intellectual revival, under the impulse of which the peasantry has been lifted to a higher level which has reacted upon their economic condition; and although that condition is rather low in Galicia, as that portion of Poland is called, immigration from there has reached its high water mark. The largest increase in immigration among the Poles is to be looked for from Russian Poland where industrial and political conditions are growing worse, and where it will take a long time to establish any kind of equilibrium which will pacify the people and hold them to the soil.
The Slovaks, who were relatively the best off, and further away from the main arteries of travel, are, comparatively speaking, newcomers and furnish at present the largest element in the Western Slavic immigration. They have retained most staunchly many of their Slavic characteristics, are the least impressionable among the Western Slavs, and usually come, lured by the increased wages. They are most liable to return to the land of their fathers after saving money enough materially to improve their lot in life.
From the Austrian provinces, Carinthia and Styria, come increasingly large numbers of Slovenes who are really the link between the Eastern and Western Slavs. They belong to the highest type of that race, but represent only a small portion of the large Slavic family. Of the Eastern Slavs, only the Southern group has moved towards America, the Russian peasant being bound to the soil, and unable to free himself from the obligation of paying the heavy taxes, by removal to a foreign country. With the larger freedom which is bound to come to him, will also come economic relief so that the emigration of the Russian peasant in large numbers is not a likelihood.
Lured by promises of higher wages in our industrial centres, Croatians and Slovenians come in increasingly large numbers, while in smaller numbers come Servians and Bulgarians.
The only Slavs who are thorough seamen and who are coming to our coasts in increasingly large numbers as sailors and fishermen, are the Dalmatians; and last but most heroic of all the Slavs, is the Montenegrin, who has held his mountain fastnesses against the Turk and who has been the living wall, resisting the victories of Islam. His little country is blessed by but a few crumbs of soil between huge mountains and boulders, and in the measure in which peace reigns in the Balkans, he is without occupation and sustenance; so that he is compelled to seek these more fertile shores, where he will for the first time in history and quite unconsciously, “Turn the sword into a plowshare and the spear into a pruning hook.”
Tennyson does not over-idealize this Montenegrin in his admirable sonnet:
They rose to where their sovran eagle sails, They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height, Chaste, frugal, savage, arm’d by day and night Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails, And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight By thousands down the crags and thro’ the vales. O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years. Great Tsernogora! never since thine own Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.
From Lithuania, a province of Russia, come smaller groups of non-Slavic emigrants; people with an old civilization of which little remains, and with a language which leans closest to Sanscrit, yet who, because of their subjection to Russia, have sunk to the level of the Russian peasants. Then there are Magyars and Finns, rather close kinsmen, who because one lives in the South and the other far North, are as different as the South is from the North; Greeks and Syrians, traders all of them and workers only when they must be. We shall follow them more closely as they pass into our own national life.
The Italian emigration, the largest which we receive from any one source, comes primarily from Southern Italy, from the crowded cities with their unspeakable vices; the smallest number of emigrants come from the villages where they have all the virtues of tillers of the soil. The most volatile of our foreign population, and perhaps the most clannish, they represent a problem recognized by their home government, which was the first to concern itself with it, to study it systematically, and to aid our government so far as possible in a rational solution. The number of Italian emigrants is still undiminished, and in spite of the fact that in recent years more than 200,000 of them have annually left their native land, their withdrawal is scarcely felt and the number could be doubled without perceptible diminution at home.
There are then upon this immigrant trail, many people of varied cultural development; some of them coming from countries in which they have been part of a very high type of civilization, while others come from the veritable back woods of Europe, into which neither steam nor electricity has entered to disturb the old order, nor has yet awakened a new life.
None of them starts for America tempted by wealth which can be picked up in the streets. That mythical man who, upon landing, refused to take a quarter from the side-walk, because he had heard that dollars were lying about loose, in America, has found it true because he has gone into politics.
The immigrant of to-day, be he Slav, Italian or Jew, starts upon this trail, with no culture, it is true, but with a virgin mind in which it may be made to grow. Not always with a keen mind, but with a surplus of muscle, which he is ready to exchange at the mouth of the pit or by the furnace’s hot blast, for a higher wage than he could earn in the miry fields of his native village;--but it is by no means settled who gets the best of the bargain.
III
THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE
Back of Warsaw, Vienna, Naples and Palermo, with no place on the world’s map to mark their existence, are small market towns to which the peasants come from their hidden villages. They come not as is their wont on feast and fast days, with song and music, but solemnly; the women bent beneath their burdens, carried on head or back, and the men who walk beside them, less conscious than usual of their superiority.
The women have lost the splendour which usually marks their attire. Their embroidered, stiffly starched petticoats, flowered aprons and gay kerchiefs have disappeared, and instead they have put on more sombre garb, some cast off clothing of our civilization. The men, too, have left their gayer coats behind them, to wear the shoddy ones which neither warm nor become them.
Beneath the black cross which marks the boundary of the Polish town, they usually rest themselves. The cross was erected when the peasants were liberated from serfdom, and beneath it every wanderer rests and prays: every wanderer but the Jew, for whom the cross symbolizes neither liberty nor rest.
These towns which used to be buried in a cloud of dust in the summer and a sea of mud in the winter time; to which the peasant came but rarely, and then only to do his petty trading or his quarrelling before the law, are the first catch basins of the little percolating streams of emigration, and have felt their influence in increased prosperity. They are the supply stations where much of the money is spent on the way out, and into which the money flows from the mining camps and industrial centres in America. One little house leans hospitably against the other, a two-story house marks the dwelling of nobility, and the power of the law is personified in the gendarmes, who, weaponed to the teeth, patrol the peaceful town.
In Russia, before one may emigrate, many painful and costly formalities must be observed, a passport obtained through the governor and speeded on its way by sundry tips. It is in itself an expensive document without which no Russian subject may leave his community, much less his country. Many persons, therefore, forego the pleasure of securing official permission to leave the Czar’s domain, and go, trusting to good luck or to a few rubles with which they may close the ever open eyes of the gendarmes of the Russian boundary. Austrian and Italian authorities also require passports for their subjects, but they are less costly and are granted to all who have satisfied the demands of the law.
These formalities over, the travellers move on to the market square, a dusty place, where women squat, selling fruits and vegetables; the plaster cast and gaily decorated saints, stoically receiving the adoration of our pilgrims, who come for the last time with a petition which now is for a prosperous journey.
There also, the agent of the steamship company receives with just as much feeling their hard earned money in exchange for the long coveted “Ticket,” which is to bear them to their land of hope.
From hundreds of such towns and squares, thousands of simple-minded people turn westward each day, disappearing in the clouds of dust which mark their progress to the railroad station and on towards the dreaded sea.
From the small windows of fourth-class railway carriages they get glimpses of a new world, larger than they ever dreamed it to be, and much more beautiful. Through orderly and stately Germany, with its picturesque villages, its castled hills and magnificent cities they pass; across mountains and hills, and by rushing rivers, until one day upon the horizon they see a forest of masts wedged in between the warehouses and factories of a great city.
Guided by an official of the steamship company whose wards they have become, they alight from the train; but not without having here and there to pay tribute to that organized brigandage, by which every port of embarkation is infested. The beer they drink and the food they buy, the necessary and unnecessary things which they are urged to purchase, are excessively dear, by virtue of the fact that a double profit is made for the benefit of the officials or the company which they represent.
The first lodging places before they are taken to the harbours, are dear, poor and often unsafe. Much bad business is done there which might be controlled or entirely discontinued. For instance in Rotterdam three years ago, coming with a party of emigrants, we were met by an employee of the steamship company and taken in charge, ostensibly to be guided to the company’s offices near the harbour. On the way we were made to stop at a dirty, third-class hotel (whose chief equipment was a huge bar) and were told to make ourselves comfortable. While we were not compelled to spend our money, we were invited to do so, urged to drink, and left there fully three hours until this same employee called for us. I complained to the company through the only official whom I could reach, and who no doubt was one of the beneficiaries, for the complaint did not travel far.
This is only the remnant of an abuse from which the emigrant and the country which received him, used to suffer; for our stringent immigration laws have made it more profitable to treat the immigrant with consideration and to look after his physical welfare.
Yet, admirable as is the machinery which has been set up at Hamburg for the reception of the emigrant, these minor abuses have not all passed away and while care is taken that his health does not suffer and that his purse is not completely emptied, he is still regarded as prey.
The Italian government safeguards its emigrants admirably at Naples and Genoa; but other governments are seemingly unconcerned. When the official has done with the emigrants, they are taken to the emigrant depot of the company (which in many cases is inadequate for the large number of passengers), their papers are examined and they are separated according to sex and religion. At Hamburg they are required to take baths and their clothing is disinfected; after which they constantly emit the delicious odours of hot steam and carbolic acid. The sleeping arrangements at Hamburg are excellent. Usually twenty persons are in one ward, but private rooms which have beds for four people can be rented.
The food is abundant and good, plenty of bread and meat are to be had, and luxuries can be bought at reasonable prices. At Hamburg music is provided and the emigrants may make merry at a dance until dawn of the day of sailing.
The medical examination is now very strict, yet seemingly not strict enough; for quite a large percentage of those who pass the German physicians are deported on account of physical unfitness.
I wish to make this point here, and emphasize it: that restrictive immigration has had a remarkable influence upon the German and Netherlands steamship companies, in that they have become fairly humane and decent, which they were not; but improvement in this direction is still possible.
The day of embarkation finds an excited crowd with heavy packs and heavier hearts, climbing the gangplank. An uncivil crew directs the bewildered travellers to their quarters, which in the older ships are far too inadequate, and in the newer ships are, if anything, worse.
Clean they are; but there is neither breathing space below nor deck room above, and the 900 steerage passengers crowded into the hold of so elegant and roomy a steamer as the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_, of the North German Lloyd line, are positively packed like cattle, making a walk on deck when the weather is good, absolutely impossible, while to breathe clean air below in rough weather, when the hatches are down is an equal impossibility. The stenches become unbearable, and many of the emigrants have to be driven down; for they prefer the bitterness and danger of the storm to the pestilential air below. The division between the sexes is not carefully looked after, and the young women who are quartered among the married passengers have neither the privacy to which they are entitled nor are they much more protected than if they were living promiscuously.
The food, which is miserable, is dealt out of huge kettles into the dinner pails provided by the steamship company. When it is distributed, the stronger push and crowd, so that meals are anything but orderly procedures. On the whole, the steerage of the modern ship ought to be condemned as unfit for the transportation of human beings; and I do not hesitate to say that the German companies, and they provide best for their cabin passengers, are unjust if not dishonest towards the steerage. Take for example, the second cabin which costs about twice as much as the steerage and sometimes not twice so much; yet the second cabin passenger on the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ has six times as much deck room, much better located and well protected against inclement weather. Two to four sleep in one cabin, which is well and comfortably furnished; while in the steerage from 200 to 400 sleep in one compartment on bunks, one above the other, with little light and no comforts. In the second cabin the food is excellent, is partaken of in a luxuriantly appointed dining-room, is well cooked and well served; while in the steerage the unsavoury rations are not served, but doled out, with less courtesy than one would find in a charity soup kitchen.
The steerage ought to be and could be abolished by law. It is true that the Italian and Polish peasant may not be accustomed to better things at home and might not be happier in better surroundings nor know how to use them; but it is a bad introduction to our life to treat him like an animal when he is coming to us. He ought to be made to feel immediately, that the standard of living in America is higher than it is abroad, and that life on the higher plane begins on board of ship. Every cabin passenger who has seen and smelt the steerage from afar, knows that it is often indecent and inhuman; and I, who have lived in it, know that it is both of these and cruel besides.
On the steamer _Noordam_, sailing from Rotterdam three years ago, a Russian boy in the last stages of consumption was brought upon the sunny deck out of the pestilential air of the steerage. I admit that to the first cabin passengers it must have been a repulsive sight--this emaciated, dirty, dying child; but to order a sailor to drive him down-stairs, was a cruel act, which I resented. Not until after repeated complaints was the child taken to the hospital and properly nursed. On many ships, even drinking water is grudgingly given, and on the steamer _Staatendam_, four years ago, we had literally to steal water for the steerage from the second cabin, and that of course at night. On many journeys, particularly on the _Fürst Bismark_, of the Hamburg American line, five years ago, the bread was absolutely uneatable, and was thrown into the water by the irate emigrants.
In providing better accommodations, the English steamship companies have always led; and while the discipline on board of ship is always stricter than on other lines, the care bestowed upon the emigrants is correspondingly greater.
* * * * *
At last the passengers are stowed away, and into the excitement of the hour of departure there comes a silent heaviness, as if the surgeon’s knife were about to cut the arteries of some vital organ. Homesickness, a disease scarcely known among the mobile Anglo-Saxons, is a real presence in the steerage; for there are the men and women who have been torn from the soil in which through many generations their lives were rooted.
No one knows the sacred agony of that moment which fills and thrills these simple minded folk who, for the first time in their lives face the unknown perils of the sea. The greater the distance which divides the ship from the fast fading dock, the nearer comes the little village, with its dusty square, its plaster cast saints and its little mud huts.
From far away Russia a small pinched face looks out and a sweet voice calls to the departing father, not to forget Leah and her six children, who will wait for tidings from him, be they good or ill. From Poland in gutteral speech comes a: “God be with you, Bratye (brother), strong oak of our village forest and our dependence; the Virgin protect thee.”
The Slovak feels his Maryanka pressing her lips against his while she sobs out her lamentation, and he, to keep up his courage, gives a “strong pull and a long pull” at the bottle, out of which his white native palenka gives him its last alcoholic greeting.
Silent are the usually vociferous Italians, whose glorious Mediterranean is blotted out by the sombre gray of the Atlantic; they shall not soon again see the full orbed moon shining upon the bay of Naples, sending from heaven to earth a path of silver upon which the blessed saints go up and down. In the silence of the moment there come to them the rattle of carts and the clatter of hoofs, the soft voice of a serenade and then the sweet scented silence of an Italian night. They all think, even if they have never thought much before; for the moment is as solemn as when the padre came with his censer and holy water, or when the acolytes rang the bells, mechanically, on the way to some death-bed.
It is all solemn, in spite of the band which strikes the well-known notes of “Lieb Vaterland, magst ruhig sein,” and makes merrier music each moment to check the tears and to heal the newly made wounds. They try to be brave now, struggling against homesickness and fear, until their faces pale, and one by one they are driven down into the hold to suffer the pangs of the damned in the throes of a complication of agonies for which as yet, no pills or powders have brought soothing.
But when the sun shines upon the Atlantic, and dries the deck space allotted to the steerage passengers, they will come out of the hold one by one, wrapped in the company’s gray blankets; pitiable looking objects, ill-kempt and ill-kept. Stretched upon the deck nearest the steam pipes, they await the return of the life which seemed “clean gone” out of them.--It is at this time that cabin passengers from their spacious deck will look down upon them in pity and dismay, getting some sport from throwing sweetmeats and pennies among the hopeless looking mass, out of which we shall have to coin our future citizens, from among whom will arise fathers and mothers of future generations.