PART I

With the Outgoing Tide

I

"THEY THAT GO OUT IN SHIPS"

"Do really nice ladies smoke cigarettes, papa?" my young daughter asked of me perplexedly, awaiting an answer.

"No, I don't _think_ they do," I replied hesitatingly, the passing of severe judgments not being much to my liking.

"Do really nice ladies drink whiskey?" the young interrogator continued. This time I answered with more assurance.

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

"But, papa dear, so many ladies in our cabin either drink or smoke, and I think they are very nice."

My little woman is perhaps a better judge of human nature than her Puritanized papa; for going into the smoking-room of the Italian steamer on which we had embarked, I saw, indeed, a number of women smoking and drinking and pretending to enjoy both, with that pharisaic air of abandon which convinced me that they were "really nice" ladies. They were "sailing away for a year and a day," and were celebrating their liberation from the conventionalities of their environment by "being quite European," as one of them expressed it.

Ladies who smoke cigarettes and drink cocktails in the smoking-room of an ocean steamer cannot expect that the gentlemen, whose domain they have invaded, will wait for an introduction before beginning a conversation, and soon I was deep in the discussion of the aforesaid cigarettes and cocktails, as pertaining to ladies who are "really nice." One of these ladies was from "ye ancient and godly town" of Hartford, Conn., and her revered ancestors sleep in the Center Church cemetery, all unconscious of the fact that "The better set, to which I belong," quoting the descendant of the revered ancestors, "smokes and drinks and breaks the Sabbath." "And swears?" I asked.

"No; but we do say: Dum it," she replied, inhaling the smoke as if she were a veteran, but betraying her novitiate by the severe attack of coughing which followed.

"Well, I am not up to it, quite," she remarked. "You see I didn't begin till my senior year in college, and gave it up during the earlier years of my married life."

Then I, a college professor, who has lived these many deluded years in the belief that not even his senior boys smoked, except perhaps when no one was looking--gasped and became speechless. Seeing me so easily shocked, she tried to shock me more by telling tales of social depravity, of divorces, remarriages and more divorces, of which she had one; until my speechlessness nearly ended in vocal paralysis.

I did not find my voice again until a gentleman from Boston who "never drank in Boston," but who, it seemed, departed from that custom to an alarming degree on shipboard, helped me to recover my lost organ, by launching forth into a tirade against the immigrant, that ready scapegoat for all our national sins.

Upon the immigrant the Boston man laid the blame for the degeneration of America and the Americans.

"What can you expect of our country with this scum of the earth coming in by the million? Black Hands, Socialists, and Anarchists? What can you expect?

"The Sabbath is broken down by them as if it had never been a day of rest. They drink like fish, they live on nothing----" and he went on with his contradictory statements until the well-known end, in which he saw our country ruined, our flag in the dust, liberty dethroned and the Constitution of the United States trampled under the feet of these infuriated Black Hands, Socialists and Anarchists.

Through the open door from the steerage below came the murmur of voices from a thousand or more passengers, crowded in their narrow space, too narrow for even scant comforts; yet in the murmur were long, cheerful notes.

A mixture of sounds it was. Weird snatches of songs from the Greeks, the mandatory call of the Italian lotto players who seem never to tire of their half innocent gambling, and the deep, guttural notes of various Slavic groups, telling the story of the hard fight for money in the strange country.

Above these sounds came the wailing notes of a lonely violin, played by an Hungarian gypsy, who was artist, vagabond, business man, beggar and thief. His playing was intended to lure pennies out of the pockets of the poor; failing in that, he meant to help himself. It would not have been the steerage if the voices of children had not been heard in all their crescendos and diminuendos; nor, indeed, would it have been the steerage if bitter cries had not come from those who could not restrain their grief, although long ago they had ceased to be children. This ship carried not a few such, who had left our land beaten by many stripes; poor and sick and ready to die.

A Boston man who has once broken through his icy crust, especially if that crust be melted by hot drink, can speak long and unctuously, and my wrath had time to gather, and grow thick as a cloud around my brain. Even before he had quite finished speaking, I blurted out in very unacademic language:

"I'll bet you five dollars, that among the thousand steerage passengers on this ship, you will not find one woman who smokes cigarettes, drinks cocktails, has had a divorce or contemplates having one."

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

Confusion was added to my anger, however, when the man from Boston said, with a reproachful glance: "I am no sport and I don't bet. I am a church-member." Then he called for another cocktail, and I sought the lower deck, over which hung the afterglow of a sunset, rare on the Northern Atlantic, even in June.

The noises on the steerage deck had almost ceased. Most of the children were in their bunks, the lotto players found the light too dim to read the numbers on their cards, the gypsy fiddler continued to wail out lamentations on his instrument; while the Greeks squatted unpicturesquely on the very edge of the forecastle, watching the waves. No doubt the gentle, bluish green held some distant promise of the glory of their Mediterranean.

As I descended the steps I looked into a sea of faces, friendly faces, all. To my "Buon Giorno," there was a chorus of "How do you do?" from Slavs, Latins and Greeks alike, and in but a few moments there was a rather vital relation established between the man from the cabin and the men in the steerage.

That is to me a perpetual wonder; this opening of their lives to the inquisitive eyes of the stranger. Why should they so readily disclose to me all their inmost thoughts, tell me of what they left behind, what they carry home and what awaits them? There is no magic in this, even as there is no effort. All I am sure of is that I want to know--not for the mere knowing, but because somehow the disclosure of a life is to me something so sacred, as if knowing men, I learned to know more of God.

Of all the pleasures of that journey; those starry, never-to-be-forgotten nights, the phosphorescent path across the sea; the moonlit way from the deeps to the eternal heights, the first dim outlines of the mighty coasts of Portugal and Spain; Capri and Sorrento in the setting of the Bay of Naples--above them all, is the glory of the first opening of strange, human hearts to me, when "How do you do," from that gentle chorus of voices answered my "Buon Giorno."

"What's your name?" I turned to a friendly Calabrian whose countrymen had encircled me and one after another we had shaken hands.

"My name Tony."

"Have you been a long time in America?"

"Three year," he answered in fairly good English, while a friendly smile covered his face.

"Where have you been?"

"Tshicago, Kansas, Eeleenoy, Oheeo."

In pretty nearly every place where rails had to be strung in that vast, encircling necklace of steel; where powder blasts opened the hidden fissures of the rocks; wherever his sinuous arm could exchange its patient stroke for American dollars.

"Do you like America?"

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

"Why are you going back?" And I looked into the face of a man whom no one would have taken for an Italian, but who, too, was from Calabria.

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

"How long have you been in America?"

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

"Where do you live?"

"In Connecticut. Among the Yankees."

"Do you like the Yankees?"

"Yes," and his smile grew broader. "Yes, good men; but they drink too much whiskey--make head go round like wheel. Then Yankee get crazy and swear." And he shook his head, this critic of ours, who evidently did not believe that "really nice" ladies or even "really nice" gentlemen should drink whiskey, overmuch.

"Why do you go back?" And this time it was a diminutive Neapolitan whom I addressed. His face wore a beatific smile.

"Him sweetheart in Neapoli." Some one ventured the information, and confusedly he acknowledged his guilt, while everybody laughed. He was going home to marry Pepitta and when times grew better they would come back to Pittsburg.

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

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

"What is your name?" I asked as I shook hands with my fellow citizen who had foresworn his allegiance to the King of Italy and plighted it to Uncle Sam.

Proudly he pulled out his papers. I looked at them and they almost dropped from my fingers; for they were made out to "John Sullivan." When he saw my astonishment he said: "I change name. Want to be an American. My name used to be Giovanni Salvini."

At the edge of the ever-increasing circle I saw my friends, the Slavs, and I reached out my hand to them. It was grasped a dozen times or more, by Poles, Slovenes and "Griners," as they are called, because they come from the Austrian province of Krain. They were less cheerful than the Italians. They were returning home because of the hard times, many of them with empty pockets, some of them with modest savings.

There were Croatians, a few Dalmatians and many Bulgarians and Serbs, who for some reason are the least successful among our Slavic toilers. They were all in rags, looked pinched and half starved and told their hard luck story with many embellishments.

A great many stalwart young fellows were going back to join the army; for the emperor had declared amnesty to all who had left their country before serving their term in arms. One could well afford to be patriotic when the king forgave and when times were hard in America.

Some of the Southern Slavs had marched up in the scale of social life; had become machinists, petty foremen and taskmasters over their own kinsmen. They knew English fairly well and seemed to have acquired some better things than mere bank accounts.

An old gentleman from Lorain, Ohio, was going home to die, and to die in poverty, because the hard times struck at the roots of his business and he was too old to labour in the mills. Another went back to claim a fortune, and asked me for the loan of a dollar, which he would be sure to send back as soon as his fingers touched the waiting wealth.

The circle received constant additions, for our laughter and banter reached down to the dreary bunks, and many of their occupants came up to listen. Women brought their half-asleep children and I drew on my stock of sweets. Even the more reticent women talked to "the man," and told him things glad and sad. A Polish woman was the spokesman of her group.

"We are going back to the Stary Kray (the Old Country). America ne dobre" (not good).

"Why is it not good?"

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

Nothing was good.

"We came to America with red cheeks, like the cheeks of summer apples, and now look at us. We are going back looking like cucumbers in the autumn."

Yes, their cheeks were pale and pinched and their skin wrinkled. How could it be otherwise? They had lived for years by the coke ovens of Pennsylvania, breathing sulphur with every breath; their eyes had rarely seen the full daylight and their cheeks had not often felt the warm sunlight. America "ne dobre."

And yet something must have seemed good to them; for they wore American clothes. Long, trailing skirts, shirt-waists with abbreviated sleeves and belts with showy buckles. All of them had children, many children of varying sizes, and among the children not one said: "America ne dobre."

The boys had penetrated into the mysteries of baseball vernacular, and one of them was the short-stop on his team.

When I inquired of him just what a short-stop is, he looked at me pityingly and said: "Say, are you a greenhorn?"

I am sure if I had told him that I was a college professor, he would have asked for my credentials.

Some of the girls, besides having gone to our public schools, belonged to clubs, wore pins and buttons and chewed gum most viciously. All were loath to go to the "Stary Kray."

I surely was in my element, the human element; with babies to cuddle, to guess their ages and their weight; to watch the boisterous, half Americanized, mysterious youth and to ask questions and answer them among these strong, friendly men.

There was one woman who neither smiled at me nor answered my greeting; who held her half-clothed, puny baby close to her breast, giving him his evening meal. Other little ones, seemingly all of one age, huddled close to the mother, who looked like a great, frightened bird hovering over her young.

"Her man been killed in the mine," the women said, and I found no more questions to ask her. I could only sympathize with her in her grief; for I knew it. I knew it because I had seen her or her kind, by the hundreds at a time, prone on the ground beside the yawning pit, claiming some unrecognizable form as that of husband or son; often of husband and son. I have heard the bitter wails and lamentations of a whole hillside. Out of each hut they came, the heart-broken cries of the living over the dead; and in that grief, the Slovak, the Polish or the Italian women were just like the American woman, who more silently, perhaps, grieved over her husband, the foreman of the mine. In the radiant morning he walked away from her and home; into the mine, his tomb.

The poor Slav woman had paid the price for her American hopes and had a right to say: "America ne dobre"; but she did not say it.

"Lift my boy!" a rather muscular, good-looking man said, in the English of New York's East Side. He seemed a little jealous of the attention I had paid to these strange children.

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

"My! But he's heavy!"

"You bet he is!" the proud father exclaimed, after my only half successful effort to lift the youngster.

"He's going to be a prize-fighter, like his daddy;" and before I realized it I was initiated into the technicalities of the prize-ring. My new friend proved to be an aspirant for strange honours, especially strange when sought by a Jew. His ambition was to be a champion.

"I was the foist one," he said, "to start the fighting business among the Jews. There's lots of 'em now."

Why was he going over? His wife, a native of Hungary, had grown homesick for the Magyarland. She was dying of that most dreadful of all diseases, consumption; so her Ike and little Joe were going with her to Budapest.

"Say," Ike confided, "I don't know what that Old Country is like; but I'll be hiking back to the good old Bowery in six weeks unless I'm mighty much mistaken."

Little Joe, with all his weight, had nestled in my arms and grown quite affectionate. When we parted, he called me "Uncle," and I was properly proud of being the uncle of a future champion prize-fighter of the world.

By the time the first bugle sounded for dinner I had tasted enough of the joys of this new fellowship; so I said good-night in four languages. Up to the deck and to my cabin door, I could hear little Joe calling after me in a voice like that of a lusty young rooster, "Good-night, uncle!"

Dinner in the first cabin was fashionably quiet; for it was our first evening meal together, and we were measuring and scanning one another after the manner of fashionable folk, trying to decide with whom it was safe to speak.

We reached the point of discussing the dinner and the merits of Italian cooking; we spoke of the weather and hoped it would remain so calm and beautiful all the way. Some of us even went so far as to ask our neighbour if this was the first trip over, which is a rather silly question to ask nowadays when every one has crossed the ocean a dozen times, except a few very extraordinary people.

After dinner, as we lounged on deck, a lady, whose face I could not see, sat down beside me and said: "You don't approve ladies' smoking, do you?" With that, she drew from her silver case a cigarette, and put it to her lips.

"I don't myself," she continued; "but I smoke because my whole nature is reacting against the Connecticut Puritanism in which I have been steeped. I don't enjoy smoking, at least my nerves don't; but my whole self takes pleasure in it because I have been told over and over again that I mustn't; so now I do.

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

I told her that I had grown accustomed to shocks, that I had seen something of the world, was fairly well acquainted with the weakness of the flesh and the power of the devil; but that I really thought it strange that an American woman and a mother should smoke and drink. Her daughter, a girl of about sixteen, properly gowned and coldly indifferent, watched her mother and listened to our conversation until her maid came and bore her away, after she had bade her mother an unaffectionate good-night.

I suppose it was the cigarettes that made my neighbour communicative, perhaps it was simply because she wanted to talk, that she told me her story--a story more lamentable than I have ever heard in the steerage.

She was graduated from a college which prides itself more than most colleges, on being an intellectual centre. Immediately after entering society she married a man of her own set, wealthy, cultured and a university graduate. Now, after seventeen years of married life, she had obtained a divorce, because, as she said, they had "had enough of each other." He had already married, and she was going to Europe to find a husband, a man with braid and gilt buttons; preferably some one connected with an embassy.

Several of her friends, she said, had married into that class and were "perfectly happy."

"Foreigners are so polite," she said. "Americans, especially American husbands, are boors. Think of nothing but business, know nothing of music or art, and are absorbed in football, the Board of Trade and fast horses."

I knew that this woman was not a typical American woman, nor typical of a large class; but she was interesting as a type of many of her class who have grown weary of Democracy and the attendant Puritanisms of America, have crossed the seas and recrossed them, have gambled at Monte Carlo and flirted at Budapest and Vienna, have seen the shady side of Paris by early morning light and have become alienated from the best there is in America.

This particular woman had broken up her home, had left a fourteen-year-old son with his grandparents, and was about to throw herself away on pretty nearly anything that presented itself, if it sported brass buttons and trimmings, and had at least a Von to its name. She belongs to a species which I have often seen in the American quarters of European cities; but one so frank as she, I had never met.

I thought I had known something of American homes and American husbands; but evidently I have lived in the social backwoods, for what she told me was indeed a revelation.

In the course of the conversation we were joined by other husbandless women who were to live abroad, although not divorced nor yet seeking gold braid and brass buttons; by the gentleman from Boston who had confessed to being a church-member, and by a merchant from the West who was eager to make up a pool on the ship's run,--and before we knew it, we were back to my proposition about the steerage.

It was the merchant from the West who said that he noticed how much American clothing these immigrants carried back. That the men had celluloid collars, watches and brass-bound trunks. It was the man from Boston who said that they carried themselves so differently from those who came over, and it was he who began to calculate how much money they carried back, impoverishing our country and enriching theirs.

"One thing," I ventured in reply, "you have not counted and cannot count. How much of that which is better than money they are carrying back. Ideals filtered into their minds, new aspirations dominating their lives, and all found in the humblest places in America.

"The steerage, as I have said before, and now say again with still more emphasis, carries into Europe more saving ideas than the cabin. What we bring we have borrowed from Europe and bring back in exaggerated forms. Neither Paris nor Berlin, nor Vienna nor Monte Carlo is being blessed by our coming or cares for us at all, but only for our dollars."

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

"Neither Europe nor America is the better for our coming or our going," I continued. "And you," turning to the man from Boston, "you who say that the immigrants are to blame for our social and religious deterioration, ask yourself what you and your class bring back to America after a season spent on the frayed edges of the so-called social life of Europe, with which the average American comes in contact. As for the money the immigrants carry back, they have earned every cent of it, and I have no doubt that we in the cabin carry more money over to Europe than they do, and we will spend it there; and I am not so sure that we have earned it.

"Moreover," waving aside the man from Boston who was about to interrupt me, but I was wound up and could not run down, "they have paid a terrible price for the money they carry home. Shall I tell you what that price is?" And I told the story of the Slavic widow and her orphaned brood. Then my good neighbour, the Puritan rebel, who had heartlessly talked of her deserted home, stretched out her hand and touching mine said: "Please don't tell us any more. You have already made me think, and I don't want to."

Then came four bells from the bridge, and the lonely sailor watching from the crow's nest called out: "All's well on board!"

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

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

After that there were more cigarettes and cocktails in the smoking-room; but one woman wasn't there.

II

THE PRICE THEY PAY

The ship's doctor was very much like other men of his profession who choose to be knocked about from port to port, dealing out pills and powder, when pills and powders seem of so little consequence. He was young, inexperienced and had not yet learned half the secret of his calling; namely, to keep his mouth shut at the proper time. At breakfast he told us that he had eight cases of consumption in the steerage, and that three men were about the worst he had ever seen.

He told this with the cool air of the medical man who delights in "cases" as such. Then he told us about one of them, a Greek, who was at the point of death, but all the time kept calling for cheese.

"Don't you give him cheese, all the cheese he wants?" cried one of the young ladies across the table.

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

Then I looked at the young lady and she looked at me; I whispered something to my steward, and she gave an order; and we both had cheese--real Greek cheese for breakfast.

In the morning the steerage looks its best. The deck has been scrubbed and so have some of the passengers. If the day promises to be fair, the travellers unconsciously draw upon the coming joy in large draughts. When I went down that day, I was no more among strangers. Tony greeted me with an unusually broad smile, John Sullivan shook hands with me so vigorously that I thought he must be the veritable John L. and the children gathered round me, confidently awaiting their sweets. This was truly inspiring; but it became touching when the Slavic widow said to her brood: "The Krist-kindel comes."

In the depths of the steerage they had heard that a man from the cabin had come down and been good to them; that he had petted the children, luring them with sweets. And the steerage gave up its treasure of little ones, seemingly endless in number; so that the stock of good things had to be replenished many a time before each child had its fair and equal share.

Truly it is "More blessed to give than to receive," yet the blessing brings its burdens, in the disclosure of real or pretended suffering; and the immigrants are no exception to the rule. I know now as I have never known before, the price they pay for the dollars so safely tucked away, which are their wealth, their power and, I trust, their happiness.

Here is a beggarly-looking group of Bulgarians. They left their home in the richest district of that new Balkan czardom about a year ago. I know their village, set in the midst of acres of roses, of poppies and of maize. Like their forefathers they lived there contentedly until restlessness, like a disease, crept upon them. Coming from the plains in the West, it spread its contagion over the Alps, the Carpathians and the Macedonian hills. The men mortgaged their homes, left their wives and children to gather the roses, the poppies and the maize, and took passage at Triest to gather dollars in America.

On landing, they were shipped West and farther West. They travelled by polluted rivers, and over mountains stripped of their verdure and robbed of the wealth of their veins. They saw the refuse of the mines left like broken trappings of war on the battle-field. They saw the glare of a thousand flaming ovens where coal was being baked into coke, and in their shadows they saw besmirched and bedraggled towns, now clustering, now trailing along, now losing themselves in the darkness, and now glowing again in the lurid light of giant flames pouring from huge furnaces. They saw day turned into night by smoke, and night turned into day by unquenched fires, and they knew not whether it was day or night, or heaven or hell to which they had come. At the end of the journey they were led into a deep ravine through which an inky river struggled, and over which hung a cloud as immovable as if the released elements were forming again into solids.

Twelve men were counted by some one who led them, or drove them, or pushed them into a hut which had once been painted some dingy colour, but now was part of the gloom around it. Other twelve men were made to enter another hut, and so on, until all were disposed of. By signs they were given to understand that this was home; so they spread out their woolen coats and went to sleep. When morning came, after a breakfast of cheap whiskey and poor bread, they were marched into the mill of a certain corporation. It would do no good to mention the name of this corporation, and it would do no harm. No one would be offended; for there is no one to offend.

I have very dear friends who own stock in that company, but they just draw dividends--they do not control the mill. The man and the men who run it produce the dividends; they do not own the stock, certainly not all of it. I cannot single out that corporation; it is not the only sinner nor the chief one, and that would be its only consolation, were it looking for anything so unpractical.

My Bulgarians saw boiling pots of metal and red-hot ingots of metal and men of metal, who shouted at them in an unknown tongue, and the louder they shouted the less the men understood. Little by little, however, they grew accustomed to the tumult, and learned to walk skillfully on the inch plank which alone separated them from death and destruction. They found consolation in the bulging envelope full of money which came to them at the end of the week; for it was much money, exchanged into their currency, more money than three months' labour brought them among the roses, the poppies and the maize.

Two-thirds of it they sent home, and lived on the other third, eating coarse meat and bread, and indulging in strong drink. Month after month they toiled in the mill, and lived in the same ravine, with the thundering, spewing, belching monsters. They lost the freshness of skin and the elasticity of movement characteristic of their race; but were happy in the fat, bulging envelope at the end of the week.

Of the city, with its churches and its beautiful homes they had seen nothing; for the mill ran day and night, and night and day, and Sabbath days and Sabbath nights as well. They cared not for cities or churches or even for fine houses, so long as they got the envelopes.

One morning, however, they came to the mill and it was silent within, as it was silent without, and the door was closed. One week and another they waited; but there was no envelope with money. Their own small change was gone and they were starving. Then came the same man who had driven them twelve by twelve into the huts, and twelve by twelve he drove them out; for they had no money with which to pay the rent, and men with hearts of metal cannot feel what it means to be driven out of a hut, even such a wretched hut, and be in the roofless street.

Half-starved, the men left their miserable shelter and marched into the main street, past the stores and the churches; and then they saw that the city had homes and that not all the men had hearts of metal.

Bread came in abundance, and soup and meat. Fine women were proud to serve them, and the basement of the church became their lodging place. On Sunday they heard above them the voices of little children, and then deep organ tones and a man's voice speaking loud enough for them to hear, although they could not understand. Then came a great volume of song, and if the congregation sang: "The Church's one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord," poetry never was more true to fact; for the church seemed buttressed upon these Slavic brothers of Jesus, in whom, as in all the needy, He incarnates Himself.

By slow stages the men found their way back to the sea, and through the charity of their own more fortunate countrymen, they were now homeward bound. A more forlorn looking set of men I have never seen; emaciated, ragged, unclean and discouraged. They had paid the price.

A man groped his way towards me, his face disfigured and his eyelids closed forever. He had money, nearly a thousand dollars, he told me. "But what would I not give for only one eye?" he said pathetically. He paid the price when a powder blast blotted daylight out forever.

A rather forward Jewish girl snatched from my hands goodies intended for the children, and at a glance I knew the price she had paid, if she carried any dollars across the sea. She belonged to an ever-increasing number of Jewish women, who have forsaken the path of virtue or have been pushed from it, who knows into how deep a hell?

A man came to me, the mere shadow of a man and asked for some soothing sweet for his cough. He was a Montenegrin and had been a stalwart soldier in the army of his prince, in whose domain the white plague is practically unknown. He, too, carried money home; more money than any man in his village in the Black Mountains had ever possessed. It was earned in the iron works of an Ohio town, in a pit so full of flying metal, ground from rough surfaces, that every breath carried destruction to his lungs.

The sight of this man recalled the conversation at the breakfast table, and I looked for the hospital. Two stories below the steerage deck I found the contagious ward, and upon iron cots lay the three dying men, mere shadows of men except the eyes. They were still the eyes of flesh, grown larger seemingly, through suffering, which was all too real.

Nearest the door, and nearest death apparently, was the Greek. He looked almost happy; for he had cheese, the cheese of Greece, which my opposite neighbour at table was feeding him bit by bit. He ate and ate, and called for more. Poor fellow! His soul had already forgotten the glory of Athens; but his craving stomach had a long memory; it remembered the cheese of Greece.

Stolidly looking at the iron ceiling from which hung the huge sweat drops of the labouring ship, lay a dying Slav. The racial marks of his face were almost obliterated, and one could with difficulty recognize the Slav, except by his silence in suffering. My hands touched his; and although they were mere skin and bone, the marks of heavy labour were still upon them. His memory had not quite faded; for between panting breaths he told me of the village in Hungary from which he had gone, a lusty youth; of the old Matka he had left behind, of the sea voyage and then of his work in the mines. It was "Prach, prach" (dust, dust), he said. He was sure that when the air of the Tatra mountains filled his lungs again, he would get well. Did he want anything? "Yes, palenka." His native white, biting drink. Oh, if he just had palenka! "Wouldn't whiskey do as well?" "Yes, anything that gives strength; but palenka would be the best."

There was a third man, an Italian of the Calabrian group to which Tony and John Sullivan belonged. There was, or there had been, a third man; for even as we turned towards him, a rattle in his hollow chest gave sign that he had crossed to another harbour than that for which he had embarked. We would have lingered; but death brought the nurse and the doctor, with much muttering and many complaints against us, and threats of quarantine.

After all, it was good to reach the noisy deck, even the deck of the steerage--and life.

"Tombola! Tombola!" the Calabrian peasants shouted, shaking a pasteboard box of dice. "Tre, sette, dieci,--terno!" the lucky winner screamed, gathering up the greasy soldi piled on the greasy deck.

In another corner the dealer was shaking a wicker basket full of the lucky and unlucky numbers, drawing them forth one by one and calling them out to the winners and the losers. All over the deck there were such groups of noisy Italians, ignorant of the death of a comrade who had drawn the unlucky number--or the lucky one; who can tell?

Unconscious of the fact that death had come in the wake of the ship and overtaken us, all went merrily on--and no one in cabin or steerage must be told; for the dark angel is nowhere so unwelcome as upon the uncertain deep, where there are never more than a few planks of wood or girders of steel between time and eternity. No one thought of death that morning. Who could think of it with the sky so blue and the sea so calm? Even nature seemed oblivious of the fact that one of her children had paid the price.

Nor was the man from Boston, nor many men in Boston, with all their inherited sensitiveness of conscience, nor the men in Pennsylvania where conscience is blackened by coal, and hardened by steel--none of these men, I say, was conscious or is conscious how great is the price these European peasants pay for the dollars they carry home.

In all the industrial states, there are hundreds and thousands of graves, marked by humble wooden crosses, beneath which sleep just such toilers, snatched from life by "The broken wheel, the loosened cord." They have paid the price, the greatest price, giving their lives for the dollars, the hoarding of which we begrudged them.

No less than 10,000 of these despised aliens laid down their lives in one year, digging coal, making steel, blasting stone and doing the numberless dangerous drudgeries of our industrial life.

All that the Boston man saw was the money, the good clothes, the celluloid collars of the men, and the gaudy shams that decked the women. _I_ could see the mouths of half a dozen mines, out of which were dragged in one year the mangled, powder-burnt, asphyxiated bodies of a thousand once-breathing souls. I heard the cries and groans of hundreds of women and thousands of children; for I have seen mothers embrace bodiless limbs and limbless bodies, fragments of the sons they had borne, and although 30,000,000 dollars and more were carried home by the living, they too had paid a price beyond the hard labour they did. In the suffering they endured in damp mines, by the hot metal blasts, in cold ditches and in dark and dangerous tunnels, they paid the price, indeed.

I wish that the man from Boston and all the men with small vision had been on the deck of that Italian steamer, when three times during her long voyage the engines stopped their breathing, just before sunrise. In the steerage and in the cabin alike, men and women were asleep. The captain, the doctor and a few of us, who knew and dared, were the only ones astir.

From the depths of the ship the sailors carried the sail-cloth sheathed bundles and held them over the waters. Then sharp and clear the captain called: "Let go!" The engines breathed again, the mighty screws churned the quiet sea to foam and the surging waves enfolded the bodies of the men who had paid the price.

III

A MURDERER, MARY AND AN HONORARY DEGREE

Once a day the steerage was roused from its monotony. Men, women and children, a thousand of them, pushed and crowded (good-naturedly, of course) in the attempt to get a glimpse of a fellow passenger. There was nothing which distinguished him from the rest of the immigrants except that he had taken human life, and was being carried back to pay the penalty of his crime.

The hour which he daily spent on deck was an hour of singular triumph. Almost reverently the crowd stared at him, as if he had just dropped from heaven or risen from his grave. I am sure that no one felt any ill will towards him, and even the sailor who, revolver in hand, stood guard over him, shared the distinction which the steerage felt in having a murderer there. The fact is, he did not look like a murderer or even like the typical bad man; neither did he seem smitten by remorse, nor did he exhibit any kind of bravado which might have aroused resentment.

Graciously he accepted the cigar which some one gave him, and as graciously permitted me to light it for him (his hands were in irons) while with remarkable frankness he told me his history and the story of his crime.

Of course he was an Italian, born in a southern town in which some 20,000 people had accepted poverty as their inheritance, and made little or no struggle against it. They had also accepted the burden of taxation and exploitation by government officials; although here and there some one with the gleam of freedom in his breast felt the grievousness of it, and secretly or openly protested.

Patriot brigands enough there were, and the stories of their exploits fired the imagination of a number of boys, of whom Luigi (the murderer) was one. On Sunday evenings under a clump of cedars these boys gathered, until in imitation of their elders they organized a society, whose patriotic purposes involved nothing less than the overthrow of monarchy, and wiping Church, priests and Pope from the face of the earth. A rather ambitious program for minors; but they had imbibed the "Zeit-geist" in an exaggerated form, had begun to feel the great social wrongs of the times, and like most youths, admired the heroic.

Luigi told me frankly that he committed thefts first from the till of his father, a shopkeeper, who, upon the discovery of his son's pilfering, beat him half to death and drove him out of the house. After that the boy stole from any one and any place; because the "Society for the Liberation of the People of Italy" needed money, first, last and all the time, to carry on its ambitious schemes. Ultimately he was caught and sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

I know something of the horrors of Southern Italian prisons, and I could well believe that three such years would ripen rebellious thoughts into desperate ones. Luigi left the prison with vengeance in his heart, slew the judge who had sentenced him, and fled to America.

I have purposely robbed his story of all its patriotic and picturesque elements, for I do not wish to glorify Luigi. He is just a type, perhaps not a very fair type, of many of his countrymen whose coming to America disturbs us and whose leaving it causes no regrets.

Luigi's further history was interesting to me because he knew some things about America which I did not know. He had lived a number of years in the state of New Jersey, which seems to be a sort of haven of refuge for Trusts and Anarchists. During those years he had been in intimate relation with our courts, jails, prisons and police. He had plotted for them, with them and against them, and now was being sent back in irons because (he said) his remaining in the United States would embarrass certain officials. Luigi saw no great difference between prisons here and in Italy; between jailers there and jailers here; between judges on this side the water and on the other side. The only difference that Luigi _did_ see was that over here they are much smarter than in Italy.

There was but one good thing which Luigi experienced in America. They had been good to his "kid." Over and over again he told me that, and over and over again he blessed the good women of a certain New Jersey town for being good to his "kid." Often as he cursed the police (police, state and nation are one in the mind of Luigi and his kind) so often did he bless two women at the edge of that New Jersey town, who had truly revealed the heart of a nation, whose conscience had been falsely revealed to him by the police and the petty courts.

Looking over the railing, the cabin passengers watched the murderer as eagerly as those in the steerage, and when I returned after my interview with him, every one clamoured for a report of the conversation. Many of the men sneered at my suggestion that the murderer might be a victim of circumstances.

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

"We're not strict enough with them," said the man from Boston; and added the information that shooting is too good for these Black Hands and Anarchists. He called me an "unpractical sentimentalist." The man from the West, however, took my part.

"You may call the professor a sentimentalist, but I guess he may be right after all. We've got a sentimentalist as they called him, in Denver. He took it into his head that you can bust kids of their meanness by being good to them instead of clapping them into jail, and he has done it. We called him a dangerous sentimentalist; but the kids of Denver call him their friend, and he has done more for them than all the sheriffs and judges and jailers put together."

While the man from the West was speaking, "Dirty Mary," as we called her, looked wistfully up at me and reminded me that it was candy time in the steerage.

Mary was positively the most hopeless little creature my eyes have ever seen. She was about eleven years of age, and could swear as picturesquely in English as if she were a Bowery tough; while from her stockingless feet up to her head, which looked as if it never had been guilty of contact with a hair-brush, she was a mass of unpicturesque dirt.

Mary had come from Naples to Mulberry Street, and never had a chance to be homesick, for she never had a home. Her father was in prison and her mother had all she could do to take care of the numerous little ones, who, at the

earliest moment, like the fledglings in a nest, were pushed out to shift for themselves. Mary had slept beneath docks, in ash cans and dark alleys, and although still a child, there was nothing left for her to learn concerning the evils of this world.

As I was sharing my sweets with her, the Boston man called down from his safe vantage ground: "Try your love-making on Mary!"

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

"He has challenged me," I answered.

"Say," she said, looking at the generous proportions of the Boston man and then at me, "he's got a cinch, ain't he?"

Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge.

"Mary," I began, in my gentlest and most persuasive tones, "Mary, I want you to wash yourself."

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

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

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

The preliminary skirmish was over, and I had lost; but I was not discouraged. Probably the attack had been wrong. I left Mary, and going to the barber's shop, I bought the most strongly scented soap he had. Armed with this weapon I returned to the steerage, and renewed the attack.

"Mary," I said, holding the soap close to her nose, "this will make you smell sweet all over, if you use water with it."

Mary sniffed the musk-laden air, and the primitive spirit in her, lured by the odour, conquered her will. She took the cake of soap and it disappeared in the pocket of her greasy skirt. Triumphantly I went to the upper deck and reported progress. After a remarkably short time Mary reappeared and smilingly looked at me from below. She had used the soap, all of it, I think; for it was liberally plastered over her face, her hands and even her limbs. Indeed dirt and soap were pretty equally distributed over her body.

I had never known that Mary was shy; but when she heard the laughter of the passengers, she disappeared as quickly as a frightened deer, leaving a strong smell of musk behind her.

"What was you all laughing about?" she demanded, when, after a long search, I found her tucked in among the blankets of the shelf which was her bed. Then I explained to her the uses of soap, and by the aid of a pocket mirror showed her its effect when used with the proper proportion of water. Mary was an apt pupil, and then and there washed herself for the first time in many days and weeks.

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

Emphatically and briefly Mary answered: "Sure."

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

The next day Mary appeared, washed clean and wearing stockings which my own little woman had provided.

After that the shoes were laced, and before we reached Naples a hair-brush had invaded the wilderness which crowned her head. A bright ribbon bow was the bribe which accomplished that miracle. Her teeth even became acquainted with a tooth-brush, although I had to use chewing-gum as an inducement to open her tightly closed lips.

Outwardly, at least, Mary became a changed creature. I cannot tell much about what went on in her little soul; but I trust she felt something of that love, which, even in the imperfect way in which it was manifested to her, had some power.

The love I have for the people in the steerage has begotten love in them, and I have brothers and sisters innumerable; while countless children call me "Uncle." I am quite sure that if these strangers are to be blended into our common life, the one great power which must be used will be this something, which practical people call sentimentalism; but which after all, at its best, is a really practical thing, and accomplishes what rigid law, whether good or bad, cannot accomplish. I have seen this force at work, healing, reclaiming, redeeming; and my faith in it is unbounded, although the practical man may ridicule it and the scientific man may scoff at it. My faith in love as a factor, the greatest factor in our social life, is based first of all upon my belief in our common kinship.

I recognize no barriers of race, class or religion between myself and any other human being that needs me. I happen to know something about human beings; I know intimately many races and more nationalities, and I have discovered that when one breaks through the strange speech, which so often separates; when one closes one's eyes to what climate has burned upon a man's skin, or what social or economic conditions have formed or deformed--one will find in every human being a kinsman.

Those of us who know certain races most intimately have come to the conclusion that what at first we regarded as essential differences, are largely upon the surface; and that when we have penetrated the unusual, we quickly reach the essentially alike.

The most interesting books and the most acceptable lectures about strange peoples often come from those who know their subjects least. They were not long enough among them to discover the likeness--that which is so commonplace that one cannot write books about it or deliver sensational lectures regarding it.

If emigration to America has done nothing else, it has proved that but few race characteristics, if any, are fixed. Should some sceptic wish to be convinced on this point, let him visit such towns as South Bend, Indiana; Scranton, Pa., or Youngstown, Ohio, and look at a group of Slavs or Italians who came here twenty years ago. Let him go among those who have had the full advantage of our environment, of our standard of living, of education and of an enlightening religion. He will find what we call race characteristics almost obliterated, from the faces of even the first generation.

The sluggish Pole has become vivacious; while the fiery Italian has had his blood cooled to a temperature approved by even the most fastidious of those who believe that fervour and enthusiasm are not signs of good breeding.

My own anthropological acumen has sometimes played me sore tricks, especially in the following case: I was the guest of a Woman's Club, in the Middle West, to speak on the theme of Immigration. At the close of the session, refreshments were served.

The mistress of the house--and be it known that her ancestors came to this country when there was neither steerage nor cabin--told me that she had an Hungarian maid whom she wished me to see. I looked about the room and saw two young women serving the guests. One was a typical American girl, with almost a Gibson face; the daughter of the house, I decided. The face of the other showed some Slavic characteristics, and mentally I placed her birthplace in the Carpathian Mountains. I was congratulating myself on my good judgment, when the young ladies came to serve me; then I discovered that the one with Slavic features was the daughter of the house, while the "Gibson girl" had been born by the river March, in Hungary.

One of the most wonderful sights from the sociological standpoint is the main street of Scranton, Pa., and the neighbouring Court-house Square. Scranton has a weekly corso. A vast stream of young people passes up and down the street on Saturday afternoon, to see and to be seen; to court and to be courted. I have watched that stream for hours, and although fully eighty per cent. of those young people are of foreign birth or children of the foreign born, I could only faintly trace racial differences. Almost invariably, too, the racial marks have been most effectually blotted out from the faces of those who have had the best advantages; that is, the same advantages which we have had. It is noticeable that children of the Southern Italians grow larger than their parents, and would grow better than they, if in the changed environment love would supply what chance or fate has denied them.

I believe in love as a factor in social redemption, not only because I believe that we are essentially alike, but because I believe that most human beings respond to it more or less quickly. We know that children do, and that we ourselves rarely outgrow the response to love.

I recall once travelling westward on an immigrant train. To begin with, the car was very much crowded, and after it became part of a slow local train, it was invaded by native Americans, who fretted much and justly, at having to travel in an unventilated, ill-smelling car.

At one station a mother came in, with a child about five years of age. The little one was crying bitterly, because it had the toothache. Two other children caught the infection and lifted up their voices, loud enough and long enough to set every passenger on edge. The mother of the five year old tried to comfort her by telling her that soon they would be at the dentist's, and he would pull the naughty tooth. That remark failed to produce the desired effect, for the little girl fairly screamed and the two babies joined in the chorus. Then the mother, growing angry, cried: "Jenny, if you don't keep still, I'll break your neck!" At which Jenny, not unnaturally, ran from her. I stretched out my arms, and catching her held the struggling form for a minute, then lifted her gently to my knee.

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

She pointed to her swollen cheek, and I said: "Now, dear, I'll take that toothache away," and I lightly stroked the sore cheek.

Here let me say that I am neither a Christian Scientist nor a Faith Healer, and that when I have a toothache, I go straightway to the dentist. I stroked Jenny's swollen cheek for a time and then asked: "Does it still hurt, dearie?" and Jenny answered: "Not now. Do it some more." And I did.

"One, two, three!" I said at last. "I'll put your toothache into my pocket." And lo! and behold! the toothache was gone.

Relieved of pain, the child soon fell asleep in my arms, and I carried her back to her mother.

The other children were still crying--challenging my faith in love as a soothing syrup; and I accepted the challenge.

One baby belonged to a Lithuanian woman who was going to join her husband in the coal fields of Illinois. It required more than love to touch that baby; it needed a good digestion as well; for the child was so dirty that it seemed perilous to take it, from whatever point I approached. Finally, I landed it safe. Its skin was hot and dry; evidently it had a fever, and I knew that it would appreciate water without and within. I applied it liberally, and before long I could really love the child; for when the dirt was removed, it was fair to look upon. When its cries ceased, as they did soon after I gave it a cool drink, I laid it on a seat far from its mother, and it went to sleep.

All this time the third baby continued its lamentations; they were the cries of a very young baby, and went to my heart. I asked its Italian mother to let me take it, and she, having witnessed the miracles I wrought, had faith in me and gave me her child. As soon as it felt the strange, muscular arm, however, it howled with renewed vigour; but I held bravely to it, and walked up and down the car, and down and up, and up and down again. I had to; for whenever I attempted to sit down, the baby shrieked the louder, and as I was being eagerly watched by all the passengers, my reputation was at stake. At last I recalled a little Italian lullaby, one my Dalmatian nurse used to sing to me; I hummed it as I continued my weary march, until the child's cries changed to a low crooning. Then I sat down and number three fell asleep. Triumphantly I carried it to its mother, and took my seat, much the worse for wear and perspiring at every pore.

In a short time a benevolent looking lady wearing eye-glasses came to me and said: "I beg your pardon, sir, but are you an M. D.?"

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

"What is that?" she inquired.

"Lover of Little Babies," I answered.

I told this story to my fellow passengers in the cabin; not only because I am proud of my honorary degree, but to prove my belief in the fact that most human beings respond to love, and also that it is a specific for many ills.

My theory may be unscientific and impractical; but my fellow voyagers saw it successfully carried out in the steerage of that steamer.

Shall I ever forget the landing of the ship at Naples? Tony and John Sullivan and Pietro and Guisseppi, resplendent in their American clothes,--eager to land; yet not forgetting to shake my hand as they bade me a smiling good-bye. I doubt that there was one of those hundreds of men whose life's history I did not know, whose hopes for the future I did not share and in whom my love had not awakened some kindly feeling.

I knew the women and the children; I was expected to kiss the babies--and I did--and the children all said good-bye to their "Uncle." After all, I may not have done them any good, but I know that they enriched my life. Proudly I looked at Mary, no longer "Dirty Mary," and her clean face made me happy; while her smile was worth much more than gold. I had new brothers and sisters, nephews, nieces and children.

My orthodox friend from Boston stood beside me when they landed. "This is like heaven," he said as he looked around.

The matchless bay, with its blue water, glittered in the light of the sun, which made a pavement of gold fit for angels and spirits to walk upon. It was like heaven to me also; not because I thought of golden pavements or harps or halos, or any of the glories which the imagination might picture to itself. To me it seemed like heaven because "The redeemed walk there," those whom America is lifting from the steerage into the many cabins of the Lord.

IV

REFLEX INFLUENCES

The ports of Naples, Triest and Fiume felt the full tide of returning immigration, and although it came sweeping in with unprecedented force, it was not regarded as a calamity. For hours at each port, noisy venders of fruit, and "runners" for modest lodging places hung about the ship, and every passenger who disembarked was an asset, not only to the port in which he waited for the train or boat which would carry him to his native place, but to the whole economic life of his nation.

There was something almost grotesquely grandiose in the air with which each immigrant viewed the shores of his native land, and an unconscious exaggeration of our American ways in his walk and talk, and the prodigality with which he handled small change.

The street venders and purveyors of small pleasures recognized this, and appealed to his newly awakened generosity by charging him twice as much for everything as they charged when he was outward bound.

The customs officers had a sharpened vision

and did not treat his baggage with the usual disrespect. The brass-bound trunks contained phonographs to disturb the age-long silence of some mountain village, samples of American whiskey, "the kind that burns all the way down," and therefore characteristic of our temper. There were cigars, manufactured by the American Tobacco Trust, and safely concealed; for the Austrian and Italian governments have been wise enough to create a monopoly of their own on tobacco.

Gold trinkets, too, there were, for some Dulcinea in the Apennines or the Carpathians--trinkets brought as tokens of faithfulness, which is often as spurious as the metal; and ah, yes! there is something else which they bring and no customs boundary can keep it out. It is hidden away in the innermost being and will come to light some day, although now the wanderer himself may be unconscious of it.

The returned immigrants scatter into thousands of villages, rousing them from their commonplaceness by stories of adventure, boasts of mighty deeds of valor and praise or criticism of our strange customs.

Sitting in the inn of a little Alpine village, I once overheard one of these immigrants comparing the slow ways of the natives with our swifter pace.

"In America the trains go so fast that they can't stop to take on passengers; they just have hooks with which they are caught as the train flies past.

"They have reaping machines," this candidate for the "Ananias Club" continued, "to which a dozen horses are hitched, and the grain is cut, threshed, ground to flour and baked, in a few minutes. All you have to do is to touch a button and you can get bread or cake as you choose."

All this his auditors believed; but when he told them that we build houses forty stories high, their credulity was strained to the breaking point; although he swore by the memory of his departed mother that it was so, and that he had seen it with his own eyes.

One reason that the returned immigrant is so quickly recognized is, that he purposely emphasizes the difference between himself and those who have remained at home. He does everything and wears everything which will make him like an American, even if over here he had scarcely moved out of his group or come in touch with our civilization. With pride the men wear our clothing, including stiff collars and ties, and when one is in doubt as to a man's relation to our life, a glance at his feet is sufficient; "for by their"--shoes--"ye shall know them."

While one may deplore the loss of the picturesque in European peasant life, there is an ethical significance in the immigrant's American garments which is of rather vital importance.

The Polish peasant in his native environment is one of the laziest among European labourers. Wrapped in his sheepskin coat, summer and winter, walking barefoot the greater part of the year, and in winter putting his feet into clumsy, heavy boots which impeded his progress, these garments fitted his temper. They were heavy, inexpensive, never changing, and rarely needed renewal. The American clothes he wears are a symbol of his altered character. They mean a new standard of living even as they mean a new standard of effort.

In America the Polish labourer loses his native laziness. The journey in itself has shaken him out of his lethargy; the high gearing of our industrial wheels, the pressure brought to bear upon him by the American foreman, the general atmosphere of our life charged by an invigorating ozone, and the absence of a leisure class, at least from the industrial community, have, in a few years, changed what many observers regarded as a fixed characteristic.

The whole Slavic race is inclined to lead an easy life, and immigration is destined to have a permanent effect upon it; for the returned immigrant acts contagiously upon his community. Unbiased landowners and manufacturers have told me that we have trained their workmen in industry, that we have quickened their wits and that while wages have risen nearly 60% in almost all departments of labour, the efficiency of the labourers has been correspondingly increased, most noticeably where the largest number of returned immigrants has entered the home field.

The Slavic peasants both in Hungary and Poland were gradually losing their allotted land, and were socially and physically deteriorating, prior to the movement to America. Indolence coupled with intemperance drove them into the hands of usurers, and they dropped into the landless class, thus becoming dependent upon casual labour.

The returned immigrant began to buy land which the large landowners were often forced to sell, because wages had risen abnormally and labourers were often not to be had at any price. In the four years between 1899 and 1903, land owned by peasants increased in some districts to 418%, and taking the immigrant districts in Austro-Hungary and Russian-Poland together, the increase in four years reaches the incredible figure of 173%.

In three districts of Russian-Poland the peasants bought in those four years 14,694 acres of farmland. This of course means not only that money was brought back from America, but that the peasant at home has become more industrious, if not always more temperate and frugal.

The little village of Kochanovce in the district of Trenczin in Hungary, out of which but few had emigrated to America, and to which not many families had returned, has, under this new economic impulse, bought the land on which the villagers' forefathers were serfs and on which they had worked during the harvest for about twenty cents a day. The peasants bought the whole baronial estate, including the castle, giving a mortgage for the largest part of the purchase sum; but they are now the owners of one of the finest estates in Hungary, and the mortgage drives them to work as they have never worked before. This same impulse has struck the district of Nyitra in which the land had almost gone out of the peasants' hands, lost by the same causes, intemperance and indolence.

In the last five years the change has been so great as to seem marvellous. Usurers have been driven out of business and the peasant's house has ceased to be a mud hut with a straw-thatched roof. In fact, that type of building has been condemned by law, at the initiative of returned immigrants.

The shopkeepers throughout the whole immigrant territory rejoice. Their stock is increased by many varieties of goods; for the peasant now wants the best there is in the market, often useless luxuries, to be sure; but while he may spend his money "for that which is not meat," he wants to spend, and that means effort, than which the Slavs as a race need nothing more for their social and political salvation.

Their advance is strikingly illustrated by the following examples.

The B. Brothers of Vienna are manufacturers of neckties. On a recent visit to their establishment I met some buyers from Hungary, one of whom, when the salesman showed him the class of goods which he had been in the habit of buying, highly coloured, stiff bows of cheap cotton, said:

"We have no use for such stuff. This is the tie we want," and he pulled out an American tie of rather fine quality and the latest pattern.

I had to promise the head of the firm of B. Brothers to put him in touch with an American haberdasher's journal, so that he may keep himself informed as to our styles.

Partly to test the influence of immigration in the remotest region of Hungary and partly to satisfy my craving for a certain kind of candy, I visited a little village hidden away in the Carpathians, where neither steam nor electricity has yet obtruded itself. There in a certain store, I bought my very first sweets, and although I have since tasted the delicacies of many civilizations, the lingering flavour of that first candy still seems the most delicious, and its taste has never left my palate. It was hard, highly coloured and usually exposed to flies and dust; but it was my first love, and my first pennies were sacrificed to it; so I was eager to revel in its delights again.

I went to that village in the spirit of one who goes on a pilgrimage, and as one seeks one's favourite shrine so did I seek that little store. My palate's memory led me to the very door; but in front of it, forcing itself upon my candy-hungry gaze, was a penny in the slot machine, out of which, in response to two Hungarian Filers, came dropping a stick of genuine American chewing-gum. It is needless to say that my primitive, highly-coloured candy was no more. In its place were caramels and buttercups very much like those I had left behind me in the United States.

Now I do not mean to imply that chewing-gum and caramels have any social or ethical bearing upon my subject; but they do prove that the old order changes and that the new has been brought in by the immigrant. Still within the sphere of the economic, yet having large ethical value, is the fact that the returned immigrant brings gold, not only in his pocket but in his teeth. I certainly never realized the far-reaching social and ethical value of the dentist until I saw the contrast between the returned immigrant, especially the contrast between his wife and daughter and the women who had remained at home.

If it ever was true that coarse fare makes strong teeth, it certainly has not been true during the period of my observations among the peasant people of Europe.

Where I know the bread to be coarsest and the fare simplest, as for instance in impoverished Montenegro, there the old, toothless hags are most numerous, and even the mouths of the young are disfigured by decaying teeth. This is especially true of the Alpine and Carpathian regions, out of which many of the Slavic immigrants come; there, a woman of forty is usually an old woman because she has no teeth. She is ugly in consequence, and therefore neglected by her husband.

The immigrant woman has discovered that gold in the teeth renews one's youth, that it preserves one's charms and is apt to keep lovers and husbands more loyal. Mistresses in America know how readily these foreign servants sacrifice their wages upon the dentist's altar.

Not only does dentistry keep the women young and their lovers faithful, it keeps the men in good health, adds to their self-respect, and into regions hitherto untouched by their beneficent influence, it has introduced tooth-brushes and dentifrice.

If the returned immigrant can be easily recognized

by his shoes and by gold in his teeth, his residence can be quickly detected from the fact that day and night his isba is blessed by fresh air; and perhaps more significant to the world's well-being than the American economic doctrine of the "Open Door," is its physiological doctrine of the open window.

Pastor Holubek, of Bosacz in Hungary, when I asked him what effect the returned immigrant had upon his parish, said:

"A good effect. The returned immigrant is a new man. He carries himself differently, he commands the respect of his fellows, he treats his wife better and he keeps the windows of his isba open."

The last two facts are exceedingly important, and my observations bear out his testimony. Wherever I saw an open window in the evening, I could with perfect assurance open the door and say: "How do you do?" and I was certain to be greeted by a still more emphatic and cordial, "How do you do?"

For some inexplicable reason, Europeans of all classes are averse to air in sleeping rooms, especially at night. Night air is supposed to hold all sorts of evils, and even the medical profession, progressive as it is, has not yet freed itself from this terrible superstition.

Frequently I have discovered in the returned immigrant a quickening of the moral sense, especially among the men who had come in contact with the better class of American mechanics; and the discovery was as welcome as unexpected. I saw this emphasized during my trip last year. It was on a Sunday's journey among the villages of the valley of the Waag. Picturesque groups were moving along the highway to and from the church and into the village and out of it. The appearance of my companions and myself always created a great sensation and never a greater one than on Sunday when the peasants were at leisure. They took it as a special privilege to see "genuine Americans," and those who had been over here were quickly on the scene to air their English and to show their familiarity with our kind.

It was a reciprocal pleasure; for it seemed like a breath from home to hear men talk intelligently of Hazleton, Pittsburg, Scranton and Wilkes-Barre; moreover it gave us a splendid opportunity to test the effect of our civilization upon them.

In one village a husband with his wife and two children came out of their isba, and we could easily imagine ourselves at home; for the whole family looked as if it had just come from a grand bargain sale at one of our department stores. What seemed most delightful to us was the way in which the man spoke of his wife, and no American husband could have been more careful of her than was he; all this in striking contrast to the peasants to whom the woman is still an inferior being.

In conversation with them, I took the returned immigrant as my subject and told them something of our own social order as shown in the relation of husband and wife in America; upon which one of the peasants told a very ugly and realistic story to illustrate what he thought of women. Then it was that the unexpected happened. My immigrant friend blushed--yes, blushed--just as I should expect any well-bred man to blush under similar circumstances, and said to me: "Don't mind him. He has a dirty mouth. He may after all have a clean heart."

The man who blushed had been five years in--Pittsburg!

The change brought about through immigration, even in a youth of the better class, whose character had been spoiled by his early training, was shown in a young Magyar in Budapest. That city has the unenviable reputation of being one of the most immoral cities in Europe. The immorality of the great cities is everywhere very much alike in certain respects; still it seems to me that a city is more or less immoral, not according to the size of its tenderloin district, but in how far immorality has been accepted as the norm of life. In that respect Budapest is considerably in the lead; for its youth is nourished in an atmosphere of indolence, false pride and various phases of social impurity.

The family to which this particular young man belonged boasted three sons of whom he is the oldest. He went the road which leads to destruction, and he went with the full knowledge of his parents, for both were going their own gait in the same direction.

Finally he was forced to run away because he had transgressed the law. He landed in New York penniless and fortunately without friends. He learned all the lessons which homesickness, hunger and cold could teach him, and as there was no other way to escape them than by labour, this youth, who never had worked, began driving a milk wagon and ultimately graduated into a clerkship. When I saw him among his own people in Budapest where he was visiting, he was so changed in his physique that not even his closest friends recognized him. Although the law had been appeased and by the death of his father he had the opportunity to conduct the business bequeathed him, his awakened conscience rebelled against the conditions around him and he was eager to return to America.

It was interesting to note that his friends found him unbearable, declaring him no longer a gentleman because he worked with his hands and was not ashamed of it; while the young ladies decided that he had been spoiled by his sojourn in America because he was not eternally kissing their hands and had forgotten how to make pretty and meaningless compliments.

Of course one does not always receive favourable replies to one's questions as to the effect of the returned immigrant upon his community. Manufacturers who exploited his labour, large landowners to whom he was no more than a serf, and priests, uneasy about the effect of the contagion, are usually very critical; but these unfavourable replies are only a proof that the leaven is at work.

I put the question to some guests at a confirmation feast. The priest told me that the immigrants become Atheists and Salvationists. In his mind there was not much difference between them. The judge told me that they become immoral; which meant that they do not pay him sufficient revenue. The host, a wealthy landowner, said that they become Socialists and Anarchists; which meant that they demand higher wages and better treatment. All agreed that emigration has been of large economic value.

So far as my observation goes, I feel certain that emigration has been of inestimable economic and ethical value to the three great monarchies chiefly concerned, namely: Italy, Austro-Hungary and Russia. It has withdrawn inefficient labour and has returned some of it capable of more and better work; it has lifted the status of the peasantry to a degree which could not have been achieved even by a revolution; it has educated the neglected masses, lifted them to a higher standard of living and has implanted new and vital ideals.

That there are attendant evils, no one will question. There is much more discontent than there ever has been, more haste and less leisure; there is less respect for authority and for established institutions; certain social evils have been accentuated; the newly acquired wealth has proved disastrous to some, and family ties have been strained by the absence of the heads of many households.

Nevertheless, an Hungarian statesman, who had risen from the ranks, said to me: "America has been a blessing to us. Had Columbus not discovered it, all Europe would still be in servitude, and had it not been rediscovered by our peasants, they would not have had much chance to get their necks from under the yoke.

"America is our leaven and will yet be our salvation."

I have watched the leaven at work, and in the succeeding chapters I have recorded some concrete instances, which clearly show that "A little leaven, leaveneth the whole lump."

V

OUR CRITICS

The third-class waiting-room in the Oderberg station, on the Northern Railroad of Austria, is splendid vantage ground from which to watch the racial and national conglomerate that forms the insecure structure called the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

Here from her East and West, her North and South, one meets those great social currents which stream from the mountains to the plains and from the villages to the cities. Here, also, the tides of immigration come in and go out, and by their volume one can judge the prosperity of the United States, or at least the condition of our labour markets.

Here the "spick and span" German, from across the border, meets his less vigorous and more "gemuethlich" cousin, the Austrian.

Here the Moravian and the Czech touch elbows and glory in their Slavic speech--the age-long battle for the supremacy of their language being one of the few points which they have won in this contentious monarchy.

This is also the meeting place of Southern and Western Slavs, and here the fierce looking Bosnians carry, in their erstwhile weapon belts, pins, pipes, jack-knives and razors, which they sell to their Slavic brothers of the West; they even deign to speak in broken German to the hated "Schwabs," when driving their bargains.

Glancing around the crowded waiting-room, one sees Ruthenians and Wallachians, in picturesque garb, travelling from their impoverished mountain homes to the upper Danubian plain. They are harvesters, and their backs are bent under the weight of crude cooking utensils and primitive harvest implements.

Close to this group are fiercely moustachioed Magyars, in their semi-Oriental, loose, white linen trousers and heavy sheepskin coats. They are going to take charge of the flocks of sheep on some lordly estates; they know the ways of all four-footed animals, and are considered faithful shepherds.

In one corner stand smoothly shaven, coarse featured Slovaks, in clothing, home-made, from their felt boots to their felt hats; primitive folk they are, seeking labour in the industrial cities along this busy highway.

Of course, there are Jews from the East and the West; as far removed from each other in culture and beliefs as those two points of the compass, yet all swayed by the same mysterious force which at its best turns their vision towards Jehovah, and at its worst towards Mammon.

They all are divided more or less by speech, blood and faith and are united, only by the poverty which compels them to travel third-class on the government's railways, whose low-zone tariff encourages the migrations of its people; thus easily relieving economic distress in some regions and providing labour where it is needed.

When the train comes, the conductor sorts this mixture of humanity according to his prejudices or the seeming ability of the travellers to reward him for rescuing them from this malodorous conglomerate, by providing a less crowded compartment. As a rule, I am willing to be thus rescued, but not this time; for there is one element in evidence which makes the well-known mass of people more interesting than usual; namely, the returning immigrant. "Where thou goest, I will go," even if it was into the thick of bag and baggage carried on the backs of men and women, through the narrow door, into an already over-crowded compartment where windows were hermetically sealed and where the air was not only stiflingly hot but full of mysterious odours, much unlike those of "Araby the blest."

There seemed no limit to the capacity of the car or to the patience of the passengers who were being pushed about like cattle; until the conductor attempted to thrust in a woman of unusual size, who evidently was acquainted with our ways and certain words of our language. She let loose upon the official the vials of her wrath, her realistic Slavic becoming fairly lurid, reënforced as it was by English words, which, when used in America, make even printers gasp, when they must be printed. Were it not that such words can be indicated only by dashes, it would prove interesting to record them here, to show what changes they undergo upon the lips of our apt pupils.

Puffing and panting, this colossal woman forced her way through the crowded car, looking for a seat. I gave her my place, and as she accepted it, she asked laconically, "'Merican man?" When I nodded assent, the point of contact was made, we shook hands and said: "How do you do?"

Like an electric current the greeting communicated itself from bench to bench. A woman across the aisle caught the force of it and waved her hand over the heads of the crowd as she cried: "How do you do?" She held up a fretful boy of five, who raised his voice in lamentation; while she said: "Behave yourself, kid; there's an American boss on the car." But the boy, thoroughly American, would not be frightened by threats of boss, police, or any other bugaboo. He pulled at her skirt, clutched her expansive hat, nearly tearing it from its insecure moorings, then rolled the window shade up and down, suddenly letting it go with a spring--after which, all in one breath, he peremptorily demanded candy, water, bananas, and that his mother make the reluctant "choo-choo cars" go at once.

This woman's husband is a merchant in Wilmerding, Pa., and she, after many years in America, was going home to visit her people, bringing this hopeful youngster with her to disturb the "peace of Jerusalem."

"If he were my boy," growled the unfortunate man who sat on the same bench with him, "I'd throw him out the window;" and the woman apologetically said: "He is an American boy, and they are all like this. You can't tame them. Whipping does no good."

"Well," the man muttered, under his fierce moustachio, "I am glad I am not living in America."

A young Moravian woman, who, in America, had exchanged her peasant garb and ruggedness for our more expensive dress and gentler ways, corroborated the mother's statement. She had worked in American homes and testified: "Children in America are all terrible. Nothing is sacred to them; neither the kitchen nor the church. It's because they have so few children; they spoil them."

"Yes," agreed a young Hungarian Jew; "in America, they have the one child system, and many women do not have even one child. They are so sterile. You should see how thin and flat-chested they are."

Then, in his realistic way, he described the physique of our women. He was a great talker, that young Jew. Having been unsuccessful in New York, he was returning home a cynic and a severe critic.

"Hm!" he continued; "the women of America are the boss. Just think of it; you can't get a woman to black your boots. That is the reason so many men get a divorce."

He knew all about the American woman's luxuries, and talked loudly and long of silken petticoats, lace waists, and other sartorial mysteries; for he had worked in a tailor's shop and was acquainted with all woman's "doings."

"The American men are to blame!" exclaimed a man who was crowded close to me. He had returned from America some time before, and was travelling up and down the country, buying butter and eggs. He had caught a vision of the American man and his business methods in Chicago, where he had worked in a large packing-house, and in a modest way, he was applying his knowledge.

"They work like niggers," he continued, "and let their women remain in idleness, sitting all day long in rocking-chairs, rocking, rocking"--and he imitated the motion--"and eating candy. Just think of it! They buy candy by the pound!"

Evidently he was not imitating the example of American men in the treatment of his wife who was with him, sharing the hardships of the journeys from village to village. While he was speaking, she drew their luncheon from her ample pockets: hard rye bread and Salami, a sausage as hard as the bread.

"No, indeed!" He had not taken her to America. "That's where they spoil the women."

His aspiration was to ultimately control the butter and egg business in his region, and future historians may record his name as a "Captain of Industry," with those of Armour and Swift. He knew a little of every language spoken in the dual monarchy, and that, together with the fact that he spoke some English, made him a most interesting travelling companion. The greater part of the time he preached to the peasants the gospel of business. "You poor rascals," he said; "you work in the fields from sunrise to sunset, eat bread-soup, and not much else, three times a day, and carry loads heavy enough to break your backs; while the Jews, who do the business, live in fine houses, eat the best spring geese, which you raise for them, and send their children to college. You ought to go to America and see business. Even the little boys of rich people sell newspapers and lemonade in front of their fathers' palaces. Go into business and the Jews will have to go back to Jerusalem where they came from."

The peasants all nodded their heads and said: "Tak ye, tak ye," it is so, it is so; but one could see in their placid, half-stupid faces, that if they ever have the spirit which ventures, they must first go to America.

The corpulent woman who had accepted my seat knew something about the lot of her kind in America, and, having by this time recovered her breath, she very emphatically gave the butter and egg man her views on the subject.

"You say that women don't work in America, and that they are spoiled? I just come from there; I have been there fourteen years, in McKeesport, Pa. I have kept boarders ever since I went there, and I haven't had time to sit in a rocking-chair, and my husband never bought me any candy. It's true, you can't beat us women there as you can over here. Soon after we went there, my husband beat me when he was drunk. I took it as patiently as I did here, and he beat me again and I didn't say anything; although I carried a black eye for a week. Then the young woman who takes the money at the grocery store asked me how I hurt myself. I said I didn't hurt myself, my husband did it. Then that young girl, as thin as a rail and as meek-looking as a swallow, said: 'You tell me the next time he hits you.'

"It wasn't long before he beat me again, and I told her and the police came and took him by the neck and put him in the lock-up, and it cost me twenty-five dollars to get him out. I earned that money myself and it was no punishment to him. I told the young woman about it, and she said: 'The next time he hits you, you hit back.' I said: 'Is it allowed?' She laughed, and said: 'If he hits you first and you kill him, nothing will happen to you.' It wasn't long until he came home drunk and beat me again and I gave him one with the rolling-pin and he fell, and as he was lying there I got so angry I gave him another and another, and after that he knew better than to beat me."

This Slavic Deborah told her story graphically and dramatically, and, undoubtedly, her husband was not the first immigrant to learn that marriage on the European plan is one thing, and on the American plan, quite another matter.

"Yes," said the young Moravian woman. "When I get married, I'll get an American husband. They don't expect a dowry, and they don't make you work like a slave."

"In a year he'll get divorced," the young Hungarian Jew broke in. "They do that quickly."

"And what of it?" she retorted. "I'll be still better off. He'll have to pay me."

I do not know exactly at what point of the conversation I began to sing the praises of the American man; his loyalty and his sense of justice--if there is one thing that I enjoy more than singing the praise of the American woman it is lauding the American man.

Hardly had I begun to speak, when a young Roumanian, whom I had not previously noticed, commenced to rail at me, telling me in a mixture of three languages to keep my mouth shut; for he knew better. From the time he landed in New York until he left the country, he had not met a man who did not take advantage of him or ill-treat him. In Chicago, he was lured from the Union Station to a saloon on Canal Street, and, when he came to himself, he was lying in an alley, penniless. He found his way to Montana, where he herded sheep. There he tasted something of loneliness and homesickness, seeing nothing for weeks but red hills and blue sky--not a living thing except his sheep, or wolves to drive away. Then one day came American men on ponies and killed every one of his sheep, hundreds and hundreds of them, knocked him down and threatened to riddle him with bullets if he did not turn his face towards the East and march on without looking back. Days and days he walked, and because his face was of a darker hue than others, and his clothes looked strange, "No man gave unto him." He then worked in the mines of Colorado. "The men there," he said, "shoot, drink, and gamble, and have about as much regard for human life as for the life of sheep, and as soon as I had money enough I made ready to go home." No more America for him, and no praise for its men.

"That's not so, Brother," came a voice from the farther end of the car, and I turned to see this valiant champion of ours. Had I been asked to give the place of his nativity, I should have put it in that Middle West of ours, which takes from her children all surplus flesh and puts in its place bone and sinew. His complexion was sallow, and the general expression of his face betokened sensitiveness, bordering on the abnormal. "I have been in America twenty years, and those years in Chicago, and I have met many good men. The good men don't shoot and drink and gamble."

It seemed strange language to my travelling companions; but to me it sounded familiar.

After the Chicago man had delivered his exordium, I had no difficulty in getting his story from him, and then I knew "whence this man had this doctrine." Emigrating in his young manhood to Chicago, he had come in touch with Methodist missionaries, who befriended him and saved him from a life of intemperance and infidelity. Unfortunately, his awakened, religion-hungry soul became confused by the shibboleths of contending sects; he travelled and travailed all the way, from striving after a "Second Blessing," to "Soul Sleepers," "Seventh Day Adventists," and Dowie's religious movement, which at times looked like Opera Bouffe, but which ended in a great tragedy. I did not discover what form of faith was now holding the allegiance of his spirit; but as he told me that it was neither a church nor a sect, I surmised that he belonged to some church or sect whose chief doctrine is that it is neither.

Evidently the Spirit was upon him, some spirit at least; for he told me that he had been sent to Hungary to convert his brethren. Knowing how much the region from which he came needed some moral and religious quickening, I timidly offered him my hand and my good wishes; but he declined both. He "must not lean on the arm of flesh; so the Bible says." The odour of tobacco offended his sensitive nostrils, and, turning to the butter and egg man, who was the chief offender, he pointed to his pipe, saying: "Throw that devilish thing away!" But a Slav and his pipe are not so soon parted, and the butter and egg man held firmly to his; although he smiled, not wishing to offend this prophet in Israel. Then the luckless man pulled his whiskey bottle out of his pocket and offered it to the ex-Dowieite, who took it, lifted it high in air, and made an eloquent temperance address, after which he threw the bottle out the window.

If, as a drowning man, he had refused a life-preserver, or had thrown diamonds into the sea, his Slavic brothers would not have thought him more reckless or insane. Palenka, as they call it, gives strength. Black bread and palenka have kept the hard-working Slav alive, have given him courage and cheer, and this crazy man had thrown the precious stuff away!

Yet he was so righteously indignant, so wrought up over his heroic task, that the peasants who had risen to remonstrate with him or to attack him, sank back into their seats; while over them all came a solemn silence, broken only by the grinding and jolting of the flat car-wheels.

This was the psychological moment for the prophet to declare his mission and preach to us all, and he did. It was a fervent message; one in which much truth and falsehood mingled, and if Dowie's spirit hovered near, his satisfaction at hearing one of his disciples speak of the things for which he fought and on which he throve, would have been marred only by the fact that, for once at least, "Elijah the Second" was outdone. All the Dowie vernacular, translated into the realistic Slavic, was let loose by this apostle. Now it was the voice of some Old Testament prophet which spoke; and again it was as if a John pleaded for love's sake. Then came a jumble of words and bitter invective, which, by comparison, caused the imprecatory Psalms to seem like the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians.

No sooner had the preacher resumed his seat than the spell he had woven about his auditors was broken. The butter and egg man rose and demanded to be reimbursed for his wasted palenka, concluding his remarks by asserting that in America good people do drink whiskey, that everybody drinks, and that "they make you drink whether you want to or not."

"Tak ye," so it is, said a young man, who, as far as his clothing was concerned, might have just stepped out of an American Jockey Club. His voice was guttural and every sentence was punctuated by oaths.

"My father keeps a saloon in Hazleton, and the policemen and aldermen come there and drink, and at election time the burgess comes and 'sets 'em up' for everybody."

While he spoke, he jingled the money in his pockets and kept his audience much interested by telling about his betting on horse-races, the intricacies of the game of poker, how much money his father made on liquor and what a high and mighty position was that of a saloon-keeper in Hazleton. He was going to Galicia to visit his grandparents, and he meant to show the slow town of Przemysl what it means to have a "hot time."

At Hodonin, in Moravia, I had to leave the train; so I bade good-bye to the interesting company.

The woman from McKeesport said, as we shook hands, "America all right, and you bet I'm going back just as soon as I have seen to my property."

With a contemptuous glance at the young Jew, the Moravian girl said: "Right she is! There's nothing the matter with America, and when I go back, I bet you I'll get an American husband!"

"Oh, yes! Of course. They are lying on the shelf waiting for you!" sneered the object of her contempt.

The sport tried to be kind in his good-bye words; but he used so many oaths that he became repulsive. When I remonstrated, he said:

"In America, everybody swear--no make trouble to say: good-morning your--Highness. See a man--slap him on shoulder and say: Hello--John--you--how dy? So long, then, you--old man, good-bye."

The butter and egg man gripped my hand mightily, and as a parting word gave me this injunction. "Don't let your old woman boss you;" then, glancing at our prophet, he added: "He little not all right."

The Roumanian shepherd looked out the window and made no effort to take my proffered hand. His sallow face was drawn by pain, caused by something I dimly divined.

We were at the station, a station famous for a certain kind of sausage, whose odorous steam soon filled our nostrils. Taking several portions from the tray which a waiter held towards me, I gave them to the Roumanian peasant. Like a wild beast he fell upon the food, while into his pain-drawn face came a ray of human joy.

The prophet had difficulty in making up his mind about me. Reluctantly he stretched out his hand as I was leaving the car. When I grasped it, he querulously asked: "Have you received the Blessing?" and with great assurance I answered: "You bet."

VI

THE DOCTOR OF THE KOPANICZE

The last people to feel the sweep of the tide which carried them to the United States and back again were the mountain folk in Eastern Europe.

The Slav is naturally a plainsman, and even in the lowlands, where he could not very well escape the force of world currents, he resisted them as long as possible, content to follow his plough for a meagre wage.

When at last the lure of the gold grew too strong for him to withstand its seductive beckoning, he went first from the great highways along the main branches of railroads, and from villages on the shores of rivers; until the ever-rising tide, with all its volume and all its good or ill, reached the mountains.

Where in straggling villages in the Carpathians the little mud-huts are detached, and scattered on top of the foothills in the midst of their stony fields, these form a Kopanicze; the individual hut is called a Kopanicza, and the inhabitants are called Kopaniczari.

They are the poor mountain folk, isolated from church and school, far from the highways of travel, and are among the most backward, most primitive, and most neglected of the Slovak people. Their isolation has often bred not only ignorance but sometimes lawlessness, and, even now, he who has no pressing business there, avoids these settlements.

Meeting a Kopaniczar on a lonely highway gives one a queer, creepy sensation. He is a raw-boned, clumsy creature, his body wrapped in a sheepskin coat, his head covered by a broad, felt hat, soaked in grease, his feet encased in woolen boots; all his garments of the most primitive home manufacture. He looks more ferocious than he is; for unless heavily under the influence of alcohol, which does not easily affect him, he is a good-natured human being. His superstition and his ignorance, however, coupled with his intemperance, make him often dangerous, as is seen by the following incident which took place last year.

A great many fires of incendiary origin occurred in one of the settlements, and as no satisfactory clue to the perpetrator was found, they were supposed to be the work of evil spirits. Fire in one of these settlements is especially disastrous; for as the huts are built of exceedingly inflammable material, everything is consumed. Such a house usually includes in its primitive possessions a horse or a cow, and when these are destroyed, it spells utter ruin.

One day a tourist came into this Kopanicze, the first of his kind who had ever ventured into that isolated region. Being a tourist, he naturally carried a camera, and as he levelled it upon the buildings, the peasants, conceiving the insane idea that he was marking their huts for destruction, ran out and beat him to death.

A boyhood friend of mine was appointed district physician in the upper Trenczin district, the most poverty stricken in Hungary, largely populated by these Kopaniczari. He was a Jew without powerful protection, and one way of getting rid of surplus Jewish physicians was to put them in charge of one of these regions, in which they were sure to be out of the way of some Gentile aspirant for a large and lucrative medical practice.

My friend had travelled the usual long and thorny road which a poor boy has to travel in striving after a university education. His parents, who were poor, laboured and begged and borrowed; while he tutored and borrowed and begged; yet he found himself still within two years of a diploma when his parents died.

Then he did the not uncommon thing; consulted a marriage broker, who found a marriageable maiden with a dowry, and parents willing to advance a portion of it; so that the young man could finish his education before he led the daughter to the altar.

In Hungary, a doctor's diploma is a splendid asset in the marriage business, and had my friend been able to wait until he really had his, he could have commanded twice as much dowry and a handsomer maiden. Being poor, he shared the lot of all those unfortunates who have to make purchases on the instalment plan, be they plush albums, life insurance, or wives.

In spite of the materialistic way in which my doctor went about getting a bride, he was an idealist; and, consequently, doomed to have a hard time in this exceedingly practical world. When after his marriage he was sent to the Trenczin district, he found that the Kopanicze had as much use for a doctor as it had for a professor of psychology. Not that the people were never ill; on the contrary, infants born in the wretched huts, unless remarkably well prepared for the stifling air they had to breathe, for the hard rye bread soaked in alcohol, which often they had to eat, and for the poppy seed concoction which they were given to keep them quiet while their mothers were working in the fields--such infants, and there were many--went back into the unknown soon after they came out of it.

If they lingered, if any one lingered, before death overtook him, the witch was the first aid brought into requisition. To cure infantile convulsions, she would lay the baby on the threshold and cause a female dog to jump over it three times. A specific against typhoid fever was a vile compound made of the heart of a black cat, juniper berries, and alcohol; while if a child had eaten poisoned mushrooms, it was hit over the head until it either died or recovered.

Strange to say, and yet not strange, a fair proportion of robust infants, as well as hardened adults, survived such treatment, and even to this day there is a witch not far from the city of Vag Ujhely, who has some degree of national fame for her healing art.

If the witch failed to cure, the priest was sent for and the proper saints invoked for the healing. If the priest's prayers failed to help--"What's the use of sending for the doctor?" The undertaker was notified, and the grave-digger did the rest.

Unselfishly my friend tried to save these people. He preached the gospel of fresh air, and in passing through one of the settlements with him, some five years ago, I saw him break window after window (they were not made to open) that fresh air might at least once enter the wretched living-rooms. The result was a riot, and that night all his windows were broken; so that for once he had more air than he desired.

There was consumption in one settlement, and he provided sanitary cuspidors, proscribed by law; but he saw them used for culinary purposes instead!

Vainly, he lifted his voice against the use of alcohol; he had the innkeepers and the State against him. The State prefers to see its people rot from poison rather than lose its revenue.

In spite of all he did, he was regarded as the enemy of the community and not its friend; so having meddled much in business which was not his, he could not expect a promotion, and none came.

Five years ago he had accepted poverty, neglect, and the enmity of his neighbours as his lot in life. He had sunk into such a hopeless attitude that neither in dress nor in habits of living could one easily distinguish him from his ignorant neighbours. His wife was more disappointed than he was. Had she bestowed upon him such a dowry to live in the Kopanicze? She had expected to be the "Highborn Mrs. Dr. M----" and taste something of the forbidden fruits of Gentile society. Ordinarily, the physician breaks through the cast of race and faith; but here she was, despised even by the Kopaniczari, the lowliest of the lowly.

I left the doctor after that last visit, vowing never to see him again; for it was an uncomfortable experience, if not a painful one.

My studies last year carried me into this very region. Since I had left it, hundreds of men and women had gone to America and a large number had returned home. Here, indeed, was the proper field for observation, and the man to help me most, was my boyhood's friend.

With difficulty I found his home; for it was new, the doctor's wife was resplendent in fine clothing, and the doctor's office, once full of dust and cobwebs, contained new cases with new surgical instruments, and, wonder of wonders! a dentist's machine. I had to wait for the return of the doctor, who was visiting a patient, and had time to catch my breath; for having come a great distance by wheel and then finding such a surprise, proved quite overwhelming.

"What has happened here?" I asked him when he returned.

"One thing at a time," he replied. "First let's have some refreshments;" and as we drank the delicious raspberry soda which he prepared, he said: "If I wished to tell you in one word what has happened, I could do it by saying: Emigration.

"It seemed almost a miracle to see the first people leaving the Kopanicze; for neither they nor their ancestors had moved away since the great persecution in the sixteenth century brought them here from Bohemia.

"The letters they wrote, and which I had to read to their neighbours, contained such glowing accounts of America that others went, until nobody was left but the women, the children, the aged, the witch, and ourselves. We were at the point of starvation when the first money came from America, and with it nearly every husband, who sent it, wrote: 'If there is anything the matter with the children, send for the doctor.'

"My first case was a scarlet fever patient. The child recovered; but the contagion had spread. The mother whose child I had saved told everybody that the witch with her machinations made no impression upon the fever; while the medicine helped. I was called to other cases. In most homes I am sure that after I left the witch was called also; but I did not care so long as the children were given my medicine.

"Soon I was called to other villages, and as the money kept coming from America, and the peasants gained confidence in me, my services were greatly in demand.

"Our old house, which nearly caved in over our heads, was replaced by this one. I still owe money on it, but I am sure I can pay the rest in a year."

"What use do you make of this?" I asked, pointing to the well-known object found in every dentist's office in America.

"Since the men have come back," he replied, "filled teeth have become as fashionable as red waistcoats used to be, and I have had to learn dentistry. And there is more money in filling teeth," he added with a shrewd smile, "than in giving pills.

"What do I think of the effect of emigration on the Kopanicze? It has driven out the witch, it has awakened a community which had slept for many centuries, it has done for these people in the twentieth century what the Reformation did in the sixteenth. And as for us, it has saved us from starvation."

As I was about to go, I heard a peasant girl in the hall say: "I kiss your hand, Most Highborn Mrs. Dr. M----. Is the Most Mighty and Honourable Mr. Dr. M---- at home?" And the "Most Highborn Mrs. Dr. M----" answered triumphantly, that the Most Mighty and Honourable Mr. Dr. M---- was at home, but busy. A gentleman from America had come to consult him about his health; and I am sure that at that moment the "Most Highborn Mrs. Dr. M----" felt that her dowry had been well invested and that it was coming back with interest, through emigration to America.

VII

"MOSCHELE AMERIKANSKY"

The Hungarian town inhabited by Magyars, does not materially differ from the villages in which so many varieties and subjects of other races live. Such a town is merely a larger village, and, instead of one broad street flanked by straw thatched huts, there are at least four streets which terminate on the "square," around which the dignitaries have built their more pretentious dwellings. Here also are the stores, usually kept by Jews, who are not indifferent to the economic movements of the people whose purveyors they are.

Twenty years ago, before emigration from the district of Nyitra had begun, the principal town in that district boasted but half a dozen stores so called, the largest and best of which could be discovered only by its tiny show-window, where, crowded in dire confusion, were a few articles of general merchandise. During all the years of my comings and goings I could never see any change in the articles displayed, nor even by a wild flight of imagination see any indication that a duster had lost its way among them.

It is not, however, of this store that I wish to tell, in spite of the fact that it now has a double show-window, and contains, among many other new things, a genuine American cash register.

The "Amerikansky Schtore" was once the meanest and smallest among all the stores of that village. No front door led into it, no show-window betrayed its existence, and certainly no sign-board gave a hint of what could be purchased within. It was then owned by "Uncle Isaac," as every one called him. He made a living out of the store; but his life came out of the Talmud, and of course both were scanty.

Uncle Isaac's father, Reb Ephraim, studied the Talmud, and his sainted grandfather, Reb Isaac, after whom he was named, left such a holy savour behind him that to this day his name is reverently uttered in prayer, as one who is surely near to God and can intercede for the children of this generation who study less Talmud and do more business.

Uncle Isaac's forefathers, "God knows how far back," kept this same store in the same way; for like the ring in Lessing's fable it was to be left to the son who knew most about the Talmud, and, as a consequence, least about the business. The Talmud had to be studied, the store ran itself. Not that there was anything automatic about it in those days; but Uncle Isaac, true to the traditions of his forefathers, sold only those things which his forefathers had sold before him, namely; red earthen pots and big green bowls which he bought from the same family in the same town where the same peasant potteries flourished, from which his forefathers had bought their supplies of these same red pots and green bowls.

If a customer came to the store while the children were little and his wife was busy caring for them (for Uncle Isaac was blessed according to the promise made to Abraham) he had to wait until Uncle Isaac disentangled himself from the mazes of the Talmud. Then almost reluctantly he sold the pot or bowl, scarcely ever exchanging a word with his customer, who was usually a peasant, and of course a Gentile whose presence disturbed the pious atmosphere into which Uncle Isaac had wrapped himself.

If any of the townspeople came, he was more friendly; he had to be, and as was often the case in later days if they asked why he didn't sell cups and saucers and wash-bowls, he would invariably shrug his shoulders as his blessed forefathers had shrugged their shoulders before him. This shrug was eloquent, and meant many things; but, above all, it meant: "Have I not bother enough to remember what Rasche's (a celebrated Jewish commentator) comment upon Rambam's (the abbreviation of another commentator's name) comment was? How can you expect me to give my time to such things as buying and selling wash-bowls and cups and saucers?"

His children, three boys and three girls, were nurtured in this atmosphere. The sons began studying the Talmud when they were five years of age, and the daughters were initiated into the mysteries of the Kosher household before that age.

As the children grew, Uncle Isaac withdrew almost entirely from business and gave himself more and more to the study of the holy books. The oldest son, named after the sainted grandfather, went to Pressburg to study for the Rabbinate, living from the charity of the faithful, by whom the support of a pious youth is considered a great privilege.

The next son married into a rich but not pious family to whom his sacred learning was a very welcome asset. This left the business, such as it was, upon the shoulders of the youngest son, Moschele.

Moschele inherited less of his pious forefathers' piety and much more of some remote ancestor's business talents, and one day he came home from a distant market bringing with him a dozen cups and saucers and a wash-bowl and pitcher.

Had he brought home idols made of clay he could not have hurt his father more, and the whole town soon knew that Moschele--young Moschele whose eyes had already rested lovingly upon the blushing faces of young maidens--had received a beating from his father, who, in his fury, had broken the cups and saucers, throwing the fragments at the poor, defenseless head of the culprit. Uncle Isaac's temper was equalled only by his piety, and the old man was beside himself.

Moschele was in the same mood, and decided to leave his old father with his red pots and green bowls and dry Talmud. I visited Uncle Isaac's store many a time after this event. It was less a store than ever. The house itself was sinking into the surrounding mire, the thatched roof was falling in on one side and sliding off on the other.

"Where is Moschele?" I asked him on one of these visits. He lifted his weary head from the Talmud, and extricated from a pile of ancient manuscripts an envelope printed all over with English letters, which announced the business of Jake Greenbaum who kept the "finest General Department Store on Avenue B." in New York. The letter in the envelope told of Moschele's employment in the great city, and of his life there.

"Moschele, my Moschele, is in America!" And the tears began to gather in the old man's eyes as he spoke.

"Who knows whether he eats Kosher, and whether he wears the sacred fringes upon his breast? How I wish I could see him before I go hence!"

I promised to visit Moschele upon my return to America, and the old man's face beamed.

"Would you mind finding out whether he eats Kosher, and whether he wears the sacred fringes?"

I promised even that; but I did not find Moschele on Avenue B. He was up town, on the West Side, in one of the larger department stores, where he had entire charge of the crockery department. When I told him that I had seen his father, he plied me with questions. I told him the condition of affairs and urged him to return home to save his parents from utter poverty. He promised to go if his father would attend to the Talmud and let him attend to the business. I did not ask him if he wore the fringes and ate Kosher, I did not need to; for we lunched together and ham sandwich was the "pièce de résistance."

Some eight years later, my journey took me once more through Uncle Isaac's town. The rapid changes taking place in America seemed as nothing compared with those which I saw in this little spot in the Carpathians. There was actually a sidewalk, a cement sidewalk, the cement furnished by Moschele.

The old wooden pump upon which generations had expended their surplus strength and patience to coax up the water, had given place to an air pressure pump, sold to the town by Moschele.

In the old days, three coal-oil lamps furnished light for the miry street (when there was no moon), and now the town had an artificial gas plant, placed there and partly owned by Moschele. Even as in Florence, this or that or the other is by Michael Angelo; so in this far-away town, generations to come will remember that Moschele ushered in a new era, if not of art, at least of civilization.

It was well worth a trip across the ocean to have looked upon Moschele and Moschele's store. First of all was the sign in big letters, "Amerikansky Schtore"; then the outer wall of a new building, covered by huge illustrations of the various things sold therein--a method of advertising made necessary because many of the peasants cannot read.

The store itself was full of all sorts of crockery and tin and graniteware, such as had never been seen there before. And oh! the wonder of it! Moschele had already sold one bath-tub, and carried four patterns in stock. "I have not seen such faith, no not in Israel." He also sold building materials, and the yard was full of everything which could not be crowded into the store. That which especially marked the business as American, was the fact that one price was charged to all.

Uncle Isaac had withdrawn from the world and mourned the departure of the good old days. I found him sitting in a well-lighted, well-furnished room, clothed in finest broadcloth; for it was the Sabbath. Everything around him was new except the Talmud.

Was he happy? No, indeed!

"Where can a thing like this lead? Only to destruction!

"Who ever heard of such a thing as this before? Moschele rests neither by day nor by night; he prints bills and scatters them as if money were paper; he sleeps with an open window even in the winter, as if he wanted to heat all outdoors, and he has even travelled on the Sabbath!"

Then the old man broke down, hid his face in the Talmud, and wept. I think I comforted him; at least I tried to, and as I left him he breathed a prayer for his venturesome son who had deserted the Talmud, and the red pots and green bowls; who certainly was no longer in peril of poverty, but in peril of his soul.

One more year passed and in visiting this town, I immediately turned my steps towards the "Amerikansky Schtore." I found its doors closed, and from within came sounds of bitter wailing and lamentation. I did not need to be told that the death angel had made his sorrow-bringing visitation, and my heart grew tender as I thought of the dear old man who would no more bend over the Talmud and mourn the departure of the good old times.

A Jewish house of mourning is sadder than can be described. Its atmosphere chills one to the bone, such an air of resigned hopelessness pervades everything. All is sackcloth and ashes; no sign of hope is visible and but little of it lies in the hearts of the mourners.

Entering the room, where the family sat upon the ground lamenting its dead, how great was my amazement to find that Uncle Isaac, instead of being the one mourned for, was the centre of the group of mourners; while the one missing was Moschele, the pillar of the household, the founder of the "Amerikansky Schtore."

The old man stretched out both hands to me in mute welcome, and when I sat down beside him he told me the sad story which I shall try to give in his own words.

"Moschele is dead! What a blow! What a blow! I expected something terrible! I knew this couldn't go on! He grew bolder and bolder, and richer and richer. Have you seen the new store? In all Hungary there is nothing like it. He was a genius; even his enemies admit that." Then the old man fell into silence.

"But tell me how he died."

"He went out from among us in the morning as strong and straight as an oak, and he was brought home felled to the ground as if struck by lightning. God's ways are mysterious; but oh, my son, my strong, noble son! If only he had not departed from the ways of his fathers I might still have him.

"He went to the railroad; they had switched his car of goods where he could not get it--he was buying goods by the carload; nothing like this has ever been heard of before--and he wanted his car; so he helped the men to move it. Moschele wasn't afraid of anything. The men pushed and Moschele fell over a switch and the car went over him."

Here a paroxysm of grief silenced the old man and he swayed to and fro, weeping piteously.

* * * * *

And again I passed through the town, and this time I went to the God's acre with Uncle Isaac, to visit the grave of his son. In weird confusion lay the gray and moss-grown stones. No care is bestowed upon the graves or upon the memorials of the departed; for the body is nothing, the spirit is everything and that is with God.

In the centre of the cemetery is a knoll, and upon its crest is a monument such as cannot be found anywhere in Hungary. It is in the shape of a sarcophagus, is hewn out of Vermont granite and is so heavy that it cost over 500 kronen to bring it from the station and put it in place. How much the stone cost no one knows except Uncle Isaac, who erected it for his son Moschele, who wanted everything he had to come from America--even his tombstone.

VIII

"NOCH IST POLEN NICHT VERLOREN"

It has always seemed to me wise to carry letters of introduction, especially when travelling to the East of Europe; often, too, I have found it still wiser to forget that I had them, for a letter of introduction sometimes blocks avenues of investigation, particularly when the problem in question involves the privileged or official classes.

This time in following the immigrant tide, I carried one letter which I was eager to deliver; it was given me by a personal friend in America and was to be presented to his mother-in-law in Poland. Not that I was overanxious to meet his mother-in-law, but because Polish women of the upper class are, as a rule, so superior to the men, so ready to talk and talk so well, that I promised myself a rather fruitful call. I did not meet the mother-in-law yet I was not disappointed.

Cracow looks dingy even to one who, like myself, is able to illuminate its sombre present in the light of its important if not glorious past. Coming, as I had come, by way of industrial German-Poland, with its glistening newness, from the

policemen's helmets to the weather-vane of the new Rathhaus; out of its tense atmosphere of whirring wheels within wheels; out of its geometrically correct parks and new and ever growing building additions, Cracow looked to me as if it had fallen off this revolving planet and settled itself "Where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest"--wherever that may be.

The only thing that had grown since last I saw the city was its hatred of the Germans. On the doors of many stores on the Rinok were large placards, which, literally translated, read: "The gentlemen travellers from Germany, who wish to come in here to do business with us, are politely requested to stay out."

Everything else looked the same, only more dingy; even the Austrian officers who loaf around Havelik's restaurant seemed to have lost something of their newness; for braid and buttons, two of the component elements out of which Austrian officers are made, were tarnished and worn.

The Jews' quarter seemed more hopeless and wretched than ever. On the Kazimir were the same haggling crowds in the same small stores, and the same shambling Jews in black, greasy cloaks. In front of the Jesuit church stood the same twelve apostles, and I regret to say that they were just as shabby-looking as their unbaptized brethren.

Cracow, the freest portion of divided Poland, is certainly as wretched looking as Warsaw, where liberty dare not lift her head, and it cannot compare with any of the cities of German-Poland where the Prussian gendarme is trying, at the point of the bayonet, to cram German speech down the unwilling throats of Polish children.

Why, I asked myself, should this shabbiness, this negligence, this "run-down-at-the-heel" appearance prevail in all the Slavic cities from Belgrade to St. Petersburg, and from Cracow to Irkutsk? Why should this be so of every place, except where the German has stepped in with his iron heel or where the Magyar or the Jew is trying to make of the Slav what he is not and does not care to be?

I was tempted to take the first train out of Cracow, so painful to me was this condition of affairs; for I admire the Slavs, although I think I know their weaknesses. But the first train did not go until midnight, and I had nearly eight long hours on my hands. Then I remembered my letter of introduction. I found it with my passport and letter of credit, and looked at it again, to assure myself that it was right. Yes, it was addressed to the Countess So & So, and all the way to the house, I pictured to myself my friend's mother-in-law. She would be rather rotund, for Slavic women incline that way, especially during the full moon of life. She would have gray hair, dark complexion, and a rather pronounced down on the upper lip. That seems to be the tendency of the Polish woman as she grows older; perhaps because of her great vitality.

Beneath the portal of a so-called palace, which was pervaded by an incredibly strong smell of whitewash, I presented my card to the porter, who looked somewhat contemptuously at the German name it bore. After long waiting I was guided to the very top story of the house, through clouds of falling mortar and showers of broken brick. The building seemed to be in the possession of masons and plasterers, and the noise they were making was as confusing as the dirt and dust their destructive hands were creating.

Two surprises awaited me. The first was, that in spite of the fact that the roof was partly torn off, and confusion reigned supreme, that top story contained some of the most lavishly appointed apartments I have ever seen. Pictures, statuary, and bric-à-brac, created by Polish genius, costly vases, rare flowers, exquisite rugs and furniture; and everything in perfect taste. If Cracow without seemed dingy and dead, here it was brilliant and alive. Thus had I pictured my Slav at his best--imaginative, creative, revelling in the beautiful, lavish of colour, yet creating harmonies. Everything around me seemed to breathe out life, and here I could understand the "Noch ist Polen nicht Verloren," although in the street I had been ready to sing a requiem for the nation.

A hundred questions passed through my brain; questions which I would ask the mother-in-law when she appeared. Then came my second surprise. As I sat there thrilled by contending emotions, the curtain opposite me was thrown back gracefully and quickly, not at all as if a short, stout mother-in-law were behind it--and my eyes fell upon one of the most beautiful young women I have ever seen. This again was Poland at her best, if not Poland typified. Her eyes were burningly eloquent, yet showed a hidden pathos; her features looked as if chiselled by a master's hand, yet, in the background, the crude touch was faintly visible. The welcome accorded me was genuinely cordial, yet tinged by the proper reserve.

"How is it," I asked, after some conversation, "that you don't look like a mother-in-law, and that you speak English as if you came from Boston?"

"Because," she said, with the sweetest smile, "I am as yet only a sister-in-law, and I do come from Boston. That is, I lived there for years after my parents were exiled from Poland. I came back here after my marriage."

This, then, was my chance to ask all manner of questions about the Slavs in general and the Poles in particular, and have them answered in the light of a rather unique experience.

"Why is Cracow a dead city?" This was certainly a perfectly familiar American question, and I received a characteristic answer.

"It is dead because it is 'crying over spilt milk.' Nobody is regarded as a patriot unless he talks about our past glory and blames some one in general and the Germans in particular, for the loss of that glory. We might do great things if we would just do them. We have the vision and the talent; but we wear ourselves out, saying what a great people we are and how superior to all other human beings; yet we accomplish nothing. Look at this house of ours, and you see Poland in miniature. I don't know just how old it is, my husband can tell you; but when it was built, the work was poorly done, and every year it has to be repaired from the bottom up. In America, it would have been torn down years ago, and a new house built, to suit the needs of the times. Instead of that, my husband is spending a fortune trying to make it a fit place to live in, and he never succeeds.

"Yet that is the thing he enjoys. He can scold the workmen half the year for dragging their task along, and the other half year he scolds them for having done their work so poorly.

"You Americans enjoy being comfortable, we Poles enjoy being miserable. If the Polish men had half the energy of the American men, we would indeed be a great people, and Cracow would be a city worthy of our pride in it."

I am not sure that I am recording the Countess' exact words, for to see her talk was such an æsthetic pleasure, that I must have forgotten much of what she said; but I give the substance of her words.

"See what America is doing for our peasants!" she continued.

"They go there lazy and shiftless, they come back thrifty and industrious, and are rapidly taking the places of our decayed nobility. When they come back, they have what we Slavs have always lacked--initiative. I wish we could export to you all our stock of Counts."

I suggested that she might try it as a business venture; for they would bring a good price in our matrimonial market.

"Oh, no!" she replied. "We would want them back. They have talent and devotion; they need only to learn to work, and America is the world's great boss."

At this point in the conversation the Count entered the room. The Countess had told me that her home was the type of Poland; she had not told me what I soon discovered, that her husband was the typical Pole, both physically and mentally.

He was a small man with unmistakable Polish features, which looked well worn; for being a Polish nobleman, he had travelled through life swiftly and indulgently. After scarcely five minutes' conversation, he began talking about the sufferings of the Poles, and what they would do if it were not for those wicked Germans.

Then followed what was as nearly a family jar as I care to witness. My hostess opened wide her beautiful eyes, and, in most forceful Polish, gave her liege lord a piece of her mind.

"I am tired of your tirades against the Germans. I don't admire their methodical ways, myself; but they are doing things.

"Go out of Cracow to the border and look across, and you will see order on that side and disorder on this. Step into a German train; it is clean and efficiently managed, while our cars, from the first-class to the third, are dirty and ill-lighted and the trains go by fits and starts.

"Go to the German towns, and you will find business flourishing; while ours stagnates. They don't neglect art, either. Their music may be slower than ours, but it is art; their paintings may not be as brilliant as ours, but they are as artistic. Go to work! Do something worth while! Build from the foundations! Develop some backbone, some character, do better than the Germans, and then you may call them names!"

The sensitive nostrils of the husband grew wider and contracted again. He was furiously angry; but facing him was his Americanized wife, and he knew that "Discretion was the better part of valour"; so he permitted his anger to cool while he nervously bit the ends of his moustache.

"Yes," he said, ignoring the Countess' outburst; "there is a great future for us Slavs when we all get together. We were in Prague this summer, at the Slavic Congress, and everything between us was so harmonious that I have great hopes of a Slav Confederation. Then we will crush our German oppressors. What do you think of it?"

I analyzed the situation thus: "As yet, the Slavs lack racial consciousness. Each group, no matter how small, thinks itself different from the other, and often superior to it. Not only are they divided by small historic dissimilarities, but religious differences have obscured racial unity to such a degree that I have but little hope that their racial consciousness will soon ripen into tangible results.

"In the great game of politics, the Slav has given his soul as a pawn, with which popes and patriarchs have gambled. Poland's national life has been lost, not so much by corruption from within, as because the Pole was used as a tool by the Roman Curia in the game of world politics she was playing, and playing unscrupulously."

Ah! It was good to see the Countess' dark eyes dancing from pleasure, while I thus analyzed the situation. I continued:

"The Slav either lacks sane pride in his race, or he has an overbearing conceit; he is either easily crushed, or he crushes, ruthlessly. Look at this daily paper. In Dalmatia, the Serbs break the windows of the Italians, and tramp madly through the streets proclaiming their superiority over the Latins. In Laibach, the Slovene does the same thing to the Germans. Tears down German business signs, shoots, and is shot in turn. In Prague, the Czechs are constantly bombarding the houses of the Germans, until martial law has to be declared. All this, to the detriment of the development of a rational, racial pride.

"And these same boisterous, roistering Slavs, to-morrow will cringe before their Magyar and German masters.

"Another thing is in the way," I hastened to add; for I saw that my host was eager to talk: "The Slavs lack collective wisdom. Where there are three thinking Slavs, there are always three quarrels. People who wish to rule must learn to act wisely together; yet in the history of the Slavs this collective wisdom, this inability of one group to acknowledge the equality of the other, has been their greatest lack.

"The Russian revolution failed, even as the Polish revolution failed, and as the Czechs' will fail, because they lack collective wisdom. It will take at least a hundred years," I concluded prophetically, "before you Slavs will confederate."

My host laughed nervously. "You are a false prophet. It will come in a decade. We will flow together like small rivers into a great stream. We Poles, of course, being the most cultured, the most civilized, and the best prepared to play the leading rôle, will be the stream into which all these lesser rivers will flow. In the great overture of Slavic union, the Pole will play the leading part."

To reason with such a man was futile; so I drank my tea and looked at the beautiful lady opposite me, in whom the practical American and the idealistic Pole were so harmoniously blended. Perhaps in her person she was a prophecy of the great day to come.

The Count talked incessantly about Poland, its past, its powers, its enemies; but I was not listening.

From my silence he thought he had convinced me, and as I rose to go, he asked: "Have you not changed your mind about its taking a hundred years to federate the Slavs?"

"Yes," I replied, "I have changed my mind. It will take two hundred years; unless"--and I looked at my fair hostess--"you bring back many more such Polish women from America."

IX

THE DISCIPLES IN THE CARPATHIANS

The river Waag has a broad and beautiful valley in which to indulge its vagabond habits. Now it seeks a channel close to the Carpathian hills on one side, and again rushes far away towards the mountain wall, close to the Austrian border.

The Romans appropriately named the river "Waag," the vagabond river, and it lives up to its reputation at all times of the year. One can scarcely find fault with its wandering propensities, for both shore lines are imposing and wildly beautiful; many of the little towns are castle-crowned, while each town and each castle has its myth and story, rivalling those of the Rhine in fantastic invention and equalling them in historic interest.

The river Waag, however, is not in Germany, where everything is prohibited, regulated, and subdued, even the turbulent rivers.

This is Hungary, the ill-mated spouse in that Austro-Hungarian alliance, in which quarrels are continual, and divorce, with alimony or without it, is threatened every day. Here rivers and races foam and rage; floods of hate beat against historic walls and there are no smooth channels for politics, education, or religion.

Struggle there is everywhere. Those who are too weak to fight, resist, and none, however small or unimportant, is ready to surrender.

Among those people with strength enough to resist, but not enough to fight, are the Slovaks, who live in wretched villages on both sides of the river. The villages grow more wretched as they climb away from the richer valley to the scant clearings in the mountains, where poverty, ignorance, superstition, and intemperance are the four walls which hem them in from the throbbing life of the century and shut them out from it. No one climbs the almost impassable highways except the Magyar gendarmes, who are the minions of the master race which has subdued the Roumanians, Ruthenians, and Germans within its borders, and is now hard at work to blot out the Slovaks, the feeble remnant of a once powerful people.

These gendarmes are but stupid tools in the hands of a stupid government. They erase the Slavic names of villages and paint over them Magyar names, not even remotely related to the original; they prohibit the Slovak language in the higher schools, fall savagely upon assemblies of innocent folk and disperse them by force of arms, annoy unsuspicious travellers and arrest nationalistic agitators and severely punish them. Then they believe that they have changed sluggish Slovak blood into the fiery Magyar fluid, obliterated age-long, historic memories, created in a day a new patriotism, blotted out a vernacular spoken in related languages and dialects by 100,000,000 of people and substituted for it one spoken by a warlike people, numbering not more than 8,000,000, and slowly emerging from Asiatic barbarism.

This they believe; but the fact is that no people were ever assimilated by force. Force begets resistance, and the most stupid Slovak, shut in by the four walls of his wretched isba, if he knows nothing else, knows that the Magyar is his enemy, and that the Magyar speech must not lodge in his memory and displace his mother tongue. Although he may have no knowledge of his historic past and no idea of the significance of the Slavic race of which he is a member, he _does_ know that he must resist the Magyars, and resist, only where he cannot fight.

Two forces are at work which will soon turn this resistance into fighting. One of them is the unbearable and unreasonable methods used by the Hungarian government, and the other is that giant in the growing, the returned immigrant.

The Slovak immigrant comes back less rugged but more agile; for he has passed through trials by fire and by flood; he goes back less docile, for he has had no masters except those that directed his daily task; his mind is awakened, for he has read the uncensored news from the Fatherland; news coloured more or less by the not always scrupulous agitator; added to all this, the Slovak immigrant goes back conscious of his racial inheritance, for he was one of a great Slavic brotherhood, organized on this side the sea, carrying on, unhampered, its agitations against the historic Magyar foe. Above all, he goes back with a bank account, and money is power in business and politics alike.

Hat in hand, the Slovak used to wait patiently at the ticket window until the Magyar station agent deigned to notice him and sell him his third-class ticket; then, as if he were an ox being loaded for the stockyards at Budapest, the Magyar conductor would push him into a car crowded by his kind.

I have repeatedly seen Slovak men and women miss the only train that could take them to the market town or from it, because the proud Magyar official paid no attention to their repeated request for a ticket. Day after day I have witnessed the incivilities and even cruelties they had to suffer on the trains; but when the Slovak comes back, he knows that the railroad official is only a servant, his servant, and he treats him like one; he demands attention. Woe unto the bribe-taking conductor--and there are no others on the Hungarian railways--who pushes him into a car crowded to suffocation, while more than half the cars of the same class are almost empty, with only here and there a passenger, who is politely treated because he is a Magyar or because he has pressed into the conductor's responsive hand the usual bribe.

The Slovak immigrant returns home somewhat of a rebel. The Hungarian government knows this, and were it not for the fact that he brings back money, and spends it freely, his emigration to America would be forbidden.

Recently a special police force has been created to watch every outgoing and incoming train, and every third-class passenger who has baggage enough to mark him as an emigrant is detained, rigidly examined, and if permitted to go to America at all, is sent _via_ the Hungarian port of Fiume. On the way he is duly inoculated by the fact that he is an Hungarian subject and that as such he must return.

The stupidity and the illiberal spirit of the Hungarian government are nowhere more clearly manifested than in its relation to the religious movements which are American in their origin and which have been transplanted from the Alleghanies to the Carpathians. In the hands of a truly liberal government this new force might become a constructive and saving one to multitudes of people; instead, it is alienated, put on the defensive and limited in its usefulness.

When the Y. M. C. A. expedition, of which I was the leader, reached the valley of the Waag, to study the Slovak language and people, serious difficulties to the carrying out of our plans presented themselves. The towns have all become Magyarized by the gendarmes and a multitude of officials. To speak the Slovak language marks one an inferior and renders one an object of suspicion.

The village inns are merely dram-shops, kept and generally ill-kept by Jews, who are under the influence of the Magyars, and consequently look down upon the Slovaks. Even had it been possible for us to lodge in one of these inns, our friendly attitude towards the Slovaks would have forbidden it.

The gendarmes were alert and agitated from the moment we entered the valley, and when they learned the nature of our errand they were incredulous. "Who ever heard of anybody's having a disinterested concern for the Slovaks? How could they believe that Americans, cold, materialistic Americans, would equip an expedition to study the needs of this downtrodden race, that it might be lifted up? Of course, we were nationalistic agitators sent out by the Slovanic Society of America, to arouse the half-awake Slovak into revolution."

That which confirmed them in this suspicion was the fact that the only place where it was posible for us to lodge was the home of Jan Chorvat, Apostle of the Christian faith in the Carpathians, and suspected of being a revolutionary, because he preached to his countrymen in their native tongue; preached to them a Gospel broad enough to embrace all races and nationalities, strong enough to wean them from drink and free enough to loose them from the bonds of superstition and ecclesiastical tyranny.

The simple and perfect hospitality which Jan Chorvat and his wife offered us was the product of that faith. Without hesitation they moved into the basement and gave the upper rooms to their guests. The first night of our sojourn with them, our hearts were cheered, and we felt as if we were at home when we overheard their evening devotions. The words of an English hymn, "My Faith Looks up to Thee," came in subdued tones through the thick walls of the room below. Then Jan Chorvat prayed, as only those can pray who walk consciously with God. The sentences which I could translate from the strange tongue knitted us into an unbroken friendship.

"I thank Thee, God, that Thou hast put it into the hearts of the American people to send these dear brothers across the sea, that they might learn to speak the tongue of my people so that they may serve them in the far-away land and inspire them to become sober and chaste; good citizens, good husbands, and good brothers.

"May these young brothers learn, above all, to love my people with the passion of Jesus, so that they will be able to lead them to the source of all redemptive power--Jesus Christ."

Jan Chorvat and his wife, in their outlook upon life, in the strength of their convictions, in their passion for righteousness, would have fitted easily into the church of the Puritans anywhere on this side the sea, where Puritanism is still at its best. In his asceticism Jan Chorvat reminded us of John the Baptist, in the sweetness of his temper of the Beloved Disciple, and, in his zeal and passion for Christ, of the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Here was a Slovak who spoke English almost perfectly, who wrote his native language classically, who clung to a noble faith passionately; yet that which bound us to him closely and I must regretfully admit, most closely, was the fact that Jan Chorvat was what he was, because of certain religious influences emanating from America. These influences and ideals, which are slowly growing stronger, are being augmented and reënforced by returning immigrants who come home with a passion for their kinsmen, eager to redeem them from their individual and national sins.

The centre of this religious movement is in O Tura, one of those mountain villages isolated, but brought into the world's current by mighty ideals; fit birthplace of a new hope.

Here a Protestant pastor ministered in the more or less stereotyped forms of the established faith, and, when he died, left three daughters, the "Roy Sisters," to carry on his work for the people he loved. Hampered by a strict orthodoxy and a suspicious government, they hungered with their people and for them, unconscious of a larger faith and a better way; until so commonplace a thing as a religious newspaper, published by the missionaries of the American Board at Prague, found its way to them.

Our credulity has been so severely tested by the narratives of missionaries who hinged mighty consequences upon trivial causes, that here too one is assailed by doubt; until one reads Christina Roy's little story: "How I came to the Light."

In simple yet graphic language, she tells of her life in the parsonage, her father's struggle against adverse conditions, her own budding ideals, and finally the important moment when for the first time she came in touch with the vital truths of Christianity as presented in the little Bohemian newspaper, _Bethania_. Upon so slender a thread travelled this mighty current which gave direction to her own life, which has enabled her to enlarge the vision of an oppressed peasantry, and which is now encouraging her and the noble group of men and women around her to attempt the almost hopeless struggle against intemperance.

Whether one agrees with the type of theology which these people preach or not, one can but feel that they are in touch with real spiritual forces, and that, by the test of character and of work accomplished, we who travel faster in the paths of what we call progress, are compelled to halt and admire.

The students who were the members of my expedition were nearly all recent college graduates and had left their schools with much of their traditional faith unsettled. Any doubts they may have had regarding the doctrine of the Incarnation, as it is commonly interpreted, were lost, when they saw the spirit of Jesus dominating the lives of simple peasants whose dull faces have become radiant, whose animal appetites have been controlled, and whose homes have become the abodes of peace and happiness.

To look into the faces of the "Roy Sisters," of Jan Chorvat and his wife, and of hundreds of peasants who come to hear the Gospel preached in true simplicity, was a better definition of the doctrine of the Incarnation than any professor of theology can give.

The Atonement, as defined by our orthodox churches and which is such a stumbling-block to the rationalistic mind, lost all its mystery in watching another member of this group, John Rohac[ve]k, at work among the gypsies; loving those whom no one loves, living with them in huts by the wayside and trying with a divine passion to lift them out of age-long Paganism into a wholesome relation to the doctrine: "Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin."

Although John Rohac[ve]k believes with all his simple soul that "Jesus paid it all," he is willing and eager to shed his blood for God's despised children, those most neglected of all, the gypsies. For them he has suffered persecution, imprisonment, hunger and thirst, in the true apostolic spirit; and although those American students may never be able to explain to themselves the meaning of the Atonement, they certainly will never be able to say that they have not seen the Atonement "at work."

Here among the Slovaks, the seed sown by the American missionary at home and abroad has brought forth more vital fruit, perhaps, than on the home soil. Although these Slovak disciples have gone out to save only this one or that one, they are helping to save a nation and are lifting a race out of degeneration.

Nominally, Jan Chorvat was a teacher in the Slovak language to our expedition; and to learn the more effectually, my students often went with him on his tours from village to village. As they walked, he explained to them the grammar

and enriched their vocabulary. How much of the difficult Slovak language they will remember when they come to their task in Pennsylvania, I do not know; but they can never forget the lessons he taught them by his singleness of purpose, his devotion to his people, and his fearless approach to those who he thought needed his admonition. Those students will surely remember that "Though they speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, it profiteth nothing."

The last day of our stay in Hungary brought us early to a village at the foot of the Tatra mountains, the village of Czorba. Leaving our uncomfortable third-class carriage in which we had spent the night, we were quickly revived by the ozone-laden mountain air, and by the marvellous sight which greeted our eyes. Here were the giant mountains of Hungary which she has proudly pictured highest on her escutcheon.

That which most quickened us, however, as a group of strangers, was the greeting extended to us by three men waiting in the early dawn. They had come many miles on foot to meet us, and carried huge loaves of rye bread and bottles of milk for our refreshment. They were to guide us to the top of the mountain. The three men belonged to three antagonistic races of Hungary, and we were Americans, a conglomerate of races; Teutonic, Semitic, and Celtic. Together we broke bread, prayed, sang, and exchanged thoughts about the vital things of life.

The man who appeared to be the leader of the group, the brightest and happiest of the three, the one with the largest outlook on life, was a Slovak who had found his vision and his happiness in America. He worked in a blacksmith's shop in Torrington, Conn. Here some one with a passion for common men ministered to him and led him from drunkenness to sobriety, and from his coarse animal existence into fellowship with the divine. He returned home and is daily at his task of shoeing horses and mending broken ploughshares; but he never forgets that what carried him back among his people was his awakened passion for them.

At the forge, he preaches the gospel of sobriety, of industry, and of peace; and, as he welds broken iron, so he is trying to weld into union the three alien races that battle round the foot of the Tatra. The task is difficult, and it will be slow.

The stupid and materialistic Hungarian government is trying to accomplish this task by throwing people into prison, because they love their mother tongue, or do not lightly regard their historic inheritance.

The Slovak Christian will certainly accomplish more than the gendarmes for the unification of these alien peoples in Hungary; for the Gospel is more powerful than guns and bayonets.

As we parted from our new friends that last day, we sang: "Blest be the Tie that Binds." The gendarmes, who were watching us, thought we were singing some revolutionary "Marseillaise," and in that they were not mistaken; for there is nothing more revolutionary than the force which "Binds our hearts in Christian Love."

X

THE GUSLAR OF RAGUSA

It is a long time since I first saw Dalmatia, on the eastern shore of the Adriatic. Her hills were denuded of verdure, monotonously barren and ashen gray, with a bit of Paradise here and there along the edge of the sea. In silence, her ancient cities mourned a turbulent past of which they were reminded by walls and palaces which the Romans built, as only the Romans knew how to build.

Although these walls have felt the force of Venetian battering-rams, of French, Turkish, and Austrian cannon-balls, they still stand, silent witnesses of a civilization which carried culture in the path of its conquest, and brought a certain kind of liberty to its captives. The Venetians took away these liberties, and, in exchange, gave the Dalmatians churches, whose graceful campaniles tower over the gray and solid Roman walls.

The French came and went; but, far as the eye can see, left nothing behind them.

Austria brought soldiers who are still there; nesting in the forts, commanding the mule-paths

and seaways and hated by the native population, which is Slavic with a sprinkling of Italian, both races being antagonistic to the ruling power.

That Dalmatia has been badly governed, no one denies. It has been purposely kept out of touch with the mainland, the old motherland behind it, Croatia. Only by the sea had it access to other peoples, to whom it rarely went and who seldom came to it.

Of all Dalmatian cities, Ragusa is the proudest, even as it is the poorest. Once the seat of a virile republic, she sent out armadas for conquest, watched from her sea-girt walls the struggles between Venice and the Ottomans, and, by force of arms, helped to decide the destinies of nations.

Ragusa's glory was short, but memory is long; although her harbour is choked and useless, her sea-wall in ruins, and her pavements grass-grown; still under marble porticoes half-sunk into the ground, sit the grandees of the city, smoking the Turkish _czibuk_ and musing over those golden days when Ragusa called herself the "Queen of the Adria," and fought with Venice for its supremacy.

On the corner of the Stradona and the Piazza, there stood all day long an old minstrel, who strummed monotonous strains on the _gusla_, while he sang the epics inspired by centuries of conflict. As he sang, the grandees smoked and mused; while the lesser folk cobbled _opankee_, embroidered garments after Oriental fashion, and wove tiny strands of silver into crude filigree.

The old _guslar_ was minstrel, poet, and historian. It was he who told me marvellous stories of the time when in each of those palaces on the Stradone there lived a statesman-soldier, at war politically with one half his world and in social rivalry with the other half. The city's gentlefolk were divided into the _Salamanchesi_ and the _Sorbonnesi_; those who sent their sons to the University of Salamanca and those who sent them to the Sorbonne.

These divergent cultural currents kept the nobility apart and gave ample cause for petty quarrels; many a Ragusan Romeo's love for his Juliet has furnished material for a romance and for a beautiful funeral.

Against these old walls and old traditions the immigrant tide has been beating for the last ten years, carrying away the grandee's sons, numbers of whom are now digging coal in Pennsylvania, or waiting on table in some cheap restaurant in New York. Yet, whether he lives in a wretched boarding-house in a Pittsburg "Patch," or accepts the modest tip his patrons give him, the son of a Ragusan grandee never forgets his nobility.

These immigrants, too, have gone home again, and make their presence felt, economically and socially. They have repaired the old palaces and brought money into circulation; but the old _guslar_, who stood on the corner of the Stradona and the Piazza, and whom I sought out after these ten years, had his story to tell.

"Yes, Signor, many have gone to America and have come back, and will go again; but, Signor, that must be a bad country, a wild country. They come home and walk carelessly up and down the Stradona, the finest street in the world, every house a palace--and they talk of it with disrespect!

"Why, Signor, they say that in America there are finer streets than this, and bigger houses, and they laugh at the _Dogana_, Signor--at the _Dogana_, where our _Principes_ and our _Consiglios_ made treaties with the great powers, where we received the ambassadors of the Sultan and of the Doges of Venice!

"Signor, they walk up and down the street with their heavy-soled shoes, talking loudly, and making such a noise that the grandees cannot take their siestas undisturbed.

"Yes, Signor, there are some of them here now. They came back a fortnight ago, a man and his two daughters. A good-for-nothing he is, Signor. Think of it! Ah, listen!" He paused abruptly. I listened. The sweet, harmonious quiet was rudely broken; the air, full of the fragrance of oleander blossoms, seemed suddenly vitiated; the Monte Sergio and the swaying palms beneath it, which made so marvellous a picture, seemed to drop with a crash out of their frame of sky and sea.

"Signor, listen!" And the old _guslar_ trembled from anger and pain. It was the grinding of a phonograph which struck our ears. "Listen, Signor! That they bring out of America! Out of your barbaric country!"

True enough; they were the painfully familiar notes of "canned ragtime" at its worst.

"Signor, that man has come back with his two daughters. They can't speak a word of their mother tongue; and oh, Signor! they walk up and down the Stradona without a duenna, they look boldly at the men, and they keep their jaws moving constantly, even when they do not speak.

"The father drinks, he drinks maraschino by the bottleful and he defiles the pavements of our ancient streets by his polluted spittle. You want to go to see him?" The _guslar_ looked deeply hurt. He feared that the phonograph had lured me from him.

"No, I shan't go until you play and sing for me."

He took his _gusla_ and moved his bow gently over its single string, while he sang of "Mustapha who came riding on a dapple gray stallion, with thirty Pashas as his escort. He struck a glass of wine from the hand of a Servian hero, who vowed that he would shed the black blood of the Turk," which, after many monotonous verses, he did.

"Signor, I can't sing very well--ah, there it is again!"

While he had been singing about Mustapha, who died so many years ago, the phonograph bawled lustily about "Tammany, Tammany," which, unfortunately, is very much alive.

I made my peace with the _guslar_ by putting into his hand a liberal fee; then I followed the sound of the phonograph which had been switched from "Tammany" to the song of "A nice young man, that lives in Kalamazoo."

On the lower floor of a house in one of the small streets which divide the Stradona, I discovered the phonograph and its owner, a man neither of the nobility nor noble. His knowledge of America extended as far as Brooklyn and the Austro-Italian docks, near which he had established a boarding-house. Of course, he had come home rich, and only for a visit.

"Who could live in Ragusa after Brooklyn?"

He told me that he made a great deal of money selling liquor, and acknowledged that he sold it without a license. Besides that, the sailors brought over various articles for which he found a ready market. His case would not be worth recording were it not for the fact that he may be looked upon as a man who has been spoiled by his sojourn with us. I doubt, though, that there was anything to spoil; evidently, he was a man of poor breeding and low moral standards. In America, he had found an outlet for his evil tendencies, and a bad business which offered opportunities for lawlessness.

His daughters were more interesting than he; for they came back perfect strangers, into the environment which they had left as children. They had quite forgotten Italian and spoke Serbo-Slavic very poorly; while their English was typical.

"Golly! But Ragusa is a bum town!"

The Adriatic shore could not be compared with the sea they knew, bordered as it was by Coney Island.

"No, sir-ree! Give me Coney Island, and you can have this two for a cent, Gravoosa." And I suppose, the peninsula of Lapad also, circled by palms and olives and set in a sea of turquoise blue.

When I mentioned the _guslar_, one of the girls said that he "might make a hit at Coney Island as a side-show."

"Were there many Dalmatians in America?" I asked the father.

"You bet! They have gone from along the whole ---- coast, and there is one ---- little town near Lucin Piccolo where there is not an able-bodied man left. They'll all come over when they get the ---- money. The more come the better for me."

His place was the centre to which they came and from which they radiated.

"What do they do in America?" I asked.

"Oh! any old thing. It all depends. There is one back here now."

"He's a regular big head," interrupted one of the girls; "thinks he's the whole cheese. He's a newspaper man. I suppose he'll be on the Stradona to-night."

Every evening after sunset, all Ragusa wakens out of its day-dreams and is on parade in the Stradona.

Demure maidens come out from behind latticed windows, reflecting in their garments the sombre hues borrowed from Venice, and a riot of Oriental colours. They are dark-eyed creatures, these maidens, and their faces, as well as their garb, show the mixture of Latin and Slav; for this is the battling-ground of the two races, the persistent Slav being in the ascendency.

The youths followed at a distance; for propriety is one of the assets of Ragusan society.

Noiselessly they walked up and down over the grass-grown pavement, and, when one heard the heavy-soled shoe striking it, one recognized the stranger; and by that sign I knew the Ragusan-American newspaper man. A graceful, swarthy young fellow he was, upon whose face his new environment had already written its story.

His eyes had lost their melancholy look, for he had escaped the thraldom of the past and seemed like a man fully awake to the present. When we met, he looked at my shoes, I looked at his, and the contact was made.

Interesting, indeed, his story was, beginning with his running away from home, one of those ancient palaces on the Stradona. His assets were: money enough to take him to Triest, third-class, a large stock of inherited pride, and nothing else.

At that time there was no passenger service from Triest, but there were freight steamers and a chance to serve as steward to the officer's mess. Three weeks of life on the sea and then New York. There he served his apprenticeship in the art of "getting along" by walking up and down Broadway, hungry and cold, sleeping in "Sailor's Boarding Houses," and finally in the police station.

At last came a turn in his fortunes, through getting work as a strawberry-picker in New Jersey, then working in a restaurant in Pennsylvania as waiter and cook. After much chance and change, he had become the owner of an Italian newspaper, whose chief object was to chronicle the happenings in the Fatherland, for the edification of his countrymen.

It had been a rough road, but it was worth the struggle; for it led to usefulness and into life. He thought that his countrymen always experienced unusual difficulties in America.

"The masses of them are illiterate to an alarming degree; bound by traditions, tribal in their social outlook, and serve as so much carrion for those birds of prey, the steamship companies' agents, the _padrone_, the boarding-house keeper, the saloon, and the venal justice of the peace."

Our national moral character he interpreted in the light or the experiences of his countrymen, and his judgment was not a flattering one. Yet he admitted that America is a blessing to Dalmatia. It has relieved bitter poverty, mentally awakened the people, and has broken down worthless traditions.

In Dalmatia, as elsewhere, the returned immigrant has sharpened the hunger for political liberties, and has intensified the struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor.

Wherever the government was aided by the reactionary church, the people left the church. This is especially true of the northern towns of the peninsula, between Zara and Triest.

"Yes, indeed! The returned immigrant causes much trouble, and I am no exception. I wound my parents by my democratic ways, and I have forgotten many of the niceties of their social life.

"Yes, it was I who hurt the _guslar's_ feelings by telling him that there are streets in New York finer than the _Stradona_, and houses bigger than the _Dogana_. Ah, yes; the returned immigrant causes both sorrow and annoyance. Just watch that man and his two daughters."

There they were; the man from Brooklyn, garishly attired. His daughters walked proudly beside him, heedless of the fact that over those pavements generations of Ragusa's great men had walked to victory or to death.

The Brooklyn man seemed quite oblivious of the fact that these people whom he passed so carelessly were the sons and daughters of nobles and heroes. He did not lift his hat to them or step aside to let them pass; his daughters occupied more than their share of space, with their gorgeous and exaggerated hats, and smiled encouragingly on the young men whom they met, although strangers to them.

Later, there was much discussion of these "Americans," among those who spend the evening at the "Café Arciduca Federigo"; smoking, singing, sipping _granite_, and talking about the good old days, those quiet, dreamy days which they had spent on this matchless spot, watching the sea as it encircled with its phosphorescent splendour the Island of Lacroma, or when, beaten by the Bora, it lashed itself into fury against the ancient walls.

The young newspaper man told me much about the pride and poverty of his countrymen, of their love for this fair spot, of their moral standards, and their unbroken word.

The _guslar_, standing in front of the café, began tuning his Jeremaic instrument, looking wistfully, as he did so, at the stranger who had given him so liberal a fee. He needed but slight encouragement to begin his plaintive recitative. A few lines clung to my memory; for they fitted so well into my conversation with the young Ragusan:

"Go out and sing of right and truth, Of valour and of manly strife; Better far, thy tongue grow mute Than that thou sing of baser life For common gain."

In the middle of a verse, he dropped his instrument hopelessly.

"Oh, Signor! These terrible Americans! Listen!"

The quiet of that matchless night was being assailed by the awful refrain of: "There'll be a hot time in the old town to-night."

"Ah, me, Signor! This will be my ruin! All the young men are at that man's house drinking like beasts; they no more care for me, or for the heroic songs of their ancestors, and while they used to give me _kreutzer_, they now give me _heller_, if they give me anything."

The old minstrel sighed profoundly and disappeared into the darkness, his _gusla_ under his arm; while from the tin horn poured a medley of songs, the climax of which was: "A nice young man that lives in Kalamazoo."

The sorrowful old man and his grief made me feel guilty, as if I were responsible for that terrible, torturing, unmusical outburst which disturbed the peace of the wonderful night.

After the _guslar_ had left us, the newspaper man rowed me in his father's _barquetta_ across the shallow harbour, as far as the shadow cast by the gigantic palm trees on the shore. Every time his oars dipped into the water they brought to the surface a flame of fire; yet amid all the splendour of that night, I could think of nothing but the sad old musician.

Many months passed and I had quite forgotten the _guslar_ of Ragusa. Again I was at the seashore; but it was the turbulent Atlantic--not the sunny Adriatic; Coney Island--not Lacroma.

Many confusing strains of music were in deadly conflict with one another; myriads of glowing lights encircled grotesque buildings of all descriptions; through streets given over to pleasure, crowded in one day nearly as many people as there are inhabitants in all Dalmatia.

I certainly did not think of Dalmatia, until I stood before an "Oriental Palace of Pleasure," in front of which I saw the man from Brooklyn, resplendent in a gorgeous Oriental costume, "barking" to the multitude the sensuous pleasures which could be enjoyed within "for the small sum of one dime, only ten cents."

When he paused for breath, I heard peculiar, strange, and yet familiar music. Following the sounds, I found on a balcony, in a blaze of electric lights, the _guslar_ of Ragusa. When he finished playing, he too cried: "Tenee cenee, onlee tenee cenee! C-o-m-e een! Only tenee cenee!"

XI

WHERE THE ANGEL DROPPED THE STONES

Prince Nicolas of Montenegro does not remember me, and why should he? It was many years ago, and I was one of 20,000 guests who suddenly descended upon his little capital of 5,000 inhabitants, during its national festivities in honour of the Prince of Bulgaria.

Cetinje's two modest hostelries, in which under normal conditions twenty strangers might have found crude comforts, were packed from cellar to garret with the entourage of the royal guest. The rest of us, mostly natives and a few strangers, roving about the odd corners of Europe, were sheltered in private homes, hospitably thrown open by Cetinje's citizens, who still believe in hospitality as a virtue, which they practice on all occasions.

I did not know until the morning after my arrival that my host was the Minister to the Exterior. The Interior, being so small, needed no minister, I suppose. His house, a rude stone structure, was only a degree better than that of the peasant; the bed was softer than his, for it was not the stone floor. The food was practically the same; a monotonous diet of maize bread and mutton, the staple food of rich and poor alike, except that the peasant eats only the bread and sells the mutton.

To find that my boots were blacked by a relative of the Minister to the Exterior, and that by virtue of being his guest I was also to be a guest at the banquet given by Prince Nicolas in honour of his princely visitor, produced in me no little feverish excitement; revealing the fact that I was a mere mortal, and as much pleased by my aristocratic surroundings and the prospect of royal favour, as if I were not a student of social phenomena with a strong bias towards democracy.

It is of no consequence to chronicle these facts here, except that they led to a passing acquaintance with the Prince and his family. His youngest son was then a growing youth of exceedingly lovable character. At that time the Queen of Italy was a visitor in her father's simple home. The Prince is a writer of some ability, and I was glad to be able to tell him that I was familiar with his contributions to Serbic literature.

The royal favour accorded me stood me in good stead; for not only could I watch the pageant and other festivities from a splendid vantage ground, but it proved very helpful in my journey through the principality, which I traversed from Nyegusi to Lake Skutari, and from the Albanian Alps to the Herzegovina.

The country seemed like a huge eagle's nest, perched amid inhospitable mountains. Here all men were warriors, from the time they were weaned from their mother's breast, until they sank into their rock-hewn graves.

The women reared the young, tilled the bit of precious soil found among a waste of boulders, and carried mutton carcases to the market at Podgoricza or Cattaro, the largest trading town in Dalmatia. On the return home, they brought coffee and spring water, the two luxuries of those arid mountain heights. These poor homes, although rarely better than stables, sheltered people full of heroism, hospitality, and primitive social virtues; as well as a passionate hatred for the "Schwab," their Austrian neighbour, and the Turk, their ancient foe.

The men lived in anticipation of war, not much caring whom they fought; for peace meant a stagnant poverty, while war held glory and pillage.

It was the day of the farewell festivities for the Bulgarian Prince, that the peasant subjects of Prince Nicolas passed in review before their patriarch, who was the supreme judge and arbiter of their fate. The menials kissed the hem of his coat, while the heads of different tribes kissed his cheek. Each man in passing before his lord told his troubles openly, and waited for the word of cheer or of judgment.

With little variation they all told of utter poverty--the kind of poverty which meant that from the month of August until the next autumn, there would be no bread; for the crops had failed. There was no prospect of relief, the Prince himself being poor and in debt; and the country had no resources.

I proposed emigration as a remedy, and rather impatiently the Prince dismissed the suggestion, saying that every warrior was of value in this mountain fastness; soldiers were its one asset, and they might at any moment be needed by their godmother, Russia, if not by himself.

Soldiers we did not need, I told him; the war with Spain was over, and even during its progress, we had soldiers to spare; but if his men would learn to "turn their spears into" crowbars, and "their swords into" shovels (taking liberties with a prophetic utterance) they would find opportunity for work, if not for valour; for a good wage, but not for pillage.

I knew they would come and they did. An apostolic band of twelve men first; seventy and more, following; three hundred on the next steamer, after which a temporary check. The three hundred, having violated the contract labour law, were sent home.

Then, like a flood, too long held back, came thousands, scattering through the Alleghanies and the Middle Western plain, as far as the Missouri River, and into California, where a colony of many hundreds at Los Angeles is in Paradise; although first they went through many a purgatory.

Ten years, and ten times ten years, which in Montenegro's past were more or less glorious, had left the country practically unchanged; except as the present ruler had tried to root out some of its latent barbarisms. Here Slavic traditions at their best were immovably intrenched, and here were the bulwarks against the best and the worst in our civilization.

Neither steam nor electricity, those destroyers of archaic simplicity, had yet entered the country, nor had our vulgarities of French dress and morals driven out the simple virtues or the picturesque national garb, worn by the Prince and by the peasant.

On all sides, Montenegro's neighbours, the Albanians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians, and even her brother, Servia, in the lowlands of the old cradle home--had all yielded, in a greater or lesser degree, to Mohammedan influences. Montenegro alone remained an unsealed fortress, in which the crescent never supplanted the cross; nor did the horse's tail wave from its flag-staff, on which once and forever had been unfurled the victorious colours--red, black, and white.

The dawn of the twentieth century found the principality still Homeric and patriarchal, but the brief years since its opening have been significant ones. During those years her sons for the first time left "their crags and unsealed passes" to go out upon so base an errand as seeking work across the Atlantic, later to return with the booty of a bloodless conquest.

About ten years after my last visit to Montenegro, I was again journeying towards it upon that serpentine road from whose every winding the truly matchless bay can be seen, receding with every turn, hemmed in more and more by the chalk cliffs which look like petrified clouds. Almost barren of verdure they are, but full of an awful majesty; until they blend with the bay, when one can see beyond them the blue Adriatic. The ships upon her bosom are moved by a gentle _sirocco_, while the islands on the Dalmatian coast, hidden in the shining green of the olive and the yellower tints of fig leaves, make patches of colour which seem to be floating away in the mist rising at noontime from the sea.

Suddenly one turns northward and faces gray stones, walls of stone, fields of stone--nothing but stone--and that is Montenegro. My peasant driver told me that when God made the earth, He saw that He had made it good, with the exception of the stones, of which there were too many. He called His angel Gabriel and told him to take a bag as large as the ends of the four winds and go down to earth, pick up the surplus stones and cast them into the sea.

The devil, who delighted in the stones and the trouble they would give humanity, flew after the busy angel.

When Gabriel had picked up all the superfluous stones on earth, and was about to drop them into the Adriatic, his Satanic Majesty took his pocket knife, cut a hole in the angel's bag, and all the stones dropped on to that part of the earth where Montenegro is situated.

The peasant's story accounts for the topsy-turvy position of the stones; now piled high as mountains, then solid walls of stone, and, again, huge boulders scattered about, with plenty of smaller ones between. There are some fertile spots, especially the famous _Brda_, where flocks find pasture; and there is an occasional field large enough for a horse to turn with its plough. Most of the country, however, is barren, and it is from this bleakest mountain region that the exodus to America has taken place.

At Nyegusi, as usual, there was an hour's wait, and a chance to refresh the inner man with cheese and coffee. In this primitive hostelry one noticed the first evidences of the changes wrought. Nyegusi, the birthplace of the Prince, under the shadow of the historic Lovczin, has been more drained of its men in these times of peace than ever it was in time of war.

When last I passed through it, there stood before every one of the wretched stone huts a giant-like figure, attired in his native costume, which, according to Montenegrin standards, was worth a fortune, and did indeed represent its wearer's wealth. Ancient and costly weapons protruded from his belt, generously wound around his portly body. Thus armed, he paraded up and down the rocky streets of Nyegusi, or lounged in the village inn, smoking cigarettes and drinking his _raki_, if he had the wherewithal.

At the time of which I write, the streets were deserted, save for the women, who bent beneath their heavy burdens of wood which they bring down from the ravines in the Lovczin mountain.

Old men sat wearily on the stone walls which surrounded their small fields, and every one told of a son who had gone "to Amerikee."

One toothless woman could tell her age only approximately, by the number of sons she had borne; and there were eighteen. Ten of them were in America; the others had been killed in border warfare.

In this same town I met a mother of twenty-two sons, twenty of whom had lost their lives in battle. The two survivors were the innkeepers of Nyegusi. The inn itself was the same as when first I saw it, with its beaten earth floor, and walls bare, except for the _icon_, a splendid bit of Byzantine workmanship; but since I drank the excellent coffee there, ten years ago, more than 5,000 braves have been under its roof, bound for my own country or returning from it. Now the room is full of them, all homeward bound, spending money far too freely in drinking and gambling; two vices which, although taken with them from their mountains, they bring back in exaggerated form.

I must confess to a sense of disappointment when I saw them beside the Montenegrin who had remained at home. The sombre dress of our civilization was a poor exchange for the brilliant, native costume. The hard labour the men performed in America had robbed them of their erect and elastic forms, and they looked like the menials of their brothers who had been keeping watch against the "Schwab," in the shadow of the Lovczin.

The change was not unlike that which has taken place in the American Indian who left the war-path to repair the steel path of the railroad.

The men in the inn, nearly thirty of them, belonged to all parts of the little realm, from Niksic in the North and Grahova on the Herzegovinian border, to Cetinje and Podgoricza, its centre. They had gone out in neighbourhood groups, members of one tribe; but, returning, had become badly mixed. Some in the original group had failed, while others had succeeded; some decided to remain in America, others were glad to come home.

Most of those in the inn had been West, and knew only the rigorous side of our industrial life, and to no European people could the experience have been so trying; while none could have adjusted itself less easily to it.

The complaints as registered in Cetinje were many, and on the whole justified. They may be classified as follows:

Cheated by Employment Agencies 80%

Cheated by Austrian boarding-house keepers 60%

Money lost by giving bribes to Irish-American bosses who promised jobs which were never given 36%

Rough treatment by bosses 72%

Robbed by railroad crews in Montana 80%

"Shanghaied"--made drunk and railroaded from St. Louis to Southern Kansas 15%

Robbed of money and tickets before departure for home 40%

This represented the dark side of the experience of the Montenegrin immigrant. The brighter side cannot so easily be classified. As with other groups, so with those; America meant an enlargement of their horizon. Most of them had earned money and meant to buy land; some of them had an eye to the undeveloped mineral wealth of their country, and two carried home enriched lives through having attended an evening school, where they had learned to read and write some English.

All were still loyal sons of their mountain home, and only three of the thirty in the inn meant to try their luck again.

The innkeeper thought emigration a great boon, and it was, to him; for the emigrants all passed through Nyegusi whether they came or went, and that meant revenue.

Externally, Cetinje, the capital, is still the same; although there the greatest change has taken place since my last visit. Cetinje now has a parliament, and its post-office officials have something more to do than smoke cigarettes. Its storekeepers are enriched by the inflow of money; the women respond to the new spirit; for a comparatively large number is going to America, and a few have already gone. The men, especially the old peasants, find this new spirit most trying. One of them, in a little stone hut at Kolasin, said: "The women come home after three years' absence and the devil has got into them. They _sit_ in my presence and demand to eat when I do!

"What kind of country is that anyway which encourages such things? Is it a woman's country?"

I met one woman whose son I knew in the "States." He is one of the few that have prospered, and he means to stay. His mother's little cottage on the outskirts of Cetinje shows plainly the influence of America.

On the walls hang many gaudy calendars, and a crayon portrait of her son, in an elaborate frame.

"Tell me," she said, as she pointed to a bulky newspaper printed in Scranton, Pa., and sent by her son, as a curiosity, "how many weeks does it take them to read it?"

Her son sends her ten dollars every month, which means fifty kronen. "Only the good Princess has so much money of her own!" the proud mother said; and I am not so sure that even the Princess has it.

There must be many such huts; for the postmaster told me that $30,000 came into this little rocky nest in one year; more money than passed through the hands of that postmaster in twenty preceding years. In a country so impoverished, this money cannot help being a blessing.

It is true, that after a brief glimpse of Montenegro I left it with feelings decidedly mixed as to the benefits it has derived from emigration. The Prince is less a patriarch than he was and not so accessible to his subjects; for he has felt the force of a revolution, small but significant.

The grand opera setting of the villages and towns is being destroyed; men no more strut about like stage heroes, waiting for their cues. The picturesque is going, is almost gone, and will go entirely; poverty, extreme poverty, pinching, grinding poverty is going too, and will soon disappear. Men drink more fiery _raki_ and gamble more; women are beginning to lift up their heads and walk _beside_ the men, not _behind_ them. I am convinced that the relative of the Minister to the Exterior would not now black my boots; for which I rejoice, although the old braves complain and say: "America is a woman's country."

Montenegro, hemmed in on three sides by Austria and on the other side by Turkey, and all around by poverty, has found an outlet and relief by way of the sea. Progress has come slowly and from far away and she must pay the price; yet when all is considered, she ought to be glad to pay it.

In talking to the postmaster of Cetinje, I referred to my driver's story, about the angel's dropping the stones upon Montenegro, and said: "It must have been a poor sort of angel; for he didn't pick them up again."

"Ah, well! He is trying to make up for it. Look here;" and he showed me advices from New York for 1,500 kronen.

"If that angel keeps up the good work, we will have a krone for every stone that he dropped on our soil. Don't you say anything against our angel!"

XII

"THE HOLE FROM WHICH YE WERE DIGGED"

It was some sort of saint's day, one of the many; this day, just before the harvest time, served at least one useful purpose. It brought together the _latifondisti_, the landowners, and the _contadini_, the labourers, who, after mass, bargained with one another for the harvest wage.

There was a time when the _padrone_ had a dozen men at his heels begging to procure them work; but now the tables are turned, and smartly dressed men court these rough toilers of the Abruzzi, and are happy, when, over a bottle of wine and a hand-grasp, the bargain is sealed.

In less than twenty years wages have increased from sixteen to sixty cents a day, and the difference in the attitude of the two classes towards each other is correspondingly great. The withdrawal from the intense congestion in Italy of nearly 2,000,000 toilers in the last ten years, accounts for the change in the economic condition of the common field labourer of that country. No phase of human relations has been left unaffected by this remarkable movement away from the home soil.

"Just as you wish, Signor," I heard a man say to one of the upper class. "Three _lire_ and not a _centesimo_ less."

The landowner watched the labourer closely, and when he saw him approached by another landowner, ran to him and sealed the bargain.

"Ah, Signor! Emigration has done this!" the labouring man said when I entered into conversation with him. "There are not men enough left to do the work, and if it weren't for the hard times in America, I would have charged him two _carini_ (about sixteen cents) more; but there are some men back from America who have not done so well, although they too will not hire out for less than three _lire_. They say that in America they have received three times as much."

The gentleman to whom I introduced myself, and who was suspicious that I might be in his parts encouraging emigration, took a different view of the situation.

"It is a curse, sir! Why, sir, you rob us of our men; of our strongest men, and leave only the aged, the women and the children!

"I have fields still unploughed, although it is June, and the bringing in of my crops will cost me three times as much as it did ten years ago."

"Didn't he get a much better price for his produce?" I asked.

"Yes, indeed! Perhaps I am no worse off financially than before; but worse than the higher wage is the changed attitude of the common people towards the landowner. Signor, those who come back are worse than the Socialists! The Socialists simply talk and argue; most of our common people cannot understand what they mean. They have always known that God made some rich and some poor, they were content with their cheese and their olives; but these men who come back from America walk through the streets as if they were our equals. They wear just such clothing as we do; shoes without hobnails and starched shirts and collars.

"They no longer greet us respectfully as they used to, and the way they spend money looks to these deluded _contadini_ as if they had _found_ it in the streets of New York.

"Everybody in my town who has anything to sell, sells it or borrows from his friends in America and goes there. Last year over 1,600 went out of my town, which has less than 6,000 inhabitants. The saints alone know what will become of us! And the worst of it is, Signor, that they lose respect for us!"

Travelling from Naples towards Calabria, I noticed in the second-class compartment a group of Italians returning from America for a visit to their native hill town. Among all the people of this class that I had seen, these were the most remarkable. They were better dressed than others, spoke English fluently, were cleanly in their habits and travelled second-class.

"Oh, yes! Italy is beautiful!" said one of them, who I afterwards learned was a stationary engineer at New Brunswick, N. J. His finely chiselled face showed his delight as he watched the landscape.

"But America is more beautiful on the insides. You ask why? I will tell you.

"I was born in a small hill town of 3,000 inhabitants. My parents were poor labourers and I was born in a hole in the wall. I will show you the wall when we come to the town. No windows, no chimney, no nothing. Our goats and pigs had another hole, smaller than ours; but the goats and pigs were not ours, they belonged to the landlord and when the pigs were killed we got half. We had just one meal of the meat and the rest had to be sold to those who could afford to eat it; we couldn't. It was a great day though when we had that taste of meat, and I don't think I have ever tasted such good meat since. Of course we had meat only three or four times a year.

"My father and mother both had to work in the fields. They left the hole in the wall at four o'clock in the morning and came back to it at seven in the evening. When I was a baby, my mother carried me along on her back; later my sister carried me and I can't remember the time when one of my sisters didn't carry a baby out into the field.

"I worked from the time I was seven; we all worked when there was work to do. I never was hungry when the melons and the figs were ripe; but I never remember having eaten as much bread as I wanted. I remember I wanted to be older than I was, for the children got about an inch more bread for every year, as they grew older.

"I went to school to the _padre_, and he taught me the _Pater Noster_ and the _Ave Maria_ and just enough writing to sign my name. When I was fourteen years old, an uncle who lived in New York sent money to my father and mother to come over. Never can I forget when that letter came. I nearly went crazy. I ran around to every hole in the wall and called out: 'We are going to America! We are going to America!'

"My father was crazy, too; for he gave the letter-man half a _lira_ for bringing him such a letter and reading to him the good news. Everybody in the town knew of our good fortune; for the letter-man told all those to whom we could not speak, because they were above us. When we went to Naples I thought I was going to heaven, and on the ship, in spite of seasickness, I was happy; because for the first time in my life I had enough bread to eat.

"I can't tell you how I felt when we came to New York; but at Ellis Island they turned all my joy into weeping. Two of the younger children had eye disease and they wanted to send all of us back. My uncle said he would take care of us older children, so they let us in and sent father and mother and the younger ones back. It was terribly sad and father and mother cried; but although I too cried, I felt very happy because I would not have to return to Italy. We promised them to come back and here we are."

These then were the older children, three sons and one daughter, who had been admitted to their heaven and were now coming home to the _padre_ and _madre_ who had lived in the hole in the wall.

"What do you think of emigration?"

The young woman answered: "Signor, it works like a miracle! I used to pray many a time, when I went to sleep, that the good saints would work a miracle and wake me in another world, where I could wear real stockings and ribbons, and now my prayer is answered and the miracle has happened."

Indeed it was a miracle. "Bessie," as the brothers called her, was transformed and transfigured. She was more "stylish" than the landowner's wife who travelled in the next compartment, and I feel sure that her gown cost more than that of a certain American woman who shared with me the pleasures of the journey Bessie was engaged to be married to a countryman of hers, who is head gardener in a cemetery in one of New York's suburbs.

"When we are married we will live in a cottage all our own, Signor, at the edge of that beautiful cemetery; six rooms it has and a bath room!"

A miracle indeed! From the hole in the wall to a six-room cottage.

Of course this group is not typical. These people went to school in America during their youth. The boys went to night school in New York and the girl went to the public school; they had entered profitable trades. Stone-cutting, engineering and dressmaking.

What was perfectly normal in their history was the effect that their going away has had upon the town from which they came.

Does the father live in the hole in the wall? No indeed. They sent home money enough to build him a house and buy about fifteen acres of land. The children at home were all sent to school. Yes, times have changed. All the children in that town are sent to school; for the immigrant father writes to his wife: "Let the children learn how to read and write. We who cannot, have to remain beasts of burden, while those who can, rule over us."

My travelling companions grew greatly excited as the train drew near their home. They collected their numerous packages and then looked longingly at the town, perched upon a high hill and crowned by a magnificent castle.

"Look, Signor, look! You see that wall, the old city wall? You see those holes? I was born in one of them!" Tears stood in Bessie's eyes. No doubt she thought of the six-room cottage and the miracle.

The station, in the shadow of the town, was much like other such stations. There was the usual donkey cart. Pompous officials bustled about and a few _carabinieri_ walked up and down, proud of their fuss and feathers. The _padre_ and _madre_ were there, and a throng of brothers and sisters and relatives, who greeted the travellers with noisy and affectionate salutations.

Bessie's _madre_ held her at arm's length at first, as if to be sure that this fine _Signorina_ was really the little girl she left behind in New York twelve years ago. Ah, me! It was a love-hungry heart to which Bessie was pressed. And the boys! What pride shone on the father's face! Any father might be proud of them, and I was prouder than the father.

"See what America does for your men!" I cried to a portly gentleman who stood beside us at the window, watching the interesting scene. He did not answer; for the train puffed and screeched, and the cars lurched as they were drawn around the curves. For a long time we could see the donkey cart piled high with baggage, the happy people following it.

The train came closer and closer to the walls of that ancient town, and on its southern side we saw again the holes in the wall, swarms of little children, a gray, tired donkey and picturesque dirt and confusion. At sight of those holes in the wall, I repeated my remark.

"See what America does for your men!"

"Ah!" replied the gentleman, "you see only one side of it; the bright side. There is a dark side to emigration, as there is to an olive leaf. We have given you nearly two million of our best men, to do your dirty and dangerous work."

"Yes," I replied; "but we pay them a decent wage; more wages in one year than you pay them in ten."

It was this remark, the sight of those holes in the wall, and the vision of that six-room cottage in America, which set me to striking the balance for Italy, the country most affected by the good and ill of immigration.

Italy has given to America for shorter or longer periods nearly two and one-half millions of men, for whose labour we have paid her a fair wage. At least two million dollars annually to every one of the provinces from which we have recruited this army of men.

While not all the money will remain in Italy, most of it has already been invested in land. In 1906, there were at least 50,000 land sales made, and much of the land will become doubly productive as a result of the extreme care which will be given it by this landless class, which has suddenly gained its foothold.

The rise in wages which is not far from sixty per cent. is a distinct benefit to the whole country; for a living wage means adequate consumption and increased production. While in some provinces there has been a dearth of labour, Italy is rather remarkable in that there is no danger of its being depopulated, and economically, the entire country is the gainer through emigration.

I have heard many complaints, especially in Italy, that we make Socialists and Anarchists out of their once docile peasantry. The facts are these. Crime has decreased in all districts affected by emigration; which however does not prove that the criminal classes have moved to America. There are other reasons. First, improved economic conditions have removed the causes for many crimes. Second, much crime was due to the uncontrolled passions and undisciplined characters of the peasantry; and the sojourn in America has given to many of them the power of self-control.

That Calabria in Sicily reports a reduction of about forty per cent. in crimes against the person, is certainly significant.

Again, the privileged classes in Italy and other European countries naturally look askance at the spirit of independence which the men bring back with them. Much as we may deplore with the aristocracy the fact that the peasant has lost his fine manners, we can but believe that, on the whole, the loss of docility and the gain in independence are a splendid exchange and of untold benefit to all concerned.

Some day, Democracy may teach her children the art of polished manners; let us hope that it may not be at the loss of the democratic spirit. That the peasant looks his master straight in the face and does not cringe; that he demands fair treatment, a comfortable yoke and no pricking with the goad, are as much benefit to Italy and Austro-Hungary, as they are cause for pride to those of us who believe that America has a mission to fulfill in the world.

If the Italian has really lost his good manners, we have given him in exchange a spirit of independence which, I admit, is sometimes a little in need of pruning, and with it, a yearning for better things and the possibility of its realization.

Public education in Italy has received an impetus directly traceable to the returned immigrant, who saw its value. He was a beast of burden because he knew nothing. The men who were educated had wealth, leisure and all that was denied him and his children.

If ignorance is removed from the common people of Italy, especially from those of the Southern provinces, she can well afford to pay double the price she has paid, whatever that price may be.

It is also charged against the returned immigrant, that he spreads sedition by bringing home strange religious ideas.

"Signor," said a priest to me in the Campagna, "a man came home who had been in America a few years; an ignorant, stupid fellow, and when he came, he invited his neighbours to his house. Not to treat them with wine, as you might think; but to preach to them. Think of the impudence of the man! A common man, uneducated and not a priest!

"And the people flocked to hear him! One day shortly after that, there came a real American and he preached to them and they sang. I could hear them singing, Signor, while I was saying mass. The tunes kept going around on the tongues of the people and a few months after, they began building a church. They call it the 'Methodisto' church.

"Tell me, what heresy do they teach? My flock is divided; the women are crazy over this new doctrine and they gather the little children and teach them to sing these heretical songs."

Undoubtedly, a new element of friction has been introduced into the solidary, religious life of the nation; but it is equally true that, in most of the towns of Italy, destructive ideas have long been at work and have weaned many peasants, especially the men, from the Mother Church, leaving them in an anarchical attitude towards Church and State.

The new religious ideals, which are largely the ideals of Protestantism while also acting destructively, have, after all, large constructive powers, and, on the whole, are of undoubted benefit. It is the undisputed testimony of impartial observers, that the Sectarians come home "cleaner" than others, that almost without exception they insist upon temperance and chastity, and that they encourage a sane, intellectual activity.

I have given concrete examples of this in other countries; but in Italy these examples could be multiplied. I do not know of a single instance where the introduction of vital religious ideals has not done more good than harm.

The work of Rev. Luigi Lo Perfido, a Baptist minister, is somewhat exceptional, yet in the main, typical. He has introduced into the town of Matera a really constructive, liberal, religious movement.

This includes, in addition to the simple church services, a coöperative system which has large economic consequences. He has made his church a social and literary centre besides keeping it a spiritual force of acknowledged value.

The Church in Italy may regard as a menace this spirit of the Reformation, which it thought dead; but the Church itself cannot fail to be stimulated by the introduction of the leaven. The Mother Church will, perhaps, have to bestir herself to hold the people, by offering them something better than _festas_ and processions.

Many observers complain that in Italian towns especially, emigration has left too great a burden upon the women, and that their economic and social condition is worse than before. This is partially true, but is only temporary. The full truth is, that woman is being benefited most by these great changes, although she now suffers most. Just as the _contadino_ in Italy or the _nadelnik_ in Hungary has been freed from the oppression of his masters, by emigration; so the woman in Italy will be freed from the oppression which she is suffering from her "liege lord" who, especially among the peasant classes affected by immigration, is always at his worst in his relation to his wife.

If there is one complaint against the returned immigrant which is louder than others, it is that the woman who has been in America is spoiled and that she is a mischief maker among the other women, who are apt pupils.

While I do not anticipate that the peasant women of Southern Europe will demand suffrage, they are beginning to demand a voice in the affairs of the household; which has ever been their right, which has long been denied them and which certainly does not indicate that they are spoiled. Neither is there danger of their being spoiled; and it is more than probable that the women of Italy as well as of other immigrant centres, are as much benefited as the men, if not more than they.

After seeing the hole in the wall in which Bessie and her brothers were born, and after looking at the matter from all sides, I can still say, and with firmer conviction than before: "So far as my observation goes, I feel certain that emigration has been of inestimable economic and ethical value to the three great monarchies chiefly concerned, namely: Italy, Austro-Hungary and Russia. It has withdrawn inefficient labour and has returned it capable of more and better work; it has lifted the status of the peasantry to a degree which could not have been achieved even by a revolution; it has stimulated the neglected masses, lifted them to a higher standard of living and has implanted new and vital ideals."

The hole in the wall in which Bessie and her brother were born brought to my mind anew the prophetic injunction: "Look unto the rock whence ye were hewn, and the hole of the pit whence ye were digged," and aroused in me the spirit of humility; an attitude of mind essential for the appreciation of all the problems and opportunities arising from the presence in our country of these "lesser folk."

This attitude of mind ought not to be a difficult one for the average American to attain; because most of his ancestors came out of such holes in the wall--some better, some worse.

Even those of whom we no longer think as immigrants, but proudly call our forefathers, who came long ago, came from good, plain, peasant stock; not blue blooded, but of virile red blood.

For this we should be deeply grateful; although we are likely to forget it, and also willing to forget it, I fear.

Recently I travelled with a friend and his wife. The gentleman, a professional man of high standing, was going on a pilgrimage to his ancestral village in Germany. The wife went there in the firm conviction that the home of his parents must have been some ancient castle; for her husband was a noble fellow indeed.

When we found the place where he was born, it was a cow-stable and looked as if it had been none too good for that purpose, even in its palmy days, and my friend discovered that his parents were peasants, so poor that they were sent to America at the expense of the town. Nevertheless, he and his wife are cultured Americans and their children are graduates of our best colleges and universities.

Not long ago, in travelling from the East to the West, my neighbour in the coach, a young man of evident good breeding, complained bitterly at the presence of some Russian Jewish immigrants. He hated them all, he said; and had no use for them.

I looked into his face, and beneath the ruddy skin and dark, wide open eyes, saw that which only the initiated can readily detect--the racial origin. "May I ask your name?" His name was McElwynne, and his parents were English; but before I had done with him I knew that they had come from Russia, that their name was Levyn and that he was a Russian Jew but one generation removed from the steerage.

Quite unintentionally, I once almost broke the heart of a woman in fashionable society. She pronounces her name with a French accent, and I translated it into Slavic; in that language it means a common garden tool, which proves her husband to be of peasant origin.

The sight of the hole in the wall in Italy, and of the wretched huts in Hungary and Poland, has quickened my sympathies with the people who come out of them. Even so our fathers and mothers went forth, driven by hunger and dire need, drawn by the dream of better things and sustained by a simple and devout faith.

After all, we are brothers. Born out of the womb of poverty, nourished by coarse fare, taught in the hard school of labour and saved from wretchedness by the same good providence.

More and more we shall grow into one another's likeness, and that of God, as all have more bread, better air, cleaner homes, good books and an unobstructed view into heaven.

For this, "Praise ye the Lord, kings and all people; princes and all judges of the earth!"

Praise Him ye Irish and Scotch! Praise Him ye English and Welsh! Praise Him ye Germans and French! Praise Him ye Slavs and ye Latins! Praise Him ye Gentiles and Jews!

"Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord! Praise ye the Lord!"