Chapter IX: Part 9

Only degenerate people sink into slums; and these foreigners have helped to regenerate them. In Chicago the first Ghetto developed in a quarter which could truly be called slums; full of dives in which the foulest vice flourished. Nearly all the women in those dens, and there must have been hundreds of them, were native Americans, or came from what we call the better immigrant stock, Germans and Scandinavians. On one side of this Ghetto was the most congested railroad district in the United States; on the other side as foul a slum as ever disgraced any city; but the Jew did not sink into the mire. He lifted that district out of it, so that to-day it is practically empty of that kind of vice.

There is no doubt that in the last few years, the army of unfortunate women and gamblers has received recruits from among recent immigrants, and there is also no doubt that the number will still increase; but the stock, the root, the peculiar kind of decayed house and people which we call slum, is a native product. Most of the Slavs who come here do not know anything about the business of prostitution or gambling; and until a few years ago this was true among the Jews also. I am willing to assert that the people who are making these peculiar crimes their business, are ninety per cent. native Americans. This does not necessarily cast any aspersion upon the American people; for I can truthfully say that as a whole their standard of morality is higher than that of any other people I know. Yet it is true that the class of immigrants who come, peasants and labourers, do not import the slum, the brothel and the gambling house.

If I were sent out to-day to find the people best fitted to replenish our physical stock, to help in winning the wealth of forest and mine, I should not go to Paris, to Vienna, to Berlin and London; or even to Glasgow or Edinburgh. I should go to the very villages in the Carpathians and Alps, on the broad Danubian plains, from which our recent immigration comes. Whether we are in need of replenishing this stock, whether the wealth of forest and mines should be harvested as quickly as it is now, is another question of those many with which I cannot deal here. Taking conditions as I see them, granting that we need muscle and brawn, I can say very dogmatically that we are getting exactly what we need. The sweat-shop it is true flourishes because of this recent immigration; but gradually its domain is losing ground and the fighters at the front against both slums and sweat-shops are the New Americans, who are helping to solve some old problems and to heal some old diseases.

The claim that every able bodied foreigner who comes here is worth so many dollars to this country has been ridiculed. Count Aponyi, of Hungary, who claims that his country loses money by the withdrawal of this able bodied army of men and women, puts the height of our gain at five thousand dollars for every man. However that may be, this is true: immigration has had a direct economic influence upon the countries from which the immigrants come, an influence which is both for good and bad. In certain regions wages have increased nearly fifty per cent. The relation between servant and master has changed, and a note of independence rings from the guttural throats of Slovaks and Poles; while “strike” and “meeting” are two English words which have entered permanently into their vocabularies. The removal of so many able bodied men has left whole villages with but women and children; and while the moral tone of such regions has not improved, one cannot as yet perceive any economic loss. This is due to the fact that money comes pouring in which offsets the loss sustained by the removal of so large a population.

Nevertheless it is a fact that the governments of Europe most concerned still regard themselves as losers, and are taking steps to restrict the emigration of desirable classes.

It has been claimed by a certain member of congress, that the withdrawal of this money from America is an economic loss and that the American people should stop it; because the money goes to support foreign governments. The argument is both narrow and false. First of all it is true, that the immigrant has earned this money in the most honest way, and that consequently he has a right to send it home if he pleases to do so.

Secondly, this money no more goes for the support of foreign governments than does the money that the politician paid for the imported cloth of which the evening suit was made which he wore when he delivered that criticism.

Thirdly, the money sent home each year by the men who have earned it, is only a small fraction of the large sums which are spent annually by Americans abroad; money which in a great number of cases has not been earned by those who spent it, or has not been earned so honestly as it has been by those “hewers of wood.”

Fourth, the money which is spent by Americans in Paris, Dresden, Nice and Carlsbad, does not so immediately return to the United States as does the money which is spent in Kottowin or Breczowa or in Oswicczim. That flows into the trade channels whose golden stream runs directly back to the United States; for more money in those villages means more money for Southern cotton, Chicago lard, and Connecticut clocks and sewing machines.

I doubt that even the minutest investigation will prove that the money sent annually to Italy or Hungary means a loss to the United States, or that as yet the immigrant is a serious economic menace.

XXII

RELIGION AND POLITICS

On a recent trip through Germany there fell into my hands a little book about America which bears the modest title, “Americana.” It was written by Professor Karl Lamprecht of the University of Leipzig, and is a note-book in which he records his impressions about us. Being a Professor of History and especially conversant with that part of it which deals with our country, his conclusions have large value.

That which impressed him most about our life was the prevalence of the religious atmosphere and the genuineness of our piety. The sentence which seemed to me to stand out above every other which he has written is this: “My conviction that this people is destined to great things bases itself above all else upon the fact, that it is capable of religious impressions.” I have felt this by virtue of a sort of vague faith, and have always regarded the religious problem which the immigrant presents, as the crucial one. We shall soon be of one blood--sooner yet of one speech; but how soon we shall have one faith, and common religious ideals, or how long we shall be able to preserve those religious ideals which are the guarantee of our greatness, as well as of our permanence as a republic, are very large and very serious questions.

It is not easy to deny that certain phases of our religious life in America are to a great degree unknown in Southern and Eastern Europe, and cannot be readily understood by the average immigrant:--the entire separation of Church and State, yet the complete union of religion and national life; the large place of the individual as a religious functionary, and yet the absolute equality of priest and people; the prevalence of forms and the permanence of the ethical and spiritual.

The immigrant comes to us, largely from countries in which the Church and the State, the cross and the sword, are one. In fact to the large majority of those who come, nationality or race, and the Church, are one and the same. The Russian and the Southern Slav who are not _pravo_ Slavs, adherents of the Greek Church, are regarded very much in the light of traitors to their nations. The Pole is a Catholic by national instinct; Poland and Roman Catholicism are to him one and the same; while the Jew is a Jew by race and faith, regarding as a profligate, him who betrays his people by becoming a Christian.

Roughly speaking, nearly eighty per cent. of our present immigration is made up of Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Jews. More or less, usually more rather than less, they bring with them and foster these ideas. This is undoubtedly true of nearly all the Slavs whom the Church divides racially and who are enemies; remaining so a long time on this side of the Atlantic. The Church, cognizant of this fact, fosters it in no small degree, because it can hold its children more loyally to itself by giving the national idea a large place. Polish, Bohemian and Slovak church societies of a semi-military character exist in large numbers, and many of their members carry arms. Although in itself this may be a harmless way of keeping men loyal to the Church, it does seem to clash with one of our religious ideals, which is fundamental in maintaining religious liberty. I am judging only as an outsider and am telling only what seems to me to be the case; but I am speaking also for a large number of Catholic priests who see in this no small menace and who have tacitly admitted it.

The sooner the Catholic Church can get rid of Polish and Italian priests who have been trained in Europe, to whom religion is a sort of politics,--and a certain kind of politics is religion,--the better for the Church and of course the better for the State.

The immigrants free themselves from the autocracy of the Church and of the priest more quickly than from the national idea, and they easily breathe in the liberating atmosphere and sometimes manifest it in a very disagreeable way. The close supervision which the priest exercises over his parishioners, the respect they pay to him, the awe in which he is held, are helpful rather than detrimental phases of their religious life, where the priest is a true priest. There are, however, too many who are not, and I am sure that the authorities of the Church concerned are perhaps more anxious about this than are we, who are simply looking over the fence at our neighbours’ affairs.

I am more concerned by the fact that in nearly all the immigrants with whom I have dealt, forms and a certain blind faith, obscure the ethical demands of Christianity. This is certainly true of the adherents of the Greek Orthodox Church and not entirely untrue of those belonging to other Churches. I am conscious of the fact that just here prejudice can blind one completely; and I want to keep myself free from that charge.

My religious outlook cannot be called narrow, when one takes into consideration that Roman Catholic priests were both my teachers and my companions, that I have lived in a Russian monastery, that I know the Slav, the Italian and the Jew better perhaps than I know the American, and that to know them as sympathetically as I do, one must know them without prejudice. Probably on the other hand I shall not escape the charge of timidity when I say that in the countries in Europe from which our present immigration flows the Church has fostered the form of religion and has too often neglected its ethical demands; or perhaps that it has laid greater emphasis upon the poetry of religion than upon its stern prose.

Into the Easter celebration the Greek Orthodox churches have woven all the charm which the religious mind can invent. I have seen almost the third heaven opened on Easter eve in Russia and also in Poland. Yet hardly had the last triumphant cry, “Christ is risen” died upon the gray morning, when the same mob which shouted, “Christ is risen,” also cried, “Kill the Jews.” Kisheneff, Bialistok, Sedlice and the scenes of small and large pogroms in Poland, Austria and Hungary, which have remained unrecorded, are sufficient proof of the fact that many of the Slavic people have no idea of the teachings of Jesus; and that religion to them is a matter of form necessary to observe, a sort of charm against evil spirits and bad luck.

In this respect, however, the churches concerned are not sinners above others; and the Protestant churches in America have also been more successful with the millinery of religion than with its essence. It would be wrong to say that the people who now come to us will dull our religious faculties, and make them less impressionable. Nothing could be further from the truth; for essentially they are a religious people and even now there are taking place among them great religious developments. I believe that in the crude state in which the present immigrant comes, he is ready for the best the Church can give to him. No one church is equal to the task, and antagonistic as they may be towards one another, I believe the nation needs both the Protestant and Catholic types; that the field now is so large and the problem so difficult, that they both need to put forth their best efforts. Each needs to prove Lessing’s story of the “Three Rings”; each needs to prove that it has the true ring, the true message of redemption, and it can prove that best by living its best, and by noblest endeavour for these children of men who have brought to our doors the problem of Christianizing the whole world.

The breadth of vision and the depth of conviction which animate a certain section of America in this respect, are best illustrated by these ringing words from a recent address by President Tucker of Dartmouth College:

“If God were not pouring into New England out of the riches of other countries, New England would be empty. While the latest foreigner may not compare favourably with the native stock, what of the second and third generations of foreigners? They are forging to the front, partly because of their virility and ambition, and partly through the sacrifice of the homes to educate their children. The rising scale of foreign population is on a better level than the falling scale of the native population. If the old New England stock is not willing to sacrifice as it used to, and if the New England boy is not as ambitious as his grandfather, I thank God that he is sending us those who are willing to sacrifice and anxious to rise; and that he is giving this challenge to the old stock: Rise up and show yourselves! If we do not see and feel it, it is to our shame. We are not the elect of God unless we prove our election, and if He can do better for the world through some other stock and religion than through the native stock and Protestant religion, let Him work in His own way.”

I need not say here how large a place the public school and the settlement both have (in spite of the fact that they are often called godless institutions) in making religious impressions upon the immigrant. The glimpse of a higher world, the world of the spirit, has been given to many eyes almost blind to the divine light, by modest men and women who have worn neither cassock nor crosses, and who were ordained to their holy task only as they felt the touch of needy children resting upon their hearts.

I recall a little, sharp-eyed Jewish lad whom lured from his news stand by recklessly buying his whole stock of evening papers. He had lived in Boston five years and was Bostonese, to the dropping of his Rs, and the picking them up again, to put where they did not belong. He was a product of the public school, not yet finished, but in the making; and over him hovered the benediction of some noble teacher, whose glory he reflected. “Teacher? O yes! teacher was even more than parents, almost like God. Teacher knew more than the stupid rabbi, who tried to drill into him the Hebrew alphabet.”

The boy had neither church nor synagogue, nor priest nor preacher nor rabbi; he had but two things to cling to, the school and the settlement. Piteous was his scorn of the faith of his fathers, the accusation and condemnation of everything Jewish, the contempt with which he called his people “Sheney”; the horror of fast and feast days, and his delight in the anticipation of a Jewish Sabbath meal. He will become what Max Nordau calls a “stomach Jew,” in opposition to the “soul Jews,” who alas! are growing fewer and fewer, on both sides of the sea.

This boy, grown up, or growing up in Boston, knew nothing of us, of our type of Christianity, or of Christianity at all; except the fact that the world is divided between Christians and Jews. The settlement has done something for him; it has given his unskilled fingers the taste for handicraft, and he told me with honest pride of the things he had made with “his own hands.” It has also given him a knowledge of human kindness, although he does not yet realize that the men and women in the settlements are working because of the love they have for God’s children.

I have found Jews everywhere who were Christian in spirit; and the distance between synagogue and church is as great as it is, only because of prejudices, which the church has not yet allayed and which unconsciously it is increasing.

The Jew is suspicious of missions and missionaries and has good reason to be, but he responds quickly to the notes of true religion whenever they strike his heart; even as he responds quickly to the best things in our national life.

I recall walking through Boston in the streets stretching South and far North where Russia and Polish Jews live. They are keepers of shops of all varieties, busy scavengers of second-hand articles; busier than we know, with thread and needle in clothing and sweat shops. They are dealers in junk, the refuse and wreckage of our industrial establishments; creators of new avenues of trade and of some new industries. Some of these Jews know that they live in Boston and act like it. I had alighted at the North Station and was walking with a lady whose luggage I had offered to carry to the car. She had a baby on one arm and a large satchel in the other hand, so in order not to knock against her with the heavy valise which I carried, I walked on the inside. Suddenly from his shop door, a Russian Jew, in English strongly tainted by Yiddish, called out: “You greenhorn, don’t you know that in Boston men don’t walk on the insides of the ladies?” Promptly, as though impelled by a command, I shifted my load, and “walked on the outside of the lady.”

That Jew had been responsive to Boston’s spirit of decorum and would be equally responsive to the best in its religious life if it were presented to him. He likes least to be singled out as a Jew and to be dealt with as such, either by churches or missions. He is most easily approached from the standpoint of the average man, and not from the peculiar racial and religious standpoint of the Jew.

The distance between synagogue and church is really not so great as some suppose. Many a Jew is Christian in spirit if not in creed.]

Side by side with the religious problem is growing to menacing proportions the problem of politics. A nation like our own, ideally founded upon universal suffrage, is putting its destinies in the hands of men untrained in citizenship; the very name citizen being so new to them that they cannot easily grasp its meaning. The tutelage of Tammany Hall and of its kind all over the United States has been a bad preparation for so momentous a task. It does not diminish the greatness of the problem in the least when I say that the foreigner is usually the innocent tool, in a corrupting process which has been going on for many years, and to the existence of which the nation is just awaking.

I have been offered citizenship papers in the city of New York for ten dollars; and have seen them peddled by Americans who had back of them the protection of political bosses of no less genuine American ancestry. I have seen whole groups of Polanders marched to the ballot-box, when they were so drunk that they had to be kept erect by a stalwart American patriot who swore that they had the right to vote, when they had scarcely been a year in this country. I have seen men who are respected in their communities, buy votes wherever they could get them, corrupting a mass of men who were as ignorant of the process of voting and as unfitted for it, as little babes; and these very men I have heard loudly proclaiming the corrupting influence of the foreign element.

With all that, the foreigner is rising in the scale of citizenship and is not so bad as he has the right to be, considering the example set him. Delaware is not controlled by foreigners, yet the peaches in its political basket are rotten both at the top and at the bottom. Connecticut, the “Constitution State” as it loves to call itself, is still dominantly American, and yet there are so many “wooden nutmegs” in the spice box of its magnificent State House that its best citizens are hanging their heads from shame. New Hampshire and Vermont are not model States, in spite of the fact that the foreign vote is almost “nil”; while the city of Philadelphia cannot claim that it is better governed than the city of New York, where the foreign population predominates and dominates.

The immigrant, it is true, will sell his vote; but the American buys it, and sells it too, and he is the greater traitor; because he is betraying his native country.

Again, this does not assume that the immigrant is not a political problem; he is, but only because we are, and in this he rises and falls with us, and sometimes rises above us. All that which we call patriotism he quickly imbibes. He loves the Fourth of July, and he knows its meaning and its value often better than the native born. I have no fear on that score; and should America, God forbid, engage in war, you would find at the very front the Jew, the Slav, and the Italian with the Yankee, fighting the same battle; yes, and fighting his own people should they unjustly attack us.

Who doubts that the German Americans would fight in our war against Germany, if it were a just war--if war be ever just; and who would doubt for a moment that the Italians, Russians and French would fight on our side if their governments should land soldiers on this continent? No one doubts it.

They are caught by the contagious enthusiasm of our patriotism, and will outdo us; for they love America as no native can love it. Neither do I fear that they will fail us in fighting our greater battles against injustice and against corruption in high places. What I fear is that they will fight, that they will become one with the tumultuous mob, which may at any time arise and blindly demand its long deferred dividends for its share of labour, toil and suffering. I fear that we are gathering inflammable material from the dissatisfied of all the nations, who here may endeavour to reek vengeance upon all governments; a mass easily inflamed by demagogues and made a scourge in the land, when the land needs scourging.

No nation has ever faced such a problem as we are facing; not only because of its gigantic proportions, nor because of its peculiar nature, but because of the fact that the nation’s weal or woe is being decided right before our very eyes; because its shroud or its wedding garment is now being woven, and we who live to-day may stretch our hands against the threads of the loom and say which it shall be.

XXIII

BIRDS OF PASSAGE

Again the ship’s band plays the songs of the Fatherland, while marching up the streets of Hoboken towards the dock, comes a long procession of men escorting one of the chief citizens of the town. He is the owner of the largest saloon and is about to visit his native land across the sea. The decks of the steamer are crowded by passengers and their friends, and through the discordant noise of rattling chains one hears the mingled notes of joy and sorrow, until finally at the stern command of the captain the long homeward journey has begun.

The steerage of the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ is crowded to the limit; and Jews, Slavs, Italians and Germans are beginning to settle down in their congested quarters, in a somewhat closer fellowship than on the westward journey; for now they have a common experience and a few sentences of common language to bind them to one another.

The women all of them, have discarded the peasant’s dress and are bedecked in the spoils of bargain counters; while the men invariably wear “store clothes,” always carry huge watches and not rarely a revolver. Where you still see peasant’s clothing you will find a heavy spirit within it; for the wearer is one of the unfortunates who was turned back from “the gate which leads into the city.”

The steerage passengers may be roughly divided into two classes: those who go home because they have succeeded, and those who go home because they have failed. Those who have succeeded have not yet reached the point of achievement which lifts them from the steerage to the cabin, but still belong to that large class which goes back to the Fatherland for a season and then returns, to try again the road to fortune. More than one-fourth of all our immigrants belong to this class and have to be reckoned with when the sum total is counted. While I cannot give the exact figures I should say that nearly two hundred thousand men and women go back and forth each year.

This class has lost much of the Old World spirit and is neither so docile nor so polite as it was when first it occupied these quarters. The ship’s crew has become more civil towards it, which is due to the fact that the homeward bound steerage passenger has grown to be something more of a man, has more self-assertion and more dollars; all of which has power to subdue the over-officious crew. The men have learned more or less English, which is freely interspersed by oaths, while the women can say: “Yes, no, and good-bye” call their “Dum, de house” and are fairly versed in the language of the grocery and dry goods store. They can say “how much” and even “you bet”; but beyond that, the English language has remained “terra incognita” to them.

The women are the birds of passage who most go back; for they are loyal to their kinsmen, to their home and their traditions, not having been long enough in America to prize the great privileges of womanhood here.

The children are most loath to return; especially those who have gone to school here and who in their migrations to and fro, have learned the difference.

Anushka, a bright twelve year old girl goes from a Pennsylvania town, to the Frenczin district in Hungary. She is dressed “American fashion,” has gone to the public school and speaks English fairly well.

“Anushka moya, tell me, do you like to go back to Hungary?” and the little girl tells me: “No, siree. America is the best country. There we have white bread and butter and candy, and I can chew gum to beat the band;” and tears fill her eyes at the memory of the American luxuries which she has tasted. If she stays in her mountain village she will degenerate into the common life about her, and marry a peasant lad with whom she will hover between enough and starvation, all the days of her life. Yet she will never forget America, the white bread and butter, the candy and the chewing-gum.

In a little village in Hungary I know a woman who in her youth had tasted all these things and the freedom of life in Chicago. Now, although she has been married fifteen years and has lived away from America longer than that, she speaks with glowing eyes of the time when she lived on South Halstad Street, ate thin bread with thick jam on it, and the land was flowing with sausages, lager beer and chewing-gum.

Most blessed are the girls who have been in service in American families. They have learned English well, and also the ways of the American household. They have tasted of the spirit of Democracy which permeates our serving class, and when such an one returns to her native village she unsettles the relations of servant and mistress. Therefore, her coming is dreaded by the “Hausfrau” who has had one servant-girl through many years, paying her fifteen dollars a year and treating her like a beast. Shall I quote one of those mistresses? “What kind of country is that anyway, that America? These servant girls come back with gold teeth in their mouths, and with long dresses which sweep the streets, and with unbearable manners. They do not kiss our hands when they meet us, and when they speak of their mistress in America they speak of her as if they were her equals. When one of those girls comes home with her finery and her money, we are liable to lose every servant; and wages are going up fabulously.”

I met one of these servant-girls “with gold teeth in her mouth” after she had lived three years in America, and I found that she had acquired something besides gold teeth. She had learned to speak both German and English, she had manners which were refined, she had been uplifted by an American mistress out of her peasant life to a plane which women reach nowhere but in America, and she was the equal if not the superior, of any of the young women in her village, who had had the privilege of a common school education which had been denied to her, because of her lowly origin. It is true, she did sweep the streets with her long skirts; but she did it gracefully. She walked as the women on Fifth Avenue walk, and she shook hands with me after the most approved fashion.

The older women on the ship returned without any of these graces. They had been pining for the Fatherland, and in spite of the fact that one of them was going back to a half-starved country, she said: “In Chicago, you no can get any tink to eat.”

In a general way it may be said that it made a vast difference where and how the men had lived in America, as to whether they carried anything but American dollars back with them. Both the men and the women who had been in service in American homes showed the largest inheritance of our spirit; while those who lived in the congested foreign quarters had simply changed climates for a while, lost some robustness and a few native virtues, and gained a modest bank account.

Yet even among those I could notice changes and gains which cannot be tabulated and which at the first glance might be put down as losses; an indefinite something which has gone into their fibre for better or for worse. This was most crudely illustrated by a Ruthenian who had lived twenty-five years in America; eleven years in a coal mining district and the rest of the time in a New England manufacturing town. He told me about his aspirations for his son, who is “very smart and will not work with his hands.” He talked in Russian: “Yes, my son will be educated. I have money enough for that. I am stupid and must bear all sorts of things, but when a man is educated, he can raisovat helle as much as he wants.” The form in which he put the American phrase saves the necessity of writing it in dashes.

I have not yet seen a village in Hungary, Russia or Italy, to which any number of men has returned even after a short sojourn in America, without that community’s gaining in some ways at least. Better houses certainly were built, with more or less sanitary improvements according to the conditions under which the men or women have lived in America. It makes a vast difference whether the men have lived in mining camps or in the cities. Undoubtedly the peasant who has lived in a small American city where he could easily feel and touch its life brings home the greatest spirit of progress.

Agricultural conditions have improved rapidly in Hungary and Poland; business in not a few instances has been put upon an American basis, which means not only more efficiency, but strange as it may seem, more honesty; and the scale of living has risen wherever a large number of people has gone to and fro across the sea.

The steerage holds numbers who go back because they have not succeeded, and many who are broken in health, who have been burned by the fires, scalded by the steam and parched by our heat. Men and women with spirits broken, who are not going back, but crawling back into the shelter of the Old World home.

“O! panye,” cried one of those to whom I tried to minister: “it is an awful country! You don’t know whether they walk on their heads or on their feet; they do not stop to eat nor sleep, and they drive one as the water drives the village mill. They build a house one minute and tear it down the next; the cities grow like mushrooms and disappear like grass before a swarm of locusts. The air is black in the city where I lived; black as the inside of the chimney in my cabin, and the water they drink looks like cabbage soup. The cars go like a whirlwind over the Puszta (prairie) and I should rather stand among a thousand stampeding horses on the plains, than on one of those dreadful street corners. How terribly those whistles blow in the morning and how dark and dismal are those shops, where they eat up iron and men out of bowls as big as the barn of our ‘Pan’ (master). The heat outside burns and the heat inside blisters, and when it is cold it freezes the blood. No, no,” and he groaned in terror at the remembrance of it; “no more America for me. That’s all I have,” pointing to his scant clothing. “I am going back a beggar.”

Women too there are whose bodies and spirits are nearly broken; and they go back to wait for their release. Among these, there was one Bohemian woman from New York, whose hollow cough and glowing cheeks betrayed the arch destroyer at work. She was one of six thousand cigar makers employed by one firm, and she had laboured five years in that shop and rolled many thousands of cigars into shape. As she had to bite the end of every cigar, she swallowed much tobacco juice, and breathed in much tobacco dust. She had attained great proficiency and could earn twenty dollars a week; but she had ruined her health, had spent all her savings for medicine and now was going home to die. She was in that stage where hope had not left her, and she was bent on making the last great fight for life in the shelter of her “Matushka’s” love.

Two old genteel looking people always stood out from the coarse mass because they kept clean in spite of the odds against them in the steerage, and because they were always together. Up and down the slippery stairs they went, like two lovers. Even seasickness did not separate them and when the sun shone they were on deck, solemnly smiling back to heaven. They had left their all in America; their children were sleeping in the strange soil, and now they were going back to the little town in Austria from which they had gone thirty-seven years before. They felt too rich in one another to rail against their fate, and their complaint was as gentle as their pain was deep. They had come to America full and now they were going home empty; three sons and two daughters they had brought, and childless they were going back; but “The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away,” and they blessed the name of the Lord.

Those who had prospered in America, and they were the majority, carried home with them sums of money which in the aggregate, amounted, among 600, to four thousand dollars, which did not however represent all they had saved; for each week they had sent small sums to their homes, and the money sent from America to Austria and Italy has been a great economic factor in the life of those countries. The total sum must reach into many millions. Nor does this sum represent an entire loss to our country; for the more money there is in a Slav or Italian village the more and better cotton goods are bought. The daily diet contains more American lard, the household is likely to be enriched by an American sewing-machine, and the notes of the phonograph are “heard in the land,”--which too comes from America.

Perhaps the greatest gainers by this constant coming and going are the steamship companies, which for a comparatively large sum of money provide quarters that in a very short time become unfit for human beings. The thrifty passengers, and there are not a few of them, who believe that the steerage going to Europe is not so crowded as coming to America, and that they can risk travelling that way, are very much mistaken. Even moderately rough weather makes the unsheltered deck impossible; the nether decks of the ship become full of sickening odours and seasickness claims nearly all the passengers as victims. There is no escape; even on so large a ship as the _Kaiser Wilhelm II_ all must remain in their bunks. On my last trip I counted five bitter days when not one steerage passenger could go on deck, while the cabin passengers were travelling over comparatively quiet waters.

When the sea has become as smooth as a mill-pond the steerage passengers may venture out; 800 people, crowded in a small space, soon become acquainted and need not wait for an introduction. Less, much less than on the outward journey have the races kept themselves apart; it is true you may still discover groups of Slavs, Italians or Jews; but they have approached the gates of the Kingdom of God and you may find your brotherhoods made up of all the nations of the earth. I had around me a group of forty men who belonged to seventeen nationalities, to four faiths and to many stations in life; yet we felt ourselves bound to one another by a meagre knowledge of the English language and by our common experience in America. Most of these men felt themselves intensely American; and that was what held us together and in a measure separated us from the mass. For the majority of these birds of passage are not yet American, as the following instance will illustrate. In taking a rough census of the politics of the steerage, I asked one man: “How do you like President Roosevelt?” He replied: “I no know him. I guess he good man, I get my pay at shop; I work, I get pay, I guess that all right.” A few expressed both admiration for the President and loyalty to him, and hoped he would run for another term. They had opinions in politics and some even declared themselves neither Republicans nor Democrats, but “Inepenny.” My group of forty men, growing at the end of the journey to nearly fifty, were a loyal set, and an honest one.

Each of the men had earned the little money he had, by hard labour; not one of them by barter, and each had caught a glimpse of the higher life in America.

The Slavs were nearly all Democrats, the Italians were Republicans, and so were the Jews. There were six Social Democrats in the group, nearly evenly divided among the three races; and they were the best educated if not the most companionable of the number. The whole group was eager to know, and the questions asked were as pertinent as numerous. All of them expected to return to America before another year, and each of them will grow into the full stature of the American man.

The touch with the mass in the steerage can be but light; yet I have looked into the smiling faces of little children, I have played with the steerage boys and girls, I have talked with every one of the five hundred adult passengers in the steerage, and I can still say that usually all of them return with some blessing, with some wealth gained, and better for having been in America.

The boys and girls are more boisterous and self-assertive, while the men and women are less cringingly polite than they were. They have lost some things but have gained more; and I am convinced that the country in which they have toiled these years has been enriched by the price of their labour.

How far these birds of passage present an economic problem is at present difficult to determine. Those who remain form the greater problem, which is more than an economic one.

Sometimes crude, often very rough human material. To mould him is the problem, a problem too, not so difficult as many think.]

XXIV

IN THE SECOND CABIN

If the man who said, “Give me neither poverty nor riches” had been a modern globe trotter he might have added: “And when I cross the ocean let me travel neither in the first cabin nor in the steerage but in the second cabin.” That is if he cared more for the companionship of human beings than for the luxuries of modern life, and if he had not objected to the fact that the second cabin is located directly over the powerful driving gear of the ship.

Because of the latter fact one may experience a “continuous performance” of an earthquake without its disastrous results, and yet not without consequences which at the moment seem very serious. The second cabin does not lapse into the silence of the steerage nor into the dignity of the first cabin, but begins its noisy comradery immediately; being interrupted only, when the earthquake plays havoc with good nature, and resumed as soon as the appetite for food and drink returns.

The second cabin usually holds only one class; the class which has succeeded. It contains a sprinkling of native Americans, teachers and preachers, whose modest savings are to be spread thinly over Europe; its usual occupants are foreigners, who after a longer or shorter sojourn, return for a visit to the cradle home. The Hoboken saloon-keeper who was escorted by the band to the dock, and in whose honour it played “Lieb Vaterland magst ruhig sein,” is a typical second class passenger on a German ship; and his like in large numbers come from Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee and other cities made famous by their output of sparkling lager.

I discovered on this journey more than thirty dispensers of drink who were at the bar from morning until midnight, and doing exactly as they like their customers to do by them; drinking and getting drunk. The Hoboken saloon-keeper bore the typical name of August, and every one of the ship’s crew down to the smallest scullion, knew this famous August and delighted to bask in the uncertainty of his sunshine and to be the beneficiary of his spasmodic generosity. He was drunk from the moment he came on board the steamer until he left it, and in his melancholy moments confided in me, telling me the story of his life and the magnitude of his fortune. He was born in Bremerhaven, the terminus of that great ferry which begins at Hoboken. He boasted the friendship of the Commodore of the German Lloyd fleet, with whom he had gone to school, and the smoking room steward was called to assert this fact. “Steward, you k-know me?” “Yes, you’re August.” “D-do you know about C-Captain Schmidt?” “Yes, you sailed under him to South Africa.” “N-no, you f-fool; I went to school with him,” and obediently the steward repeated: “Yes, you went to school with him.” He told me the secrets of the liquor business, the misfortunes which had overtaken his boy who is following in his father’s footsteps, and is travelling towards delirium tremens at even a faster rate than this robust, convivial sailor. I tried my arts on August, painting in wonderful colours the glories of the Mecca of his pilgrimage, that I might keep him from drinking himself to death with beer before he saw his Fatherland. And I succeeded; for when I saw August of Hoboken again, he was drinking whiskey.

Poles, Bohemians and Slovaks all travelled in the second cabin; but invariably they were saloon-keepers and displayed the demoralizing tendencies of their business to their full extent.

The first days of this journey were made memorable by the noisy behaviour of two Polish priests who were constantly mixing whiskey with beer, and who rose to a spiritual ecstasy which was both unpriestly and ungentlemanly. Among the many priests who were on board, but few were priests in the true sense of the word, the others bringing disgrace upon their calling and upon their Church. In spite of the fact that the steerage was full of their kindred and people of their faith, not a priest found his way to that neglected quarter. As a rule they were busier at the bar than at their prayers, a fact which of course must not be charged to priests as a class; but the sooner the Church in America gets rid of most of its foreign born priests, especially those from Italy and the Slavic countries, and replaces them by Irish or Americans, the better for the Church and for our country.

Dividing the passengers according to their race, most of them were Jews from Hungary and Russia; and while still unmistakable Jews, they all bore marks of the new birth which had taken place. The Russian Jews in many cases were slovenly, obtrusively dressed and noisy; their Yiddish was tainted by bad English, but they were frugal, sober, and minded their own business.

One of the group which I had gathered around me was on his way to Palestine where his parents now live. His home is in a little Illinois town not far from Chicago. He began his career like many of his kind, by peddling. Now he owns a department store and allows himself the luxury of this long and expensive journey. He is leniently orthodox in his faith, has come close enough to his Gentile neighbours to have a glimpse of Christianity at its best, and has been completely permeated by the American spirit. His daughter is a high school graduate, plays the piano, gives receptions, dabbles in art, takes part in the Methodist Church fairs and on occasions sings in the church choir.

Such a close touch with American life was not vouchsafed to another Russian Jew in that group. He had lived in New York and had also gone through the long tutelage of hard bargaining and hard times. He too was going to Europe; but he went to buy diamonds, not to visit his relatives, and neither his past experience nor his vision was tinged by any idealism. He was money from the toes up, and in each pocket he carried some trinket, from fountain pens to diamond pins, which could be bought at a bargain.

The Hungarian Jews from “Little Hungary” had progressed most rapidly in becoming Americanized. They played poker from morning until night, could bluff with the true American “sang froid,” and swear at their ill luck; but that they had kept their Jewish shrewdness was shown by their leaving the game when the tide of luck was at its height. When they did not play poker they talked about the game of politics as played in New York, and they knew its ins and outs thoroughly. The higher and better note struck by Roosevelt and Jerome they had grasped in but a vague way; and that a man could be honest in politics was strange news to them, nor did they believe that President Roosevelt’s activities were without regard to his own profit in the game.

“Little Hungary” has been a bad political school and one need not be over apprehensive if he regards this poor political tutelage as one of the greatest problems connected with the influx of foreigners into our large cities. In speech and names these Hungarian Jews were almost completely metamorphosed, and their patriotism knew no bounds. On a certain day one of them dug out of the depths of his trunk a dozen or more American flags, with which he wanted us to parade up and down the ship to the notes of a patriotic air. Upon our refusal to do so he grew angry, saying: “Nice Americans you fas.”

In contrast to the steerage, the women in the second cabin appeared to have changed most, and among the younger women, the transformation seemed complete. I doubt that their clothing lacked the latest fashionable wrinkle; their physique had lost its robustness and they had gained in self-possession. I have noticed a very important difference in the behaviour of the second class coming from America and going there. The young women who go to America are more or less molested by the men, their language and behaviour one to the other is not always correct, and even the American girls have lost something of their dignity and reserve; but going to Europe the greatest propriety is observed, and although the young people have a good time together, the young women know how to take care of themselves, the men know better than to be obtrusively attentive, and if they try, they receive a rebuff from which they do not lightly recover.

The second cabin goes back richer not only in worldly goods but in conscious manhood and womanhood, in loftiness of ideals and above all else, pathetically grateful to the country which gave these gifts.

“I owe everything to America,” “I would give everything I own to America,” “It is God’s country,” are phrases from which I could not disentangle myself, so fervent and frequent were they. Some of these people have still a richer inheritance in the consciousness of having had a share in building up the country in which they have lived. Among these was a Jewish gentleman, Mr. K., who had in his possession letters from Christian people in his county, commending him to their friends abroad, praising his public spirit, his generosity towards the people of all faiths, and his uprightness in business. He was proud of the fact that he had voted for William McKinley when he ran for prosecuting attorney of his county, and that he had voted for him every time he ran for office. It is true that Mr. K. belonged to that class of Jews which came from Southern Germany and which is the best Jewish product that Europe has sent us; but his is not an isolated case, and nearly every county in America has produced such specimens coming from widely different portions of Europe.

But few Italians travel in the cabin; there were half a dozen who had reached that degree of prosperity, and they came from the South, had been engaged in the cotton business and were indulging in an European trip, while the product of their plantations was daily increasing in price. They were genteel, and quiet, and so well dressed and well groomed, that it came as a surprise to most of the passengers to find that they were Italians, and that they had risen from the “Dago” class. On them America has performed the miracle of transformation, in spite of its sordid instincts and its materialistic atmosphere; a miracle which art-filled Italy could not perform, a task before which both sculptor and painter are powerless.