Chapter IV: Part 4

I examined in detail the coloured glass of a fine "Reform Church" that I passed on the road. The windows were rather impressive. They were not representations of scenes in Holy Writ, they contained no pictures of saints or angels, of the Saviour, or of the Virgin. So they escaped the imputation of idolatry. They were just pictures of symbolical objects or of significant letters. Thus, one window was the bird and symbolised Freedom, another was an anchor and symbolised Hope, another was a crown and symbolised Eternal Life. In one window the letters C.E. were illuminated--meaning Christian Endeavour, I presume; on another window was the open Bible, symbolising the foundation of belief. In every case the whole window was stained, and the little symbolical picture was set against a brilliant background.

It was all in good taste, and was a pleasant ornament, which made the church look very attractive exteriorly. But it was a compromise with a spirit not its own. My explanation is, some one must have wanted chapels to put in stained glass. Some one now has a great interest in making them put in stained glass. He is the manufacturer of that commodity. He has put stained glass on the market in such a way that every church is bound to have it. And he has devised a way of not offending the rigorous Puritans. "What is wrong in coloured light?" said he. "Nothing. It is only what you use it for. We can use it to show the things in which we believe." If incense could be manufactured in such a way as to make millions of dollars it would find its way somehow into the chapels. I was walking one day with an itinerant preacher, a man who called himself "a creed smasher." He wanted to weld all creeds into one and unify the Church of Christ. "Think of commerce," said he, "already it has stopped the wars of the nations; in time it will calm the wars of the sects. If only the churches were corporations, and Methodists could hold shares in Roman Catholicism, and Roman Catholics in Methodism!"

Commerce is exerting an influence that cannot be withstood. To take another instance, it has provided America with rocking-chairs and porch-swings. Although the Americans are an extremely active people, much more so than the British, yet their houses are all full of rocking-chairs, and on their verandahs they have porch-swings and hammocks. The British have straight-backs.

The Americans did not all cry out with one voice for rocking-chairs and swings. The Pilgrim Fathers did not bring them over. The reason they have them lies in the fact that some manufacturer started making them for the few. Then ambition took possession of him and he said, "There's something in rocking-chairs. I'm going to turn them out on a large scale."

"But there aren't the customers to buy them," some one objected.

"Never mind, we'll make the customers. We'll put them to the people in such a way that they gotta buy. We'll make 'em feel there's going to be such an opportunity for buyin' 'em as never was and never will be again."

"You believe you'll succeed?"

"We'll make it so universal that if a man goes into a house and doesn't see a rocking-chair and a porch-swing he'll think, 'My Lord, they've had the brokers in!'"

So rocking-chairs and porch-swings came. So, many things have come to humanity--many worse things.

I had just written this note, for I have written most of my book by the road, when I heard the following interesting talk about the town of Benton, Pennsylvania. I was walking from Wilkes Barre to Williamsport, and Benton is on the way. It is a place that has had many fires lately.

"Ah reckon ah know wot cleared Benton out more'n fires."

"What's that?"

"Wy, otomobeeles; mortgaging their farms to get 'em. There's not much in Benton. You couldn't raise a hundred dollars. It's the agents and the boosters of the companies that are mos' to blame, no doubt, but they're fools all the same who buy otomobeeles when they cahn pay their bills at the stores."

"What agents?" I asked. "D'you mean commercial travellers?"

"No. The agents in the town. Every little town has a man, sometimes two or three men, who are agents for the companies who manufacture the cars; they are just like the insurance agents, and are always talking about their business, comparing makes of car, praising this one and that, and getting folks on to want them."

"I suppose the companies want to make the motor car a domestic necessity, a thing no one can do without," I remarked.

"You're right; they do and they will. They'll fix that in time, you betcher, we'll all be having them. Then when we cahn do without 'em they'll raise the prices on us. Already they've started it with the gasoline; there's plenty motor spirit in the world, but the company gets possession of it and regulates the prices. An' you cahn make an oto go without gasoline. They can put it on us every time."

I should say society at Benton was suffering very badly from the influence of depraved commercialism. Some years ago Miss Ida Tarbell exposed what has been called "The Arson Trust," a company formed for setting fire to insured establishments on a basis of 10 per cent profit on the spoil. Benton might have furnished her with some interesting examples. There have been so many fires in the little town of late that tramps are refused the shelter even of barns, as if their match-ends were responsible. On the Fourth of July three years ago half the town was burnt down. Last year in a gale the shirt factory was gutted; the workmen had banked the fire up for the night, and about twenty minutes after the last man had left the works there was an explosion, and the red coals were scattered over the wooden building. Two months ago a large house took fire, and just a week before I reached the settlement the large Presbyterian church was consumed. Indeed, as I came into the town I remarked with some surprise the charred walls and beams of the church, and read the pathetic printing on the stone of foundation, "This stone was laid in 1903."

I had an interesting account of the church from the wife of a farmer at whose house I stayed a night. The church had been insured for seventeen thousand dollars, and it was twelve thousand dollars in debt. The money borrowed was not secured on the church building, but on the personal estates of many people in the town. Consequently, several people were liable to be sold up if the money were not forthcoming. Two days before settling day the fire took place, and there was doubtless rejoicing in some hearts. The villagers had tried hard to make the place pay, they had even let a portion of the church building to be used as a bank! Bazaars had failed. The debt-raiser had tried "to put a revival over on to them," but had failed. The minister, not receiving his salary, had abandoned them, and at last the bare fact remained of the big white church and the big unpaid debt. Then occurred the providential fire.

But the insurance company would not pay the seventeen thousand dollars. The fire had taken place under suspicious circumstances, and it was said there would be a legal fight over it. The conflagration had occurred on the night of a school-opening meeting. Choice flowers had been sent from many houses in the town, and it was beautifully decorated. There was, however, nothing obviously inflammable in the church; it was built largely of brick and stone. But about an hour after the people had gone home the fire broke out. Next day it was found that the big Bible had been soaked in coal oil. Oiled newspaper was found, and it was alleged that the fire brigade would have saved the church, but that as fast as they put it out in front somebody else was lighting it up behind. Anyhow, the insurance company refused to pay the seventeen thousand dollars. But it cannot refuse absolutely; the advertisement of failure to pay would be too damaging--it will put up a new church instead! The Presbyterian church will be resurrected.

"I put Benton up against the world for fires," said my hostess. "For a small place, only a thousand people, I reckon there isn't its like."

For my part I felt sorry for the Bentonians, even for those who set the fire alight, supposing it was deliberately lighted. When commercial interest is the greatest thing in the world there are opportunities for a few men to feel themselves great and powerful, but that glory of mankind is far overbalanced by the occasions on which it causes man to be mean. Commercial tricks bring the holy spirit of man into disrepute. To find oneself mixed up in certain machinations is poignantly humiliating. We have all of us been wounded in that way ere now. The just pride of the soul has been offended, and we have thought how shameful a thing it was to have become mixed up in it at all, by _it_ meaning the world, the whole shady business, call it what you will.

As I went along from village to village in New York and Pennsylvania I was struck by the uniformity of the architecture. Every church and school and store and farmstead seemed standard size and "as supplied." There seemed to be a passion for having known units. Not only in architecture was this evident, but in every utensil, machine, carriage, dress of the people. It was evident in the people themselves. Americans have the name of being extremely conventional. I think that is because, under the present domination of the _commercial machine_, American boys and girls and men and women are all turned into standard sizes. If Americans have rigid principles of ethics it is because they believe all the parts of the great machine are standardised, and that when any one part wears out there must always be an accurately fitting other part ready to be fixed where the old one has fallen out. Personality itself is standardised; thus the tailor-priest advertises his wear, "Preserve your Personality in Clothes. Occasionally you have observed some article of wear that has led you to the mental conclusion--'That's my style--that's me.'"

It was strange to me to find that even tramps and outcasts, who fulfil little function in the machine, were expected to conform to type. I was stared at, questioned; my rough tweeds, so suitable to me, were an object of mirth; my action of washing my face and my teeth by the side of the road was a portentous aberration. I remember how astonished a motorist and his wife appeared when they came upon me in the act of drawing a pail of water for a thirsty calf one morning in Indiana. The temperature stood at ninety-five in the shade--all nature was parched, and as I came along the highway a calf, fastened by a chain to the steel netting of a field, came up and rubbed his nose on my knees. As calves don't usually take the initiative in this way, I concluded he expected me to do something for him. There was an empty pail beside him. I took it to the farmhouse pump and drew water. As I did so, the farmer and his wife drew up at the farm in their motor, and they looked at me curiously. The calf came bounding towards me and almost upset the pail in his eagerness to drink. Then he gulped down all the water, and whilst I went to draw another pailful he executed a sort of war-dance or joy-dance, throwing out his hind legs and bounding about in a way that testified his happiness. The farmer's wife broke silence:

"Wha' yer doing?"

"I'm giving the calf some water."

"Nao," said she, and looked at her husband, "giving the calf some water, can--you--beat--that?"

I gave the calf his second bucketful and then started off down the way again, and the farmer and his wife looked after me in blank surprise. In America no tramp has any compassion for thirsty calves, he is not expected to look after the thirst of any one but himself. The farmer and his wife looked at one another, and their eyes seemed to say, "But tramps don't do these things!"

Thence it may be surmised that America is no place for individuals as such. Originality is a sin. Americans hate to give an individual special attention, special notice. Even personal salvation is merged in mass salvation. The revivalist, his press agents, and stewards are a means of wholesale salvation. A revival meeting is a machine for saving souls on a large scale. It might be thought that the revivalist himself took his stand as an exceptional individual. Not at all: he is only a type. American public opinion does not allow a man to stand out as superior. It is surprising the dearth of noble men in the popular estimate of to-day. Mockery follows on the heels of noble action or individual action, and reduces it to type. That is a great function of the American Press of to-day, the defaming of men of originality and the explaining away of noble action. I remember a conversation I heard at Cleveland. Roosevelt had just cleared himself of the press libel of drunkenness.

"Wasn't it a good thing to clear the air, so," said one man, "and get clear of the charge once for all?"

"I don't think he got clear of it," said the other. "It's all very well to bring an action against the editor of a provincial paper, but why didn't he take up the cudgels against one of the powerful New York journals, who said the same thing? They had money and could have defended their case."

"I don't think money was needed--except to buy evidence."

"If you ask me," said the other, "it was all a very shrewd electioneering dodge. Roosevelt is an expert politician. He knows the value of being in the limelight, and he knows that nothing will fetch more votes in the United States just now than a reputation for sobriety. He was just boosting himself and the home products."

That is a fair example of the way people think of striking personalities and original views.

Then every man is considered a booster. Boosting is accepted as a national and individual function. Towns are placarded: "Boost for your own city and its own industries. Make a habit of it." In Oil City, for instance, I found in every shop a ticket announcing "Booster Week June 9-16." In that week Oil City was going to do all it could to call attention to itself. Citizens would pledge themselves to speak of Oil City to strangers in the train and when on visits to other towns. The city of Newark, New Jersey, is always recommending its own people and visitors to "Think of Newark." Whenever you enter into conversation with an American you find him suddenly drifting towards telling you the name of a hotel to stay at, or of an establishment where they sell "dandy cream," or he is praising the bricks turned out by the local brick works, or the conditions of the employment of labour in some silk works on which his native town is dependent for prosperity. In a widely distributed "Creed of the American" I read, "I remember always that I am a booster." Even fathers refer to their new-born babies as "little boosters." It should be remembered when Americans are boasting of their native land and its institutions that they were cradled in boosting. It is a habit that in many ways has profited America. It has attracted the emigrant more than all that has ever been printed about it. It is a great commercial habit. But it is in the end degrading.

What is the name of the fairy who has muttered an incantation over the Pilgrim Father and changed him into a booster? And is a booster only a Pilgrim Father who brags about the stuff he manufactures?

It seemed to me that by substituting the idea _booster_ for the idea _man_ you get rid of so many of the weaknesses of flesh and blood. A man who is boosting day in and day out, using his tongue as a sort of living stores' catalogue, is necessarily loyal to the great machine. But loyalty to the machine has its dangers. On my journey to Chicago I made some interesting observations in Natural History. I got into the train at Franklin to go to Oil City, some five or six urban miles. What was my astonishment to see that each of the eight or nine passengers in my car had fixed their railway tickets in the ribbons of their hats, and they themselves were deep in their newspapers. The conductor came along and took the tickets from their hats and examined them, collected those that were due to be given up and punched those that were not, and stuck them back in the ribbons of the hats, the wearers reading their newspapers all the time and making not the slightest sign that they noticed what the conductor was doing. The only sign of consciousness I observed was a sort of subtle pleasure in acting so--the sort of mild pleasure which suffuses the faces of lunatics when they are humoured by visitors to the asylum. They were shamming that they were machinery, and in almost the same style as the man who is under the delusion that he is a teapot, one arm being his spout and the other his handle.

Thus the elevator man in the Department Store also thinks himself a bit of machinery. He seems to be trained to act mechanically, and never to alter the staccato patter that comes from his mouth at each floor. He speaks like a human phonograph.

Then all waiters, shop-attendants, barbers, and the like try to behave like manikins. Most of all, in the language of Americans is the mechanical obsession apparent. A man who is confined in a hospital writes: "I'm _holding down a bed_ in the hospital over here." The man who meets another and brings him along, simply "collects" him in America. The baseball team that beats another 6-0 "slips a six-nothing defeat" on them. Especially in baseball reports, commercialism and rhythms heard in great "works" abound.

The influence of great machinery gets to the heart of the people. A man when he joins a gang of workmen is taught to co-operate; he has to trim off any original or personal way of doing things, and fit in with the rest of the gang. When the gang is going mechanically and easily, a man quicker than the rest is taken as leader, and the speed of the work is raised. The mechanical action in each individual is intensified, is perfected. Cinematograph films are even taken of gangs at work; the pictures are shown before experts, who indicate weak points, recommend discharges or alterations and show how the gangs can be reconstituted to work more smoothly. Each man is drilled to act like a machine, and the drilling enters into the fibre of his being to such an extent that when work is over his muscles move habitually in certain directions, and the rhythm of his day's labour controls his language and his thought.

In the factory it is the same. In a vast mechanical contrivance there is just one thing that machinery cannot do; so between two immense complicated engines it is necessary to place a human link. A man goes there, and flesh and blood is grafted into steel and oil. The man performs his function all day, but he also senses the great machine in his mind and his soul; and when he goes out to vote for his President, or talk to men and women about the world in which he lives, he does so more as a standardised bit of mechanism, than as a tender human being.

Alas, for the men and women who wear out and cease to be serviceable! They are the old iron, and their place is the scrap-heap. "White trash" is the name by which they go.

Bernard Shaw, and indeed many others, look forward to the diminution of toil by machinery. The minimising of toil is to them a great blessing. Because machinery lessens toil they are on the side of machinery. Meanwhile life shows a paradox. The Russian peasant who works without machines toils less than the American who takes advantage of every invention. The Russian emigrant who comes to America simply does not know what work is, and he stares in amazement at the angry foreman who tells him, when he is at it at his hardest, to "get a move on yer."

In America the Americans slave; they slave for dollars, for more business, for advancement, but in the end for dollars only, I suppose. They will fill up any odd moment with some work that will bring in money. They will make others work, and take the last ounce of energy out of their employees. The machine itself is the size of America, and only in little nooks and corners can anything spring up that is not of the machine. Even millionaires know nothing more to do than to go on making millions. Yet there is not a feverish anxiety to get money. Losses are borne with equanimity. It's just a matter of "the apple tree's loaded with fruit. I'm going up to get another apple."

Present experience shows that machinery increases the toil of mankind. It need not increase it, but it does. It might diminish it, but there are many reasons why it does not. For one thing, it increases the standard of living. It makes rocking-chairs, porch-swings, automobiles, and the like indispensable things. First, machinery makes the things, then the things make the machinery duplicate themselves. So it raises the standard of living and increases the toil of mankind. It is going on increasing the standard of living for the rich, for the middle-class aping the rich, and for the working men aping the middle-class.

Is it good, then, that the standard of living is being raised? Well, no; because the standard of living now means the standard of luxury. I should have used that phrase from the beginning.

I said this to a man on the road, and he asked me what I thought a man should live for, but I could not answer him. Each man has his individual destiny to fulfil. Destiny is not a matter of the clothes you wear or of the cushions you sit upon. The beggar pilgrim going in rags to Jerusalem may be more happy than a Pierpont Morgan, who writes pathetically at the head of the bequest of his millions that he believes in the blood of Jesus.

One thing I noted in America, that the blossom of religion seems to have been pressed between Bible leaves, withered and dried long ago. What is called religion is a sort of ethical rampage. The descendants of the Puritans are "probing sin" and "whipping vice." The rich are signing cheques, the hospitals are receiving cheques. The women of the upper classes are visiting the poor and adopting the waifs. But seldom did I come in contact with a man or a woman who stood in humble relation to God or the mystery of life. Even the great passion to put things right, lift the masses, stop corruption, and build beautiful cities and states is begotten in the sureness of science rather than in the fear of the Lord. Far from fearing God, preachers announce from their pulpits that they are "working with Him," or "co-operating with the inevitable tendencies of the world," or "hastening on the work of evolution." For my part I believe that it is my sacred due to my brother that he be given an opportunity of facing this world, the mystery of its beauty and of his life upon it, that he find out God for himself and learn to pray to Him. But that is at once Eastern and personal.

The Y.M.C.A. informs me as I sit in a car that "The great asset of this town is the young men of this town." Must it be put that way? Is that the only way in which the people of the town can be got to understand how wonderful is the life and promise of any young man, how tender and gentle and lovable he is personally, how unformed, how fresh from his mother and his Creator?

As I go along the road I pick up tracts, sown by the devil, I suppose. Here is one of them:

Verily I say unto you that each and every one of you may be a
Count of Monte Christo, and some day exclaim, "The World is mine!"

The world was made for you, that I know. That you were made for
the world goes without saying.

Therefore hear me and believe me. If you desire wealth it _can_ be
yours. If you desire _fame_ it can be yours.

But you cannot get something for nothing. You must pay for
everything worth having. You must pay the price set upon it, and
in the coin of the realm.

The coin of the realm is industry--just that. Industry and only
industry. Nothing but industry.

Poor immigrant, who thinks it would be grand to be a Count of Monte Christo, or, to bring it nearer home, a John D. Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie, and who thinks that honest labour will take him there! Even were American success a thing worth striving for it is not won by that means. It is a game of halma. It's not the man who moves all his pieces out one square at a time who wins, but the sagacious player who knows both to plan in advance and to hop over others when the opportunity arises.

But the good American young man, "the greatest asset of the town," believes this gospel, and he gives his body and mind to the great machine, and fills the gap between two otherwise disconnected mechanisms. If he has been brought up "well," he just fits the gap and is standard size. He feels in his soul every throb of the engines, and registers in his integuments every rhythm and rhyme of the great, accurate, definite, circulating, oscillating machine. He behaves like a machine in his leisure hours. He even dances like a mechanical contrivance. On none of the occasions when the Fatherland requires his sober human judgment can he stand as a man. He seems spoilt for the true citizenship. What he does understand is the improvement, adjustment, and significance of machinery, and he can look intelligently at America the Great Machine. Perhaps this is his function whilst America is realising the dream of materialism and progress. But America would take care of itself if the American were all right. I could not but have that opinion as I left the cities and walked through the rich country, the new world, as yet scarcely visibly shopsoiled by commercialism.

VII

RUSSIANS AND SLAVS AT SCRANTON

I came into Forest City along a road made of coal-dust. A black by-path led off to the right down a long gradual slope, and was lost among the culm-heaps of a devastated country side. Miners with sooty faces and heavy coal-dusty moustaches came up in ones and twos and threes, wearing old peak-hats, from the centre of the front of which rose their black nine-inch lamps looking like cockades. They carried large tarnished "grub-cans," they wore old cotton blouses, and showed by unbuttoned buttons their packed, muscular bodies. Shuffling forward up the hill they looked like a different race of men--these divers of the earth. And they were nearly all Russians or Lithuanians or Slavs of one kind or another.

"Mostly foreigners here," said I to an American whom I overtook.

"You can go into that saloon among the crowd and not hear a word of white the whole night," he replied.

I addressed a collier in English.

"Are you an American?"

"No speak English," he replied, and frowned.

"From Russia?" I inquired, in his own tongue.

"And you from where?" he asked with a smile. "Are you looking for a job?"

But before I could answer he sped away to meet a trolly that was just whizzing along to a stopping-place. Presently I myself got into a car and watched in rapid procession the suburbs of Carbondale and Scranton. Black-faced miners waited in knots at the stations all along the road. I read on many rocks and railings the scrawled advertisement, "Buy diamonds from Scurry." Girls crowded into the car from the emptying silk-mills, and they were in slashed skirts, some of them, and all in loud colours, and over-decorated with frills, ribbons, and shoddy jewellery. We came to dreary Iceville, all little grey houses in the shadow of an immense slack mountain. We came into the fumes of Carbondale, where the mines have been on fire ten years; we got glimpses of the far, beautiful hills and the tender green of spring woods set against the soft darkness of abundant mountains. We dived into wretched purlieus where the frame-buildings seemed like flotsam that had drifted together into ridges on the bending earth. We saw dainty little wooden churches with green and yellow domes, the worshipping places of Orthodox Greeks, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and at every turn of the road saw the broad-faced, cavernous-eyed men and the bright-eyed, full-bosomed women of the Slavish nations. I realised that I had reached the barracks of a portion of America's great army of industrial mercenaries.

I stayed three days at Casey's Hotel in Scranton, and slept nights under a roof once more, after many under the stars. I suppose there was a journalist in the foyer of the hotel, for next morning, when I opened one of the local papers, I read the following impression of my arrival:

With an Alpine rucksack strapped to his back, his shoes thick with
coal-dust, and a slouch hat pulled down on all sides to shut out
the sun, a tall, raw-boned stranger walked up Lackawanna Avenue
yesterday afternoon, walked into the rotunda of the Hotel Casey
and actually obtained a room.

Every paper told that I was an Englishman specially interested in Russians and the America of the immigrant. So I needed no further introduction to the people of the town.

Just as I was going into the breakfast-room a bright boy came up to me and asked me in Russian if I were Stephen Graham. "My name is Kuzma," said he. "I am a Little Russian. I read you wanted to know about the Russians here, so I came along to see you."

"Come and have breakfast," said I.

We sat down at a table for two, and considered each a delicately printed sheet entitled, "Some suggestions for your breakfast." Kuzma was thrilled to sit in such a place; he had never been inside the hotel before. It was pretty daring of him to come and seek me there. But Russians are like that, and America is a free country.

As we had our grape-fruit and our coffee and banana cream and various other "suggestions," Kuzma told me his story. He was a Little Russian, or rather a Red Russian or Ruthenian, and came from Galicia. Three years previously he had arrived in New York and found a job as dish-washer at a restaurant, after three months of that he progressed to being bottle-washer at a druggist's, then he became ice-carrier at a hotel. Then another friendly Ruthenian introduced him to a Polish estate agent, who was doing a large business in selling farms to Polish immigrants. As Kuzma knew half a dozen Slavonic dialects the Pole took him away from New York, and sat him in his office at Scranton, putting him into smart American attire, and making a citizen out of a "Kike." I should say for the benefit of English readers that illiterate Russians and Russian Jews are called Kikes, illiterate Italians are "Wops," Hungarians are "Hunkies." These are rather terms of contempt, and the immigrant is happy when he can speak and understand and answer in English, and so can take his stand as an American. After six months' clerking and interpreting Kuzma began to do a little business on his own account, and actually learned how to deal in real estate and sell to his brother Slavs at a profit.

Kuzma, as he sat before me at breakfast, was a bright, well-dressed business American. You'd never guess that but three years before he had entered the New World and taken a job as dish-washer. He had seized the opportunity.

"You're a rich man now?" said I.

"So-so. Richer than I could ever be in Galicia. I'm learning English at the High School here, and when I pass my examination I shall begin to do well."

"You are studying?"

"I do a composition every day, on any subject, sometimes I write a little story. I try to write my life for the teacher, but he says I am too ambitious."

"Do you love your Ruthenian brothers and sisters here?"

"No; I prefer the Great Russians."

"You're a very handsome young man. I expect you've got a young lady in your mind now. Is she an American, or one of your own people? Does she live here, or did you leave her away over there, in Europe?"

"I don't think of them. I shall, however, marry a Russian girl."

"Have you many friends here?"

"Very many."

"You will take me to them?"

"Oh yes, with pleasure."

"And where shall we go first? It is Sunday morning. Shall we go to church?"

We left the hotel and went to a large Baptist chapel. When we arrived there we found the whole congregation engaged in Bible study. The people were divided into three sections,--Russians, Ruthenians, Poles. Russians sat together, Ruthenians and Little Russians together, and Poles together. I was most heartily welcomed, and took a place among the circle of Russians, Kuzma being admitted there also, though by rights he should have gone to the other Ruthenians. He was evidently a favourite.

We took the forty-second chapter of Genesis, reading aloud the first verse in Russian, the second in Ruthenian, and the third in Polish. When that was accomplished we prayed in Ruthenian, then we listened to an evangelical sermon in Russian, and then sang, "Nearer, my God, to Thee!" in the same manner as we had read the chapter of Genesis--first verse in Russian, second in Ruthenian, third in Polish. It was strange to find myself singing with Kuzma:

Do Ciebie Boze moj!
Przyblizam sie.

I have never seen Poles and Ruthenians and Russians so happy together as in this chapel, and indeed in America generally. In Russia they more or less detest one another. They are certainly of different faiths, and they do not care about one another's language. But here there is a real Pan-Slavism. It will hold the Slavic peoples together a long time, and separate them from other Americans. Still there are not many cities in the United States resembling Scranton ethnologically. The wandering Slav when he moves to another city is generally obliged to go to a chapel where only English is spoken, and he strains his mind and his emotions to comprehend the American spirit.

After the hymn the congregation divided into classes, and talked about the Sermon on the Mount, and to me they were like very earnest children at a Sunday School. I was able to look round. There were few women in the place; nearly all of us were working men, miners whose wan faces peered out from the grime that showed the limit of their washing. At least half the men were suffering from blood-poisoning caused by coal bruises, and their foreheads and temples showed dents and discolorations. They had been "up against it." They would not have been marked that way in Russia, but I don't think they grudged anything to America. They had smiles on their lips and warmth in their eyes; they were very much alive. "Tough fellows, these Russians," wrote Gorky. "Pound them to bits and they'll come up smiling."

They were nearly all peasants who had been Orthodox, but had been "converted"; they were strictly abstinent; they sighed for Russia, but they were proud to feel themselves part of the great Baptist community, and knit to America by religious ties. None of them entirely approved of Scranton. They felt that a mining town was worse than anything they had come from in Russia, but they were glad of the high wages they obtained, and were saving up either to go back to Russia and buy land or to buy land in America. They craved to settle on the land again.

It seemed to me Kuzma's business of agent for real estate among the Slavs was likely to prove a very profitable one. I shall come back to Scranton one day and find him a millionaire. He evidently had the business instinct--an example of the Slav who does not want the land again. The fact that he sought me out showed that he was on the _qui vive_ in life.

When the service was concluded we went over the church with a young Russian who had fled to America to escape conscription, and who averred that he would never go back to his own country. His nose was broken, and of a peculiar blue hue, owing to blood-poisoning. His finger-nails were cut short to the quick, but even so, the coal-dust was deep between the flesh and the nail. He was most cordial, his handshake was something to remember, even to rue a little. He had been one of those who took the collection, and he emptied the money on to a table--a clatter of cents and nickels. He showed us with much edification the big bath behind the pulpit where the converted miners upon occasion walked the plank to the songs of fellow-worshippers. They were no doubt attracted by the holiness of water, considering the dirt in which they lived.

"He is a Socialist," said Kuzma, as we went away to have lunch. "A Socialist and a Baptist as well. He has a Socialist gathering in the afternoon and Russian tea and speeches, and he wants me to go. But they hold there should be no private property. I want private property. I want to travel and to have books of my own, so I can't call myself a Socialist."

In the afternoon Kuzma took me to the Public Library and showed me its resources. In the evening we went to supper at the house of a dear old Slovak lady, who had come from Hungary on a visit thirty years ago, and had never returned to her native land. She had been courted and won and married within three weeks of her arrival--her husband a rich Galician Slav. Now she was a widow, and had three or four daughters, who were so American you'd never suspect their foreign parentage.

She told me of the many Austrian and Hungarian Slavs in Pennsylvania, and gave it as her opinion that whenever a political party was badly worsted in south-eastern Europe the beaten wanted to emigrate _en bloc_ to the land of freedom. When they came over they held to the national traditions and discussed national happenings for a while, but they gradually forgot, and seldom went back to the European imbroglio.

A touching thing about this lady's house was a ruined chapel I found on the lawn--a broken-down wooden hut with a cross above it, built when the Slav tradition had been strong, and used then to pray in before the Ikon, but now only accommodating the spade and the rake and a garden-roller.

We had a long talk, partly in Russian, partly in English--the old lady had forgotten the one and only knew the other badly. So it was a strange conversation, but very informing and pleasant.

Slavs always talk of human, interesting things.

Kuzma was very happy, having spent a long day with an Englishman whose name had been in the newspaper. We walked back to the hotel, and for a memory he took away with him a newspaper-cutting of a review of one of my books and a portrait of the tramp himself.

Next day, through the kindness of a young American whom I had met the week before entirely by chance, I was enabled to go down one of the coal-mines of Scranton, and see the place where the men work. The whole of the city is undermined, and during the daytime there are more men under Scranton than above it.

I was put into the charge of a very intelligent Welshman, who was a foreman, and we stepped into the cage and shot down the black shaft through a blizzard of coal-dust, crouching because the cage was so small, and holding on to a grimy steel bar to steady ourselves in the swift descent. In a few seconds we reached the foot--a place where there was ceaseless drip of water on glistening coal--and we walked out into the gloom.

Black men were moving about with flaming lamps at their heads, electric cars came whizzing out of the darkness, drawing trucks of coal. Whole trucks were elevated in the opposite shaft from that in which we had descended, elevated to the pit-mouth with a roar and a rush and a scattering of lumps of coal. I gained a lively realisation of one way in which it is possible to get a coal-bruise.

My guide showed me a map of the mine, and we went along dark tunnels to the telephone cavern, and were enabled to give greeting to miners as far as three miles away underground. Every man working in the mine was in telephonic communication with the pit-mouth. I saw the men at work, watched small trucks of coal being drawn by asses to the main line where the train was made up. I talked with Poles, Ruthenians, Russians--actually meeting underground several of those whom I had seen the day before in the Baptist Chapel. They were all very cheerful, and smiled as they worked with their picks. Some were miners, some labourers. The miner directs the blasting and drilling, puts in the powder and blows out the coal; the labourer works with pick and shovel. A man has to serve two years in a mine as a labourer before he can be a miner. Even a British immigrant, who has worked in South Wales or Northumberland or elsewhere, has to serve his term as a labourer. This discourages British men. Scranton used to be almost entirely Welsh; but it goes against the grain in an English-speaking man to fetch and carry for a Slovak or a Pole. On the other hand, this rule safeguards American strikers against imported miners.

After I had wandered about the mine a while I went up to the "Breaker's" tower, to the top of which each truck of coal was hoisted by the elevator; and I watched the fanning and screening and guiding and sifting of this wonderful machine, which in collaboration with the force of gravity can sort a ton of coal a second. I talked with Polish boys sitting in the stream of the rolling, hurrying coal; their task was to pick out bits of slate and ore; and I watched the platemen splitting lumps of coal with their long-handled hammers, and casting out the impurities. I saw the wee washhouse where the collier may bathe if he wish.

"Well, America or Russia, which is it?" I asked of almost every Russian I met. "Which do you prefer? Are you Americans now or Russians?"

And nearly all replied, "America; we will be Americans. What does one get in Russia?--fifty cents a day."[2] Only a few said that America was bad, that the mining was dangerous and degrading. Strange to say, the astonishment at America's wealth and the wages they get from her had not died away. They admired America for the wages she gave; not for the things for which the people of culture in the great cities admire her. America gave them money, the power to buy land, the power to buy low pleasures, the power to get back to Russia, or to journey onward to some other country--to the Argentine or to Canada.

I then spent a day visiting people at random. I went into Police Station No. 4, and found Sergeant Goerlitz sitting at a desk reading his morning paper, and he was very ready to talk to me. From him I gathered that the Slavs were the best citizens--quiet, industrious, and law-abiding. By Slavs he meant Huns, Bulgarians, Galicians, Ruthenians. The Russians were vulgar and pushing. He probably meant Russian Jews and Russians. The Italians were the most dangerous people; they committed most crimes, and never gave one another away to the police. The Poles and Jews were the most successful people.

I went to the house of a communicative, broad-nosed, broad-lipped little Ruthenian priest--an Austrian subject--and he told me that Russia could take India whenever she wanted to, America could take Canada, and that Germany would break our naval power. But the English would still be the greatest people in the world. In the near future the whole of North America would be one empire, and the whole of South America another--one Anglo-Saxon, the other Latin. He was evidently a student of contemporary possibilities. Despite his belief in America he was proud of his own nationality, and jealous of the loss of any of his flock. To his church there came three hundred Little Russians and about thirty Great Russians. He reckoned there were fifty families in Scranton purely Nihilist--by that he meant atheistic and pleasure-seeking. At his church the service was in Slavonic and the sermon in Ruthenian. He was sorry to say there were comparatively few marriages. People came to the town to make money rather than to live.

Then I went to the official Russian priest, away on Division Street. He shepherded one hundred and thirty-seven families, and four hundred and sixty-two unmarried people. His church had been burned down the year before, but had sprung up again immediately. Some of the congregation had succeeded in business, and having come as poor colonists were now rich and respected citizens, professional men, large storekeepers, responsible clerks. Scranton was more like a Russian city than an American, and it was possible to flourish as a lawyer or a doctor or an estate agent although you knew very little of the English language. And out in the country round about were many Russian farms with real Russian peasants on them; and he spent many weeks in the year travelling about in the rural districts giving the consolation of Orthodoxy to the faithful.

A pathetic thing happened whilst I was taking leave of the priest; a young workman came in to ask advice, and in salutation he took the priest's hand to kiss it, but the latter was ashamed to receive that homage before me, and so tried to pull his hand away. Despite the churchman's enthusiastic account of his work I felt that little action was symbolical of the ebb-tide. It was to me as if I had looked at the sea of faith, and said, "The tide is just turning."

I visited the Y.M.C.A., so important an institution in America, giving a good room for fifty cents a day, and having its club-rooms, its swimming-baths, its classes for learning English. It wanted to raise seventeen thousand dollars in the forthcoming week, and many posters reminded passers-by that Scranton's greatest asset was not its coal or its factories or its shops, its buildings, its business, but its young men.

I walked the many streets at evening time when the wild crowd was surging in and out of the cinema houses and the saloons, and heard the American chaff and music-hall catch-words mixed with half a dozen Slavonic dialects. A young American engineer took me to several resorts, and initiated me in the mysteries of bull-dogs and fizzes, and as we went along the street he gave a running comment on the gaudily attired girls of the town, which he classified as "pick-ups," "chickens," and the like. At ten o'clock at night the streets were full of mirth, and all given over to sweethearting and flirting. Scranton's safety lies in the interest which the people have in one another, their sociability and general disposition to talk and hope. What it would be like if all these foreign mercenaries were mirthless and brutal it would be loathsome to picture. But I was surprised to find such lightness, such Southern frivolity in the people. It is strange that a people, most of whom are working all day in darkness, should take life so gaily. Even when they come up to the air of the outside world it is a bad air that is theirs, vitiated by the fumes of the burning mines; for at Scranton also the coal has been on fire ten years, and the smoke rolls from the slag-coloured wastes in volumes, and diffuses itself into the general atmosphere. One would think that the wretched frame-dwellings, ruined by the subsidence of the ground on which they were built, and begrimed with the smoke which factories belch all day, would disgust humanity. But it seems the man who works in dirt and ruin accepts dirt and disorder as something not wrong in themselves, quite tolerable, something even to be desired, a condition of freedom.

One day I met a young reporter, who was also a poet, and he took me to a point where there was a view of the city which he specially admired. It was a grey day--surely all days there are grey. We looked to the ridge of the West Mountain, a long dark wall built up to the sky, and many-roofed Scranton lay below it; the thin spires of many conventicles pointed upward, and from numberless chimneys and spouts proceeded hardly moving white steams and smokes, all in strange curls and twists. Here and there were black chutes and shafts and mountains of slag, and the slates of the roofs of the houses glimmered appallingly under the wanness and darkening dusty grey of the sky.

"This sight does my heart good," said the poet. "It's good to live in a place like this where we're doing something."

"It would be a beautiful place if there were no Scranton here at all," I ventured.

"That's the glory of it," said he. "We have the faith to smash up the beauty of Nature in the hope of getting something better. It would be a beautiful world entirely if there were no such thing as man. Nature's beauty has no need of us. But we happen to be here. We have something in us that Nature could never think of. Scranton expresses man's passion more truly than the virginal beauty of the Alleghany mountains or the valley of the young Susquehanna."

"A revolt against Eden," said I, "a fixed sullenness, man's determination to live in grime if he wants to--the children's infatuation for playing with the dirt."

"Oh, more than that," said the reporter poet. "Much more."

Perhaps.

That was perhaps a glimpse of the religion of America.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] Fifty cents a day is very good pay for a miner in Russia, thirty cents is quite a common wage.

VIII

AMERICAN HOSPITALITY

It is possible to distinguish two sorts of hospitality, one which is given to a person because of his introductions, and the other which is given to the person who has no introductions, the one given on the strength of a man's importance, the other on the strength of the common love of mankind. America is rich in the one species, she is not so rich in the other.

There is no country in the world where an introduction helps you more than in the United States. In this respect how vastly more hospitable the Americans are than the British! It is wonderful the extent to which an American will put himself to trouble in order to help a properly introduced visitor to see America. It is a real hospitality, and it springs from a great belief in America and in the American people, and a realisation of the fact that if nation and individuals are to co-operate to do things in the world, they must unbend and think of others beside themselves.

To me, in the literary and artistic clubs of New York, in the city institutions and schools, in the houses of the rich and cultured, and in the homes of the poor, America breathed kindness. New York seemed to me more friendly and hospitable than any other great city I had lived in. There also, as in Russia, one person came out and took me by the hand, and was America to me.