THE IMMIGRANT TIDE
ITS EBB AND FLOW

EDWARD A. STEINER’S
Studies of Immigration

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THE
IMMIGRANT TIDE
ITS EBB AND FLOW

EDWARD A. STEINER
Professor in Grinnell College, Iowa
Author of “On the Trail of the Immigrant,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED

New York Chicago Toronto
Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1909, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

PREFACE

“PUT your hand on this cable,” the captain said; and a dozen hands grasped it before it sank back into the sea. Our fingers felt no thrill or shock, for we had touched only the incasing insulation. Then the captain told its length, stretching along the ocean’s depths, its weight and cost; but the figures falling upon our ears roused no emotions; for they gave no idea of the cable’s value to society.

On shore we were taken into a dark chamber and there saw flashes of light, which lived but a moment; yet each spark was a letter, holding some hidden meaning, revealing some vital truth. Here the imagination was stirred and the mighty significance of the cable comprehended.

There are two ways in which to reveal the import of those vital connections between the continents, as established by the immigration of European peoples to America. One way is to record its volume, measure its fluctuations, classify the different groups and statistically determine the value of this movement to them; to trace the effect upon its sources and its significance to the country which receives them.

The state of New York and the government of the United States, through their Immigrant Commissions, have attempted to do this from the statistical standpoint with material gathered by observers, more or less skilled. The difficulties involved in this method are very great, especially if the result is to furnish a test of the desirability of one race or nationality over another, or determine its value to our civilization. A race may be homogeneous in its historical or racial consciousness, but heterogeneous in its cultural development. This is true of the Slavs, the Latins and the Semitic peoples who make up the bulk of our immigrant population.

Not only is there a number of well defined racial groups, but each group needs to be sub-divided, and those subdivisions in turn have many divisions; for every mountainside has its own traditions and each valley holds different ideals. For instance: I know of one Slav village in Hungary in which illegitimacy is unknown; yet within two or three miles there is a village in which it is the rule rather than the exception. I know some villages in the Carpathians, so remote from civilization that the inhabitants have not yet learned how to make bread with yeast, and I know other villages in the same locality in which are culinary artists who make a cake having national fame.

A man may be a Polish peasant and be a semi-barbarian or he may be on the same cultural level as the German “bauer” at his best.

The statistical method is of value; but it must be exceedingly painstaking, and even then I doubt that it can serve in all cases the purpose for which it is intended.

I have therefore chosen the second, the interpretative method. It sees the sparks in the dark room, it interprets the flying flame and feels the influences on both sides of the sea. It crosses and recrosses the ocean with these human cables which bind together the continents; it listens to their stories and records them, hesitatingly draws conclusions and undogmatically tries to teach some lessons.

In the first part of my book I have tried to show the influences of the returned immigrant upon his peasant home and his social and national life. In the second part I interpret the relation of various races to our institutions, their attitude towards them and their influence upon them.

In all I have told, I have aspired to be an interpreter and not an enumerator; a mediator and not a critic; I have desired to create contacts and not divisions; to disarm prejudice and not give it new weapons.

In this book, as in all the others I have written, I am indebted to my wife; not only for doing all the tedious tasks such work involves, but also for inspiration and the creation of an atmosphere in which I could write in superlative terms of American ideals.

I wish to acknowledge the courtesy of the editors of the Outlook and the Review of Reviews in permitting me to reprint portions of this book.

I heartily thank the Y. M. C. A. of Pennsylvania and Mr. E. B. Buckalew, its efficient State Secretary, for the opportunity to gather material in that state and in Europe; the young men who made up the Pennsylvania Expedition for the Study of Immigration, who were helpful, joyous comrades, and the trustees of Grinnell College, Iowa, for a generous leave of absence.

E. A. S.

Grinnell, Iowa,
August, 1909.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

PART I
With the Outgoing Tide

I
“THEY THAT GO OUT IN SHIPS”

“DO really nice ladies smoke cigarettes, papa?” my young daughter asked of me perplexedly, awaiting an answer.

“No, I don’t think they do,” I replied hesitatingly, the passing of severe judgments not being much to my liking.

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

“No. Really nice ladies do not drink whiskey.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My name Tony.”

“Have you been a long time in America?”

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

“Where have you been?”

“Tshicago, Kansas, Eeleenoy, Oheeo.”

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

“Do you like America?”

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

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

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

“How long have you been in America?”

“Twelve years.” That accounts for the changed look.

“Where do you live?”

“In Connecticut. Among the Yankees.”

“Do you like the Yankees?”

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

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

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

“Don’t you get homesick for Neapoli in Pittsburg?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why is it not good?”

“The air ne dobre, the food ne dobre, the houses ne dobre.”

Nothing was good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s the real stuff,” he continued. “A genuine Yankee boy. Born on the East Side.”

“My! But he’s heavy!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sailor, that isn’t so!” Then she said: “Good-night.”

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

II
THE PRICE THEY PAY

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

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

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

“No,” replied the doctor; “what’s the use?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III
A MURDERER, MARY AND AN HONORARY DEGREE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s that bloke talkin’ about?” she asked, noisily chewing her candy.

“He has challenged me,” I answered.

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

Nevertheless, I accepted the challenge.

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

“Ain’t got no soap,” was the reply.

“Will you wash yourself if I furnish the soap?”

“Nop”—very decidedly—“no soap in mine.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emphatically and briefly Mary answered: “Sure.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, madam,” I replied, “I am an L. L. B.”

“What is that?” she inquired.

“Lover of Little Babies,” I answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV
REFLEX INFLUENCES

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

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

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

The customs officers had a sharpened vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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