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[Illustration: _From stereograph copyright--1904, by Underwood &
Underwood, N. Y._

AT THE GATE

With tickets fastened to coats and dresses, the immigrants pass out
through the gate to enter into their new inheritance, and become our
fellow citizens.]




ON THE TRAIL

OF

THE IMMIGRANT

EDWARD A. STEINER'S

Studies of Immigration

_From Alien to Citizen_

The Story of My Life in America
Illustrated      net $1.50

In this interesting autobiography we see Professor Steiner
pressing ever forward and upward to a position of international
opportunity and influence.

_The wonderful varied Life-story of the author of
"On the Trail of the Immigrant."_

_The Broken Wall_

Stories of the Mingling Folk.
Illustrated      net $1.00

"A big heart and a sense of humor go a long way toward making
a good book. Dr. Edward A. Steiner has both these qualifications
and a knowledge of immigrants' traits and character."

--_Outlook._

_Against the Current_

Simple Chapters from a Complex Life.
12mo, cloth      net $1.25

"As frank a bit of autobiography as has been published for
many a year. The author has for a long time made a close
study of the problems of immigration, and makes a strong
appeal to the reader."--_The Living Age._

_The Immigrant Tide--Its Ebb and Flow_
Illustrated, 8vo, cloth      net $1.50

"May justly be called an epic of present day immigration,
and is a revelation that should set our country thinking."

--_Los Angeles Times._

_On the Trail of The Immigrant_

Illustrated, 12mo, cloth      net $1.50

"Deals with the character, temperaments, racial traits, aspirations
and capabilities of the immigrant himself. Cannot fail to afford
excellent material for the use of students of immigrant
problems."--_Outlook._

_The Mediator_

A Tale of the Old World and the New.
Illustrated, 12mo, cloth      net $1.25

"A graphic story, splendidly told."--ROBERT WATCHORN,
_Former Commissioner of Immigration_.

_Tolstoy, the Man and His Message_

A Biographical Interpretation.
_Revised and enlarged._ Illustrated, 12mo, cloth      net $1.50




ON THE TRAIL

OF

THE IMMIGRANT

EDWARD A. STEINER

_Professor in Iowa College, Grinnell, Iowa_

_ILLUSTRATED_

[Illustration]

NEW YORK CHICAGO TORONTO

Fleming H. Revell Company

LONDON AND EDINBURGH

Copyright, 1906, by

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
Chicago: 125 No. Wabash Ave.
Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street

_This book is affectionately dedicated to
"The Man at the Gate"
ROBERT WATCHORN,
United States Commissioner of Immigration
at the
Port of New York:


     Who, in the exercise of his office has been loyal to the interests
     of his country, and has dealt humanely, justly and without
     prejudice, with men of "Every kindred and tongue and people and
     nation."_

     _ACKNOWLEDGMENT_

     _Cordial recognition is tendered to the editors of The Outlook for
     their courtesy in permitting the use of certain portions of this
     book which have already appeared in that journal._




CONTENTS


I.            BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION                                  9

II.           THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL                             16

III.          THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE                         30

IV.           LAND, HO!                                              48

V.            AT THE GATEWAY                                         64

VI.           "THE MAN AT THE GATE"                                  78

VII.          THE GERMAN IN AMERICA                                  94

VIII.         THE SCANDINAVIAN IMMIGRANT                            112

IX.           THE JEW IN HIS OLD WORLD HOME                         126

X.            THE NEW EXODUS                                        143

XI.           IN THE GHETTOS OF NEW YORK                            154

XII.          THE SLAVS AT HOME                                     179

XIII.         THE SLAVIC INVASION                                   198

XIV.          DRIFTING WITH THE "HUNKIES"                           213

XV.           THE BOHEMIAN IMMIGRANT                                225

XVI.          LITTLE HUNGARY                                        238

XVII.         THE ITALIAN AT HOME                                   252

XVIII.        THE ITALIAN IN AMERICA                                262

XIX.          WHERE GREEK MEETS GREEK                               282

XX.           THE NEW AMERICAN AND THE NEW PROBLEM                  292

XXI.          THE NEW AMERICAN AND OLD PROBLEMS                     309

XXII.         RELIGION AND POLITICS                                 321

XXIII.        BIRDS OF PASSAGE                                      334

XXIV.         IN THE SECOND CABIN                                   347

XXV.          AU REVOIR                                             359

              APPENDIX                                              365

              INDEX                                                 371




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                           _Facing page_

AT THE GATE                                                      _Title_

AS SEEN BY MY LADY OF THE FIRST CABIN                                10

THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL                                           26

WILL THEY LET ME IN?                                                 50

THE SHEEP AND THE GOATS                                              66

BACK TO THE FATHERLAND                                               92

FAREWELL TO HOME AND FRIENDS                                        114

ISRAELITES INDEED                                                   140

THE GHETTO OF THE NEW WORLD                                         156

FROM THE BLACK MOUNTAIN                                             180

WITHOUT THE PALE                                                    208

HO FOR THE PRAIRIE!                                                 246

THE BOSS                                                            270

IN AN EVENING SCHOOL, NEW YORK                                      294

A SLAV OF THE BALKANS                                               302

ON THE DAY OF ATONEMENT                                             330




ON THE TRAIL OF THE IMMIGRANT




I

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION



_My Dear Lady of the First Cabin_:

On the fourth morning out from Hamburg, after your maid had disentangled
you from your soft wrappings of steamer rugs, and leaning upon her arm,
you paced the deck for the first time, the sun smiled softly upon the
smooth sea, and its broken reflections came back hot upon your pale
cheeks. Then your gentle eyes wandered from the illimitable sea back to
the steamer which carried you. You saw the four funnels out of which
came pouring clouds of smoke trailing behind the ship in picturesque
tracery; you watched the encircling gulls which had been your fellow
travellers ever since we left the white cliffs of Albion; and then your
eyes rested upon those mighty Teutons who stood on the bridge, and whose
blue eyes searched the sea for danger, or rested upon the compass for
direction.

From below came the sweet notes of music, gentle and wooing, one of the
many ways in which the steamship company tried to make life pleasant
for you, to bring back your "Bon appetit" to its tempting tables. Then
suddenly, you stood transfixed, looking below you upon the deck from
which came rather pronounced odours and confused noises. The notes of a
jerky harmonica harshly struck your ears attuned to symphonies; and the
song which accompanied it was gutteral and unmusical.

The deck which you saw, was crowded by human beings; men, women and
children lay there, many of them motionless, and the children, numerous
as the sands of the sea,--unkempt and unwashed, were everywhere in
evidence.

You felt great pity for the little ones, and you threw chocolate cakes
among them, smiling as you saw them in their tangled struggle to get
your sweet bounty.

You pitied them all; the frowsy headed, ill clothed women, the men who
looked so hungry and so greedy, and above all you pitied, you said
so,--do you remember?--you said you pitied your own country for having
to receive such a conglomerate of human beings, so near to the level of
the beasts. I well recall it; for that day they did look like animals.
It was the day after the storm and they had all been seasick; they had
neither the spirit nor the appliances necessary for cleanliness. The
toilet rooms were small and hard to reach, and sea water as you well
know is not a good cleanser. They were wrapped in gray blankets which
they had brought from their bunks, and you were right; they did look
like animals, but not half so clean as the cattle which one sees so
often on an outward journey; certainly not half so comfortable.

[Illustration: _From stereograph copyright--1905, by Underwood &
Underwood, N. Y._

AS SEEN BY MY LADY OF THE FIRST CABIN.

The fellowship of the steerage makes good comrades, where no barriers
exist and introductions are neither possible nor necessary.]

You were taken aback when I spoke to you. I took offense at your
suspecting us to be beasts, for I was one of them; although all that
separated you and me was a little iron bar, about fifteen or twenty
rungs of an iron ladder, and perhaps as many dollars in the price of our
tickets.

You were amazed at my temerity, and did not answer at once; then you
begged my pardon, and I grudgingly forgave you. One likes to have a
grudge against the first cabin when one is travelling steerage.

The next time you came to us, it was without your maid. You had quite
recovered and so had we. The steerage deck was more crowded than ever,
but we were happy, comparatively speaking; happy in spite of the fact
that the bread was so doughy that we voluntarily fed the fishes with it,
and the meat was suspiciously flavoured.

Again you threw your sweetmeats among us, and asked me to carry a basket
of fruit to the women and children. I did so; I think to your
satisfaction. When I returned the empty basket, you wished to know all
about us, and I proceeded to tell you many things--who the Slavs are,
and I brought you fine specimens of Poles, Bohemians, Servians and
Slovaks,--men, women and children: and they began to look to you like
men, women and children, and not like beasts. I introduced to you,
German, Austrian and Hungarian Jews, and you began to understand the
difference. Do you remember the group of Italians, to whom you said
good-morning in their own tongue, and how they smiled back upon you all
the joy of their native land? And you learned to know the difference
between a Sicilian and a Neapolitan, between a Piedmontese and a
Calabrian. You met Lithuanians, Greeks, Magyars and Finns; you came in
touch with twenty nationalities in an hour, and your sympathetic smile
grew sweeter, and your loving bounty increased day by day.

You wondered how I happened to know these people so well; and I told you
jokingly, that it was my Social nose which over and over again, had led
me steerage way across the sea, back to the villages from which the
immigrants come and onward with them into the new life in America.

You suspected that it was not a Social nose but a Social heart; that I
was led by my sympathies and not by my scientific sense, and I did not
dispute you. You urged me to write what I knew and what I felt, and now
you see, I have written. I have tried to tell it in this book as I told
it to you on board of ship. I told you much about the Jews and the
Slavs because they are less known and come in larger numbers. When I had
finished telling you just who these strangers are, and something of
their life at home and among us, in the strange land, you grew very
sympathetic, without being less conscious how great is the problem which
these strangers bring with them.

If I succeed in accomplishing this for my larger audience, the public, I
shall be content.

You were loth to listen to figures; for you said that statistics were
not to your liking and apt to be misleading; so I leave them from these
pages and crowd them somewhere into the back of the book, where the
curious may find them if they delight in them.

My telling deals only with life; all I attempt to do is to tell what I
have lived among the immigrants, and not much of what I have counted.
Here and there I have dropped a story which you said might be worth
re-telling; and I tell it as I told it to you--not to earn the smile
which may follow, but simply that it may win a little more sympathy for
the immigrant.

If here and there I stop to moralize, it is largely from force of habit;
and not because I am eager to play either preacher or prophet. If I
point out some great problems, I do it because I love America with a
love passing your own; because you are home-born and know not the lot
of the stranger.

You may be incredulous if I tell you that I do not realize that I was
not born and educated here; that I am not thrilled by the sight of my
cradle home, nor moved by my country's flag.

I know no Fatherland but America; for after all, it matters less where
one was born, than where one's ideals had their birth; and to me,
America is not the land of mighty dollars, but the land of great ideals.

I am not yet convinced that the peril to these ideals lies in those who
come to you, crude and unfinished; if I were, I would be the first one
to call out: "Shut the gates," and not the last one to exile myself for
your country's good.

I think that the peril lies more in the first cabin than in the
steerage; more in the American colonies in Monte Carlo and Nice than in
the Italian colonies in New York and Chicago. Not the least of the peril
lies in the fact that there is too great a gulf between you and the
steerage passenger, whose virtues you will discover as soon as you learn
to know him.

I send out this book in the hope that it will mediate between the first
cabin and the steerage; between the hilltop and lower town; between the
fashionable West side and the Ghetto.

Do you remember my Lady of the First Cabin, what those Slovaks said to
you as you walked down the gangplank in Hoboken? What they said to you,
I now say to my book: "Z'Boghem," "The Lord be with thee."




II

THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL


Some twenty years ago, while travelling from Vienna on the Northern
Railway, I was locked into my compartment with three Slavic women, who
entered at a way station, and who for the first time in their lives had
ventured from their native home by way of the railroad. In fear and awe
they looked out the window upon the moving landscape, while with each
recurring jolt they held tightly to the wooden benches.

One of them volunteered the information that they were journeying a
great distance, nearly twenty-five miles from their native village. I
ventured to say that I was going much further than twenty-five miles,
upon which I was asked my destination. I replied: "America," expecting
much astonishment at the announcement; but all they said was: "Merica?
where is that? is it really further than twenty-five miles?"

Until about the time mentioned, the people of Eastern and Southeastern
Europe had remained stationary; just where they had been left by the
slow and glacial like movement of the races and tribes to which they
belonged. Scarcely any traces of their former migrations survive,
except where some warlike tribe has exploited its history in song,
describing its escape from the enemy, into some mountain fastness, which
was of course deserted as soon as the fury of war had spent itself.

From the great movements which changed the destinies of other European
nations, these people were separated by political and religious
barriers; so that the discovery of America was as little felt as the
discovery of the new religious and political world laid bare by the
Reformation. Each tribe and even each smaller group developed according
to its own native strength, or according to how closely it leaned
towards Western Europe, which was passing through great evolutionary and
revolutionary changes.

On the whole, it may be said that in many ways they remained stationary,
certainly immobile. Old customs survived and became laws; slight
differentiations in dress occurred and became the unalterable costume of
certain regions; idioms grew into dialects and where the native genius
manifested itself in literature, the dialect became a language. These
artificial boundaries became impassable, especially where differences in
religion occurred. Each group was locked in, often hating its nearest
neighbours and closest kinsmen, and also having an aversion to anything
which came from without. Social and economic causes played no little
part, both in the isolation of these tribes and groups and in the
necessity for migration. When the latter was necessary, they moved
together to where there was less tyranny and more virgin soil. They went
out peacefully most of the time, but could be bitter, relentless and
brave when they encountered opposition.

But they did not go out with the conqueror's courage nor with the
adventurer's lust for fame; they were no iconoclasts of a new
civilization, nor the bearers of new tidings. They went where no one
remained; where the Romans had thinned the ranks of the Germans, where
Hun, Avar and Turk had left valleys soaked in blood and made ready for
the Slav's crude plow; where Roman colonies were decaying and Roman
cities were sinking into the dunes made by ocean's sands. They destroyed
nothing nor did they build anything; they accepted little or nothing
which they found on conquered soil, but lived the old life in the new
home, whether it was under the shadow of the Turkish crescent, or where
Roman conquerors had left empty cities and decaying palaces.

In travelling through that most interesting Austrian province, Dalmatia,
on the shores of the Adriatic, opposite Italy, I came upon the palace of
Diocletian, in which the Slav has built a town, using the palace walls
for the foundations of his dwellings. In spite of the fact that both
strength and beauty lie imbedded in these foundations, the houses are
as crude and simple as those built in an American mining camp. Upon the
ruins of the ancient city of Salona, I found peasants breaking the
Corinthian pillars into gravel for donkey paths. These people although
surrounded by conquering nations were not amalgamated, and were enslaved
but not changed. Art lived and died in their midst but bequeathed them
little or no culture.

This is true not only of many of the Slavs but also of many of the Jews
who live among them and who have remained unimpressed and unchanged for
centuries; except as tyrannical governments played shuffle-board with
them, pushing them hither and thither as policy or caprice dictated.

The Italian peasant began his wanderings earlier than the other nations,
at least to other portions of Europe, where he was regarded as
indispensable in the building of railroads. These movements, however,
were spasmodic, and he soon returned to his native village to remain
there, locked in by prejudice and superstition, and unbaptized by the
spirit of progress.

But all this is different now; and the change came through that word
quite unknown in those regions twenty-five years ago--the word AMERICA.
Having exhausted the labour supply of northern Europe which, as for
instance in Germany, needed all its strength for the up-building of its
own industries, American capitalists deemed it necessary to find new
human forces to increase their wealth by developing the vast, untouched
natural resources. Just how systematically the recruiting was carried on
is hard to tell, but it is sure that it did not require much effort, and
that the only thing necessary was to make a beginning.

In nearly all the countries from which new forces were to be drawn there
was chronic, economic distress, which had lasted long, and which grew
more painful as new and higher needs disclosed themselves to the lower
classes of society. Most of the land as a rule, was held by a privileged
class, and labour was illy paid. The average earning of a Slovak peasant
during the harvest season was about twenty-five cents a day, which sank
to half that sum the rest of the time, with work as scarce as wages were
low.

If a load of wood was brought to town, it was besieged by a small army
of labourers ready to do the necessary sawing; other work than wood
sawing there practically was none, and consequently in the winter time
much distress prevailed.

The labour of women was still more poorly paid. A muscular servant girl,
who would wash, scrub, attend to the garden and cattle and help with the
harvesting, received about ten dollars a year, with a huge cake and
perhaps a pair of boots no less huge as a premium. These wages were
paid only in the most prosperous portion of the Slavic world, being much
lower in other regions, while in the mountains neither work nor wages
were obtainable.

The hard rye bread, scantily cut and rarely unadulterated, with an
onion, was the daily portion, while meat to many of the people was a
luxury obtainable only on special holidays. I remember vividly the
untimely passing away of a pig, which belonged to a titled estate.
According to the law, which reached with its mighty arm to this small
village, the pig must be decently buried and covered by--not balsam and
spices, but quick lime and coal oil. Hardly had these rites been
performed when the carcass mysteriously disappeared--but meat was
scarce, and the peasants were hungry.

During this same period, the Jewish people who were scattered through
Eastern Europe, began to feel not only economic distress, but existence
itself was often made unbearable by the newly awakened national feeling,
which reacted against the Jews in waves of cruel persecution. Such trade
as could be diverted into other channels was taken from them and they
grew daily poorer, living became precarious and life insecure. It did
not take much agitation to induce any of these people to emigrate, and
when the first venturesome travellers returned with money in the bank,
silver watches in their pockets, "store clothes" on their backs, and a
feeling of "I am as good as anybody" in their minds, each one of them
became an agent and an agitator, and if paid agents ever existed, they
might have been immediately dispensed with.

Now one can stand in any district town of Hungary, Poland or Italy and
see, coming down the mountains or passing along the highways and byways
of the plains, larger or smaller groups of peasants, not all
picturesquely clad, passing in a never ending stream, on, towards this
new world. The stream is growing larger each day, and the source seems
inexhaustible.

Sombre Jews come, on whose faces fear and care have plowed deep furrows,
whose backs are bent beneath the burden of law and lawlessness. They
come, thousands at a time, at least 5,000,000 more may be expected; and
he does not know what misery is, who has not seen them on that march
which has lasted nearly 2,000 years beneath the burden heaped by hate
and prejudice. Both peasant and Jew come from Russian, Austrian or
Magyar rule, under which they have had few of the privileges of
citizenship but many of its burdens. From valleys in the crescent shaped
Carpathians, from the sunny but barren <DW72>s of the Alps and from the
Russian-Polish plains they are coming as once they went forth from
earlier homes; peaceful toilers, who seek a field for their surplus
labour or as traders to use their wits, and it is a longer journey than
any of their timid forbears ever undertook.

The most venturesome of the Slavs, the Bohemians, in whom the love of
wandering was always alive, started this stream of emigration as early
as the seventeenth century, sending us the noblest of their sons and
daughters, the heroes and heroines of the reformatory wars; idealists,
who like the Pilgrim Fathers, came for "Freedom to worship God." Their
descendants have long ago been blended into the common life of the
people of America, scarcely conscious of the fact that they might have
the same pride in ancestry which the descendants of the Pilgrims delight
to exhibit. Not until the latter part of the nineteenth century, in the
70s, did the Bohemian immigrants come in large numbers and in a steady
stream, bringing with them the Czechs of Moravia, a neighbouring
province. Together they make some 200,000 of our population, fairly
distributed throughout the country, and about equally divided between
tillers of the soil and those following industrial pursuits. Nearly all
Bohemian immigrants come to stay, and adjust themselves more or less
easily to their environment. The economic distress which has brought
them here, while never acute, threatens to become so now from the over
accentuated language struggle which diverts the energies of the people
and makes proper legislation impossible. The building of railroads and
other governmental enterprises have been retarded by parliamentary
obstructionists, to whom language is more than bread and butter.
Business relations with the Germanic portions of Austria have come
almost to a standstill; conditions which are bound to increase
emigration from Bohemia's industrial centres.

The Poles were the next of the Western Slavs to be drawn out of the
seclusion of their villages; those from Eastern Prussia being the
earliest, and those from Russian Poland the latest who have swelled the
stream of emigration.

The largest number of the Polish immigrants is composed of unskilled
labourers, most of them coming from villages where they worked in the
fields during the summer time, and in winter went to the cities where
they did the cruder work in the factories. The Poles from Germany's part
of the divided kingdom have furnished nearly their quota of immigrants,
and those remaining upon their native acres will continue to remain
there, if only to spite the Germans who are grievously disappointed not
to see them grow less under the repressive measures of the government.
They are the thorn in the Emperor's flesh, and with social Democrats
make enough trouble, to verify the saying: "Uneasy lies the head that
wears a crown," true! even with regard to that most imperial of
emperors.

The Austrian Poles who have retained many of their liberties and have
also gained new privileges, have had a national and intellectual
revival, under the impulse of which the peasantry has been lifted to a
higher level which has reacted upon their economic condition; and
although that condition is rather low in Galicia, as that portion of
Poland is called, immigration from there has reached its high water
mark. The largest increase in immigration among the Poles is to be
looked for from Russian Poland where industrial and political conditions
are growing worse, and where it will take a long time to establish any
kind of equilibrium which will pacify the people and hold them to the
soil.

The Slovaks, who were relatively the best off, and further away from the
main arteries of travel, are, comparatively speaking, newcomers and
furnish at present the largest element in the Western Slavic
immigration. They have retained most staunchly many of their Slavic
characteristics, are the least impressionable among the Western Slavs,
and usually come, lured by the increased wages. They are most liable to
return to the land of their fathers after saving money enough materially
to improve their lot in life.

From the Austrian provinces, Carinthia and Styria, come increasingly
large numbers of Slovenes who are really the link between the Eastern
and Western Slavs. They belong to the highest type of that race, but
represent only a small portion of the large Slavic family. Of the
Eastern Slavs, only the Southern group has moved towards America, the
Russian peasant being bound to the soil, and unable to free himself from
the obligation of paying the heavy taxes, by removal to a foreign
country. With the larger freedom which is bound to come to him, will
also come economic relief so that the emigration of the Russian peasant
in large numbers is not a likelihood.

Lured by promises of higher wages in our industrial centres, Croatians
and Slovenians come in increasingly large numbers, while in smaller
numbers come Servians and Bulgarians.

The only Slavs who are thorough seamen and who are coming to our coasts
in increasingly large numbers as sailors and fishermen, are the
Dalmatians; and last but most heroic of all the Slavs, is the
Montenegrin, who has held his mountain fastnesses against the Turk and
who has been the living wall, resisting the victories of Islam. His
little country is blessed by but a few crumbs of soil between huge
mountains and boulders, and in the measure in which peace reigns in the
Balkans, he is without occupation and sustenance; so that he is
compelled to seek these more fertile shores, where he will for the
first time in history and quite unconsciously, "Turn the sword into a
plowshare and the spear into a pruning hook."

[Illustration: THE BEGINNING OF THE TRAIL.

The Wanderlust of the olden time still gets its grip on the peasants of
the great plains of Eastern Europe.]

Tennyson does not over-idealize this Montenegrin in his admirable
sonnet:

    They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,
    They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,
    Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night
    Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales
    Their headlong passes, but his footstep fails,
    And red with blood the Crescent reels from fight
    Before their dauntless hundreds, in prone flight
    By thousands down the crags and thro' the vales.
    O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne
    Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm
    Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years.
    Great Tsernogora! never since thine own
    Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm
    Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.

From Lithuania, a province of Russia, come smaller groups of non-Slavic
emigrants; people with an old civilization of which little remains, and
with a language which leans closest to Sanscrit, yet who, because of
their subjection to Russia, have sunk to the level of the Russian
peasants. Then there are Magyars and Finns, rather close kinsmen, who
because one lives in the South and the other far North, are as different
as the South is from the North; Greeks and Syrians, traders all of them
and workers only when they must be. We shall follow them more closely as
they pass into our own national life.

The Italian emigration, the largest which we receive from any one
source, comes primarily from Southern Italy, from the crowded cities
with their unspeakable vices; the smallest number of emigrants come from
the villages where they have all the virtues of tillers of the soil. The
most volatile of our foreign population, and perhaps the most clannish,
they represent a problem recognized by their home government, which was
the first to concern itself with it, to study it systematically, and to
aid our government so far as possible in a rational solution. The number
of Italian emigrants is still undiminished, and in spite of the fact
that in recent years more than 200,000 of them have annually left their
native land, their withdrawal is scarcely felt and the number could be
doubled without perceptible diminution at home.

There are then upon this immigrant trail, many people of varied cultural
development; some of them coming from countries in which they have been
part of a very high type of civilization, while others come from the
veritable back woods of Europe, into which neither steam nor electricity
has entered to disturb the old order, nor has yet awakened a new life.

None of them starts for America tempted by wealth which can be picked
up in the streets. That mythical man who, upon landing, refused to take
a quarter from the side-walk, because he had heard that dollars were
lying about loose, in America, has found it true because he has gone
into politics.

The immigrant of to-day, be he Slav, Italian or Jew, starts upon this
trail, with no culture, it is true, but with a virgin mind in which it
may be made to grow. Not always with a keen mind, but with a surplus of
muscle, which he is ready to exchange at the mouth of the pit or by the
furnace's hot blast, for a higher wage than he could earn in the miry
fields of his native village;--but it is by no means settled who gets
the best of the bargain.




III

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE STEERAGE


Back of Warsaw, Vienna, Naples and Palermo, with no place on the world's
map to mark their existence, are small market