THE SLAVIC POPULATION OF AMERICA.* Miss BALCH'S book, Our Slavic

Fellow Citizens, is a remark- able example of the thoroughness with which the work of economic investigation is carried on in the United States. She modestly claims nothing more for it than that it is " based upon first-hand inquiry both in Europe and in America." But it is just this first-band inquiry that is so indispensable for economic purposes and so hard to come by. Miss Balch spent the greater part of one year in Austria-Hungary, and over another in visiting Slavic colonies in the United States, while for an autumn she lived as a boarder in the family of a Bohemian working man in New York City. The European part of her inquiries deserves the more praise that it was strictly preparatory work. Her ultimate object was to examine the conditions in which the Slavic immigrant lives when he has reached the United States, and how far he remains under these conditions the same man that he was at home. Englishmen have been accustomed to attach very great importance to this last factor in the American problem. They have been told again and again that one city in the United States is more Irish than Dublin and another more German than Berlin ; that the true Americans are dying out under the influence of an exhausting climate and a declining birth-rate ; and that the nationalities which are taking their places bring with them their own ideas of civilisation. Miss Balch's testi- mony does not confirm this theory. In her opinion, the new air into which the immigrant enters alters those who breathe it. " The prestige of America and the almost hypnotic influence of this prestige on the poorer class of emigrants is often both pathetic and absurd. They cannot throw away fast enough good things and ways that they have brought with them, to replace them by sometimes inferior substitutes." To a great extent, no doubt, this is due to the poverty of the immigrants. When Englishmen carry their own hours, their own meals, their own habits of life into foreign countries, and make English colonies in every foreign city to which they habitually

• Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. By Emily Greene Balch. New York : Charity Publications Committee, D2'50 post-paid.]

resort, they do so because they can afford to live differently from their neighbours. How far the same tendency is

present when English working men have been brought together in large numbers abroad we do not know, and it may be that the rapid assimilation of which Miss Balch

speaks is a special characteristic of the Slavic race. Whatever be the explanation, there seems no question as to the fact. In Europe, in Asia, in Africa, race feeling is a constant source of severance, of illwill, even of actual conflict. In America we find " over 75,000,000 people, representatives of an indefinite variety of human stocks, yet presenting in general an almost painful degree of uniformity." The higher class of immigrants are often anxious to maintain their race cbaracteristies,—a cir- cumstance which makes against the racial explanation. Miss Balch speaks of a Polish convent school where " little round- cheeked boys just fresh from play on a Chicago side walk" are taught to sing : " We are little exiles ; Far from our dear home We weep night and day." What the nuns vainly try the fathers and mothers try also. But it is all to no purpose.

Do what they will, the immigrants find themselves the parents of American children. " The children themselves are their worst enemies." They hate being " different from their play- mates " ; they cannot resist " the prestige of America." The slowness of the parents to adapt themselves to new surround- ings ministers to the same result. The children pick up English far sooner than their elders ; consequently it is the children who have to act as interpreters, and do what business there is to be done. In this way "they are thrown into a position of unnatural importance," till " one hears stories of children refusing to reply to their mother if spoken to in Italian," and " I ain't no Hun, I'm an American," becomes- a common form of youthful self-assertion.

There seems to be no accurate census of the Slavic popula- tion in the United States. Miss Balch quotes two conjectural estimates. According to one, the numbers are nearly three

millions and three-quarters ; according to the other, they are a little under six millions and a half,—chiefly employed;

in mines and foundries. The effect of this immigration has not been to keep down wages. The immigrant sympa-

thises too much with the desire of the native workman to make money to have any wish to undersell him. The Slays "have proved surprisingly available Union material," and, even where they do not join a Union they have an instinctive

class feeling which keeps them from being "strike-breakers." They play, however, into the hands of employers by their readiness to run greater risks. Under the factory laws as interpreted by the Courts, says a factory inspector,

"employers are so largely absolved from paying damages that an unparalleled indifference to the safety of employees has developed within the last quarter century. The waste of life, limb, health, and nervous energy of working men in the prime of life is so conspicuous in factory work in Pittsburgh that for one with technical professional acquaintance with the processes of industry in other communities the abiding impression is one of horror and depression."

But fatalism and a certain indifference to pain blind the Slav to the character of the work he undertakes. "In a mining company's hospital a nurse told me that if an injured Italian screamed and 'took on' they thought little of it, but if a Slav complained they knew that he was very badly, if not fatally, hurt."

Why do so many Slav immigrants, who in Europe have • mostly worked on the land, fill the mines and foundries in America ? The primary reason is that they have not the money to buy land. What they have scraped together to bring them out to America is all spent by the time they get there. The-

position of a farm labourer does not attract them, for the wages are low, and they can be earned only for a part of the- year. A second reason is the obstacle of language. In a mine or a factory when a man has once learned his special task the rest of his work is mere repetition. On a farm the work is constantly changing, and each change is a fresh opportunity for costly and annoying mistakes from inability to understand orders." The isolation of American farm life is a third reason. The Slav immigrant wants his accustomed food, his own church, and the company of men of his own speech. This preference is not confined to

the Slays. Miss Balch gives a very interesting quotation from Miss Jane Addams's Newer Ideals of Peace, which traces the preference of the Italian immigrant for city life to the same cause. It is an unfortunate preference from the

point of view of American agriculture, for this specially needs "that painstaking method of cultivating the soil which American farmers despise," and the Italian immigrant is usually able to supply :— " It is characteristic of American complacency, when any assisted

removal to agricultural regions is contemplated, that we always assume that each family will be content to live in the

middle of its own piece of ground This is the American way—a survival of our pioneer days—and we refuse to modify it even in regard to the South Italians, although from the day of mediaeval incursions they have lived in compact villages with an intense and elaborated social life."

Thus America loses an agricultural factor of which she stands in real need from failure to provide the conditions with which the agricultural immigrant is familiar. Still, in spite of these obstacles, the Slavic farm population was estimated in 1900 at about one hundred thousand, not counting women or children over ten years. The " timber belt," the States of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota, has the greatest number. In the Bohemian settlements in Wisconsin Miss Balch notes " the roomy farmhouses of wood or of yellow brick, the well-built farms, the thrifty fields, and the cheese factories. Ten years ago every other farm was mortgaged, to-day not one in seven." In the prairie States the immigrant needs a larger capital to begin with, and it takes fifteen hundred dollars to do what a sixth of that sum will do in the timber belt. But even here the Slav immigrant manages to succeed. Miss Balch gives the "true story of a Bohemian pioneer" in Nebraska as told by herself, and describes how hard she found it to

"realise that the quiet-voiced, middle-aged lady beside me had lived as a girl in a dug-out, had herself broken prairie '—heart- breaking labour for a man—had endured storms and famine, rattlesnake bites and plagues of grasshoppers, droughts and floods and lived to see the treeless and uninhabited prairie covered with stacked wheat and shaded farmhouses, and the scattered sod houses replaced by a pleasant, well-built town with a friendly, honest Bohemian air ; with good houses, gardens, and shade trees ; with a Court house, churches, a Bohemian cemetery, and an opera house' for Bohemian theatricals."

In this case the "assimilation " which Miss Balch elsewhere regrets seems to have been successfully withstood.

The chapter on " Household Life among the Slays" is in part an indictment of American social legislation, or rather

absence of legislation. In some States there are no laws seemingly against overcrowding or want of elementary sani- tation, and where they exist the indolence or corruption of local officials often makes them useless. Still, however badly the Slays may begin in these respects, they improve rapidly as they are able to earn more money. Indeed even money is not everything with them. A Slovak priest told

Miss Balch that though in the Far West the women often make eighty dollars a month, with ten or fifteen boarders, and the men as much more, "yet when the children get to be five • or six years old, the parents leave the mining or factory settlement where there are no chances for education, and come to the city where there are schools and kindergartens."

This involves the sacrifice of half the man's income and the whole of the woman's. Among the Slav immigrants a great deal of work is done by women, and as they generally marry as soon as they get to America it is mostly done by married women. It even pays married women working in the cigar factories to hire cheaper substitutes and turn over the children and part of the housework to them. The love of music is very marked among the Slav women, and "it is not uncommon to find a large upright piano wedged between two immense beds in a little bedroom." They certainly stand in need of all the humanising influences they can get, for much of their work is very hard. American and German girls turn over the inferior and unpleasant jobs to newcomers from Poland and Russia, who are willing to do men's work for less than men's wages. It is not that they are indifferent to the conditions with which they have to put up, but " they are in the factory too much on sufferance for grievances to be worth their while." Unfor- tunately employers often profit by this compulsory indiffer-

ence, and the American public tolerates in the case of foreigners what it might not tolerate in the case of its own

people. We can warmly recommend Our Slavic Fellow Citizens to every one who is interested either in the future of the Slays, with which the future of Europe promises to be more and more hound up, or in the condition and prospects of European lmmagrunta in_the New World.