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 slopes 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