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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