The Immigrant Tide, Its Ebb and Flow by Edward Alfred Steiner

Author:Edward Alfred Steiner [Steiner, Edward Alfred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Reference & Language, Reference, Fiction & Literature, Classics
ISBN: 4064066234324
Google: 75AcnwEACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2019-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

XIV

THE SLAV IN THE IMMIGRANT PROBLEM

IN the three groups which form the bulk of our immigrant population, the Slav is now the strongest and the most interesting factor, and is destined to be for some time to come.

In spite of his being from the least densely populated regions, he is numerically the greatest and will long maintain his supremacy. There are more than 100,000,000 Slavs, and the territory they occupy is vast, covering half the European continent and reaching far into Asia.

These people are scattered in villages, but rarely concentrated in cities; nevertheless, social and political conditions among all of them are now such as to force this most immovable of European races into the great outgoing tide.

The majority of Slavic people is of peasant type, and scarcely anywhere has it developed a middle class strong enough to form a bridge upon which to cross the age-long chasm between it and the upper class. This means that poverty and contempt have been accepted as the reward for hard labour, and as the divinely appointed lot of the peasant, who in but few Slavic countries has escaped serfdom, a condition of semi-slavery from which he emerged with insufficient land, or none, with many limitations as to individual ownership and with practically no limitations as to his share of the burden of government support.

The masses of the peoples of the Slavic countries have never been above economic want, and have been but slowly awakened to the more expensive demands of our civilization.

To the peasant, bread and cabbage to eat, a straw thatched isba to shelter his family, and an occasional pull at the vodka bottle, meant comfort; while to have feather beds, a crowing cock in the barn-yard and a pig killing once a year, was the realization of his wildest dreams.

Fully two-thirds of these more than 100,000,000 people do not know what it means to have enough bread to eat, and with the exception of Hungary, many of the countries in which they live do not produce enough foodstuffs to allow every man the ordinary military rations. Nevertheless, they are forced to export a fair share of their crops, in order to bring sufficient money into the country for the support of the government.

To people living under such economic conditions, emigrating to America will, for some years at least, be a going from Egypt to the Promised Land; although manna and meat have to be supplied without supernatural intervention and at the constant peril of life and limb.

As the Slav has not yet developed a compact middle class, this has had to be supplied by foreigners. Germans, Jews, Tartars, Armenians and Greeks are his merchants and mechanics, his bankers and manufacturers. This condition has fixed the social status of the peasant, placed him under exceptionally burdensome laws and marked him an inferior.

His picturesque clothing became his prison garb, and rarely did he have opportunity to exchange it for the commonplace clothing of our civilization.

To be a peasant means to be addressed

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