Edward Alfred Steiner

“ This they believe; but the fact is that no people were ever assimilated by force. Force begets resistance, and the most stupid Slovak, shut in by the four walls of his wretched isba, if he knows nothing else, knows that the Magyar is his enemy, and that the Magyar speech must not lodge in his memory and displace his mother tongue. Although he may have no knowledge of his historic past and no idea of the significance of the Slavic race of which he is a member, he does know that he must resist the Magyars, and resist, only where he cannot fight. ”

“ Need I mention Giotto, the builder, Raphael, the painter, a Dante, a Petrarch, a Savonarola—a hundred masters of the chisel and the brush, of rhythmic rhyme and stately prose, all reared in that Garden of Europe, Italy?
Will the Jew learn to appreciate that culture, the best of which was created by his sires? For the glory of our American culture lies in the quality of its manhood and womanhood and that at its best is patterned after men and women whose names would debar them from certain clubs and hotels to-day. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I am not at all concerned regarding the inability of the Protestant church to adjust other men to her creeds or to adjust herself to theirs; but I am deeply concerned with her inability or unwillingness to make good her professions of democracy, and to relate herself in some vital way to these new citizens who are satiated by creeds, but are hungry for brotherhood; upon whom, like a curse, rest the damp and mould of tombs and chapels, but who have been untouched by the power of the living, redeeming Christ, as He has incarnated Himself in His followers. ”

“ I have asked for the aliens, and shall not cease asking until I am heard: First, that we learn to know them. The people of Montenegro, Poland, Hungary, and Italy are worth the knowing. If struggle for liberty means anything in the character of a nation, then these people have character; for their fields are drenched in martyrs’ blood. Where in Hungary the poppy grows reddest, or in Italy the figs are most luscious, there the common people have shed their blood heroically. ”

“ Speaking of the assimilation of the immigrant, he says:
“On the whole, those who come now Americanize much more readily than did the non-English immigrants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only do they come from lesser peoples and from humbler social strata, but, thanks to the great rôle the United States plays in the world, the American culture meets with far more prestige than it had then. Although we have ever greater masses to assimilate, let us comfort ourselves with the fact that the vortical suction of our civilization is stronger now than ever before.” ”

“ My faith in love as a factor, the greatest factor in our social life, is based first of all upon my belief in our common kinship.
I recognize no barriers of race, class or religion between myself and any other human being that needs me. I happen to know something about human beings; I know intimately many races and more nationalities, and I have discovered that when one breaks through the strange speech, which so often separates ”

“ Yes, it was the type one sees beneath the half-ruined porticoes of ancient palaces, where young men play the tambouritza and young maidens listen behind latticed windows; where old men dream dreams of the Ragusan Republic and its vanished glory, when it vied with Venice in maritime power, although it never gained her ascendency. Now it is dying a slow and a forgotten death, beneath shading palm trees, while its warrior sons, the bluest blood of Dalmatia, are sent to dig coal in Pennsylvania, and its guslar minstrels make music for the merry-makers at Coney Island. ”

“ His place was the centre to which they came and from which they radiated.
“What do they do in America?” I asked.
“Oh! any old thing. It all depends. There is one back here now.”
“He’s a regular big head,” interrupted one of the girls; “thinks he’s the whole cheese. He’s a newspaper man. I suppose he’ll be on the Stradona to-night.”
Every evening after sunset, all Ragusa wakens out of its day-dreams and is on parade in the Stradona.
Demure maidens come out from behind latticed windows, reflecting in their garments the sombre hues borrowed from Venice, and a riot of Oriental colours. ”

“ Large groups driven to the plains of the Volga or the Danube are now coming to the United States; with narrow doctrines, it is true, but with deep convictions, and the churches of the Reformation feel this current in the measure in which they have kept themselves spiritually alert. Yet one must admit that the vast majority of those who come is driven by no higher motive than the economic pressure. Yet it is not always poverty which drives them from their village homes to our cities or from their quiet fields to our noisy shops. ”

“ Moschele rests neither by day nor by night; he prints bills and scatters them as if money were paper; he sleeps with an open window even in the winter, as if he wanted to heat all outdoors, and he has even travelled on the Sabbath!”
Then the old man broke down, hid his face in the Talmud, and wept. I think I comforted him; at least I tried to, and as I left him he breathed a prayer for his venturesome son who had deserted the Talmud, and the red pots and green bowls; who certainly was no longer in peril of poverty, but in peril of his soul. ”

“ We might do great things if we would just do them. We have the vision and the talent; but we wear ourselves out, saying what a great people we are and how superior to all other human beings; yet we accomplish nothing. Look at this house of ours, and you see Poland in miniature. I don’t know just how old it is, my husband can tell you; but when it was built, the work was poorly done, and every year it has to be repaired from the bottom up. In America, it would have been torn down years ago, and a new house built, to suit the needs of the times. ”

“ If emigration to America has done nothing else, it has proved that but few race characteristics, if any, are fixed. Should some sceptic wish to be convinced on this point, let him visit such towns as South Bend, Indiana; Scranton, Pa., or Youngstown, Ohio, and look at a group of Slavs or Italians who came here twenty years ago. Let him go among those who have had the full advantage of our environment, of our standard of living, of education and of an enlightening religion. He will find what we call race characteristics almost obliterated, from the faces of even the first generation. ”

“ In America the Polish labourer loses his native laziness. The journey in itself has shaken him out of his lethargy; the high gearing of our industrial wheels, the pressure brought to bear upon him by the American foreman, the general atmosphere of our life charged by an invigorating ozone, and the absence of a leisure class, at least from the industrial community, have, in a few years, changed what many observers regarded as a fixed characteristic. ”

“ I must confess to a sense of disappointment when I saw them beside the Montenegrin who had remained at home. The sombre dress of our civilization was a poor exchange for the brilliant, native costume. The hard labour the men performed in America had robbed them of their erect and elastic forms, and they looked like the menials of their brothers who had been keeping watch against the “Schwab,” in the shadow of the Lovczin. ”

“ The gendarmes were alert and agitated from the moment we entered the valley, and when they learned the nature of our errand they were incredulous. “Who ever heard of anybody’s having a disinterested concern for the Slovaks? How could they believe that Americans, cold, materialistic Americans, would equip an expedition to study the needs of this downtrodden race, that it might be lifted up? Of course, we were nationalistic agitators sent out by the Slovanic Society of America, to arouse the half-awake Slovak into revolution.” ”

“ The greater part of the time he preached to the peasants the gospel of business. “You poor rascals,” he said; “you work in the fields from sunrise to sunset, eat bread-soup, and not much else, three times a day, and carry loads heavy enough to break your backs; while the Jews, who do the business, live in fine houses, eat the best spring geese, which you raise for them, and send their children to college. You ought to go to America and see business. Even the little boys of rich people sell newspapers and lemonade in front of their fathers’ palaces. ”

“ A young Moravian woman, who, in America, had exchanged her peasant garb and ruggedness for our more expensive dress and gentler ways, corroborated the mother’s statement. She had worked in American homes and testified: “Children in America are all terrible. Nothing is sacred to them; neither the kitchen nor the church. It’s because they have so few children; they spoil them.”
“Yes,” agreed a young Hungarian Jew; “in America, they have the one child system, and many women do not have even one child. They are so sterile. ”

“ The problem, the real problem, is: how to feed these people on truly vital knowledge, how to make common to all, the beautiful, the harmonious, the ethical; how to bring to all, the knowledge of that religion which indeed makes free from tribal pride and racial hate and leads men into the freedom of the sons of God. ”

“ THE JEW IN THE IMMIGRANT PROBLEM THE Jew has nearly always been an immigrant and a problem. Nowhere is he accepted as indigenous; neither in Russia, where he has lived for centuries, nor in New York, where he will soon represent the bulk of population. He is as much a stranger on his home soil in Palestine as upon the rawest bit of ground staked into a city, in Wyoming or the Dakotas. His going is nowhere regretted at the time and his coming is not welcomed; while his remaining in a place leads to the development of prejudice, which has its root in various causes, already discussed. ”

“ Yes, Signor, many have gone to America and have come back, and will go again; but, Signor, that must be a bad country, a wild country. They come home and walk carelessly up and down the Stradona, the finest street in the world, every house a palace—and they talk of it with disrespect! ”

“ Visiting the tombs of saints and the dwelling places of hermits is a national mania, and religious ceremonies, which in their origin and meaning are wholly Pagan, take place in hut and palace alike; for no class of Russian society is quite free from gross superstitions. The peasant coachman, who drives his miserable beast over the cobblestone pavement, crosses himself before every chapel and icon; while his passenger, be he a general, a university professor or one of the common people, will do the same, with perhaps only a little less unction. ”

“ If it ever was true that coarse fare makes strong teeth, it certainly has not been true during the period of my observations among the peasant people of Europe.
Where I know the bread to be coarsest and the fare simplest, as for instance in impoverished Montenegro, there the old, toothless hags are most numerous, and even the mouths of the young are disfigured by decaying teeth. This is especially true of the Alpine and Carpathian regions, out of which many of the Slavic immigrants come; there, a woman of forty is usually an old woman because she has no teeth. ”

“ One might imagine that the Poles would have learned enough in the school of political adversity to treat their own kinsmen, at least, as they would wish to be treated; but the trials the Ruthenians have endured at their hands are equalled only by what they themselves have endured at the hands of the Russians.
That the Poles suffer from the Germans, the Slovaks from the Magyars, the Slovenes and Servians from the Austrians, is only additional evidence that everywhere the Slavic peasant suffers politically, and that there is sufficient cause for the insecurity of his foothold. ”

“ The river Waag, however, is not in Germany, where everything is prohibited, regulated, and subdued, even the turbulent rivers.
This is Hungary, the ill-mated spouse in that Austro-Hungarian alliance, in which quarrels are continual, and divorce, with alimony or without it, is threatened every day. Here rivers and races foam and rage; floods of hate beat against{125} historic walls and there are no smooth channels for politics, education, or religion.
Struggle there is everywhere. Those who are too weak to fight, resist, and none, however small or unimportant, is ready to surrender. ”

“ There is in the Slav a certain passivity of temper, a lack in sustained effort and enthusiasms, an unwillingness to take the consequences of telling the truth, a failure to confide in one another and in those who would do them good, a rather gross attitude towards sexual morality and an undeniable tendency towards Anarchy and intemperance.
They have but little collective wisdom, even as they have no genius for leadership, scant courtesy towards women, and other human weaknesses to which the whole human race is heir. ”