The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

There is a region in northeastern Hungary where in the course of a day's ride one may pass through, one after another, villages inhabited by as many as five different races—Ruthenians, Jews, Roumanians, Hungarians, and Germans. A racial map of the Dual Empire shows districts in which one race predominates, but these same districts will very likely be dotted with villages in which the fragments of other races still survive, some of them, like the Turks, so few in number that they are not separately counted as part of the population. Under these circumstances travel in this part of the world is made interesting but not easy.

Fortunately, I had letters of introduction to Dr. Albert W. Clarke, head of the Austrian branch of the American Board of Missions at Prague, and he introduced me to some of his native assistants who spoke English, and kindly assisted me in finding what I most desired to see of the city and the people. Through him I had an opportunity to get inside of some of the tenements in which European people live, and to see some of the working people in their homes. I did not have an opportunity to explore the parts of the city in which the very poor people live; in fact, I was told that there was nothing in Prague that corresponded to the slums of our English and American cities. There is much poverty, but it is poverty of a self-respecting sort—not of those who have been defeated and gone under, but of those who have never got up.

I found the average Bohemian workman living in two rooms and working for wages considerably less than the same kind of labour would have brought in England, and very much less than the same kind of labour would have brought in America. There is, however, very little use in comparing the wages that men earn unless you are able to compare all the surrounding conditions.

During my stay in Prague I had an opportunity to see something close at hand of the life of the farming population. Under the guidance of one of Doctor Clarke's assistants I drove out one day to a little village where there were a number of people who had come under the influence of the American Mission in Prague, and where I was assured I should find a welcome.

It was not, perhaps, the best place to get an idea of what is most characteristic in Bohemian country life. I had hoped to see something of the local customs of the country people, but, though it was a holiday when I made my visit, I did not see a single peasant costume.

There are still many places in Bohemia, I understand, where the people take pride in wearing the national costumes, and there are still many parts of the Austrian Empire where relics of the older civilization linger. Indeed, I heard of places where, it is said, the peasants are still paying the old feudal dues; in other places the old unfree condition of the peasants is still continued in the form of peonage, as it may still be sometimes found in our Southern States. In this case the peasants have got themselves into debt for land. They are not allowed to work off this debt, and this serves as a pretence for keeping them bound to the soil. But education and the growth of manufacturing industries have banished the traces of the older civilization from the greater part of Bohemia.

In the village which I visited, as in most of the farming villages in this part of the world, the houses of the farmers stand in a row quite close together on either side of the street. In the rear are the quarters of the servants, the storehouses and the stables, the pig-stys and the cow-stalls, all closely connected, so that it was often a little uncertain to me where the quarters for the servants left off and those for the animals began. In fact, in some places no very definite distinction was made.

One of the most interesting places that I visited during my stay in this village was a dairy farm which was conducted by a Jew. He was evidently one of those of the lower or middle class—a type one hears much of in Europe—who, with very little knowledge or skill in the actual work of agriculture, have succeeded by their superior business skill in getting possession of the land and reducing the peasant to a position not much better than that of a serf. This man not only kept a dairy farm but he operated two or three brickyards besides, and had other extensive business interests in the village. Although he was a man of wealth and intelligence, he had his dwelling in the midst of a compound around which were grouped houses for his labourers, cow-stalls, a wheelwright and blacksmith shop, places for pigs, chickens, and dogs, the whole in a condition of indescribable disorder and filth.

The greater part of the work on the farm seemed to be done by women, most of whom were barefooted or wore wooden shoes. I do not think I have seen any one wearing wooden shoes before since the days of slavery. They had remained in my mind as the symbol of poverty and degradation; but they are worn everywhere in country districts in Europe. In fact, I remember in one instance, when I visited an agricultural school, finding one of the teachers working in the garden wearing wooden shoes. The people who worked on this farm all lived, as far as I could see, in one little ill-smelling and filthy room. There was no sign in the homes which I visited of those household industries for which Hungarian peasants are noted, and which should help to brighten and make comfortable the simplest home.

I believe there are few plantations in our Southern States where, even in the small one-room cabins, one would not find the coloured people living in more real comfort and more cleanliness than was the case here. Even in the poorest Negro cabins in the South I have found evidences that the floor was sometimes scrubbed, and usually there was a white counterpane on the bed, or some evidence of an effort to be tidy.