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

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

The Slavic peoples, otherwise divided by language and tradition, are also divided by religion. People speaking the same language, and sharing in other respects the same traditions, are frequently just as widely separated by differences of religion as they could be by differences of race. For example, among the southern Slavs the majority of the Slovenes and the Croatians are Roman Catholics, others are Protestants. On the other hand, the majority of the Serbs, their close neighbours, are members of the Greek Orthodox Church, while others are Mohammedans. So wide is the division between the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox Slavs that in some cases members of the Eastern and Western branches of the Church belonging to the same nationality wear a different costume in order to emphasize the differences of religion that might otherwise be forgotten or overlooked.

In Galicia there are not only the Roman and Orthodox branches of the Church, but there are also three or four other minor branches. One of these, the Uniates, which is a compromise between the two and is intended to be a sort of link between the Eastern and Western churches, is now, it is said, just as distinct from both as any of the other branches of the Church. In this region, which has been the battleground of all the religions in Europe, religious distinctions play a much more important rôle than they do elsewhere, because the masses of the people have not yet forgotten the bitterness and the harshness of the early struggles of the sects. The result is that religious differences seem to have intensified rather than to have softened the racial animosities.

In spite of the divisions and rivalries which exist, there seems to be growing up, under the influence of the struggle against the other and dominant races in the Empire, and as a result of the political agitations to which this struggle has given rise, a sense of common purpose and interest in the different branches of the Slavic race; a sort of racial consciousness, as it is sometimes called, which seems to be one of the conditions without which a race that is down is not able to get the ambition and the courage to rise.

It is the presence of this great Slav race in western Europe, groping its way forward under the conditions and difficulties which I have described, that constitutes, as well as I am able to define it, the race problem of southern Europe.

In many respects the situation of the Slavs in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and in southern Europe generally is more like that of the Negroes in the Southern States than is true of any other class or race in Europe. For one thing, the vast majority of that race are, like the Negroes, an agricultural people. For centuries they have lived and worked on the soil, where they have been the servants of the great landowners, looked down upon by the educated and higher classes as "an inferior race." Although they were not distinguished from the dominant classes, as the Negro was, by the colour of their skin, they were distinguished by the language they spoke, and this difference in language seems to have been, as far as mutual understanding and sympathy are concerned, a greater bar than the fact of colour has been in the case of the white man and the black man in the South.

Up to a comparatively few years ago an educated Slav did not ordinarily speak, at least in public, the language of the masses of the people. Doctor Clarke, the head of the Austrian Mission of the American Board in Prague, told me that as recently as thirty years ago an educated Czech did not care to speak his own language on the streets of Prague. At that time the German language was still the language of the educated classes, and all the learning of Europe was, to a very large extent, a closed book to the people who did not speak and read that language.

To-day conditions have so changed, Doctor Clarke tells me, that the people in certain quarters of Prague scowl at any one who speaks German on the street.

"When we go to visit an official of the Government," said Doctor Clarke, "we usually inquire, first of all, which language this particular official prefers to speak, German or Czech. It is wise to do this because most of the officials, particularly if they represent the central government of Vienna, speak German; but a Czech who is loyal to his race will not speak the hated German unless he has to do so."

Doctor Clarke told me, as illustrating the fanaticism of the Bohemian people in this matter of language, that his little girls, who had been educated in German schools and preferred to speak that language among themselves, had more than once been hooted at, and even stoned, by young Bohemians in the part of the town where he lives, because they spoke a language which the masses of the people had been brought up to hate.

Another way in which the situation of the Slavic people resembles, to a certain extent, that of the masses of the Negroes in the Southern States, is in the matter of their political relations to the dominant races. Both in Austria and in Hungary all the races are supposed to have the same political privileges, and, in the case of Austria at least, the Government seems to have made a real effort to secure equal rights to all. Here, again, racial and traditional prejudices, as well as the wide differences in wealth and culture of the different peoples, have kept the political power in Austria proper in the hands of the Germans, and in Hungary in the hands of the Magyars.