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

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

Few people, I venture to say, have any definite notion to what extent the most remote parts of Europe, from which the majority of our immigrants now come, have been penetrated by the ideas and the sentiments of the Socialistic party. There are, for example, some five or six different branches of the party in Bohemia. Socialism, I learn, has made its way even into such countries as Roumania, Servia, Bulgaria, and Dalmatia, where perhaps three fourths of the population are engaged in agriculture.

There are, however, as I discovered, various kinds and types of Socialism. I think I saw during my journey across Europe as many different kinds of Socialists as I did kinds of Jews, which is saying a good deal. In Denmark and Italy, for example, I met men of the very highest type who were members of the Socialist party. In Copenhagen I was entertained by the editors of the Socialistic paper, The Politiken, which is perhaps the most ably edited and influential paper in Denmark. In Italy many of the most patriotic as well as the most brilliant men in the country, writers, students, and teachers, are members of the Socialist party.

In Poland, on the other hand, I met other Socialists who had taken an active part in the revolution in Russia and who, for aught I know, were members of that group of desperate men who are said even now to be plotting from Cracow, Austria, a new revolutionary movement among the agricultural classes in Russia.

In short, I found that where the masses of the people are oppressed, where the people at the bottom are being crushed by those who are above them, there Socialism means revolution. On the other hand, where governments have shown a liberal spirit, and especially where the Socialists have had an opportunity to participate in the Government, or have been able, by means of the coöperative societies I have described, to do constructive work for the benefit of the masses, they have ceased to be revolutionists, have no longer sought to overturn the Government, but have patriotically striven to strengthen the existing order by freeing it from those defects that were dangerous to its existence.

In saying this, I do not mean to imply that I in any way favour the Socialistic programme of reform. I live in the Southern States, a part of the country which, more than any other part of the civilized world, still believes that the best government is the government that governs least; the government that you can wear like an old coat, without feeling it. More than that, I believe that the best and only fundamental way of bringing about reform is not by revolution, not through political machinery that tries to control and direct the individual from the outside, but by education, which gets at the individual from within; in short, fits him for life but leaves him free.

There is much in the history of the agricultural labourers of Hungary and Italy that is interesting to any one who has studied the condition of the Negro farm labourer in the South. In many respects their history has been the same. There is, however, this difference: When the serfs were freed in Hungary, as in most other parts of Europe, provision was made to give them land, though to a very large extent they were denied the political privileges enjoyed by the upper classes.

In Italy also it was intended, in giving the serfs freedom, to give them likewise land. Again, when the vast estates of the Church were taken over by the State, an attempt was made to increase the class of small owners and to give the land to the people who tilled it. In both cases, however, it was but a few years before the greater portion of the peasant owners were wiped out and their lands absorbed into the large estates. At the present time the small landowners, under the influence of education and agricultural organization, are gaining ground, and both countries, in the interest of agriculture, are seeking to encourage this movement.

The case of the Negro was just the opposite. When the masses of the Negro people were turned loose from slavery they carried in their hands the ballot that they did not know how to use, but they took no property with them. At the present time, I believe, by a conservative estimate, that the Negroes in the South own not less than twenty million acres of land, an area equal to the five New England States of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

On the other hand, the Negroes have largely lost, at least temporarily, many of the political privileges which were given them at emancipation. The experience of the peasants of Europe, just as the experience of the Negro in America, has served to confirm an opinion I have long held—namely, that it is very hard for a man to keep anything that he has not earned or does not know how to use. And in most cases, the best way and, in fact, the only way to insure any people in the possession either of property or political privileges is to fit them by education to use these gifts for their own good and for the highest good of the community in which they live.