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

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

For example, it struck me as curious that in a city which is so well provided with the latest type of electric street cars one should see peasant women trudging in from the country with heavy loads of vegetables on their backs; and, in a city where the Government is seeking to provide modern houses for the labouring classes, with all the conveniences that invention can supply, one should see these same peasant women peacefully sleeping on the pavement or under the wagons in the public square, just as they have been so long accustomed to sleep, during the harvest times, in the open fields.

In the same way, in another connection, it seemed strange to read in the report of the Minister of Agriculture that an agricultural school at Debreczen, which had been carried on in connection with an agricultural college at the same place, had been closed because "the pupils of this school, being in daily contact with the first-year pupils of the college, boarding at the Pallag, attempted to imitate their ways, wanted more than was necessary for their future social position, and at the same time they aimed at a position they were not able to maintain."

All this suggests and illustrates the rapidity with which changes are going on in Hungary and the haste with which the leaders in the Government and in social life are moving to catch up with and, if possible, get ahead of the procession of progress in the rest of Europe.

The trouble seems to be that in Hungary progress has begun at the top, with the Government, instead of at the bottom, with the people. The Government, apparently, desires and hopes to give the masses of the people an education that will increase their usefulness, without at the same time increasing their wants and stimulating their desire to rise. Its efforts to improve the condition of the masses are further confused by a determination to suppress the other nationalities and preserve the domination of the Magyar race. In short, I think I might sum up the situation by saying that Hungary is trying the doubtful experiment of attempting to increase the efficiency of the people without giving them freedom.

The result is that while the Government is closing up the schools because, as the Minister of Agriculture says, "an important political and social principle is endangered" when students begin to hope and dream of a higher and better situation in life than that in which they were born, the masses of the people are emigrating to America in order to better their condition.

At Fiume I had an opportunity to study at close range what I may call the process of this emigration. I had, in other words, an opportunity to see something, not merely of the manner in which the stream of emigration, flowing out from the little inland villages, is collected and cared for at Fiume until it pours into and is carried away in the ships, but also to get a more definite idea of the motives and social forces that are working together to bring about this vast migration of the rural populations of southeastern Europe.

In no country in Europe, not even in Italy, has emigration been so carefully studied, and in no country has more been done to direct and control emigration than in Hungary. At the same time I think it is safe to say that nowhere else has emigration brought so many changes in the political and social life of the people. At one time, indeed, it seemed as if Hungary proposed to make emigration a state monopoly. This was when the Government, in granting to the Cunard Steamship Company a monopoly of the emigrant business at Fiume, made a contract to furnish that line at least 30,000 emigrants a year. At that time there were between one hundred and two hundred thousand emigrants leaving Hungary every year, most of whom were making the journey to America by way of the German lines at Hamburg and Bremen.

It is said that the Hungarian Government, in order to turn the tide of emigration in the direction of Fiume and swell the traffic at that port, directed that all steamship tickets should be sold by Government agents, who refused permission to emigrants to leave the country by other than the Fiume route.

Since then, however, Hungary has, I understand, modified its contract with the Cunard Company in such a manner that it does not appear as if the Government had actually gone into the business of exporting its own citizens, and, instead of attempting to direct emigration through Fiume by something amounting almost to force, it has rather sought to invite traffic by creating at this post model accommodations for emigrants.