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

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

Two of the emigrants with whom I talked had been in America before. One of these, who understood a little English, seemed to be a leader among the others. When I asked him the reason why he was going back to America he spoke quite frankly and disparagingly about conditions in the old country.

He said it was not so much the wages that led people to emigrate, though they were small enough. But the worst of it was that there were long intervals when it was not possible to get any work. Besides that, the taxes were high.

"And then," he added, shrugging his shoulders and throwing out his arm with a gesture of impatience, "it is too tight here."

I suspect that this expresses the feeling of a good many emigrants who, returning to their native country, have emigrated a second time. They have found things in the old country "too tight" for comfort. There is still room in America for people to spread out, and grow and find out for themselves what they are capable of. As long as people find things "too tight" they will move on. The plant stretches always toward the light.

Among the emigrants with whom I had an opportunity to talk was a group of Roumanians who had come up from Transylvania, or Siebenbürgen, as they called it. They were a dark, silent sort of people, who hung very closely together and looked at us out of the corners of their eyes. When I sought to talk with them they seemed indisposed to answer my questions, and finally one of them told the interpreter that they had been instructed not to talk with any one until they reached America.

Considering the elaborate regulations which their Government has imposed upon people seeking to leave Hungary, and the still more elaborate regulations which our Government has imposed upon people seeking to enter the United States, this did not particularly surprise me.

Since these people were Roumanians, or Wallachs, from Siebenbürgen, they may have had other reasons for not telling why they were leaving the country. The Roumanians, although they proudly claim descent from the Roman conquerors of this part of the world, are, nevertheless, classed among the "inferior," as they are, in fact, among the most ignorant, races in Hungary. As they have been particularly persistent in advertising their wrongs to the rest of Europe, and have been frequently punished for it, they may, perhaps, have learned that silence is golden, particularly in the presence of Magyar officials.

When in Vienna I was seeking for information that would help me to understand the racial situation in the Dual Monarchy, I found that one of the most learned and brilliant writers on that subject was a Roumanian who, while he was a student in a Roumanian academy in 1892, had been arrested with other students and condemned to four years' imprisonment for writing and circulating a pamphlet in which were enumerated "acts of violence" committed against the other races of Hungary by the "superior" Magyars.

The superiority of the dominant race seems, as a matter of fact, to be the foundation stone of the political policy of the present government in Hungary. In the last analysis it seems to be the major premise, so to speak, of every argument which I happen to have heard or read in justification of the policy which the Government has pursued in reference to the other races of the monarchy. In fact, the "superiority of the Magyar" race is responsible for most that is good and evil in the history of Hungary for the past seventy years. It seems, for example, to have been the chief source of inspiration for the heroic struggle against Austria which began in 1848 and ended with the independence of Hungary in 1867. It seems, also, to have been the goad which has spurred on the impatient leaders of modern Hungary in their hurry to overtake and surpass the progress of civilization in the rest of Europe.

Unfortunately the ambition and success of the Magyars in their effort to gain their political independence and preserve their peculiar racial type from being lost and swallowed up by the other and "inferior" peoples by whom it is surrounded have encouraged every other nationality in a similar desire and determination.