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

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

We visited one of the little peasant houses in the neighbourhood of the customs office. It was a little, low log hut with a duck pond in front of the doorway and a cow-pen at right angles to the house. There were two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen. In the kitchen, which had an earthen floor, three or four or five members of the family were sitting on stools, gathered about a large bowl, into which each was dipping his or her spoon. The bedroom was a neat little room, containing a high bed, a highly decorated chest of drawers, and was filled with curious bits of the rustic art, including among other things several religious pictures and images.

Although everything in this house was very simple and primitive, there was about it an air of self-respecting thrift and neatness that showed that the family which lived here was relatively prosperous and well-to-do.

Quite as interesting to me as the houses we visited were the stories that our guide told us about the people that lived in them. I recall among others the story of the young widow who served in the customs office as a clerk and lived in a single room in one corner of the peasant's cottage to which I have just referred. She was a woman, he told me, of the higher classes, as her enterprising manner and intelligent face seemed to indicate; one of the lesser nobility, who had married a Russian official condemned for some fault or other to serve at this obscure post. He had died here, leaving a child with the rickets, and no means.

Another time our guide pointed out to us a more imposing building than the others we had seen, though it was built in the same rustic style as the smaller peasants' cottages around it. This house, it seems, had at one time belonged to one of the nobility, but it was now owned by a peasant. This peasant, as I understood, had at one time been a serf and served as a hostler in a wealthy family. From this family he had inherited, as a reward for his long and faithful service, a considerable sum of money, with which he had purchased this place and set himself up, in a small way, as a landlord.

I gained, I think, a more intimate view of the peasant life in Poland than I did in any other part of Europe that I visited. For that reason, and because I hoped also that these seeming trivial matters would, perhaps, prove as interesting and suggestive to others as they were to me, I have set down in some detail in this and the preceding chapters the impressions which I gathered there.

In the little village of Barany, in Russian Poland, I had reached the point farthest removed, if not in distance at least in its institutions and civilization, from America; but, as I stood on a little elevation of land at the edge of the village and looked across the rolling landscape, I felt that I was merely at the entrance of a world in which, under many outward changes and differences of circumstance, there was much the same life that I had known and lived among the Negro farmers in Alabama. I believed, also, that I would find in that life of the Russian peasants much that would be instructive and helpful to the masses of my own people.

I touched, before I completed my European experiences, not only the Austrian, but the Russian and German Polish provinces, but I should have liked to have gone farther, to Warsaw and Posen, and looked deeper into the life and learned more of the remarkable struggle which the Polish people, especially in these two latter provinces, are making to preserve the Polish nationality and improve the conditions of the Polish people.

In this connection, and in concluding what I have to say about my observations in Poland, I want to note one singular, and it seems to me suggestive, fact: Of the three sections of the Polish race, German, Russian, and Austrian, there are two in which, according to the information I was able to obtain, the people are oppressed, and one in which they seem to be, if anything, the oppressors. In Russian Poland and in German Poland the Polish are making a desperate struggle to maintain their national existence, but in these two countries the Poles are prosperous. Russian Poland has become in recent years one of the largest manufacturing centres in Europe, and the masses of the Polish people have become prosperous citizens and labourers. In German Poland the Polish peasants have, within the past forty years, become a thrifty farming class. The large estates which were formerly in the hands of the Polish nobility have been, to a very large extent, divided up and sold among a rapidly rising class of small landowners. In other words, what was originally a political movement in these two countries to revive and reëstablish the kingdom of Poland has become a determined effort to lift the level of existence among the masses of the Polish people.

In Austrian Poland, on the contrary, where the Austrian Government, in order, perhaps, to hold the political aspirations of the Ruthenians in check, has given them a free hand in the government of the province, they have vastly greater freedom and they have made less progress.

I am stating this fact baldly, as it was given to me, and without any attempt at an explanation. Many different factors have no doubt combined to produce this seeming paradox. I will merely add this further observation: Where the Poles are advancing, progress has begun at the bottom, among the peasants; where they have remained stationary the Polish nobility still rules and the masses of the people have not yet been forced to any great extent into the struggle for national existence. The nobles are content with opportunity to play at politics, in something like the old traditional way, and have not learned the necessity of developing the resources that exist in the masses of the people. On the other hand, oppression has not yet aroused the peasants as it has, particularly in Germany, to a united effort to help themselves.