We heard one delightful story which is so typically American and so reveals the American Spirit at its best, that the Herr Director embodied it in his book. The president of a Quaker college told us that just as he found there was some danger that the men who had to work their way through, were losing caste, one of the upper classmen opened a boot and shoe mending and cleaning shop. As he was a man of means, whose standing in his group was unquestioned, his action took from common labor its ever renewing curse.
In many of the colleges we met groups of men so full of this spirit, so concerned with fostering it, that all the snobberies of which we had heard seemed even smaller than they were in their own right. We met those who gave their leisure hours to that most difficult and worthy task of Americanizing the immigrants who, in many instances, almost encroached upon the campus. The students visited them in the box-cars where they lived, or in the hovels where they reared children; they taught them English and the elements of good citizenship, and every one of them had some particular Antonio to whom he was devoted, and whom he was trying to lift to his level.
Although the general testimony was that the students had gained more from the contact than the immigrants had, I know how immeasurably much it means to these strangers to have leaning up against their own lonely souls men of culture, and sweet, clean breath, and brotherly heart.
It is this idealism in our college youth which is so precious an asset that to lose it would mean bankruptcy to our educational institutions.
Although the Herr Director did not tell me, I knew that this excursion into the universities of the East had been a success; for thus far he seemed to have enjoyed everything; at least he did not complain about anything. He seemed in an especially happy mood when we were talking it over in the home of one of the presidents, whose guests we had become. “Yes, I like your colleges very much, and if I should want my boy to have four years of more or less organized happiness, I would send him to an American college. He would have a good time, I think his morals would be safe,” and he added with a smile, “his intellect would be safe also.”
VIII
The Russian Soul and the American Spirit
NEW YORK is geographically misplaced for such a purpose as mine. It ought to lie somewhere west of Niagara Falls, so that one might be able to take strangers to that wonderful cataract without their having previously exhausted all the emotions which they are capable of expressing.
The day journey between New York and Buffalo is never commonplace, especially when it furnishes such euphonious names as Susquehanna, Wilkes Barre, Mauch Chunk, etc. From the hilltops we had glimpses of great valleys below, valleys which are mined and furrowed and channelled by a great industrial host whose crowded dwellings resemble the hives of bees and are as monotonously alike.
I could make these glimpses interesting enough, for I could tell by the shape of the church steeples and by the style of cross which crowned them, what faiths were there contending with each other. With equal certainty, and by the same signs, I knew the nationality of the people who worked there, and had faith enough to build steeples in the shadow of mine shafts and coal breakers. It was an atmosphere tense from the labor of seven unbroken days, and heavy from noxious gases in which trees languish and die, fish perish in the murky rivers, birds fear to nest, and man alone, immigrant man, lives and works and worships.
The Herr Director, like all Germans, has a natural contempt for the Slavs, and when I proposed that before we visited Niagara Falls we should see some of the Slavic settlements, he demurred; but when the Frau Directorin added her plea to mine, he reluctantly yielded. I was able to promise them an interesting meeting with an idealistic, young Russian priest, who had voluntarily taken a mission among these miners. He was earnestly striving to guard their souls, and also that which seems quite as precious to their church, their Russian nationality.