I braved the snow-banks and waded through an unmarked path towards the cemetery where they shall all soon lie. I wandered among the graves, among those who long ago went to their rest and their reward. Here among others are the Sisters Iphigenia and Anastasia and the Brothers Daniel and Gabriel, the headstones of their graves quite covered by the snow. In the centre of the cemetery a stone sarcophagus rises above the snow. It seems to have withstood the ravaging tooth of time, for it stands squarely upon the ground. I brushed aside as best I could the snow which covered the tablet, and read: “Here rests an outgrowth of the love of God, a solitary brother, afterwards a leader, ruler, teacher of the solitary and the congregation of Christ in and around Ephrata. Born in Eberbach, in the Palatinate. Called by his worldly name, Conrad Beisel; but according to his spiritual name, ‘Friedsam,’ the peaceful one.”
The snow and the frost clung closely. I could not read it all, but I saw plainly the beautiful German letters cut deep into the stone. “Friedsam”—it was this word which took me back to Whiskey Hill.
“Friedsam.” No one could be called that on Whiskey Hill. Weather-beaten wooden buildings there are, scaffolded structures, shaken by the vibration of coal-crushing machinery within. From their third or fourth stories down, young boys sit before troughs, along which the coal rushes and rumbles and tumbles. Nine hours a day, in an atmosphere black as night from coal dust, sitting in a cramped and unnatural position, the breaker-boys pick slate from the falling coal by the light of smoky oil lamps directly under their nostrils. Nine hours of this, and many of these boys, mere children, although sworn to be the legal age, which is fourteen, walk homeward like old men. They look so weary, so old, so wizened! They surely are not “Friedsam.”
An old man climbs down the breaker. He, too, is now a breaker “boy.” Only about fifty-six years of age, unfit for the harder work in the mine, he picks slate from the larger lumps. He clings to a bit of broken fence as soon as the fresh air strikes him and coughs so violently that his paroxysm shakes the fence. The boys stand about, jeering; but when a clot of blood comes from the old man’s mouth, and another followed by a stream, the boys take to their heels.
“Prach, dust, got into my lungs,” the Slovak miner says. “It can’t last much longer.” Looking after the boys, and then pointing to himself, he adds, “The beginning and the end of the breaker-boy.”
I shall never forget the pain written on that man’s face as he told me that he came to this country, a young Slovak boy from a village by the river Waag, strong and full of health. He is giving his life-blood drop by drop, drop by drop, for our enrichment. He is unable to walk home; so I lead him. Home! This is his home. A gray, weather-beaten hut, one of thirty, standing on a slant of the hillside, surrounded by culm piles, black and forbidding. There is a street, deeply sunk in mire; for there is no sewerage, and a sickening green scum has gathered in front of every house. I say there is no sewerage—there is not even a decent ditch which might carry the foul stuff away.
The hut has three stories, the lowest one built into the hillside, with windows only to the front; the rest of the rooms are damp and cold, not even fit for the storing of vegetables. In one of these holes lives the old, consumptive breaker-boy. Surely this suggests nothing “Friedsam.”
There are thousands and tens of thousands such “homes” in Pennsylvania, all the way from Pittsburg to Whiskey Hill. Each one of them brings rich revenue to somebody, and all of them reap a rich harvest of death. Six, eight, and ten dollars’ rent a month is paid by these miners for a place in which they often die by inches.
The battle against filth is not everywhere zealously prosecuted; but I challenge any American woman to do better than some of these Slovak women on Whiskey Hill. Let me take you into one such home—and I came upon it more often than you may think. The room is freshly papered, the work done by the miner’s wife, and not ill done. The floor is scrupulously clean; gorgeous pictures of the saints hang on the wall; there is a sewing-machine, and a woman busy at her task of making shirts for her miner husband.