It is true that out of the 500 Welsh miners there are only about fifty left; but the 450 were pushed up and not out and are in no position to complain. They have moved on to farms and have grown prosperous while some of the most lucrative business in the city is theirs.
It does seem a great pity that a skilled trade like mining should have passed into the hands of unskilled labourers; but for this, the invention of machinery is to blame, and not the foreigner. Had comparatively cheap labour been unavailable, the genius of the American would not have stopped until he had all but eliminated the human element, as he has done in many other trades in which unskilled foreign labour is not a factor.
Twenty-five years ago I “squatted” near mine No. 3 with my men from Scharosh. It was as wretched a patch as miners’ patches always are. We bunked twenty in a room and took as good care of our bodies as conditions permitted; so that when we went down-town we were cleanly if not stylish.
My men soon learned to drink whiskey like the Irish, swear like the English and dress like the Americans.
After twenty-five years the patches around the mines in Streator are practically gone, and the homes there are as good as the Welsh or English miners ever had. Some of the newer additions in that growing city are occupied entirely by Slavs and do them credit.
Nor has the Slav been content to remain in the mines; he, too, has begun to move out and up. He owns saloons and sightly stores in which his sons and daughters clerk, and it would take a very keen student of race characteristics to distinguish the Slavs from the native Americans.
“Do you see that young man at the entrance to the Chautauqua?” said Mr. Williams, its public spirited secretary.
“Racially, his father is as sharply marked a man as I have ever seen, and the son, a graduate of Harvard, looks as if his forefathers had all grown up in the salt air of the New England coast.”
Here in Streator were the people who have lived with the new immigrant a quarter of a century and more, and I have spoken to them three times, in my most optimistic vein; many a man and woman has said: