and did not treat his baggage with the usual disrespect. The brass-bound trunks contained phonographs to disturb the age-long silence of some mountain village, samples of American whiskey, “the kind that burns all the way down,” and therefore characteristic of our temper. There were cigars, manufactured by the American Tobacco Trust, and safely concealed; for the Austrian and Italian governments have been wise enough to create a monopoly of their own on tobacco.
Gold trinkets, too, there were, for some Dulcinea in the Apennines or the Carpathians—trinkets brought as tokens of faithfulness, which is often as spurious as the metal; and ah, yes! there is something else which they bring and no customs boundary can keep it out. It is hidden away in the innermost being and will come to light some day, although now the wanderer himself may be unconscious of it.
The returned immigrants scatter into thousands of villages, rousing them from their commonplaceness by stories of adventure, boasts of mighty deeds of valor and praise or criticism of our strange customs.
Sitting in the inn of a little Alpine village, I once overheard one of these immigrants comparing the slow ways of the natives with our swifter pace.
“In America the trains go so fast that they can’t stop to take on passengers; they just have hooks with which they are caught as the train flies past.
“They have reaping machines,” this candidate for the “Ananias Club” continued, “to which a dozen horses are hitched, and the grain is cut, threshed, ground to flour and baked, in a few minutes. All you have to do is to touch a button and you can get bread or cake as you choose.”
All this his auditors believed; but when he told them that we build houses forty stories high, their credulity was strained to the breaking point; although he swore by the memory of his departed mother that it was so, and that he had seen it with his own eyes.
One reason that the returned immigrant is so quickly recognized is, that he purposely emphasizes the difference between himself and those who have remained at home. He does everything and wears everything which will make him like an American, even if over here he had scarcely moved out of his group or come in touch with our civilization. With pride the men wear our clothing, including stiff collars and ties, and when one is in doubt as to a man’s relation to our life, a glance at his feet is sufficient; “for by their”—shoes—“ye shall know them.”
While one may deplore the loss of the picturesque in European peasant life, there is an ethical significance in the immigrant’s American garments which is of rather vital importance.
The Polish peasant in his native environment is one of the laziest among European labourers. Wrapped in his sheepskin coat, summer and winter, walking barefoot the greater part of the year, and in winter putting his feet into clumsy, heavy boots which impeded his progress, these garments fitted his temper. They were heavy, inexpensive, never changing, and rarely needed renewal. The American clothes he wears are a symbol of his altered character. They mean a new standard of living even as they mean a new standard of effort.