In America the Polish labourer loses his native laziness. The journey in itself has shaken him out of his lethargy; the high gearing of our industrial wheels, the pressure brought to bear upon him by the American foreman, the general atmosphere of our life charged by an invigorating ozone, and the absence of a leisure class, at least from the industrial community, have, in a few years, changed what many observers regarded as a fixed characteristic.
The whole Slavic race is inclined to lead an easy life, and immigration is destined to have a permanent effect upon it; for the returned immigrant acts contagiously upon his community. Unbiased landowners and manufacturers have told me that we have trained their workmen in industry, that we have quickened their wits and that while wages have risen nearly 60% in almost all departments of labour, the efficiency of the labourers has been correspondingly increased, most noticeably where the largest number of returned immigrants has entered the home field.
The Slavic peasants both in Hungary and Poland were gradually losing their allotted land, and were socially and physically deteriorating, prior to the movement to America. Indolence coupled with intemperance drove them into the hands of usurers, and they dropped into the landless class, thus becoming dependent upon casual labour.
The returned immigrant began to buy land which the large landowners were often forced to sell, because wages had risen abnormally and labourers were often not to be had at any price. In the four years between 1899 and 1903, land owned by peasants increased in some districts to 418%, and taking the immigrant districts in Austro-Hungary and Russian-Poland together, the increase in four years reaches the incredible figure of 173%.
In three districts of Russian-Poland the peasants bought in those four years 14,694 acres of farmland. This of course means not only that money was brought back from America, but that the peasant at home has become more industrious, if not always more temperate and frugal.
The little village of Kochanovce in the district of Trenczin in Hungary, out of which but few had emigrated to America, and to which not many families had returned, has, under this new economic impulse, bought the land on which the villagers’ forefathers were serfs and on which they had worked during the harvest for about twenty cents a day. The peasants bought the whole baronial estate, including the castle, giving a mortgage for the largest part of the purchase sum; but they are now the owners of one of the finest estates in Hungary, and the mortgage drives them to work as they have never worked before. This same impulse has struck the district of Nyitra in which the land had almost gone out of the peasants’ hands, lost by the same causes, intemperance and indolence.
In the last five years the change has been so great as to seem marvellous. Usurers have been driven out of business and the peasant’s house has ceased to be a mud hut with a straw-thatched roof. In fact, that type of building has been condemned by law, at the initiative of returned immigrants.
The shopkeepers throughout the whole immigrant territory rejoice. Their stock is increased by many varieties of goods; for the peasant now wants the best there is in the market, often useless luxuries, to be sure; but while he may spend his money “for that which is not meat,” he wants to spend, and that means effort, than which the Slavs as a race need nothing more for their social and political salvation.
Their advance is strikingly illustrated by the following examples.
The B. Brothers of Vienna are manufacturers of neckties. On a recent visit to their establishment I met some buyers from Hungary, one of whom, when the salesman showed him the class of goods which he had been in the habit of buying, highly coloured, stiff bows of cheap cotton, said: