The complaints as registered in Cetinje were many, and on the whole justified. They may be classified as follows:
| Cheated by Employment Agencies | 80% |
| Cheated by Austrian boarding-house keepers | 60% |
| Money lost by giving bribes to Irish-American bosses who promised jobs which were never given | 36% |
| Rough treatment by bosses | 72% |
| Robbed by railroad crews in Montana | 80% |
| “Shanghaied”—made drunk and railroaded from St. Louis to Southern Kansas | 15% |
| Robbed of money and tickets before departure for home | 40% |
This represented the dark side of the experience of the Montenegrin immigrant. The brighter side cannot so easily be classified. As with other groups, so with those; America meant an enlargement of their horizon. Most of them had earned money and meant to buy land; some of them had an eye to the undeveloped mineral wealth of their country, and two carried home enriched lives through having attended an evening school, where they had learned to read and write some English.
All were still loyal sons of their mountain home, and only three of the thirty in the inn meant to try their luck again.
The innkeeper thought emigration a great boon, and it was, to him; for the emigrants all passed through Nyegusi whether they came or went, and that meant revenue.
Externally, Cetinje, the capital, is still the same; although there the greatest change has taken place since my last visit. Cetinje now has a parliament, and its post-office officials have something more to do than smoke cigarettes. Its storekeepers are enriched by the inflow of money; the women respond to the new spirit; for a comparatively large number is going to America, and a few have already gone. The men, especially the old peasants, find this new spirit most trying. One of them, in a little stone hut at Kolasin, said: “The women come home after three years’ absence and the devil has got into them. They sit in my presence and demand to eat when I do!
“What kind of country is that anyway which encourages such things? Is it a woman’s country?”
I met one woman whose son I knew in the “States.” He is one of the few that have prospered, and he means to stay. His mother’s little cottage on the outskirts of Cetinje shows plainly the influence of America.
On the walls hang many gaudy calendars, and a crayon portrait of her son, in an elaborate frame.
“Tell me,” she said, as she pointed to a bulky newspaper printed in Scranton, Pa., and sent by her son, as a curiosity, “how many weeks does it take them to read it?”