Religion must wean him from his ancient enemies, intemperance and superstition, and when it has done this, it has rendered a service which may again make of the Slavs a homogeneous race; great, vital, virile and well prepared to play a leading part in the future history of Europe as well as America, where they are now, numerically at least, the most important element in the great immigrant tide.
XVI
FROM EPHRATA TO WHISKEY HILL
THAT portion of our history, which began with the inflow of Germans from the Palatinate, seems to most of us a closed chapter; yet in the very heart of the Keystone State, where more than 200 years ago the German pietist began to build its cities, since grown to greatness, the German is still a foreigner.
Indeed, he is almost as complete a foreigner as the Slav who lives in the mining patches along the Wyoming arid Susquehanna Rivers. Germanic speech, habits and types survive, and it was in a crowded trolley car in Reading, Pa., just after I had finished a wearisome investigation among the Slavs, that a woman of generously Teutonic proportions said to me: “Setz dich a mahl zu mir her.”
Let me add that although I had never seen the lady before, I obeyed the summons. First, because there was no other seat vacant, and, second, because I have been long enough in America to obey implicitly when a lady commands.
“Du acts wie ein stranger,” the good woman continued, taking my hand; and then, discovering that I had a right to act like a stranger, she apologized profusely. She had mistaken me for her family physician. In spite of her evident embarrassment, we began a conversation, and my ears, accustomed as they now are to our rather monotonous and uneuphonic English, refreshed themselves by listening to this new speech—Pennsylvania Dutch. It required thinking in two languages, and that in their most archaic forms.
Four generations had passed since my neighbour’s ancestors came to this country; yet her English, whenever she attempted it, smacked strongly of the Fatherland, and in an unguarded moment, when my sentences seemed to her rather involved, she said, “Du talkst a bissel zu fast.”
The trolley took us through the manufacturing centre of Reading and out into the fruitful fields of Lancaster County, and the further I travelled in that state the more I realized the difference between the old and the new Pennsylvania, even in the names called into my ears by the prosaic conductor. Philadelphia does not now suggest Bible times so much as it might; but there are Bethlehem, Nazareth, Emmaus, and Ephrata, each name suggesting at once a sacred atmosphere. Then for the new Pennsylvania are the names of Johnstown, Coalton, Scranton, and Steelton, besides those yet unplaced on the map—names like Hunkeytown, Guinea Hill, Dago Roost, and Whiskey Hill, squatted close to the mines, flanked by culm heaps and huge breakers, and cut through and through by ravines and dirt-clogged rivers. All these towns are destined to disappear long before the last lumps of coal dug there, are burned.
The trolley stopped at Ephrata, and my neighbour, who had been in Reading, “bargains zu kaufe im grosse schtore,” left the car; but not without admonishing me to be sure to see the cloister of the German Baptist Brothers, which, she said, “is a grosse sight.” I needed no admonition, for I was there on a pilgrimage. I had come, to stand face to face with a great past, to visit the old haunts of these German mystics, to lose myself in the all-pervading peace of Ephrata, after having been in the thick of the great industrial war, whose presence was attested even here by the cloud of smoke on the western horizon. This cloud of smoke, although changing into a pillar of fire by night, does not seem to be the guide out of captivity. I suppose one easily reads something into the atmosphere of a place; but I am sure that, even without the pilgrim spirit which brought me there, I should have recognized Ephrata as one of the places in which dreamers have built air castles; and these are castles which have foundations. The archæologist does not see them in the dust; but the sociologist, if he has a sensitive spirit, feels them, especially if he has come from a week’s study of Whiskey Hill.
One of the men who has written of Ephrata before me says: “There is nothing peculiar about the village itself, or its people.” He evidently had no “inner sense,” and, moreover, he had never been at Whiskey Hill. Not only is the air of Ephrata “salubrious and the outlook delightful,” the street is full of gabled houses one close upon the other. Some of them are commonplace indeed; but many of them are quaint and clean, with deep-set windows full of flower-pots, the green foliage shining through latticed panes, in rich contrast to the white snow almost up to the window-sills. And the people one sees—“commonplace”? People who for nearly two hundred years have clung tenaciously to a strange garb, in the midst of a “perverse and crooked generation,” bent upon changing the cut of its coats with every passing season? Women who wear brown bonnets and look as modest as thrushes, whom one sees in single file following the men; women who have resisted the allurements of pokes and toques and picture hats for two hundred years—such women commonplace? Such women are as remarkable as they are rare, and such there are in Ephrata.