For crime the Slav betrays no such bent as the South Italian. Aside from petty thieving—noted in some cases—the complaints of people near a Slav settlement center upon the affrays that follow in the wake of convivial drinking. The Bohemians have about the same criminal tendencies as the Germans. The other Slavs reveal the propensities of a rude, undeveloped people of undisciplined primitive passions. Animosity rather than cupidity is the motive of crime. When the Slav seeks illicit gain he takes the direct path of violence rather than the devious path of chicane; he commits robbery or burglary rather than theft or fraud or extortion. From crimes against chastity, and the loathsome knaveries that center in the social evil, he is singularly free. Morally, the stock is better than one would judge from the police records and from its reputation. No doubt if the descendants of these immigrants have the proper training and surrounding they will prove as orderly as the old American stock.
SLAVIC BRUTALITY AND RECKLESS FECUNDITY
Among the South Slavs "every married man," says Vrčević, as quoted by Professor W. I. Thomas, "strikes his wife black and blue at least once a month, or spreads a box on the ear over her whole face, or else people are likely to say that he is afraid of his wife." Their popular proverbs corroborate this, as for example: "He who does not beat his wife is no man." "Strike a wife and a snake on the head." "One devil is afraid of the cross, the other (the wife) of a stick." "The dog may howl, but the wife must hold her tongue." In one wedding-song the bride begs her husband: "Strike your wife only with good cause and when she has greatly vexed you." In another folk-song the young wife sings: "What sort of husband are you to me? You do not pull my hair, nor do you strike me!"
Although beating the wife with a wet rope is going out of practice, the Galician peasant, says Von Hupka, "still regards her as a thing belonging to him, which was made in the first place for his service." No wonder the Slav mother averages eight children! No wonder there is an appalling infant mortality, while a childbed death is too often the fate of the forspent mother. Little cares the stolid peasant. What is the woman there for? Nor is this view strange in the New World. In Hungary the Slovak women "bear a child a year—'always either bearing or nursing,' is the saying." But the annual child arrives likewise in the Slovak families of New York. The Slav wife in this country bears from two to two and a half times as fast as the wife of American parentage. Her daughter born under the Stars and Stripes is seven-eighths as prolific as her barefoot immigrant mother. The average Slavic charity case involves five persons, the German or Scandinavian case four persons, the American case three and one-half persons. A drunken Pole said with pride to the agent of a charitable society that was supporting his family: "Just think what I've done for the State! I've given it ten children!"
Courtesy of The Survey
Slav Woman and Italian Husband
