In Chicago, where over 100,000 of them make of that city the third largest Bohemian center in the world, they have a strongly organized Freethinkers' Society, with three hundred branches, which issues an atheistic catechism, and has it taught in its numerous Sunday-schools, as they are called. But there are thousands who do not belong to this cult, and who are open to the gospel. The same is true of the Bohemians in New York, Cleveland, and elsewhere who have not advanced to the Chicago infidel standpoint. Their character has not been well understood. They possess excellent qualities for the making of good Americans. Christianity in pure and true form is all they need.
A Home-loving and Musical People
The Bohemians are a home people, social, and fond of organizations of every kind. Music is their passion, and their clubs, mutual benefit societies, and loan associations, successfully run, show large capacity for management. They have forty-two papers, seven of them religious, two Protestant. Their freethinking is not all of it by any means of the dogmatic sort which has its catechism of atheism. There is another class, represented by an old woman with a broad brow over which the silvery hair is smoothly parted, who says to the missionary, "I have my God in my heart, I shall deal with him. I do not want any priest to step between us." That is the class which the gospel can reach and ought to reach speedily.
Where Located
About seventy-five per cent, of the Bohemians live in the northwest. In Cleveland they have entered into various industries. In New York they are largely employed in cigar-making, at which the women and girls work under conditions not calculated to inspire them with regard for God or man. The home life cannot be what it should when the mothers are compelled to work in the factories, besides having all the home cares and work. The testimony of the tenement inspectors is that the Bohemians are perhaps the cleanest of the poor people in the city, and are struggling heroically against the pitiful conditions of the tenement-houses in which they are compelled to exist.
II. The Poles
A Large Element
The Poles form one of the oldest and largest elements of the Slav immigration. In 1900 the census gave 668,536 persons whose parents were born in Poland, and of these 383,510 were themselves born there. Nearly a quarter of a million of the latter came to this country between 1890 and 1900, and in the five years following, 1900-5, about 350,000 more arrived. A third of a million Poles now in America do not understand English. The Polish strength is indicated by the Polish National Alliance, with 50,000 members, and by a list of fifty newspapers published in the Polish tongue, four of them dailies, printed in Chicago, Buffalo, and Milwaukee, the largest centers.
