Another incident occurred last spring as I was passing through a border on one of those nerve-racking coal roads.
At a small, desolate mining village a group of men entered the car, unwillingly enough. They were chained to one another and were driven to their seats with curses and the butt of a gun. They were Italian miners, part of that human material now scattered all over the United States, carried by something swifter, though not less insistent than the glacial movements which graved the beds of the rivers and shifted so much of earth’s original scenery. There was some danger of violence, and the accompanying minions of the law held back the angry passengers. There was scarcely a moment, however, when they themselves did not apply some vigorous measure to assure themselves that three undersized Southern Italians, chained to one another, should not escape them.
The car was uncomfortably crowded and grew more so at every station; for the next day the new governor was to be inaugurated at the capital, toward which our train was leisurely travelling.
I had some difficulty in ethnologically classifying the man who shared my seat. He was large, the colonel and major type, although his head was rounder. The features, too, were of a different cast, his speech less refined and his manners less gentle.
He wore a broad, new hat, his hair was long, curling slightly, and he had an air of special importance, the cause of which I discovered later.
“I wonder why they are treating those poor fellows so roughly,” I audibly soliloquized, turning to him. He was studying a typewritten document and evidently did not relish the interruption.
“Is that any of your business?” he asked, punctuating the short sentence with a liberal supply of oaths.
“Yes, I have no other business,” I replied. “I travel about the world trying to find out why we people treat one another as we do, if we happen to be of different races.”
“What kind of business is that?” looking up from his manuscript and regarding me suspiciously.
“Well,” I said, “we call that ‘Social Psychology.’”