II
WHY DO THEY COME?

Migration. Why do such vast armies of human beings leave their homes? Why do they travel weary miles over land and sea and suffer such hardships and privations? The causes would indeed be urgent that would induce us to take a like journey and leave behind our pleasant, comfortable homes. Can it be that the home of the immigrant is not pleasant and comfortable? As we continue our study we shall find at least some of the reasons for this greatest migration in history.

On a beautiful day in autumn you may have seen large flocks of swallows wheeling around the steeple of some old church—“a river of winged life.” Some one has told you they are gathering before they migrate. “Oh, yes,” you say, “they are going away because they do not like the cold winter.” In the spring, you have seen a great moving V in the sky all made of birds, and some one has cried out, “There go the wild geese,” and you are told that they are journeying to the far, desolate North where the summer will soon be and where no one will molest them while they rear their young. So when great companies of people migrate there is a good reason. No one wants to leave a comfortable home without good cause.

You will be interested to study the causes of some of the great migrations in the past. If you will turn to the Book of Exodus you will find there the story of a vast human river of slaves flowing out of Egypt, across the Red Sea, into the wilderness. Why did they migrate? What drove the Goths down into the pleasant valleys of Italy? Did the richness of the Italian cities, the fertility of the plains, and the indolence of the inhabitants have anything to do with it? What brought the Tartars into China where as Manchus they have ruled 300 years, and where their long rein is now ended? The answer is simple. The Manchus were warlike Tartars, soldiers of fortune of a barren country. The Chinese were peace-loving dwellers in fertile valleys and plains. The better soldier was the victor.

There is no great nation of ancient or modern times but can tell its own story of migration. There once crossed into England a company of many thousands of splendid craftsmen bringing from France the secrets of trades that have helped make England great. What drove these Protestant families from their beloved land? There rang in their ears the solemn tolling of a great palace bell. That bell, sounding over the city of Paris, was the signal for the death of over forty thousand of the noblest Protestants of France. The St. Bartholomew massacre caused the migration.

In recent years a great tide of Irish began to move across the Atlantic. In ten years this mighty tide totaled over one million and a quarter human beings. The reason they came was the failure of the potato crop. The potato was their great food staple, as bread is ours. Great armies of Germans began to come after 1848. It would be interesting for you to find the reason of their coming. How hard it must be for the Southern Italian to leave his beautiful home and exchange his blue skies and hills and mountains for a dark, ill-smelling tenement, or for toil far underground in a mine. Why does he migrate and in numbers so great as to form every year a city the size of Portland, Oregon? We may find the answer farther along in our studies.

“If I were a Russian,” some one says, “I would want to leave home. The winter is so long, there is so much ice and snow, I would be glad to get to a warmer country.” But the Russian loves his winter. He drives his sankey with its hoop of tinkling bells arched high over his horse’s back faster than any other horseman in Europe. In his home is a great brick oven and on top of this the family sleeps, no matter how the storm blows, as warm as a Negro boy in a Southern cotton field. The Russian does not leave his home because of the winter.

WHY THEY BECOME OUR NEIGHBORS

Opportunity. Some one says another name for America is “opportunity.” Amid weeping and “Il Signore vi Benedica,” “God Bless You,” Giuseppe has gone away. He has been earning as contadino (farmer) 20 cents per day and is like a serf tied to the land. He earns in America $1.50 a day, or as much in one day as he earned before in seven. Giuseppe is frugal. He rises in his position to better pay, spends little money, and his bank account goes up until he has a sum that would have seemed a fortune in the little Sicilian village. Then, work slacking, he returns home. His watch and ponderous gold chain, his stylish American clothes, an exhibition of lofty independence, all make him a marked man.

Wherever you meet him on the village street, an awed, admiring group of friends is with him. He spreads the glowing tale of the New World and you may be sure the reality loses nothing in the telling. Every youthful heart is fired to a like adventure, to seek the golden, western world. As one returned immigrant said:—“It’s a land where all wear shoes, where trains shoot through the air, and shoot through the ground; even the poor ride, no one needs an umbrella, the cars pass everywhere.” It is little wonder they want to come. In America labor is dear and materials are cheap; in Italy labor is cheap and materials are expensive. There it pays a landlord to hire a man to watch his cows, rather than to build a fence, wood is so costly. In America no one would think of hiring a man for such a purpose, labor is so high.

The price paid in health and suffering for the money they take back is often far more than its worth. Many a poor fellow pale and haggard with that dread disease, tuberculosis, goes home hopeful that his genial skies will cure him of the death-blow the wet and cold and exposure of America have given him. But the defeated come home in the twilight, unattended and silent, while the successful swagger in at noonday with the blare of trumpet and beat of drums. As one Italian said to me no later than yesterday, “My uncle never told me the hardships I would have to face. I was far better off in Italy than here, but I am ashamed to go back.” And yet, all who come realize that the possibilities of success are far greater here than at home. As another said, “In Italy I wanted to do but could not. In America I want to and can. I am sorry, but ‘Good-bye, Italy.’”

The same opportunity for riches attracts the Chinese. He lives in a land that, labor as he will, is barely able to feed its almost half a billion human mouths. His wages at home are so meagre he can never hope for independence; two cents per day is what the farm laborer in Shantung earns. Since as a laborer he cannot legally enter the United States, he comes in under cover of darkness over the Mexican or Canadian borders, or any other way he can devise. The same hope of wealth attracts the Chinese.

Steamship Advertising. Many come because the steamship companies are such good advertisers. These companies paint beautiful pictures of the New World, and the peasant sees great farms, busy factories, and wealthy cities. The companies never show any views of dark, unhealthful tenements.

Through this steamship advertising many unfit persons sail for America, persons whom the agents might have known would be rejected, while many of the lowest class are induced to leave their country because their country is glad to get rid of them. It is said that in one small district in Austria two hundred and seventy criminals were released from prison one year and one hundred and eighty of them were in America within the next twelve months.

The Commissioner of Immigration at New York stated one year that 200,000 of the one million immigrants of that year were a real injury to the best interests of the country. Since the steamship company must be at the expense of returning an immigrant who is sent back, they make doubtful cases give a bond repaying them the return fare if the immigrant fails to slip by the “man at the gate.” Of course the only interest the company has is to get the immigrant’s money.

One steamship line anxious to make money brought over on one ship three hundred and eighty diseased peasants that Ellis Island promptly sent back. Among those peasants were many people of Montenegro. The Montenegrins are great soldiers. Tennyson wrote of them as

For five hundred years they have stood as a bulwark between the Turk and Europe. When they reached the home port, they stormed the offices of the steamship company, demanding the return of their fare, and after one look at their determined faces the clerks promptly locked themselves in and telephoned the authorities for help.

Some are induced to part with all they own, selling their little business and then, because of ill health or other difficulties that the agent might easily have known, are turned back broken-hearted and poverty-stricken to the village whence they came. Sometimes they are even sent to ports entirely different from those to which they had planned to go. This, of course, is all wrong.

The Employer. The reason back of the coming of many of these people is the employer, the man who manages the railways, the mines, or large contracts. He works through the padrones, and the Italian banks that “direct two-thirds of the stream of Italian immigration.” You may be surprised to know that the news of a big railroad contract reaches Italy as soon as we hear it. If we are to build subways or barge canals, or carry an underground river into New York, or let great railroad contracts, or make a garden of the desert with colossal irrigation reservoirs and canals, the message flies under the ocean to far-away Italy and there is spread through a thousand villages.

The employer is constantly looking for cheaper labor. Around his mine or factory are American homes, practising the “American standard of living.” This is a valuable term much in use and since it will occur again in this book we stop here to explain what it means. The American standard of living simply means the way most Americans live. Do you know that we live better than any other people in the world?

“I don’t think we live well,” one boy says, “we don’t have an automobile, or a pony, or a piano, and the people next door to us do.” But automobiles, and ponies and pianos, while pleasant to own, are not real necessities. Let us take a peep into the home of a Chinese boy. It is breakfast time and he is busy with a bowl of rice and a pair of chopsticks. Do you think you could eat rice with chopsticks? No! I think you would do much better with a spoon. “But doesn’t he like milk and sugar on his rice?” Perhaps so, but neither milk nor sugar are in sight. Now, let us look in at dinner. Here are the same boy, and the same chopsticks, and the same bowl with more rice. “Where are the bread and butter, the meat and potatoes, and the dessert? We always have different things like that for dinner,” you say. The Chinese boy does not seem to miss them; what seems to be troubling him is the small amount of rice left in the bowl.

Now take a look through this crack in the paper window, (the father of this little man is too poor to have glass windows in his home,) and see what our boy has for supper. Why there are the identical bowl, and the identical chopsticks, and what looks like the identical rice, though of course it is not. “So that is all this boy has had to eat for breakfast, dinner and supper—only rice?” Yes, that is all, and let me tell you he is very well satisfied, because he likes that much better than eating millet seed and that is what so many really poor Chinese live upon. As for shoes, our Chinese boy has none. His clothes cost only a few cents where yours cost dollars.

Nor is the Chinese boy so great an exception. The standard of living among the peasants in Russia is also very low; the same is true among the great mass of peasants in Sicily, and remember these peasants form the large majority of the population. That our standard is not the standard of living of some nations may be gathered from the question of the great Chinese viceroy, Li Hung Chang, when visiting America. After seeing the ever-present throngs of prosperous-looking people on the streets, he asked in great surprise, “But where are your working people?” He did not know that the happy-faced, well-dressed people he was looking at were working people practising the American standard of living.

The immigrant provides the cheap, unskilled labor. As he becomes influenced by American customs, he requires better clothes, a room for himself instead of sharing his room with ten other men, more pay as he becomes more skilled. He wants shoes for his wife. The American law compels him to send his children to school instead of making them wage-earners while little children. As his expenses increase he demands more money that he may live as the people about him live. Then the employer begins to replace him by labor costing what he formerly cost. Herein is a remarkable story that would fill many little books like this. It accounts for the procession of the Welsh, Scotch, Irish, Germans, and Huns in the coal regions. It accounts for practically all the civil war, in the form of bloody strikes, carried on in the Pennsylvania coal fields, and much of that which occurs in other industries throughout the country, this method of the employer seeking to replace those demanding higher wages by those willing to work more cheaply.

OPPRESSION

The Sicilian. Many come because of oppression in the home land. The Sicilian lives in a beautiful country, but while the sea and the mountains are good to look upon, the people are very poor. The farm worker cannot send his boy to school as boys go in America, for the rural schools are few. He must pay such heavy taxes he has little left for himself. Then, a few rich people own almost all the land and he must work for them, or starve. They pay him such small wages he cannot buy good, nourishing food for his children and they often suffer greatly in consequence. You draw a long breath when you are told his wages are from eight to thirty-two cents per day. Many of us use more each day in car-fare than a laborer in Sicily receives though he works from the time the top of Etna is crimson with morning, until the birds go to sleep. Even salt, so cheap with us, is taxed so heavily he cannot use it and when he cooks his corn meal in the salt water from the sea he is accused of smuggling. Oppression is what makes many of these people our neighbors.

The Jew. Let us step in and visit an old Jewish tailor, a saintly man who worships devoutly after the manner of his fathers. I am very careful not to give him any work on Saturday as it grieves him to disoblige his friends, and yet he will not work on his Sabbath day. He says, as do many others of the Jewish race: “I pray every day; my son prays once a week; my grandson does not pray at all.” This old tailor speaks such broken English, we will let his daughter tell the story. “My father is almost eighty years of age; he never worked with his own hands until he came to America. He was for many years the tailor of a Russian regiment, making all the uniforms for the officers and having a number of men employed under him; we were well-to-do, the officers loved my father, but when the riots arose it was all they could do to save his life and all we had was destroyed. Now he is an old man, he should not toil any more, but,” as she shrugs her shoulders, “who will give us bread?”

A kindly-faced man is sitting in my office. He speaks such good English you can tell he is a foreigner only by the peculiar way he pronounces some words. He says “dough” for though. Just imagine yourself sitting quietly by and listening, then you will know why many thousands come to us from one part of Europe. “We were friendly with all the people of our town. My ancestors had been in the same business for generations. All the Russians trusted us and although we were Jews they would rather deal with us than with their own countrymen. One day there had been many murmurs around us; the people had looked less friendly; they were ignorant, superstitious people, and they were miserably poor. Few of them could read or write. The nobility had fleeced them for centuries, but the nobility was too strong to be reached and so as scapegoats for the nobles we were pointed out as the cause of their wretchedness. We went to sleep that night, peaceful, prosperous and unsuspecting. At midnight our house was in flames. I never again saw father, mother, brothers, or sisters alive. I escaped in the night and was hidden by some friendly Russians. High above the roar of the flames and the din and slaughter rose the hoarse cry of the peasants—Our Daddy, the Tzar, wants it. Our Daddy, the Tzar, wants it.” Multiply that scene by thousands and you have a Russian pogrom. Oppression brings many Jews.

The Russian. The Russian does not leave his land because of the winter cold. He leaves it because he dare not speak out against the wrong he sees. He is always fearful of some police spy making charges against him, shutting him up in prison, and sending him to Siberia. No one is safe from these spies. The Russian comes to America because here he can think aloud and here he can worship according to the voice of his own conscience. America is his hope.

One of our poets pictures America as she really is, a refuge for these fleeing, hunted people. He shows how the tyrant must give up the chase and return empty-handed when once these poor people have reached our friendly shores.