My Dear Lady of the First Cabin:

ON the fourth morning out from Hamburg, after your maid had disentangled you from your soft wrappings of steamer rugs, and leaning upon her arm, you paced the deck for the first time, the sun smiled softly upon the smooth sea, and its broken reflections came back hot upon your pale cheeks. Then your gentle eyes wandered from the illimitable sea back to the steamer which carried you. You saw the four funnels out of which came pouring clouds of smoke trailing behind the ship in picturesque tracery; you watched the encircling gulls which had been your fellow travellers ever since we left the white cliffs of Albion; and then your eyes rested upon those mighty Teutons who stood on the bridge, and whose blue eyes searched the sea for danger, or rested upon the compass for direction.

From below came the sweet notes of music, gentle and wooing, one of the many ways in which the steamship company tried to make life pleasant for you, to bring back your “Bon appÉtit” to its tempting tables. Then suddenly, you stood transfixed, looking below you upon the deck from which came rather pronounced odours and confused noises. The notes of a jerky harmonica harshly struck your ears attuned to symphonies; and the song which accompanied it was gutteral and unmusical.

The deck which you saw, was crowded by human beings; men, women and children lay there, many of them motionless, and the children, numerous as the sands of the sea,—unkempt and unwashed, were everywhere in evidence.

You felt great pity for the little ones, and you threw chocolate cakes among them, smiling as you saw them in their tangled struggle to get your sweet bounty.

You pitied them all; the frowsy headed, ill clothed women, the men who looked so hungry and so greedy, and above all you pitied, you said so,—do you remember?—you said you pitied your own country for having to receive such a conglomerate of human beings, so near to the level of the beasts. I well recall it; for that day they did look like animals. It was the day after the storm and they had all been seasick; they had neither the spirit nor the appliances necessary for cleanliness. The toilet rooms were small and hard to reach, and sea water as you well know is not a good cleanser. They were wrapped in gray blankets which they had brought from their bunks, and you were right; they did look like animals, but not half so clean as the cattle which one sees so often on an outward journey; certainly not half so comfortable.

From stereograph copyright—1905, by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y. AS SEEN BY MY LADY OF THE FIRST CABIN. The fellowship of the steerage makes good comrades, where no barriers exist and introductions are neither possible nor necessary.
From stereograph copyright—1905, by Underwood & Underwood, N. Y.
AS SEEN BY MY LADY OF THE FIRST CABIN.
The fellowship of the steerage makes good comrades, where no barriers exist and introductions are neither possible nor necessary.

You were taken aback when I spoke to you. I took offense at your suspecting us to be beasts, for I was one of them; although all that separated you and me was a little iron bar, about fifteen or twenty rungs of an iron ladder, and perhaps as many dollars in the price of our tickets.

You were amazed at my temerity, and did not answer at once; then you begged my pardon, and I grudgingly forgave you. One likes to have a grudge against the first cabin when one is travelling steerage.

The next time you came to us, it was without your maid. You had quite recovered and so had we. The steerage deck was more crowded than ever, but we were happy, comparatively speaking; happy in spite of the fact that the bread was so doughy that we voluntarily fed the fishes with it, and the meat was suspiciously flavoured.

Again you threw your sweetmeats among us, and asked me to carry a basket of fruit to the women and children. I did so; I think to your satisfaction. When I returned the empty basket, you wished to know all about us, and I proceeded to tell you many things—who the Slavs are, and I brought you fine specimens of Poles, Bohemians, Servians and Slovaks,—men, women and children: and they began to look to you like men, women and children, and not like beasts. I introduced to you, German, Austrian and Hungarian Jews, and you began to understand the difference. Do you remember the group of Italians, to whom you said good-morning in their own tongue, and how they smiled back upon you all the joy of their native land? And you learned to know the difference between a Sicilian and a Neapolitan, between a Piedmontese and a Calabrian. You met Lithuanians, Greeks, Magyars and Finns; you came in touch with twenty nationalities in an hour, and your sympathetic smile grew sweeter, and your loving bounty increased day by day.

You wondered how I happened to know these people so well; and I told you jokingly, that it was my Social nose which over and over again, had led me steerage way across the sea, back to the villages from which the immigrants come and onward with them into the new life in America.

You suspected that it was not a Social nose but a Social heart; that I was led by my sympathies and not by my scientific sense, and I did not dispute you. You urged me to write what I knew and what I felt, and now you see, I have written. I have tried to tell it in this book as I told it to you on board of ship. I told you much about the Jews and the Slavs because they are less known and come in larger numbers. When I had finished telling you just who these strangers are, and something of their life at home and among us, in the strange land, you grew very sympathetic, without being less conscious how great is the problem which these strangers bring with them.

If I succeed in accomplishing this for my larger audience, the public, I shall be content.

You were loth to listen to figures; for you said that statistics were not to your liking and apt to be misleading; so I leave them from these pages and crowd them somewhere into the back of the book, where the curious may find them if they delight in them.

My telling deals only with life; all I attempt to do is to tell what I have lived among the immigrants, and not much of what I have counted. Here and there I have dropped a story which you said might be worth re-telling; and I tell it as I told it to you—not to earn the smile which may follow, but simply that it may win a little more sympathy for the immigrant.

If here and there I stop to moralize, it is largely from force of habit; and not because I am eager to play either preacher or prophet. If I point out some great problems, I do it because I love America with a love passing your own; because you are home-born and know not the lot of the stranger.

You may be incredulous if I tell you that I do not realize that I was not born and educated here; that I am not thrilled by the sight of my cradle home, nor moved by my country’s flag.

I know no Fatherland but America; for after all, it matters less where one was born, than where one’s ideals had their birth; and to me, America is not the land of mighty dollars, but the land of great ideals.

I am not yet convinced that the peril to these ideals lies in those who come to you, crude and unfinished; if I were, I would be the first one to call out: “Shut the gates,” and not the last one to exile myself for your country’s good.

I think that the peril lies more in the first cabin than in the steerage; more in the American colonies in Monte Carlo and Nice than in the Italian colonies in New York and Chicago. Not the least of the peril lies in the fact that there is too great a gulf between you and the steerage passenger, whose virtues you will discover as soon as you learn to know him.

I send out this book in the hope that it will mediate between the first cabin and the steerage; between the hilltop and lower town; between the fashionable West side and the Ghetto.

Do you remember my Lady of the First Cabin, what those Slovaks said to you as you walked down the gangplank in Hoboken? What they said to you, I now say to my book: “Z’Boghem,” “The Lord be with thee.”