FOOTNOTES:

FOOTNOTES:[3]M. Fishberg, "The Jews," p. 366.[4]M. Fishberg, "The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment," p. 361.

[3]M. Fishberg, "The Jews," p. 366.

[4]M. Fishberg, "The Jews: A Study of Race and Environment," p. 361.

It was a Jewish trader who advised me to visit Jedlovka. He said that I would see the peasants living there now as they had lived for hundreds of years—in the simplest and most primitive fashion.

Jedlovka, I found, is a little straggling village in the foothills of the Carpathians—the mountains which divide Galicia from Hungary. In order to reach the village it was necessary to take the train at Cracow and ride for an hour or more in the direction of Lemberg, which is the Ruthenian, just as Cracow is the Polish, metropolis of Galicia.

At a place called Turnow we changed cars and continued our journey in a direction at right angles to that in which we previously travelled. It was another hour's ride by train to the foothills of the mountain. At Tuchow, at the point where the railway, running southward, plunges into the mountain, we disembarked again and continued our journey by wagon. The road led up out of the broad plainthrough which we had been travelling, into a narrow and sombre little valley. At the end of this valley there is a little wayside inn. Higher up, where the road, winding up out of the valley, leads out into a high, clear space at what seemed to be the top of the mountain, there is a church, and this tavern and the church, together with a few scattering log huts, were the village of Jedlovka and the end of our journey.

I had had a vague sort of notion that somewhere in this remote region I should meet peasants wearing sheepskin jackets, sandals, and leggings bound with thongs, driving their herds to pasture. I even had a wild hope that I should come upon some rustic festival, such as I had read about, where the young men and women would dance upon the greensward, to the music of shepherds' pipes. As a matter of fact, it chanced that our visit did fall upon a feast day, but there were no shepherds and no dances. What I saw was a crowd of women pouring out of the little church, high upon the hill, and crowds of drunken men carousing at the tavern below.

Before I proceed to tell what I learned of the peasant life in this mountain country, however, I want to refer to one feature of Polish life which was impressed upon me by what I saw on the way.

I have referred in the preceding chapter to the position which the Jew occupies in the economic organization of Polish life. He is the middleman and has the trade of the country very largely in his hands. I was particularly impressed with this fact by what I saw in the course of this journey. Although the Jews represent only about 13 per cent. of the population of Galicia, I am certain that more than half of the people on the train on which we travelled were people of that race. There were Jews of all descriptions and in all stages of evolution, from the poor, patient pedler, wearing the garb of the Ghetto, to the wealthy banker or merchant fastidiously dressed in the latest European fashion. When we left the train at Tuchow it was a Jewish horse trader who drove us in his improvised coach the remainder of our journey into the mountains. A restaurant at which we stopped to get something to eat on our return was conducted by a Jew. Halfway to our destination we passed a tumbledown cottage, close to the roadside, with a few trinkets in the window and some skins hanging from the beam which ran along the front of the building. We stopped and spoke to an ancient man with a long white beard, who lives there. He, also, was a Jewish trader. As I recall, he was engaged in buying skins from the peasants,paying them in the junk which I noticed displayed in the window. When we reached the tavern at the end of our journey it turned out that the man who ran the tavern was a Jew. Apparently wherever in Poland money changes hands a Jew is always there to take charge of it. In fact, it seemed to me that the Jew in Poland was almost like the money he handled, a sort of medium of exchange.

It was a very curious conveyance in which we made the last stage of our journey into the mountains. Instead of the droske we had expected to meet at the station we found what, under ordinary circumstances, would have been a farmer's wagon, I suppose, although it was an altogether different sort of farmer's wagon from any I had ever seen in America. The frame of this vehicle was something like a great long basket, narrow at the bottom, where it sat upon the axles, and wider at the top. The rim of this basket was made of poles, about the size of a fence rail, and this rim was supported upon the frame, which rested on the wagon, by little poles or pickets fastened in the frame below and the rim above, like a fence paling. The frame was so formed that it might have served the purpose either of a hayrick or a carryall. In this case it had been converted into a sort of coach or omnibus, with hanging seats, supported withleather straps from the rim. Arranged in this way this farmer's wagon was a not inconvenient mode of travel, and, driving through the fresh green country, dotted with quaint, little moss-covered cottages which seemed as much a part of the landscape as if they had grown there, the journey was made very pleasantly.

The houses in this part of the country were, for the most part, smaller, more weather-worn and decrepit, than those I had seen in other parts of Galicia. In fact, in some cases the green-thatched roofs were so old, so overgrown with vegetation, and the little whitewashed frames of the buildings that supported them had so sunken into the soil, that some of them looked like gigantic toadstools. As the day we visited this part of the country was a holiday, we met along the way many of the peasants, dressed in the quaint and picturesque garb of the country, passing in groups of two or three along the road.

I had before this visited a number of the peasant houses and was familiar with the plan and arrangement of them. The interior of these houses is usually divided into two rooms, separated in most cases by an entrance or hallway. In one of these rooms the whole family, consisting of the parents and perhaps five or six children, live, eat, and sleep. In this room thereis usually a very large brick or stone oven which, on the cold winter nights, I learned, frequently serves the purpose of a bed. In the other room are the cows, pigs, geese, chickens. If the farmer is well-to-do he will have a number of buildings arranged in a hollow square having a goose pond in the centre and, in that case, the servants will very likely sleep in the straw in the barns with the cattle. I can give a more vivid notion of some of these houses by quoting a few lines from the notes jotted down by Doctor Park at the time of our visit:

To-day, for the first time, we visited some of the peasant houses in a little village about three or four miles from Cracow. It was difficult at first to make friends with the people. After a time it transpired that they were afraid that, although we were evidently foreigners, we might be Government officials of some sort. This is, perhaps, not strange, since there are many races in this country and most of them are "foreigners" to each other. Our guide says the people fear the country will be some day handed over to Russia. We got on better when the people learned we were Americans.Every window of the little cottages we passed was crowded with laughing, curious children, with pink faces and white teeth. We visited the home of a widow with ten "yokes" of land and two cows. The cows give fifteen litres of milk a day, which is about ten quarts. The woman carries this to the market in Cracow every day. In the narrow little kitchen the children were all lined up in a row against the wall as we entered. One of them darted forward suddenly to kiss my hand. Mother and children were barefoot. The cow is across the hall from the kitchen. These two rooms, the kitchen and the cow-stall, are all there is to the house. I discovered what the duck pond infront of the house is for. The woman was filling it with straw to make manure.One of the leading men in the village has a brand-new house made of logs. The logs were neatly squared and the chinks between them carefully plastered and painted. The house had three rooms, besides a storeroom and cow-stall. I counted three barns in the court, besides three outdoor cellars, one for the milk and the others for the storing of vegetables. To my question as to what the farmer did in the winter our guide replied, "Nothing. When they want money they go to the hole where the potatoes and turnips are buried and carry a load to the town." The owner of this house was very proud of his new place and showed one room in which were several huge chests, decorated and stained in bright vermilion in the peculiar style of peasant art. These chests were filled with clothes—peasant costumes of very handsome material, very beautifully embroidered and decorated. The principal ornament of the costume shown us was a belt studded with brass nails with broad leather clasps, as large as a small platter, behind and in front. It must have occupied the hours of a good many long winter evenings to make the garments this man had stowed away in these chests. Although there was plenty of room in this house, it is evident that the family lives almost wholly in the one large living-room.

Every window of the little cottages we passed was crowded with laughing, curious children, with pink faces and white teeth. We visited the home of a widow with ten "yokes" of land and two cows. The cows give fifteen litres of milk a day, which is about ten quarts. The woman carries this to the market in Cracow every day. In the narrow little kitchen the children were all lined up in a row against the wall as we entered. One of them darted forward suddenly to kiss my hand. Mother and children were barefoot. The cow is across the hall from the kitchen. These two rooms, the kitchen and the cow-stall, are all there is to the house. I discovered what the duck pond infront of the house is for. The woman was filling it with straw to make manure.

One of the leading men in the village has a brand-new house made of logs. The logs were neatly squared and the chinks between them carefully plastered and painted. The house had three rooms, besides a storeroom and cow-stall. I counted three barns in the court, besides three outdoor cellars, one for the milk and the others for the storing of vegetables. To my question as to what the farmer did in the winter our guide replied, "Nothing. When they want money they go to the hole where the potatoes and turnips are buried and carry a load to the town." The owner of this house was very proud of his new place and showed one room in which were several huge chests, decorated and stained in bright vermilion in the peculiar style of peasant art. These chests were filled with clothes—peasant costumes of very handsome material, very beautifully embroidered and decorated. The principal ornament of the costume shown us was a belt studded with brass nails with broad leather clasps, as large as a small platter, behind and in front. It must have occupied the hours of a good many long winter evenings to make the garments this man had stowed away in these chests. Although there was plenty of room in this house, it is evident that the family lives almost wholly in the one large living-room.

The houses I visited in the mountain were constructed on the same plan as those described, except sometimes there was only one room for the whole family, including the cow, the chickens, and the rest of the animals. It is very cold on the north side of the mountains in winter, and the peasants and cattle frequently live in the same room to keep warm.

In one of the little huts which I ventured toenter I found two old women lying down, apparently asleep, on a heap of straw, while a cow standing nearby them was peacefully chewing her cud, and several chickens were busily scratching among the straw on the earth floor. As there was almost no ventilation the air in some of these houses was almost indescribable.

It was in this part of the country, in the vicinity of the village tavern, that I found people who were poor, even by the very moderate standard of comfort that prevails in rural Poland. We passed on the drive up the valley a number of little huddling straw-thatched huts. One of these, which did not seem to be inhabited, I determined to explore. The building was of the prevailing type, with the cowshed in one end and the living-room in the other, but the thatch was no longer green, and age had imparted to the whole of the outside of the building a very dismal, weather-worn appearance. The windows were evidently of skins, of the same brown colour as the building itself. The entrance was through what would evidently have been the cowshed, but this was empty. The door into the living-room was open, and, as I entered, I saw at first only a cow tied to a manger. At the other end of the room, hovering about a little stone hearth, on which a little fire of twigs burned, were an old man andwoman. As is frequently the case in many parts of Poland, there was no chimney, and the rafters of the house were deeply incrusted with the smoke which had accumulated in the peak of the roof and filtered out through the thatch or through an opening at the end of the building. The old people seemed very poor and helpless and, as I was about to leave the room, they held out their hands and begged for alms. I should like to have stayed and talked with them, but unfortunately I had no one with me at the time who was able to speak the Polish language.

As I learned that a number of people had gone to America from this valley I suspected that these old people were some of those who had been left behind and perhaps forgotten by the younger generation who had gone across the seas. I made some attempt later to learn if my suspicions were well founded, but no one whom I afterward met seemed to know anything about the history of the old people.

The wealthiest landlord in the vicinity was, as I learned, a Polish priest, who owned four different farms, and most of the people in the neighbourhood seemed to be his tenants. He lived in a big, bare, rambling house, surrounded by great barns filled with cattle and produce of various kinds. I stopped to call at this house, thinking that I might learn something from himabout the poor people I have referred to, but the good priest was not at home and the people whom I found at this house did not seem to be able to tell me anything.

The tavern, which was a long, low log structure, built on the same general plan as the houses in the village, was crowded with revellers and steaming with the fumes of beer. Men were standing about, swinging their arms and shouting at each other at the top of their lungs, and almost every one of them was drunk. Several of the men present, including the proprietor, had been, as I learned, in America. One of them, who could speak a few words of English, gave us an especially hearty welcome. Some of the money which pours into Poland from America had reached even this remote corner of the country, it seemed.

I asked the proprietor, who had lived in Newark, N.J., for a time and spoke a little English, whether he liked this part of the world better than America.

"It is easier to live here," he said. Then added, "when you have a little money."

"But when you haven't any money?" I suggested. He shrugged his shoulders. "Then go to America," he said.

He told me a good deal of land had been purchased in this part of the country with moneyearned in America. Land was worth from 500 to 1,000 guilder per "yoke," which is about $100 to $200 per acre, a very large sum in a country where wages are, perhaps, not more than 25 or 50 cents a day.

At nightfall we returned to Tuchow, which appeared to be a typical market town. The town is arranged, like many of our country villages in the South, around a large open square. In the centre of this square is a great covered well, from which the town draws its water. Four pumps, with long twisted iron handles, arranged in a circle about the well, serve to draw the water to the surface. Around the four corners of this square are the tradesmen's shops, most of them with low, thatched roofs projecting over the sidewalk to form a cover for the walk in front of the shops, and frequently supported, on the side toward the street, by curiously carved wooden posts. The little shops were not more than six or eight feet wide. There was usually one little room in front which was for the store, and another little room back in which the shopkeeper lived. As the ceilings were usually very low and the windows under the wide projecting roofs were very small, it made everything appear very snug and tight, somewhat as if every building were holding on to all that it contained with both arms.

It all looked very interesting but very quaint and old-fashioned. I noticed, however, that there were one or two new brick buildings in the town, and the evening we arrived every one was in great excitement over the installation in the public square of two new electric lights, the first, I suspect, that had been seen in that part of the country. It was evident that in spite of the apparent solidity and antiquity that things were changing here as elsewhere.

Of the three former capitals of Poland the city of Cracow, the last of Polish territory to lose its independence, is now an Austrian fortress. One day, shortly after my arrival, I was driving in the suburbs of the city when my attention was directed to a number of low, grass-covered mounds scattered about at regular intervals in the level plain outside the city. To all appearances these mounds were nothing more than slight elevations of land sinking, in a direction away from the city, almost imperceptibly into the surrounding landscape. In all probability, if it had not been for a certain regularity in the positions which they occupied, I should not have noticed them. I had never seen a modern fortified city and I was therefore considerably surprised when I learned that these gentle elevations were fortifications and that beneath these grass-grown mounds enormous guns were concealed, powerful enough to keep a vast army at bay. These facts served to remind methat Cracow was a border city, guarding a frontier which divides, not merely two European countries, but two civilizations—I might almost say, two worlds. Cracow is, as a matter of fact, ten miles from the Russian frontier, and, although the people in Russian Poland are of the same race or nationality as those who live in the Austrian province of Galicia, speaking the same language and sharing the same traditions, the line which divides them marks the limits of free government in Europe.

Now, there were several things that made this frontier, where eastern and western Europe meet, peculiarly interesting to me. In the first place, I knew that thousands of people, most of them Poles and Jews, who were unwilling or unable to pay the high tax which Russia imposes upon its emigrants, were every year smuggled across that border in order to embark at some German or Austrian port for America. I knew at the same time that Jews and, to a lesser extent, perhaps, Poles, outside of Russia were making use of this same underground railway to send back, in return for the emigrants who came out, another kind of contraband—namely, books and bombs. In fact, I had heard that a few years ago, when Russian Poland was all aflame with civil war, it was from Cracow that the Jews, who were theleading spirits in that movement, directed the revolution.

Naturally all this served to increase my natural curiosity in this border country. So it was that one cool, clear day in September I rented a little droske for the day and started, in company with my companion, Doctor Park, for the Russian border.

We drove leisurely along a splendid military road, between broad fields, in which peasants were gathering, in the cool autumn sunlight, the last fruits of the summer's harvest. A country road in Galicia, as is true in almost any part of Europe, is a good deal more of a highway than a country road in most parts of America. One meets all sorts of travellers. We passed, for example, just beyond the limits of the city, a troop of soldiers, with the raw look of recruits—red-faced country boys they seemed, for the most, bulging out of their military suits and trudging along the dusty road with an awkward effort at the military precision and order of veterans. Now and then we passed a barefoot peasant woman, tramping briskly to or from the city, with a basket on her head or a milk can thrown over her shoulder.

Once we stopped to watch a group of women and girls threshing. One woman waspitching down sheaves of rye from the barn loft, another was feeding them to the machine, and all were in high glee at the wonderful way, as it seemed to them, in which this new invention separated the grain from the chaff. They were so proud of this little machine that, when we stopped and showed our interest in what they were doing, they insisted on showing us how it worked, and took pains to explain the advantages over the old-fashioned flail. There was a man sitting on a beam outside the barn smoking a pipe, but the women were doing the work.

On this same journey we stopped at a little straggling village and spent an hour or two visiting the homes of the people. We saw the house of the richest peasant in the village, who owned and farmed something like a hundred acres of land, as I remember; and then we visited the home of the poorest man in the community, who lived in a little thatch-roofed cottage of two rooms; one of these was just large enough to hold a cow, but there was no cow there. The other room, although it was neat and clean, was not much larger than the cow-stall, and in this room this poor old man and his daughter lived. Incidentally, in the course of our tramp about the village, Doctor Park managed to pick up something of the family histories of the people and not a little of the current gossip inthe community, and all this aided me in getting an insight, such as I had not been able to get elsewhere, into the daily life and human interests of this little rural community.

At one point along the road we stopped for a few minutes at a wayside tavern. It was a log structure, with one great, long, low, desolate room, in one corner of which was a bar at which a sour-faced woman presided. Two or three men were lounging about on the benches in different parts of the room, but here again the woman was doing the work.

Every mile or two it seemed to me we met a wagon piled high with great bulging bags as large as bed ticks. In each case these wagons were driven by a little shrewd-faced Jew. These wagons, as I learned, had come that morning from Russia and the loads they carried were goose feathers.

A little farther on we came up with a foot passenger who was making toward the border with great strides. He turned out to be a Jew, a tall, erect figure, with the customary round, flat hat and the long black coat which distinguish the Polish Jew. Our driver informed us, however, that he was a Russian Jew, and pointed out the absence of the side curls as indicating that fact. Although this man had the outward appearance, the manner, and thedress of the Jews whom I had seen in Cracow, there was something in the vigorous and erect carriage that impressed me to such an extent that I suggested that we stop and talk with him. As we were already near the border, and he was evidently from Russia, I suggested that Doctor Park show him our passports and ask him if they would let us into Russia.

He stopped abruptly as we spoke to him, and turned his black, piercing eyes upon us. Without saying a word he took the passports, glanced them through rapidly, tapped them with the back of his hand, and handed them back to us.

"That is no passport," he said, and then he added, "it should have the visé of your consul."

Having said this much he turned abruptly, without waiting for further conversation, and strode on. We soon came up with and passed him, but he did not look up. A little later we halted at the border. I looked around to see what had become of our wandering Jew, but he had disappeared. Perhaps he had stopped at the inn, and perhaps he had his own way of crossing the border.

I was reminded of this strange figure a few months later when I noticed in one of the London papers a telegram from Vienna to the effect that some thirty persons had beenarrested at Cracow who were suspected of being the ringleaders "in what is believed to be a widespread revolutionary organization of Russian refugees." The report added that "a whole wagon-load of Mannliches rifles, Browning pistols, and dynamite grenades, together with a large number of compromising documents and plans of military works, were seized as a result of searches by the police in the houses of the arrested men."

I had frequently seen reports like this in the newspapers before this time, but they had a new significance for me now that I had visited the border country where this commerce with what has been called the "Underground" or "Revolutionary" Russia was part of the daily experience of the people. It all recalled to my mind the stories I had heard, when I was a boy, from my mother's lips of the American Underground Railway and the adventures of the runaway slaves in their efforts to cross the border between the free and slave states. It reminded me, also, of the wilder and more desperate struggles, of which we used to hear whispers in slavery time, when the slaves sought to gain their freedom by means of insurrection. That was a time when, in the Southern States, no matter how good the relations between the individual master and his slaves, each racelived in constant fear of the other. It is in this condition, so far as I can learn, that a great part of the people in Russia are living to-day, for it is fatally true that no community can live without fear in which one portion of the people seeks to govern the other portion through terror.

The Austrian and Russian border at Barany, the village at which we had now arrived, is not imposing. A wire fence, and a gate such as is sometimes used to guard a railway crossing, are all that separate one country from the other. On one side of this gate I noticed a little sentinel's box, marked in broad stripes, with the Austrian colours, and at the other end of the gate there was a similar little box marked in broad stripes, with the Russian colours. On the Austrian side there was a large building for the use of the customs officials. On the Russian side there was a similar building with the addition of a large compound. In this compound there were about twenty Russian soldiers, standing idly about, with their horses saddled and bridled. The reason for the presence of the soldiers on the Russian side of the border was due to the fact that it is the business of the customs officers not merely to collect the tolls on the commerce that crosses the border at this point, but to prevent any one entering or leaving thecountry. As Russia imposes an almost prohibitive tax on emigration, most of the Russian emigrants are smuggled across the border.

At the same time it is necessary to closely guard the frontier in order to prevent, as I have said, the importation of books and bombs, the two elements in western civilization of which Russia seems to stand most in fear.

Leaving our droske on the Austrian side of the boundary, Doctor Park and myself applied at the gate between the two countries. A big, good-natured Russian official grinned, but shook his head and indicated that we could not be allowed to cross over. Our driver spoke to him in Polish, but he did not understand, or pretended he did not. Then we found a man who could speak Russian as well as German, and through him we explained that we merely wanted to visit the town and be able to say that we had at least touched Russian soil. On this the man permitted us to go up to the customs office and make our request there. At the customs office we tried to look as harmless as possible, and, with the aid of the interpreter we had brought with us, I explained what we wanted.

At the customs office every one was polite, good-humoured, and apparently quite as much interested in us as we were in them. I was told,however, that I should have to wait until a certain higher and more important personage arrived. In the course of half an hour the more important personage appeared. He looked us over carefully, listened to the explanations of his subordinates, and then, smiling good-naturedly, gave us permission to look about the village. With this gracious permission we started out.

The first thing I noticed was that the smooth, hard road upon which we had travelled from Cracow to the frontier broke off abruptly on the Russian side of the border. The road through the village was full of ruts and mudholes and the mournful and mud-bedraggled teams which were standing near the gate, waiting to cross the border, showed only too plainly the difficulties of travel in the country through which they had passed. Now I had learned in Europe that roads are a pretty good index of the character of the governments that maintain them, so that it was not difficult to see at the outset that the Russians were very poor housekeepers, so to speak, at least as compared with their Austrian neighbours. This was evidently not due to a lack of men and officials to do the work. Counting the civil officials and the soldiers, I suppose there must have been somewhere between twenty and thirty persons, and perhaps more, stationed at this little bordervillage, to collect the toll on the petty traffic that crossed at this point. They were, however, but part of the vast army of officials and soldiers which the Russian Empire maintains along its western border from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to keep the watch between the east and the west; to halt, inspect, and tax, not merely the ordinary traffic, but the interchange of sentiments and ideas.

I could not help thinking how much more profitable it would be if these soldiers, clerks, and officials, and the vast army of frontiersmen to which they belonged, could be employed, for example, in building roads rather than maintaining fences; in making commerce easier, opening the way to civilization, rather than shutting it out.

Indeed it was no longer strange that, with all the vast resources which Russia possesses, the masses of the people have made so little progress when I considered how large a portion of the population had no other task than that of holding the people down, hindering rather than inspiring and directing the efforts of the masses to rise.

I had not gone far on our stroll about the village before I discovered that the Pole who so kindly volunteered to help us was a man of more than ordinary intelligence. He had seensomething of the world, and I found his rather gossipy comments on the character of the different individuals we met, and upon the habits of the people generally in the village, not only entertaining but instructive. He had, for example, a very frank contempt for what he called the stupidity of the officials on both sides of the border, and it was clear he was no lover of the soldiers and the Government. At one time, as we started down a side street, he said: "There's a gendarme down there. He is just like one of those stupid, faithful watch-dogs that bristle up and bark at every person that passes. You will see presently. He will come puffing up the street to halt you and turn you back."

"What shall we do when we meet him?" I asked.

"Oh, there's nothing to do but go back if he says so, but you will, perhaps, be interested to observe the way he behaves."

Presently we noticed a soldier clambering hastily over an adjoining fence, and in a few minutes he had come up with us, his face all screwed up in an expression of alarmed surprise.

"This is the gendarme I was telling you about," said our guide quietly, and continued speaking about the man just as if he were not present.

As we were not able to talk with this soldierourselves, and as he did not look very promising in any case, we strolled leisurely back while our guide entered into a long explanation of who and what we were. I imagine that he must have put a good deal of varnish on his story, for I noticed that, as the soldier glanced at us from time to time, his eyes began getting bigger and bigger, and his mouth opened wider and wider, until he stared at us in a stupid, awestruck way. Finally the interpreter announced that the gendarme had come to the conclusion that we might go down the road as far as we wanted to, only he would be obliged to accompany us to see that we did not break the peace in any way.

Under the direction of our self-appointed guide we visited a dusty, musty little bar-room, which seemed to be the centre of such life as existed in the village. We found a few young country boys lolling about on benches, and the usual shrewish, sharp-faced, overworked woman, who grumblingly left her housework to inquire what we wanted.

The contents of the bar itself consisted of rows of little bottles of different coloured liquors, interspersed with packages of cigarettes, all of them made and sold under the supervision of the Government. I purchased one of these little bottles of vodka, as it is called, because Iwanted to see what it was the Government gave the peasants to drink. It was a white, colourless liquid, which looked like raw alcohol and was, in fact, as I afterward learned, largely, if not wholly, what the chemists call "methylated spirits," or wood alcohol.

We visited one of the little peasant houses in the neighbourhood of the customs office. It was a little, low log hut with a duck pond in front of the doorway and a cow-pen at right angles to the house. There were two rooms, a bedroom and a kitchen. In the kitchen, which had an earthen floor, three or four or five members of the family were sitting on stools, gathered about a large bowl, into which each was dipping his or her spoon. The bedroom was a neat little room, containing a high bed, a highly decorated chest of drawers, and was filled with curious bits of the rustic art, including among other things several religious pictures and images.

Although everything in this house was very simple and primitive, there was about it an air of self-respecting thrift and neatness that showed that the family which lived here was relatively prosperous and well-to-do.

Quite as interesting to me as the houses we visited were the stories that our guide told us about the people that lived in them. I recall among others the story of the young widowwho served in the customs office as a clerk and lived in a single room in one corner of the peasant's cottage to which I have just referred. She was a woman, he told me, of the higher classes, as her enterprising manner and intelligent face seemed to indicate; one of the lesser nobility, who had married a Russian official condemned for some fault or other to serve at this obscure post. He had died here, leaving a child with the rickets, and no means.

Another time our guide pointed out to us a more imposing building than the others we had seen, though it was built in the same rustic style as the smaller peasants' cottages around it. This house, it seems, had at one time belonged to one of the nobility, but it was now owned by a peasant. This peasant, as I understood, had at one time been a serf and served as a hostler in a wealthy family. From this family he had inherited, as a reward for his long and faithful service, a considerable sum of money, with which he had purchased this place and set himself up, in a small way, as a landlord.

I gained, I think, a more intimate view of the peasant life in Poland than I did in any other part of Europe that I visited. For that reason, and because I hoped also that these seeming trivial matters would, perhaps, prove as interesting and suggestive to others as they wereto me, I have set down in some detail in this and the preceding chapters the impressions which I gathered there.

In the little village of Barany, in Russian Poland, I had reached the point farthest removed, if not in distance at least in its institutions and civilization, from America; but, as I stood on a little elevation of land at the edge of the village and looked across the rolling landscape, I felt that I was merely at the entrance of a world in which, under many outward changes and differences of circumstance, there was much the same life that I had known and lived among the Negro farmers in Alabama. I believed, also, that I would find in that life of the Russian peasants much that would be instructive and helpful to the masses of my own people.

I touched, before I completed my European experiences, not only the Austrian, but the Russian and German Polish provinces, but I should have liked to have gone farther, to Warsaw and Posen, and looked deeper into the life and learned more of the remarkable struggle which the Polish people, especially in these two latter provinces, are making to preserve the Polish nationality and improve the conditions of the Polish people.

In this connection, and in concluding what Ihave to say about my observations in Poland, I want to note one singular, and it seems to me suggestive, fact: Of the three sections of the Polish race, German, Russian, and Austrian, there are two in which, according to the information I was able to obtain, the people are oppressed, and one in which they seem to be, if anything, the oppressors. In Russian Poland and in German Poland the Polish are making a desperate struggle to maintain their national existence, but in these two countries the Poles are prosperous. Russian Poland has become in recent years one of the largest manufacturing centres in Europe, and the masses of the Polish people have become prosperous citizens and labourers. In German Poland the Polish peasants have, within the past forty years, become a thrifty farming class. The large estates which were formerly in the hands of the Polish nobility have been, to a very large extent, divided up and sold among a rapidly rising class of small landowners. In other words, what was originally a political movement in these two countries to revive and reëstablish the kingdom of Poland has become a determined effort to lift the level of existence among the masses of the Polish people.

In Austrian Poland, on the contrary, where the Austrian Government, in order, perhaps,to hold the political aspirations of the Ruthenians in check, has given them a free hand in the government of the province, they have vastly greater freedom and they have made less progress.

I am stating this fact baldly, as it was given to me, and without any attempt at an explanation. Many different factors have no doubt combined to produce this seeming paradox. I will merely add this further observation: Where the Poles are advancing, progress has begun at the bottom, among the peasants; where they have remained stationary the Polish nobility still rules and the masses of the people have not yet been forced to any great extent into the struggle for national existence. The nobles are content with opportunity to play at politics, in something like the old traditional way, and have not learned the necessity of developing the resources that exist in the masses of the people. On the other hand, oppression has not yet aroused the peasants as it has, particularly in Germany, to a united effort to help themselves.

I mention this fact not merely because it is interesting, but because I am convinced that any one who studies the movements and progress of the Negroes in America will find much that is interesting by way of comparison in thepresent situation of the Polish people and that of the American Negroes. My own observation has convinced me, for example, that in those states where the leaders of the Negro have been encouraged to turn their attention to politics the masses of the people have not made the same progress that they have in those states where the leaders, because of racial prejudice or for other reasons, have been compelled to seek their own salvation in educating and building up, in moral and material directions, the more lowly members of their own people.

I do not wish to make comparisons, but I think I can safely say, by way of illustration, that in no other part of the United States have the masses of the Negroes been more completely deprived of political privileges than in the state of Mississippi, and yet there is, at the same time, scarcely any part of the country in which the masses of the people have built more schools and churches, or where they have gained a more solid foothold on the soil and in the industries of the state.

In calling attention to this fact I do not intend to offer an excuse for depriving any members of my race of any of the privileges to which the law entitles them. I merely wish to emphasize the fact that there is hope for them in other and more fundamental directions than ordinaryparty politics. More especially I wish to emphasize one fact—namely, that for the Negroes, as for other peoples who are struggling to get on their feet, success comes to those who learn to take advantage of their disadvantages and make their difficulties their opportunities. This is what the Poles in Germany, to a greater extent than any of the other oppressed nationalities in Europe, seem to have done.

Several times during my stay in London I observed, standing on a corner in one of the most crowded parts of the city, a young woman selling papers. There are a good many women, young and old, who sell papers in London, but any one could see at a glance that this girl was different. There was something in her voice and manner which impressed me, because it seemed to be at once timid, ingratiating, and a little insolent, if that is not too strong a word. This young woman was, as I soon learned, a Suffragette, and she was selling newspapers—"Votes for Women."

This was my first meeting with the women insurgents of England. A day or two later, however, I happened to fall in with a number of these Suffragette newspaper-sellers. One of them, in a lively and amusing fashion, was relating the story of the morning's happenings. I could hardly help hearing what she said, and soon became very much interested in the conversation. In fact, I soon found myself soentertained by the bright and witty accounts these young women gave of their adventures that it was not long before I began to enter with them into the spirit of their crusade and to realize for the first time in my life what a glorious and exciting thing it was to be a Suffragette, and, I might add, what a lot of fun these young women were having out of it.

It had not occurred to me, when I set out from America to make the acquaintance of the man farthest down, that I should find myself in any way concerned with the woman problem. I had not been in London more than a few days, however, before I discovered that the woman who is at the bottom in London life is just as interesting as the man in the same level of life, and perhaps a more deserving object of study and observation.

In a certain way all that I saw of the condition of woman at the bottom connected itself in my mind with the agitation that is going on with regard to woman at the top.

Except in England, the women's movement has not, so far as I was able to learn, penetrated to any extent into the lower strata of life, and that strikes me as one of the interesting facts about the movement. It shows to what extent the interests, hopes, and ambitions of modern life have, or rather have not, entered into andbecome a force in the lives of the people at the bottom.

Thus it came about that my interest in all that I saw of workingwomen in Europe was tinged with the thought of what was going to happen when the present agitation for the emancipation and the wider freedom of women generally should reach and influence the women farthest down.

In my journey through Europe I was interested, in each of the different countries I visited, in certain definite and characteristic things. In London, for example, it was some of the destructive effects of a highly organized and complicated city life, and the methods which the Government and organized philanthropy have employed to correct them, that attracted my attention. Elsewhere it was chiefly the condition of the agricultural populations that interested me. In all my observation and study, however, I found that the facts which I have learned about the condition of women tended to set themselves off and assume a special importance in my mind. It is for that reason that I propose to give, as well as I am able, a connected account of them at this point.

What impressed me particularly in London were the extent and effects of the drinking habitamong women of the lower classes. Until I went to London I do not believe that I had more than once or twice in my life seen women standing side by side with the men in order to drink at a public bar. One of the first things I noticed in London was the number of drunken, loafing women that one passed in the streets of the poorer quarters. More than once I ran across these drunken and besotted creatures, with red, blotched faces, which told of years of steady excess—ragged, dirty, and disorderly in their clothing—leaning tipsily against the outside of a gin-parlour or sleeping peacefully on the pavement of an alleyway.

In certain parts of London the bar-room seems to be the general meeting place of men and women alike. There, in the evening, neighbours gather and gossip while they drink their black, bitter beer. It is against the law for parents to take their children into the bar-rooms, but I have frequently observed women standing about the door of the tap-room with their babies in their arms, leisurely chatting while they sipped their beer. In such cases they frequently give the lees of their glass to the children to drink.

In America we usually think of a bar-room as a sort of men's club, and, if women go into such a place at all, they are let in surreptitiouslyat the "family entrance." Among the poorer classes in England the bar-room is quite as much the woman's club as it is the man's. The light, the warmth, and the free and friendly gossip of these places make them attractive, too, and I can understand that the people in these densely populated quarters of the city, many of them living in one or two crowded little rooms, should be drawn to these places by the desire for a little human comfort and social intercourse.

In this respect the bar-rooms in the poorer parts of London are like the beer halls that one meets on the Continent. There is, however, this difference—that the effect of drink upon the people of England seems to be more destructive than it is in the case of the people on the Continent. It is not that the English people as a whole consume more intoxicating drink than the people elsewhere, because the statistics show that Denmark leads the rest of Europe in the amount of spirits, just as Belgium leads in the amount of beer, consumed per capita of the population. One trouble seems to be that, under the English industrial system, the people take greater chances, they are subject to greater stress and strain, and this leads to irregularities and to excessive drinking.

While I was in Vienna I went out one Sunday evening to the Prater, the great public park,which seems to be a sort of combination of Central Park, New York, and Coney Island. In this park one may see all types of Austrian life, from the highest to the lowest. Sunday seems, however, to be the day of the common people, and the night I visited the place there were, in addition to the ordinary labouring people of the city, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of peasant people from the country there. They were mostly young men and women who had evidently come into the city for the Sunday holiday. Beside the sober, modern dress of the city crowds these peasant women, with their high boots, the bright-coloured kerchiefs over their heads, and their wide, flaring, voluminous skirts (something like those of a female circus-rider, only a little longer and not so gauzy), made a strange and picturesque appearance.

Meanwhile there was a great flare of music of a certain sort; and a multitude of catchpenny shows, mountebanks, music halls, theatres, merry-go-rounds, and dancing pavilions gave the place the appearance of a stupendous county fair. I do not think that I ever saw anywhere, except at a picnic or a barbecue among the Negroes of the Southern States, people who gave themselves up so frankly and with such entire zest to this simple, physical sort of enjoyment. Everywhere there were eating, drinking, anddancing, but nevertheless I saw no disorder; very few people seemed to be the worse for drinking, and in no instance did I see people who showed, in the disorder of their dress or in the blotched appearance of their faces, the effects of continued excesses, such as one sees in so many parts of London. Individuals were, for the most part, neatly and cleanly dressed; each class of people seemed to have its own place of amusement and its own code of manners, and every one seemed to keep easily and naturally within the restraints which custom prescribed.

I do not mean to say that I approve of this way of spending the Sabbath. I simply desire to point out the fact, which others have noticed, that the effect of the drinking habit seems to be quite different in England from what it is in countries on the Continent.

I had an opportunity to observe the evil effects of the drinking habit upon the Englishwomen of the lower classes when I visited some of the police courts in the poorer parts of London. When I remarked to a newspaper acquaintance in London that I wanted to see as much as I could, while I was in the city, of the life of the poorer people, he advised me to visit the Worship Street and Thames police stations. The Worship Street station is situated in one ofthe most crowded parts of London, in close proximity to Bethnal Green and Spitalfields, which have for many years been the homes of the poorer working classes, and especially of those poor people known as houseworkers and casuals, who live in garrets and make paper boxes, artificial flowers, etc., or pick up such odd jobs as they can find. The Thames station is situated a little way from London Dock and not far from the notorious Ratcliffe Highway, which until a few years ago was the roughest and most dangerous part of London.

Perhaps I ought to say, at the outset, that two things in regard to the London police courts especially impressed me: first, the order and dignity with which the court is conducted; second, the care with which the judge inquires into all the facts of every case he tries, the anxiety which he shows to secure the rights of the defendant, and the leniency with which those found guilty are treated. In many cases, particularly those in which men or women were charged with drunkenness, the prisoners were allowed to go with little more than a mild and fatherly reprimand.

After listening for several hours to the various cases that came up for hearing, I could well understand that the police have sometimes complained that their efforts to put down crimewere not supported by the magistrates, who, they say, always take the side of the culprits.

In this connection I might mention a statement which I ran across recently of a man who had served at one time as a magistrate in both the Worship Street and Thames police courts. He said that there was a great deal of drunkenness among certain of the factory girls of East London, although they were seldom arrested and brought into court for that offence.

He added: "It must not be forgotten that the number of convictions for drunkenness is not by any means a proper measure of insobriety. If a policeman sees a drunken man conducting himself quietly or sleeping in a doorway, he passes on and takes no notice. Those who are convicted belong, as a rule, to the disorderly classes, who, the moment liquor rises to their heads, manifest their natural propensities by obstreperous and riotous conduct. For one drunkard of this order there must be fifty who behave quietly and always manage to reach their homes, however zigzag may be their journey thither."

That statement was made a number of years ago, but I am convinced that it holds good now, because I noticed that most of the persons arrested and brought into court, especially women, were bloodstained and badly battered.

In the majority of these cases, as I have said, the persons were allowed to go with a reprimand or a small fine. The only case in which, it seemed to me, the judge showed a disposition to be severe was in that of a poor woman who was accused of begging. She was a pale, emaciated, and entirely wretched appearing little woman, and the charge against her was that of going through the streets, leading one of her children by the hand, and asking for alms because she and her children were starving. I learned from talking with the officer who investigated the case that the statement she made was very likely true. He had known her for some time, and she was in a very sad condition. But then, it seems, the law required that in such circumstances she should have gone to the workhouse.

I think that there were as many as fifteen or twenty women brought into court on each of the mornings I visited the court. Most of them were arrested for quarrelling and fighting, and nearly all of them showed in their bloated faces and in their disorderly appearance that steady and besotted drunkenness was at the bottom of their trouble.

I have found since I returned from Europe that the extent of drunkenness among Englishwomen has frequently been a matter of observation and comment. Richard Grant White,in his volume "England Within and Without," says:

I was struck with horror at the besotted condition of so many of the women—women who were bearing children every year, and suckling them, and who seemed to me little better than foul human stills through which the accursed liquor with which they were soaked filtered drop by drop into the little drunkards at their breasts. To these children drunkenness comes unconsciously, like their mother tongue. They cannot remember a time when it was new to them. They come out of the cloudland of infancy with the impression that drunkenness is one of the normal conditions of man, like hunger and sleep.

This was written thirty years ago. It is said that conditions have greatly improved in recent years in respect to the amount of drunkenness among the poor of London. Nevertheless, I notice in the last volume of the "Annual Charities Register" for London the statement that inebriety seems to be increasing among women, and that it prevails to such an alarming extent among women in all ranks of society that "national action is becoming essential for the nation's very existence."

The statistics of London crime show that, while only about half as many women as men are arrested on the charges of "simple drunkenness" and "drunkenness with aggravations," more than three times as many women as men are arrested on the charge of "habitual" drunkenness. Another thing that impressedme was that the American police courts deal much more severely with women. This is certainly true in the Southern States, where almost all the women brought before the police courts are Negroes.

The class of people to whom I have referred represent, as a matter of course, the lowest and most degraded among the working classes. Nevertheless, they represent a very large element in the population, and the very existence of this hopeless class, which constitutes the dregs of life in the large cities, is an indication of the hardship and bitterness of the struggle for existence in the classes above them.

I have attempted in what I have already said to indicate the situation of the women at the bottom in the complex life of the largest and, if I may say so, the most civilized city in the world, where women are just now clamouring for all the rights and privileges of men. But there are parts of Europe where, as far as I have been able to learn, women have as yet never heard that they had any rights or interests in life separate and distinct from those of their husbands and children. I have already referred to the increasing number of barefoot women I met as I journeyed southward from Berlin. At first these were for the most part women who worked in the fields. But by the time I reachedVienna I found that it was no uncommon thing to meet barefoot women in the most crowded and fashionable parts of the city.

Experience in travelling had taught me that the wearing of shoes is a pretty accurate indication of civilization. The fact that in a large part of southern Europe women who come from the country districts have not yet reached the point where they feel comfortable in shoes is an indication of the backwardness of the people.

What interested and surprised me more than the increasing absence of shoes among the countrywomen was the increasing number of women whom I saw engaged in rough and unskilled labour of every kind. I had never seen Negro women doing the sort of work I saw the women of southern Europe doing. When I reached Prague, for example, I noticed a load of coal going through the streets. A man was driving it, but women were standing up behind with shovels. I learned then that it was the custom to employ women to load and unload the coal and carry it into the houses. The driving and the shovelling were done by the man, but the dirtiest and the hardest part of the work was performed by the women.

In Vienna I saw hundreds of women at work as helpers in the construction of buildings; theymixed the mortar, loaded it in tubs, placed it on their heads, and carried it up two or three stories to men at work on the walls. The women who engage in this sort of labour wear little round mats on their heads, which support the burdens which they carry. Some of these women are still young, simply grown girls, fresh from the country, but the majority of them looked like old women.

Not infrequently I ran across women hauling carts through the streets. Sometimes there would be a dog harnessed to the cart beside them. That, for example, is the way in which the countrywomen sometimes bring their garden truck to market. More often, however, they will be seen bringing their garden products to market in big baskets on their heads or swung over their shoulders. I remember, while I was in Budapest, that, in returning to my hotel rather late one night, I passed through an open square near the market, where there were hundreds of these market women asleep on the sidewalks or in the street. Some of them had thrown down a truss of straw on the pavement under their wagons and gone to sleep there. Others, who had brought their produce into town from the country on their backs, had in many cases merely put their baskets on the sidewalk, lain down, thrown a portion of theirskirts up over their heads, and gone to sleep. At this hour the city was still wide awake. From a nearby beer hall there came the sounds of music and occasional shouts of laughter. Meanwhile people were passing and repassing in the street and on the sidewalk, but they paid no more attention to these sleeping women than they would if they had been horses or cows.

In other parts of Austria-Hungary I ran across women engaged in various sorts of rough and unskilled labour. While I was in Cracow, in Austrian Poland, I saw women at work in the stone quarries. The men were blasting out the rock, but the women were assisting them in removing the earth and in loading the wagons. At the same time I saw women working in brickyards. The men made the brick, the women acted as helpers. While I was in Cracow one of the most interesting places I visited in which women are employed was a cement factory. The man in charge was kind enough to permit me to go through the works, and explained the process of crushing and burning the stone used in the manufacture of cement. A large part of the rough work in this cement factory is done by girls. The work of loading the kilns is performed by them. Very stolid, heavy, and dirty-looking creatures they were. They hadnone of the freshness and health that I noticed so frequently among the girls at work in the fields.

While I was studying the different kinds of work which women are doing in Austria-Hungary I was reminded of the complaint that I had heard sometimes from women in America, that they were denied their rights in respect to labour, that men in America wanted to keep women in the house, tied down to household duties.

In southern Europe, at any rate, there does not seem to be any disposition to keep women tied up in the houses. Apparently they are permitted to do any kind of labour that men are permitted to do; and they do, in fact, perform a great many kinds of labour that we in America think fit only for men. I noticed, moreover, as a rule, that it was only the rough, unskilled labour which was allotted to them. If women worked in the stone quarries, men did the part of the work that required skill. Men used the tools, did the work of blasting the rock. If women worked on the buildings, they did only the roughest and cheapest kinds of work. I did not see any women laying brick, nor did I see anywhere women carpenters or stone-masons.

In America Negro women and children are employed very largely at harvest time in the cotton-fields, but I never saw in America, asI have seen in Austria, women employed as section hands on a railway, or digging sewers, hauling coal, carrying the hod, or doing the rough work in brickyards, kilns, and cement factories.

In the Southern States of America the lowest form of unskilled labour is that of the men who are employed on what is known as public works—that is to say, the digging of sewers, building of railways, and so forth. I was greatly surprised, while I was in Vienna, to see women engaged side by side with men in digging a sewer. This was such a novel sight to me that I stopped to watch these women handle the pick and shovel. They were, for the most part, young women, of that heavy, stolid type I have referred to. I watched them for some time, and I could not see but that they did their work as rapidly and as easily as the men beside them. After this I came to the conclusion that there was not anything a man could do which a woman could not do also.

In Poland the women apparently do most of the work on the farms. Many of the men have gone to Vienna to seek their fortune. Many, also, have gone to the cities, and still others are in the army, because on the Continent every able-bodied man must serve in the army. The result is that more and more of the work thatwas formerly performed by men is now done by women.

One of the most interesting sights I met in Europe was the market in Cracow. This market is a large open square in the very centre of the ancient city. In this square is situated the ancient Cloth Hall, a magnificent old building, which dates back to the Middle Ages, when it was used as a place for the exhibition of merchandise, principally textiles of various kinds. On the four sides of this square are some of the principal buildings of the city, including the City Hall and the Church of the Virgin Mary, from the tall tower of which the hours are sounded by the melodious notes of a bugle.

On market days this whole square is crowded with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of market women, who come in from the country in the early morning with their produce, remain until it is sold, and then return to their homes.

In this market one may see offered for sale anything and everything that the peasant people produce in their homes or on the farms. Among other things for sale I noted the following: geese, chickens, bread, cheese, potatoes, salads, fruits of various sorts, mushrooms, baskets, toys, milk, and butter.

What interested me as much as anything was to observe that nearly everything that was soldin this market was carried into the city on the backs of the women. Practically, I think, one may say that the whole city of Cracow, with a population of 90,000 persons, is fed on the provisions that the peasant women carry into the city, some of them travelling as far as ten or fifteen miles daily.

One day, while driving in the market of Cracow, our carriage came up with a vigorous young peasant woman who was tramping, barefoot, briskly along the highway with a bundle swung on her shoulder. In this bundle, I noticed, she carried a milk-can. We stopped, and the driver spoke to her in Polish and then translated to my companion, Doctor Park, in German. At first the woman seemed apprehensive and afraid. As soon as we told her we were from America, however, her face lighted up and she seemed very glad to answer all my questions.

I learned that she was a widow, the owner of a little farm with two cows. She lived something like fourteen kilometres (about ten miles) from the city, and every day she came into town to dispose of the milk she had from her two cows. She did not walk all the way, but rode half the distance in the train, and walked the other half. She owned a horse, she said, but the horse was at work on the farm, and shecould not afford to use him to drive to town. In order to take care of and milk her cows and reach the city early enough to deliver her milk she had to get up very early in the morning, so that she generally got back home about ten or eleven o'clock. Then, in the afternoon, she took care of the house and worked in the garden. This is a pretty good example, I suspect, of the way some of these peasant women work.

All day long one sees these women, with their bright-coloured peasant costumes, coming and going through the streets of Cracow with their baskets on their backs. Many of them are barefoot, but most of them wear very high leather boots, which differ from those I have seen worn by peasant women in other parts of Austria and Hungary in the fact that they have very small heels.

I had an opportunity to see a great many types of women in the course of my journey across Europe, but I saw none who looked so handsome, fresh, and vigorous as these Polish peasant women.

It is said of the Polish women, as it is said of the women of the Slavic races generally, that they are still living in the mental and physical slavery of former ages. Probably very few of them have ever heard of women's rights. But, if that is true, it simply shows how very littleconnection such abstract words have with the condition, welfare, and happiness of the people who enjoy the freedom and independence of country life. At any rate, I venture to say that there are very few women, even in the higher ranks of labouring women in England, whose condition in life compares with that of these vigorous, wholesome, and healthy peasant women.

How can work in the stifling atmosphere of a factory or in some crowded city garret compare with the life which these women lead, working in the fields and living in the free and open country?

The emigration to America has left an enormous surplus of women in Europe. In England, for instance, the women stand in the proportion of sixteen to fifteen to the men. In some parts of Italy there are cities, it is said, where all the able-bodied men have left the country and gone to America. The changes brought by emigration have not, on the whole, it seems to me, affected the life of women favourably. But the same thing is true with regard to the changes brought about by the growth of cities and the use of machinery. Men have profited by the use of machinery more than women. The machines have taken away from the women the occupations they had in the homes, and this has driven them to take upother forms of labour, of more or less temporary character, in which they are overworked and underpaid.

Everywhere we find the women in Europe either doing the obsolete things or performing some form of unskilled labour. For example, there are still one hundred thousand people, mostly women, in East London, it is said, who are engaged in home industries—in other words, sweating their lives away in crowded garrets trying to compete with machinery and organization in the making of clothes or artificial flowers, and in other kinds of work of this same general description.

The movement for women's suffrage in England, which began in the upper classes among the women of the West End, has got down, to some extent, to the lower levels among the women who work with the hands. Women's suffrage meetings have been held, I have learned, in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel. But I do not believe that voting alone will improve the condition of workingwomen.

There must be a new distribution of the occupations. Too many women in Europe are performing a kind of labour for which they are not naturally fitted and for which they have had no special training. There are too many women in the ranks of unskilled labour. My ownconviction is that what the workingwomen of Europe need most is a kind of education that will lift a larger number of them into the ranks of skilled labour—that will teach them to do something, and to do that something well.

The Negro women in America have a great advantage in this respect. They are everywhere admitted to the same schools to which the men are admitted. All the Negro colleges are crowded with women. They are admitted to the industrial schools and to training in the different trades on the same terms as men. One of the chief practical results of the agitation for the suffrage in Europe will be, I imagine, to turn the attention of the women in the upper classes to the needs of the women in the lower classes. In Europe there is much work for women among their own sex, for, as I have said elsewhere, in Europe the man farthest down is woman.

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