th this training, the
Bohemian or Polish farmer who takes up land in America soon becomes a
well-to-do citizen.

Taxation, too, is unequal. For many years the government suffered
deficits, the military expenses increased, and worst of all, the
nobility were exempt from taxation. The latter injustice, however, was
remedied by the revolution of 1848, and yet at the present time the
great landowners pay much less than their proportionate share of the
land-tax, to say nothing of the heavy taxes on consumption and industry.

As in other countries of low standards, the number of births is large in
proportion to the inhabitants. For every one thousand persons in
Hungary, there are forty-three births each year,[50] a number exceeded
by but one great country of Europe, Russia. Yet, with this large number
of births, because the economic conditions are so onerous and the
consequent deaths so frequent, the net increase is less than that of any
other country except France. In Austria the births and deaths are less
and the net increase greater, and they run close to those of prolific
Italy.

In each of these countries the figures for births and deaths stand near
those of the negroes in America, and like the negroes, two-fifths of the
mortality is that of children under five years of age, whereas with
other more favored countries and races this proportion is only one-fifth
or one-fourth. It is not so much the overpopulation of Austria-Hungary
that incites emigration as it is the poverty, ignorance, inequality, and
helplessness that produce a seeming overpopulation. While these
conditions continue, emigration will continue to increase, and the
efforts of the Hungarian government to reduce it will not succeed.

=Russia.=--The Russian Empire is at the present time the third in the rank
of contributors to American immigration. Russian immigration, like that
of Italy and Austria-Hungary, is practically limited to the past two
decades. In 1881 it first reached 10,000. In 1893 it was 42,000, and in
1906, 216,000.

The significant fact of this immigration is that it is only 2 per cent
Russian and 98 per cent non-Russian. The Russian peasant is probably the
most oppressed of the peasants of Europe, and though his recent uprising
has aroused his intellect and disabused the former opinion of his
stupidity, yet he has been so tied to the soil by his system of
communism, his burden of taxes and debt and his subjection to landlords,
that he i