orer, or the still better educated
professional or business man. There may be a great demand here for
unskilled labor. Again, the moral qualities of the untaught but
industrious, simple-minded, unspoiled countryman may be far more
wholesome for the communities to which he comes than those of the
educated, town-bred, unsuccessful business or professional man, the
misfit skilled laborer, or the actual loafer and sharper of the cities,
who comes over here when home gets too hot for him. As to illiteracy,
moreover, the peasant is improving. The great mass of this unskilled
labor pushes directly through the great gateway of New York, where
unfortunately so many other races stop. They go to the eastern, middle,
and northern states, mainly into our coal and iron mines, and our steel
mills, but also to the farming regions, where they work patiently and
thriftily, first as farm laborers, then as owners of abandoned farming
lands or cut-over timber lands, reclaiming and making them fertile to
the great advantage of the markets they supply."

Let us now look at this conglomerate immigration a little more in
detail, and no longer class these peoples indiscriminately as "barbarian
Huns."

_I. The Bohemians_

[Sidenote: The Czechs and their History]

We may well begin with the Bohemians, who are among the most skilled,
least illiterate, and, to Protestants, most interesting of the Slavs. In
studying any group of "strangers within our gates," it is necessary to
know its preemigration history. These people, who call themselves
Czechs, are a principal branch of the Slav family and one of the large
constituents of the Austria-Hungarian empire, numbering 6,318,697 in
1901. At home they are chiefly agriculturists. In 1900 there were in
this country 325,400 persons of Bohemian parentage, of whom 156,991 were
born in Bohemia. Since 1900 above 50,000 more have come. Three fourths
of them all are in the north central states of the Mississippi Valley,
with Chicago as their great center. Cleveland has about 15,000, New York
about the same number; while in agriculture there are in round numbers
16,000 in Nebraska, 14,000 in Wisconsin, 11,000 in Iowa, and 9,000 in
Texas.

[Sidenote: Stormy National Struggle]

As to their history in the old world, the Bohemians have had such a
stormy national struggle, and the bitterness of it has so entered into
their lives, that it is impossible rightly to judge them apart from it.
It has some instructi