class which the gospel can reach and ought to
reach speedily.

[Sidenote: Where Located]

About seventy-five per cent, of the Bohemians live in the northwest. In
Cleveland they have entered into various industries. In New York they
are largely employed in cigar-making, at which the women and girls work
under conditions not calculated to inspire them with regard for God or
man. The home life cannot be what it should when the mothers are
compelled to work in the factories, besides having all the home cares
and work. The testimony of the tenement inspectors is that the Bohemians
are perhaps the cleanest of the poor people in the city, and are
struggling heroically against the pitiful conditions of the
tenement-houses in which they are compelled to exist.

_II. The Poles_

[Sidenote: A Large Element]

The Poles form one of the oldest and largest elements of the Slav
immigration. In 1900 the census gave 668,536 persons whose parents were
born in Poland, and of these 383,510 were themselves born there. Nearly
a quarter of a million of the latter came to this country between 1890
and 1900, and in the five years following, 1900-5, about 350,000 more
arrived. A third of a million Poles now in America do not understand
English. The Polish strength is indicated by the Polish National
Alliance, with 50,000 members, and by a list of fifty newspapers
published in the Polish tongue, four of them dailies, printed in
Chicago, Buffalo, and Milwaukee, the largest centers.

[Illustration: Born in Russia, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary--Resident
in the United States 1900

Reproduced by special permission from "The World's Work"
Copyright, 1903.]

[Sidenote: Religious Tolerance]

"The higher classes of Poland were touched by the pre-Reformation
movement of Huss at Prague, where they were generally educated.
Reformation ideas did not gain as great currency as in Bohemia, but both
Calvin and Luther were interested in their progress in Poland. A Jesuit
authority complained that two thousand Romanist churches had become
Protestant. A Union Synod was formed and consensus of doctrine adopted.
Poland is described as the most tolerant country of Europe in the
sixteenth century. It became an asylum for the persecuted Protestants of
other lands, notably the Bohemian brethren. Later on, under the
influence of Protestantism, literature and education were stimulated.
But under succeeding Swedish and Saxon dynasties, and through Jesuit
instrumen