nace involved in the
increasing numbers of these inveterate aliens to institutions that are
fundamentally American.

The Lithuanians and Magyars are often classed with the Slavs. They
hotly resent this inclusion, however, for they are distinct racial
strains of ancient lineage. An adverse fate has left the Lithuanian
little of his old civilization except his language. Political and
economic suppression has made sad havoc of what was once a proud and
prosperous people. Most of them are now crowded into the Baltic
province that bears their name, and they are reduced to the mental and
economic level of the Russian moujik. In 1868 a famine drove the first
of these immigrants to America, where they were soon absorbed by the
anthracite mines of Pennsylvania. They were joined in the seventies by
numbers of army deserters. The hard times of the nineties caused a
rush of young men to the western El Dorado. Since then the influx has
steadily continued until now over 200,000 are in America. They
persistently avoid agriculture and seek the coal mine and the factory.
The one craft in which they excel is tailoring, and they proudly boast
of being the best dressed among all the Eastern-European immigrants.
The one mercantile ambition which they have nourished is to keep a
saloon. Drinking is their national vice; and they measure the social
success of every wedding, christening, picnic, and jollification by
its salvage of empty beer kegs.

Over 338,000 Magyars immigrated to the United States during the decade
ending 1910. These brilliant and masterful folk are a Mongoloid blend
that swept from the steppes of Asia across eastern Europe a thousand
years ago. As the wave receded, the Magyars remained dominant in
beautiful and fertile Hungary, where their aggressive nationalism
still brings them into constant rivalry on the one hand with the
Germans of Austria and on the other with the Slavs of Hungary. The
immigrants to America are largely recruited from the peasantry. They
almost invariably seek the cities, where the Magyar neighborhoods can
be easily distinguished by their scrupulously neat housekeeping, the
flower beds, the little patches of well-swept grass, the clean
children, and the robust and tidy women. Among them is less illiteracy
than in any other group from eastern and southern Europe, excepting
the Finns, who are their ethnic brothers. As a rule they own their own
homes. They learn the English language quickly but unfortun