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.
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