Their preference
for the larger cities is shown by these figures. Recent immigrants are
going more into the New England States. Already there is a second
generation of them in the cities and the farming country of the Middle
West, and they have their own teachers and doctors. In New England they
are spreading in the factory towns, and Chicopee, Massachusetts, has six
thousand of them; while in the tobacco belt of Connecticut they furnish
a majority of the farm hands. Ten years ago Hartford had only three or
four hundred Polish families; to-day there is a parish of a thousand
people, and they have built a Catholic church and given $20,000 toward a
school.
[Sidenote: Independent in Spirit; Open to the Gospel]
Like most of the Slavs, the Poles who come here are commonly poor, and
of the peasant class; about one third of them are illiterate. They are
clannish, and clash with the Lithuanians and other races. Lovers of
liberty, they clash also with the Catholic authorities, going so far
even as organized rebellion to obtain control of their church properties
and freedom in the choice of priests. They have a superstitious dread of
Protestantism, which has been misrepresented to them as extremely
difficult.
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