An interesting series of articles appeared in 1906 in a magazine devoted to social betterment,[68] the writer having spent a year in studying conditions in the Slav districts of Austria-Hungary. Living among the people, she has become profoundly interested in them, and takes a most hopeful view of their possibilities in America. She says the life from which the peasants mostly come to us is the old peasant life, but a little way removed from feudalism and serfdom. Each little village is a tiny world in itself, with its own traditions and ways, its own dress, perhaps even its own dialect. The amazing gift of the Slav for color and music permeates the whole home life with poetry. The Slav immigrants have the virtues and faults of their primitive world. They come to America to make money. The majority come with intent to earn money to take back home, rather than with expectation to settle here permanently. Unenterprising, unlettered, they are at the same time hardy, thrifty and shrewd, honest and pious. They are undoubtedly highly endowed with gifts of imagination and artistic expression for which in their American conditions they find little or no outlet. [Sidenote: Necessity of Christian Environment] And here again is the point we are constantly having impressed upon us. What the immigrant shall become, for good or ill, depends chiefly upon what conditions are made for him, and whether he is given a chance to express his best self in this country. Grinding monopoly, harsh treatment, prejudice that drives into clannishness and race hatred--these will make of the Slavs a peril. A genuinely Christian environment and treatment will find them receptive and ready for Americanization through evangelization. _VIII. The Russian Jews_ [Sidenote: An Interesting Group] In some respects the most interesting immigrants from the Slav countries are the Jews from Russia and Roumania. The German Jew and the Russian Jew must not be confounded; they are as distinct as any two races in the entire immigrant group. The German Jew came to America to make more money, and is making it. The Russian Jew, who comes from persecution, is rigidly orthodox, and regards the commercial German class as apostate. He forms a picturesque, vigorous, _sui generis_ member of the alien procession. [Sidenote: Coming Rapidly] Since the year 1881 not less than 750,000 Jewish immigrants have arrived at the port of New York alone. On Manhattan Island more than every fourth person you meet is a Jew. The Jews admitted at Ellis Island during the past five years outnumbered all the communicants in the Protestant churches in Greater New York. [Sidenote: Where they Come from] Of the 106,000 Jews admitted in 1904, a large proportion of whom settled in New York, 77,000 came from the Russian Empire, 20,000 from Austria-Hungary, and 6,000 from Roumania. Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe are all one people. [Sidenote: Occupation]