Then he fell upon me savagely. "But you don't mean to say that these 'Dagos' that come over here are anything like Michael Angelo or Raphael!" To which I replied: "No, they are not; but neither are you anything like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln." Then I returned to the perusal of my newspaper. That man was an average American of the middle class, a representative of the bulk of our population, and he, in common with many of his countrymen, is criminally ignorant of the people who will soon have his weal and woe in their hands. The Italian, the Greek, and the Syrian are usually called by the classic names "Dago," "Roundhead," or "Guinea," and the Slavs, be they Poles, Servians, Slovaks, or Montenegrins, are called "Hunyaks," "Hunkies," and "Slabs"; and I once heard the owner of a great industrial establishment call them "Bohunks." It was not an ignorant or malicious friend of mine who said of a Jew, a man of scholarly attainment and a common acquaintance, "He is a pretty decent Sheeny." I have no quarrel with the fact that the average American is ignorant of the historic place which these people hold among the nations, and of the great age-long struggle through which some of them have passed and are still passing, that they may preserve their identity as a people. I am thoroughly incensed, however, that nearly every one of the names applied to them is an expression of contempt, an offhand judgment of inferiority. After all, it is not even that which makes me take up the cudgel for them, because they must and will prove for themselves that they are perfectly human like the rest of us, and that in all essential things they will grow like us as soon as they have the same privileges which we have had, who came after the first "Dago" had discovered the way to this land of opportunity. What really _does_ burden me and make me cry out is the consequences which result from such ignorance as I have cited, and because of which I was on that train travelling to Guinea Hill. Guinea Hill differs from Whiskey Hill in that it bears many other fantastic names and in that there are fewer saloons. The beer-kegs do not lie about in such unpicturesque confusion, and the Slavs who live there come from the shores of the Adriatic and the bleak mountains of Montenegro. The huts in which they live on Guinea Hill are even worse than those of the earlier comers from the north of the Slavic world. I am told that they were built some thirty years ago, and no sacrilegious hand has touched them since, to paint them or to change their original primitive, dry-goods-box architecture. They seem to have sunk into the refuse of the mines, and the sociological investigators, who know the housing conditions in Pennsylvania, declare them to be "the worst in the state," which phrase would be eloquent from meaning were it not so common as to lose its force.