That there are attendant evils, no one will question. There is much more discontent than there ever has been, more haste and less leisure; there is less respect for authority and for established institutions; certain social evils have been accentuated; the newly acquired wealth has proved disastrous to some, and family ties have been strained by the absence of the heads of many households. Nevertheless, an Hungarian statesman, who had risen from the ranks, said to me: "America has been a blessing to us. Had Columbus not discovered it, all Europe would still be in servitude, and had it not been rediscovered by our peasants, they would not have had much chance to get their necks from under the yoke. "America is our leaven and will yet be our salvation." I have watched the leaven at work, and in the succeeding chapters I have recorded some concrete instances, which clearly show that "A little leaven, leaveneth the whole lump." V OUR CRITICS The third-class waiting-room in the Oderberg station, on the Northern Railroad of Austria, is splendid vantage ground from which to watch the racial and national conglomerate that forms the insecure structure called the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Here from her East and West, her North and South, one meets those great social currents which stream from the mountains to the plains and from the villages to the cities. Here, also, the tides of immigration come in and go out, and by their volume one can judge the prosperity of the United States, or at least the condition of our labour markets. Here the "spick and span" German, from across the border, meets his less vigorous and more "gemuethlich" cousin, the Austrian. Here the Moravian and the Czech touch elbows and glory in their Slavic speech--the age-long battle for the supremacy of their language being one of the few points which they have won in this contentious monarchy. This is also the meeting place of Southern and Western Slavs, and here the fierce looking Bosnians carry, in their erstwhile weapon belts, pins, pipes, jack-knives and razors, which they sell to their Slavic brothers of the West; they even deign to speak in broken German to the hated "Schwabs," when driving their bargains. Glancing around the crowded waiting-room, one sees Ruthenians and Wallachians, in picturesque garb, travelling from their impoverished mountain homes to the upper Danubian plain. They are harvesters, and their backs are bent under the weight of crude cooking utensils and primitive harvest implements. Close to this group are fiercely moustachioed Magyars, in their semi-Oriental, loose, white linen trousers and heavy sheepskin coats. They are going to take charge of the flocks of sheep on some lordly estates; they know the ways of all four-footed animals, and are considered faithful shepherds.