In order that my hearers might understand what I said, it was necessary for the secretary of the association, a Bohemian who spoke very good English, to translate my words sentence by sentence. In spite of these difficulties I do not think I ever spoke to an audience of labouring people who were more intelligent or more appreciative. It was a great pleasure and satisfaction to me to be able to speak to this audience. I felt, as I think they did, that we had something in common which others, perhaps, could not entirely understand, because each of us belonged to a race which, however different in other respects, was the same in this: that it was struggling upward. CHAPTER V POLITICS AND RACES In Prague, the capital of Bohemia, I came in contact for the first time with the advance guard, if I may use the expression, of a new race, the Slavs. I say a new race, because although the Slavic peoples claim an antiquity as great as that of any other race in Europe, the masses of the race seem just now emerging from a condition of life more primitive than that of almost any other people in Europe. Many little things, not only what I saw with my own eyes, but what I heard from others, gave me the impression, as I travelled southward, that I was entering into a country where the masses of the people lived a simpler and more primitive existence than any I had seen elsewhere in Europe. I remember, for one thing, that I was one day startled to see, in the neighbourhood of the mining regions of Bohemia, a half-dozen women engaged in loading a coal barge--shovelling the coal into wheelbarrows and wheeling them along a narrow plank from the coal wharf to the ship alongside. I was impressed, again, by the fact that several of the peoples of the Austrian Empire--the Moravians and Ruthenians are an illustration--still preserve their old tribal names. Certain other of these peoples still keep not only the tribal names, but many of the old tribal customs. Among most of the Slavic peoples, for example, custom still gives to the marriage ceremony the character of barter and sale. In fact, I found that in one of the large provincial towns in eastern Hungary the old "matrimonial fairs" are still kept up. On a certain day in each year hundreds of marriageable young women are brought down to this fair by their parents, where they may be seen seated on their trunks and surrounded by the cattle they expect to have for a dowry. Naturally young men come from all the surrounding country to attend this fair, and usually a lawyer sits out under a tree nearby prepared to draw up the marriage contract. In some cases as many as forty marriages are arranged in this way in a single day.