Divided into petty kingdoms or provinces, each speaking a separate language, living for the most part in the country districts, and held in some sort of political and economic subjection, sometimes by the descendants of foreign conquerors, and sometimes, as in the case of the Poles, by the nobility of their own race, the masses of the Slavic peoples in southern Europe have lived for centuries out of touch with the life of cities, and to a large extent out of touch with the world. Compared, therefore, with the peoples of western Europe, who are living in the centres of modern life and progress, the Slavic peoples are just now on the horizon. In the course of my travels through Austria and Hungary I think I met, at one time or another, representatives of nearly every branch of the Slavic race in the empire. In Bohemia I became acquainted, as I have said, with the most progressive portion of the race, the Czechs. In Galicia I saw something of the life of the Polish people, both in the towns and in the country districts. Again, in Budapest and Vienna I learned something of the condition of the labouring and peasant classes, among whom the Slavic peoples are usually in the majority. At Fiume, the port of Hungary, from which forty thousand emigrants sail every year for the United States, I met and talked with Dalmatians, Croatians, Slovenes, Ruthenians, and Serbs--representatives, in fact, of almost every race in Hungary. In the plains of central Hungary, and again in eastern Prussia, I saw gangs of wandering labourers, made up of men and women who come to this part of the country from the Slavic countries farther south and east to take part in the harvest on the great estates. During this time I became acquainted to some extent also with representatives of almost every type of civilization, high and low, among the peoples of southern Europe, from the Dalmatian herdsmen, who lead a rude and semi-barbarous existence on the high, barren mountains along the coast of the Adriatic, to the thrifty and energetic artisans of Bohemia and the talented Polish nobility, who are said to be among the most intellectual people in Europe. I did not, among these classes I have mentioned, see the most primitive people of the Slavic race, nor the type of the man of that race farthest down. In fact, I have heard that in the mountain regions of southern Galicia there are people who make their homes in holes in the ground or herd together in little huts built of mud. I did not see, either, as I should like to have seen, the life of those Slavic people in southwestern Hungary who still hold their lands in common and live together in patriarchal communities, several families beneath one roof, under the rule of a "house father" and a "house mother," who are elected annually to govern the community.