As I have considered the complications and difficulties, both political and economic, which not merely Austria but Europe has to face as a consequence of the different languages spoken by the different races, I have asked myself what would probably happen in our Southern States if, as some people have suggested, large numbers of these foreign peoples were induced to settle there. I greatly fear that if these people should come in large numbers and settle in colonies outside of the cities, where they would have comparatively few educational advantages and where they would be better able and more disposed to preserve their native customs and languages, we might have a racial problem in the South more difficult and more dangerous than that which is caused by the presence of the Negro. Whatever else one may say of the Negro, he is, in everything except his colour, more like the Southern white man, more willing and able to absorb the ideas and the culture of the white man and adapt himself to existing conditions, than is true of any race which is now coming into this country. Perhaps my attempt to compare racial conditions in southern Europe with racial conditions in the southern United States will seem to some persons a trifle strange and out of place because in the one case the races concerned are both white, while in the other case one is white and one is black. Nevertheless, I am convinced that a careful study of conditions as they exist in southern Europe will throw a great deal of light upon the situation of the races in our Southern States. More than that, strange and irrational as racial conflicts often seem, whether in Europe or in America, I suspect that at bottom they are merely the efforts of groups of people to readjust their relations under changing conditions. In short, they grow out of the efforts of the people who are at the bottom to lift themselves to a higher stage of existence. If that be so, it seems to me there need be no fear, under a free government, where every man is given opportunity to get an education, where every man is encouraged to develop in himself and bring to the service of the community the best that is in him, that racial difficulties should not finally be adjusted, and white man and black man live, each helping rather than hindering the other. CHAPTER VI STRIKES AND FARM LABOUR IN ITALY AND HUNGARY There is one English word which seems to be more widely known and used in Europe than almost any other. It is the word "strike." Labour strikes, I have understood, had their origin with the factory system in England. But the people on the Continent have improved on the original English device, and have found ways of using it of which we in America, I suspect, have rarely if ever heard.