1866-70 8300 1871-75 27100 1876-80 28700 1881-85 109500 1886-90 197800 1891-95 289200 1896-1900 369300 1901-05 959800 1906-10 1186100 Immigration from Italy, 1866-1910] CHAPTER VI THE SLAVS In the dim east of Europe, far from the vertical beams of civilization, lies the melancholy Slavic world, with its 150,000,000 of human beings multiplying twice as fast and dying twice as fast as the peoples of the West. Since the curtain of history rose, the Slavs have been anvil rather than hammer. Subjugated by the Gauls in the first century B. C., by the Germans early in the Christian era, and by the Avars in the sixth century, they have played no master rôle in history and their very name is a conqueror's insult. In the temper of this race there appears to be something soft and yielding. For all their courage, these peaceful agriculturists have shown much less of the fighting, retaliating instinct than the Britons and the Norsemen. At a time when western Europe was sending forth armies to rescue the Holy Sepulcher much of Slavland lay still in heathen darkness. Human sacrifices and the practice of _suttee_ did not disappear until the adoption of Christianity. Helmold, a priest of Lübeck, who in 1158 was sent to Christianize the Slavs, speaks of them as a "depraved and perverse nation," and their country is to him "a land of horror and a vast solitude." In 1108 the Archbishop of Magdeburg writes in a pastoral letter, "These cruel people, the Slavs, have risen against us."... "They have cut off the heads of Christians and offered them as sacrifices." [Illustration: Photograph by Hine Slav Sisters] [Illustration: Photograph by Hine Slovak Girl] Unlike the maritime peoples of the West, the Slavs had no easement from the colonizing of the New World. When the era of machine industry dawned, they were not able, as were the English, the French, and the Germans, to get into the sunshine by catering to the world's demand for cheap manufactured goods. Moreover, they have had to bear the brunt of Oriental onslaught. The South Slavs--of Servia, Bulgaria, Herzegovina, and Macedonia--fell under those Comanches of Asia, the Turks, so that only within the last thirty-five years have the spires and turrets of their submerged civilization reappeared above the receding Ottoman flood.