While the Bohemians and the Moravians, thanks to a great intellectual awakening, have come nearly abreast of the Germans, the bulk of the Slavs remain on a much lower plane of culture. In ignorance and illiteracy, in the prevalence of superstition and priestcraft, in the harshness of church and state, in the subservience of the common people to the upper classes, in the low position of woman, in the subjection of the child to the parent, in coarseness of manner and speech, and in low standards of cleanliness and comfort, a large part of the Slavic world remains at the level of our English forefathers in the days of Henry the Eighth. According to mother-tongue, there were in this country in 1910, 941,000 Poles, 228,000 Bohemians and Moravians, 165,000 Slovaks from the southern slopes of the Carpathians, 123,000 Slovenes from the head of the Adriatic, 78,000 Croatians and Dalmatians, 56,000 Russians, 40,000 Bulgarians, Servians, and Montenegrins, 30,000 Slavonians, 25,000 Ruthenians, to say nothing of 140,000 Lithuanians and Letts, who insist that they are a race apart. All told, there are 2,000,000 Slavs among us, and, if we heed the estimates of the leaders of the Slav groups, we should reckon at least 3,000,000. No doubt, between five and six per cent. of the whites in this country are of Slavic blood. Of the Slav arrivals since 1899 nearly three-fourths are males. Among the immigrants from the Balkans, the men are from ten to twenty times as numerous as the women. Thirty-two per cent. have been illiterates, the proportion ranging from 1.7 per cent. among the Bohemians to 53.4 per cent. among the Ruthenians. Excepting the Bohemians, few of them have had any industrial experience or bring any valuable skill. It is as if great numbers of the English of the sixteenth century had suddenly appeared among us. OCCUPATIONS OF THE SLAVIC IMMIGRANTS When, about fifteen years ago, the great Slav invasion began, the American frontier was remote, shrunken, and forbidding. The newcomers were not in quest of cheap land, with independence, so much as of paying jobs from which they might hoard "big money" and return well off to their homes. They gravitated, therefore, to the mining, metal-working, and packing centers, where there is a demand for unlimited quantities of raw labor, provided always it be cheap. So these sturdy peasant lads came to be Nibelungs, "sons of the gloom," haunting our coal-pits, blast-furnaces, coke-ovens, smelters, foundries, steel-mills, and metal refineries, doing rough, coarse work under skilled men who, as one foreman put it to me, "don't want them to _think_, but to _obey orders_."