Bohemians and Poles come here to stay, so it is they who furnish the farmers. The Bohemian current began as far back as the fifties, and in 1900 a quarter of all the Bohemian-Americans were on the land. The Poles came later, and with less money, so that only one-tenth were then in agriculture. The immigrants of the seventies sought wild, cheap land, and therefore the Slav settlements are thickest in the Northwest and the Southwest. One-third of all the Polish farmers are in Wisconsin, while in Texas Bohemian cotton-growers are so numerous that in some localities even the negroes speak Bohemian! Of late raw Poles, working up through farm labor and tenancy, are coming to own "abandoned farms" in the Connecticut Valley. Crowded with several other families in an old Yankee farm-house, the Pole is raising, with the aid of his numerous progeny, incredible crops of onions and tobacco. "In old Hadley," reports Professor Emily Balch of Wellesley College, "all up and down the beautiful elm-shaded street the old colonial mansions are occupied by Poles." In one year these Poles, who were but one-fifth of the population, accounted for two-thirds of the births. EXCESSIVE ALCOHOLISM AMONG THE SLAVS Coming from an Elizabethan world, the Slav is as frankly vinous as Falstaff with his "cup o' sack." He is a Bacchus worshiper unashamed, and our squeamishness about liquor strikes him as either hypocrisy or prudery. He thinks, too, that without stimulant he cannot stand up to the grueling work of mill and mine. A steel-worker, when besought to give up drink, replied, "No beer, no whisky, me no work." Hence an incredible amount of his wages goes to line the till of the saloon-keeper. In a steel town of 30,000 population, $60,000 are left with the saloon-keepers the Saturday and Sunday after pay-day. The Saturday brewery-wagon makes the rounds, and on a pleasant Sunday one sees in the yard of each boarding-house a knot of broad-shouldered, big-faced men about a keg of liquid comfort. It is at celebrations that the worst excesses show themselves. What with caring for their large families and their boarders, the women usually lose their attractiveness early, and therewith their power to exercise a refining influence upon their men-folk. A wedding or a christening-feast lasts an entire day, and toward the end men beastly drunk bellow and fight in the presence of the terrified women and children. During festivals, too, old feuds, rekindled by drink, flare up in brutal and bloody rows. At such times one realizes that the poet Kollár's famous phrase "the dove-blood of the Slav" does not apply to the exhilarated.