Although beating the wife with a wet rope is going out of practice, the Galician peasant, says Von Hupka, "still regards her as a thing belonging to him, which was made in the first place for his service." No wonder the Slav mother averages eight children! No wonder there is an appalling infant mortality, while a childbed death is too often the fate of the forspent mother. Little cares the stolid peasant. What is the woman there for? Nor is this view strange in the New World. In Hungary the Slovak women "bear a child a year--'always either bearing or nursing,' is the saying." But the annual child arrives likewise in the Slovak families of New York. The Slav wife in this country bears from two to two and a half times as fast as the wife of American parentage. Her daughter born under the Stars and Stripes is seven-eighths as prolific as her barefoot immigrant mother. The average Slavic charity case involves five persons, the German or Scandinavian case four persons, the American case three and one-half persons. A drunken Pole said with pride to the agent of a charitable society that was supporting his family: "Just think what I've done for the State! I've given it ten children!" [Illustration: Courtesy of The Survey Slav Woman and Italian Husband] [Illustration: Photograph by Hine Slovak Girls] The Middle Ages are beginning to show among us. In twenty-one rural counties of Minnesota the Polish women have borne, on an average, seven children in the course of fourteen and a half years of married life. The full tale, no doubt, will come to nine or ten. Thanks to our child-pitying, child-saving civilization, the Polish mother will keep her brood nearly as well as her American neighbor with four or five. "The Irish for children," runs the proverb; and yet one Irish-American wife out of thirteen is childless, and one English-American wife out of twelve. But on the Minnesota farms only one Polish-American wife out of fifty-eight is barren! In a county where the Poles, although but a third of the population, register 58 per cent. of the births, an old farmer said to me: "The Yankees here are too lazy to have kids. The Poles have from ten to fifteen in a family, and in a hundred years the people here will all be Poles." A hundred years? Even fourteen years ago Father Kruszka reckoned that there were in this country 700 such Polish communities, averaging a hundred families each. So there are hundreds of centers from which the Middle Ages spread. Farm by farm, township by township, the displacement of the American goes on--a quiet conquest, without spear or trumpet, a conquest made by child-bearing women. The fathers forage, but it is the mothers who have to face anguish, exhaustion, and even death in the campaign to possess the land. Spending their women brutally, the Slavs advance; pitying their women, the Americans retreat.