Marya had ever been used to comfort or the material decencies. A home was a place, not to live in, but to save in. After all, the house, though wretched, was superior to some of the Polish houses in which the roof was so rotten that the rain came through and formed puddles on the floor. The furnishings of Jan's house were of the simplest description. He had not reached the oilcloth stage of development, and carpets were as yet beyond the range of his wildest hopes. The cooking-stove, picked up in a junk-shop, was both a necessity and an adornment, as were the plates and one or two china dishes which reposed upon the kitchen table. A large bed, four plain chairs, a number of clothes-hooks upon the wall, a chromo of Vice-President Hobart, and a prayer-book in Polish completed the appointments of the new home.

For the time being, at least, Jan was satisfied. He had a wife and a home and enough to eat. He did not, of course, endeavor to compete in expenditures for food with the lavish English-speaking miners, who lived in houses that might rival the mansion of a mayor, and, though workmen, dined, no doubt, on unheard-of luxuries. Still Jan, with his average of nine dollars a week, could buy his meat and eggs and cheese and sardines, and his cabbages, potatoes, pickles, and apples, to say nothing of coffee and beer, and so he and his wife felt that they had the run of the American markets.

The labor through which Jan earned the money to buy all these luxuries was by no means to the immigrant's liking. It was very hard work in the close little mine chamber, and Jan, who was only a miner's laborer, envied the full-fledged miner with whom he worked, and who for less labor got more pay.. Besides, it was dangerous. The very first day of his work Jan saw a Polish mine laborer in an adjoining chamber carried out senseless, and before the man reached the upper air he was already dead. There were many widows in the Polish district of Shenandoah.

Then the Union came. Jan had known nothing of unions, and after he had asked the priest he knew little more. But soon he noticed that a change had come over the stolid mine-workers, a strange excite

ment filled them, and new words, like "grievance," "wage-scale," "powdercharge," came to him in mutilated and unintelligible forms. The English-speaking men were friendlier, and one day an Irish miner met Jan in the up-going cage, and, putting his hand upon the immigrant's shoulder, said, "Hullo." Thenceforth Jan was an ardent unionist.

The strike came. Ostentatiously and with an almost reverent enthusiasm Jan quit work. He did not quite understand the intricacies of the situation. He did not know of the impending Presidential election or of the financial and political problems involved, but he was unreservedly for the strike. A great new feeling of brotherhood with all these men of all these nations filled the heart of Jan, and when the strike ended in a victory, the immigrant almost forgot the higher wages and the better conditions in the glorious sense of a great vague destiny fulfilled. For the first time since landing in this country Jan felt himself to be an American.

Before the next strike came Jan was a full-fledged miner and an ardent and devoted unionist. He was now earning better wages, but his standard of living had risen and his horizon widened. A carpet had come into the little house, a baby had followed, and a second was on the way. Jan now read not only the Polish but even the English papers, and when one day he was elected as a delegate from his local, his pride knew no bounds, On the very day he bought the piano Jan heard that the convention had declared for a suspension, and within a short time, after many abortive conferences, the final clash came, and the great strike of 1902 was on.

Striking is very slow, very undramatic work. When you are sweating in the bowels of the earth you like to think of the green fields above, but during the long, dull, strike-enforced vacations you almost wish yourself back in the mines with your pick in your hand. There were picnics and baseball games and other diversions for the striking mine-workers, and there was always work to be done in your house and in your garden. Then there were strike meetings, when the crowds of many-tongued miners standing under the cool green trees listened for

hours to the harangues of English, Polish, Italian, and Hungarian orators. Jan attended all of these meetings and spoke at many, but he avoided saloons where the more turbulent unionists gathered, and when a bloody affray broke out between strikers and imported strike-breakers, Jan was away and took no part.

The time had come for the immigrant to maintain the foothold that he had gained. The foreign-speaking mine-workers, with their greater economy and their lower standard of living, were in a good position to fight out the battle of starvation, and long after the English-speaking miners were in receipt of relief the Poles and Italians and Hungarians were cheerfully drawing upon their past savings. But Jan was less fortunate. He cursed the wretched piano which he had bought to mock his distress, and he almost deplored the advent of the new baby, which added to the expenses of the household. Stanislaus had his own children to look after. To cap the climax, Marya was ill, and sometimes the querulous wife upbraided Jan for all these strikes, for which she seemed to hold him uniquely responsible. But Jan, despite subtle suggestions, refused to return to work. The piano was sold for a fifth of what it had cost, other articles of less value went to the pawnshop, and finally the family came down to a diet of potatoes and coffee. But still Jan refused either to give in or to accept aid from the Union.

At last the strike was over and the victory won. It had been a dearly fought battle, and there were blanched cheeks when the struggle was over. But the conditions against which the men had fought were at least improved, and, more than all, there was born in the hearts of many thousands of men a new sense of brotherhood and a new feeling of solidarity. To-day Jan is still a miner, and to the end of his days he is likely to remain a miner. "There is no life," he thinks, "like the life underground, where it is warm in winter and cool in summer." True, men are killed every day, and others. are maimed, but is life aught but the readiness to die? To-day Jan earns more wages than he did before the strike, but his struggle is harder. He has now six children, besides the four that Stanislaus

left when the mine explosion occurred. There is less space in the six-roomed house than formerly there was in the tworoomed cabin.

For another eight or ten years Jan's life is likely to be hard. He has become imbued with the American idea of educational opportunity, and his children will not be sent to work until they are sixteen. Though enthusiastically a miner, and loving his métier, Jan intends all his children for more genteel occupations, perhaps as clerks or stenographers or school-teachers, or perhaps—perhaps even as lawyers. Sometimes poor Jan is troubled by the recognized superiority of his children to himself.

He will never speak English fluently, though every evening he religiously reads his newspaper; but for his children English is as natural as is praying to a priest. The children do not seem to be as obedient or respectful as Jan remembers his own brothers to have been, and they do not seem interested in the least in the woes of Poland or in the dream of that great country's future rehabilitation. "America is a wonderful land," thinks Jan, "but it is a land of forgetfulness. My children are not my children, for my children have forgotten that they are Poles."

Jan has never forgotten. Ten years in America, ten thousand thousand æons in America, would never efface from his mind the doleful memories of his native land, the persecutions of the Russian or the petty tyrannies of the Prussian. Even his Union card and his certificate of citizenship are less cherished by Jan than is his membership card in the Polish National Union, which exists for its tens of thousands of members in America and for the greater glory and profit of the future republic in Poland.

The Poles in America are excellent citizens of the land of their adoption, but they would be unworthy of their glorious national heritage if their hearts did not throb with the wild hope of a regenerated Poland. And wherever you find Polesin the steel mills of Ohio, in the mines of Pennsylvania, in the congested sections of Chicago and New York City, in the coun try districts of Wisconsin and Michigan, on farms, in factories, in labor camps, in little villages which bear such historic names as Pulaski, Sobieski, Krakow,

Wilno, and Tarnow-you find always the high aspiration of a Free Poland. The Poles gain their foothold in America, but they do not, in the first generation, lose their love for their native distressful country. It is because the children are less Polish than their fathers that many far-seeing, patriotic Poles regret the enormous immigration to America. "The Poles are gaining their foothold," a Polish intellectual recently said; " but what will it profit the nation if it loses itself in the millions of America? Already you have over two millions of our citizens; already Chicago has a quarter of a million of Poles, and Buffalo, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Pittsburgh more Poles than any city in Russia except Warsaw and Lodz. These people, when they are not exploited and plundered, and when they have a job, are doing wellbut their children?

It is the penalty of gaining a foothold. America is the great melting-pot of the world, the solvent of races, the mitigator of national jealousies and hatreds. Even the Pole or the Bohemian hates the German a little less cordially in America. As for the children or the grandchildren, who can tell one race from another among the knickerbockered youngsters, with their foreign names abraded and their language standardized? Had the Poles settled extensively on the land and gained their foothold in compact, indissoluble agricultural groups, like the Germans of Pennsylvania or the French of Quebec, they might perhaps have had more chance of maintaining their national identity. But insuperable obstacles prevented the Poles from going on the land en masse. At home the peasant either owned no land at all or merely a tiny strip, and he arrived with insufficient means to purchase a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre farm. The life of a farm laborer did not attract him. He did not and still does not wish to go out alone among an alien people whom he cannot understand. He does not understand the large, extensive ultivation of American farms, and he misses the traditional feasts, holidays, processions, national music and pastimes that make the hard life in Poland so cheerful. Better one's native tongue and friendship and

companionship than any number of dollars. And, finally, it doesn't pay. Farm work is for only a part of the year, and the wages of the hired man cannot compete with the wages of the mine or the foundry, or even of the slaughter-house. By the time the Pole has saved enough to go to the country he no longer feels the desire. He has already gained in the city his foothold.

Nevertheless, despite our congested districts, a surprising number of our Polish immigrants have actually found their way to the land. Father Kruska, in a voluminous work upon the subject, estimates that there are seven hundred Polish settlements in America, containing seventy thousand Polish farm-owners. It is estimated that these farms comprise a total of over five million acres, or the combined areas of New Jersey and Rhode Island, and that the whole Polish population on this tract, including hired laborers and women and children, is no less than five hundred thousand.

Even

In the early days before our Civil War the first Polish immigrants traversed without stopping the Atlantic and North Central States and settled on the wide prairies of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, and later in Iowa, Nebraska, and the Dakotas, while other Poles, arriving at New Orleans, made themselves farms in the vast domains of Texas. to-day there is a stream of hardy Polish immigrants from New York City to the decaying farms of New England, and where once the early settlers were concealing fugitive regicides there now live and work hundreds of plodding Polish peasants, whose little boys and girls attend the same village school to which in former days the old New England families sent their children.

These little schools form the second step in the gaining of a foothold. The immigrant must struggle against great odds, he is despoiled and cheated and insulted, but he gains a foothold. In the public schools, which are open to all, in the other public and private institutions which seek to improve the hard conditions of industrial life, the child of the immigrant is prepared for a newer struggle on a higher plane.