Until 1882 the bulk of immigration, as we have seen, came from the north of Europe, and these immigrants were kinsmen to the American and for the most part sought the country.  The new immigration, however, which chiefly sought the cities, hailed from southern and eastern Europe.  It has shown itself alien in language, custom, in ethnic affinities and political concepts, in personal standards and assimilative ambitions.  These immigrants arrived usually in masculine hordes, leaving women and children behind, clinging to their own kind with an apprehensive mistrust of all things American, and filled with the desire to extract from this fabulous mine as much gold as possible and then to return to their native villages.  Yet a very large number of those who have gone home to Europe have returned to America with bride or family.  As a result the larger cities of the United States are congeries of foreign quarters, whose alarming fecundity fills the streets with progeny and whose polyglot chatter on pay night turns even many a demure New England town into a veritable babel.

There are in the United States today roughly eight or ten millions of these new immigrants.  A line drawn southward from Minneapolis to St. Louis and thence eastward to Washington would embrace over four-fifths of them, for most of the great American cities lie in this northeastern corner of the land.  Whence come these millions?  From the vast and mysterious lands of the Slavs, from Italy, from Greece, and from the Levant.

The term Slav covers a welter of nationalities whose common ethnic heritage has long been concealed under religious, geographical, and political diversities and feuds.  They may be divided into North Slavs, including Bohemians, Poles, Ruthenians, Slovaks, and “Russians,” and South Slavs, including Bulgarians, Serbians and Montenegrins, Croatians, Slovenians, and Dalmatians.  As one writer on these races says, “It is often impossible in America to distinguish these national groups....  Yet the differences are there....  In American communities they have their different churches societies, newspapers, and a separate social life....  The Pole wastes no love on the Russian, nor the Ruthenian on the Pole, and a person who acts in ignorance of these facts, a missionary for instance, or a political boss, or a trade union organizer, may find himself in the position of a host who should innocently invite a Fenian from Cork County to hobnob with an Ulster Orangeman on the ground that both were Irish."[35]

The Bohemians (including the Moravians) are the most venturesome and the most enlightened of the great Slav family.  Many of them came to America in the seventeenth century as religious pilgrims; more came as political refugees after 1848; and since 1870, they have come in larger numbers, seeking better economic conditions.  All told, they numbered over 220,000, from which it may be estimated that there are probably today half a million persons of Bohemian parentage