All these numerous peoples have inherited in common the impassive, patient temperament and the unhappy political fate of the Slav.  Their countries are mere eddies left by the mighty currents of European conquest and reconquest, backward lands untouched by machine industry and avoided by capital, whose only living links with the moving world are the birds of passage, the immigrants who flit between the mines and cities of America and these isolated European villages.  Held together by national costume, song, dance, festival, traditions, and language, these people live in the pale glory of a heroic past.  Most of those who come to America are peasants who have been crushed by land feudalism, kept in ignorance by political intolerance, and bound in superstition by a reactionary ecclesiasticism.  The brutality with which they treat their women, their disregard for sanitary measures, and their love for strong drink are evidences of the survival of medievalism in the midst of modern life, as are their notions of class prerogative and their concept of the State.  Buffeted by the world, their language suppressed, their nationalism reviled, poor, ignorant, unskilled, these children of the open country come to the ugliest spots of America, the slums of the cities, and the choking atmosphere of the mines.  Here, crowded in their colonies, jealously shepherded by their church, neglected by the community, they remain for an entire generation immune to American influences.  According to estimates given by Emily G. Balch,[40] between four and six million persons of Slavic descent are now dwelling among us, and their fecundity is amazing.  Equally amazing is the indifference of the Government and of Americans generally to the menace involved in the increasing numbers of these inveterate aliens to institutions that are fundamentally American.

The Lithuanians and Magyars are often classed with the Slavs.  They hotly resent this inclusion, however, for they are distinct racial strains of ancient lineage.  An adverse fate has left the Lithuanian little of his old civilization except his language.  Political and economic suppression has made sad havoc of what was once a proud and prosperous people.  Most of them are now crowded into the Baltic province that bears their name, and they are reduced to the mental and economic level of the Russian moujik.  In 1868 a famine drove the first of these immigrants to America, where they were soon absorbed by the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania.  They were joined in the seventies by numbers of army deserters.  The hard times of the nineties caused a rush of young men to the western El Dorado.  Since then the influx has steadily continued until now over 200,000 are in America.  They persistently avoid agriculture and seek the coal mine and the factory.  The one craft in which they excel is tailoring, and they proudly boast of being the best dressed among all the Eastern-European immigrants.  The one mercantile ambition which they have nourished is to keep a saloon.  Drinking is their national vice; and they measure the social success of every wedding, christening, picnic, and jollification by its salvage of empty beer kegs.