LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OR 
 CALIFORNIA 
 
 SAN DIEGO
 
 M X^4XC^1xUH^O<
 
 WHY 
 EUROPE 
 LEAVES 
 HOME
 
 A typical morning gathering of emigrants at the vise office in Warsaw. 
 The people in the gallery are standing four deep. The serpentine 
 line on the floor, only a small part of which appears in the picture, 
 is nearly two hundred yards long. Ninety per cent, of these people 
 are Jews.
 
 WHY EUROPE 
 LEAVES HOME 
 
 A true account of the reasons which 
 cause Central Europeans to overrun 
 America ^ which lead Russians 
 to rush to Constantinople and 
 other fascinating and unpleasant 
 places ^ which coax Greek 
 royalty and commoners into strange 
 byways and hedges $ and which 
 induce Englishmen and Scotchmen 
 to go out at night. 4? fc? V? 
 
 By * 
 
 KENNETH L. ROBERTS 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 
 
 From accurate and de-propagandized information gathered in 
 
 England, Scotland, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Danaig, 
 
 Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Italy, Turkey and Greece in the 
 
 yemn 1920 and 1921 
 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY 
 
 PuHiihtrt
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1920, 1921 
 THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COM PAN v 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1922 
 THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPAM? 
 
 Printed in the United State* of Amtrie* 
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 BRAUNWORTH 41 CO. 
 
 BOOK MANUFACTURERS 
 
 BROOKLYN. N. Y.
 
 To 
 BOOTH TARKINGTON
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME i 
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 35 
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 67 
 
 THE REMEDY 99 
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 121 
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 169 
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 221 
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 263 
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 315
 
 Why Europe Leaves Home 
 
 THE center of Europe, prior to the attempt of the 
 male members of the Hohenzollern family to corner the 
 world and kick it brutally in the face, was occupied by 
 the large and fretful combination of peoples known as the 
 Austro-Hungarian Empire. In this so-called nation dwelt 
 Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Poles, Croats, Slov- 
 enes, Rusins, Rumanians, Dalmatians, Serbians, Jews, 
 Gipsies, and a number of other peculiar folk. When an 
 outsider strolled into Austria-Hungary and tried to get a 
 quick but comprehensive grasp of the different national 
 groups which made up the empire, his brain reeled with a 
 loud buzzing noise. 
 
 Among the peoples in the old Austria-Hungary, for 
 example, there were Slovaks, Slovenes and Slavonians. 
 The newcomer, hearing these names for the first time, 
 usually thinks that they are garbled versions of the 
 same thing. They aren't, however. The Slovenes and the 
 Slovaks are hundreds of miles apart. The Slovaks hate the 
 Hungarians and their Czech rulers ; the Slovenes hate their 
 Serb rulers and the Italians. It is a baffling matter at first 
 sight ; and even travelers frequently speak of Jugo-Slovakia 
 in the same breath with Czecho-Slovakia. Yet there is no 
 such country as Jugo-Slovakia. There is Czecho-Slovakia. 
 
 I
 
 2 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 and there is Jugo-Slavia. There are plenty of Jugo- Slavs, 
 but no Jugo- Slovaks. It is all very strange and befuddling; 
 but in time one learns these delicate nuances, just as one 
 finally learns that standard time is an hour later than day- 
 light-saving time or vice versa, whichever it is. 
 
 The people in the old Austria-Hungary ranged all the 
 way from the refined and cultured individuals who lived in 
 the great centers like Prague and Vienna and Budapest, used 
 whipped-cream on their chocolate and murmured muti- 
 nously when there were fewer than fifty beautiful women in 
 the ballet of Faust, down to the hard-boiled Rusins who 
 wore sheepskin undergarments and slept on the mud floor 
 of the living-room with the heifers and the pigs. They 
 differed widely from one another in their traditions, their 
 history, their religions, their languages, their culture and 
 their national costumes. They had only a few things in com- 
 mon : not one of the different peoples of old Austria-Hun- 
 gary was ever satisfied with its government ; each nationality 
 had a bitter, passionate and unwavering hatred for at least 
 one adjoining nationality; and all of them wanted to go to 
 America. In these things they were alike. 
 
 During the thirty-five years before the war, the bulk of 
 the immigrants who surged so freely into the United States 
 came from three countries Austria-Hungary, Italy and 
 Russia. They were running neck and neck when the war 
 broke ; and on an average about a quarter of a million immi- 
 grants were entering America from each of the three coun- 
 tries. Austria-Hungary, however, showed unmistakable 
 signs of nosing out the other two. In the ten years before 
 the war broke out, 2,347,636 immigrants had entered the 
 United States from Austria-Hungary as against 2,196,884 
 from Italy and 1,991,284 from Russia. In the big immi-
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 3 
 
 gration year of 1907, Austria-Hungary alone sent to 
 America the staggering total of 338,452 emigrants. This 
 was the greatest number of people that ever moved from 
 one country to another country in one year's time in the 
 history of the world. Part of them went because the agents 
 of steamship lines painted glowing pictures of the ease with 
 which money could be made in America ; part of them went 
 because agents of big manufacturing concerns circulated 
 through the crowded districts and offered jobs in American 
 mills at wages which seemed fabulous to the poor peasant ; 
 and by far the largest part went because relatives and 
 friends and acquaintances who had already gone to America 
 wrote back to their home towns telling of easy money and 
 bright lights and fine clothes, and filling the minds of the 
 stay-at-homes with a red-hot, sizzling desire to be up and 
 doing in order to participate in the delights of America 
 especially in the easy-money part. 
 
 To-day Austria-Hungary no longer exists. It has 
 become Czecho-Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, a part of 
 Poland, a part of Rumania, a part of Italy and a part of 
 Jugo-Slavia. The inhabitants of these new divisions of an 
 old empire have as little in common as they had before the 
 war; but the few things which they have in common have 
 grown greatly during the last few years. They hate one 
 another even more passionately than they hated one another 
 in 1914; they are even more dissatisfied with their govern- 
 ments, for the most part, than they used to be; and their 
 longing to go to America is so violent and poignant and 
 all-pervasive that they would willingly permit themselves to 
 be kicked all the way from Warsaw to Paris or from Bel- 
 grade to Danzig both of which trips would require a vast 
 amount of kicking, to say nothing of a frightful amount of
 
 4 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 wear and tear on the garments of the kickee if the final 
 kick deposited them aboard a ship bound for America. They 
 would do anything to get to America. They would lie with 
 a fluency that would cause the bones of Baron Munchhausen 
 to rattle feverishly in his grave; they would steal anything 
 which could be stolen by human hands ; probably they would 
 willingly commit murder; for human life is not highly 
 valued in Europe at the present time, what with several 
 years of war, and the menace of Bolshevism, and the low 
 rate of exchange, and one thing and another. 
 
 Before the war there was a great pother over the vast 
 quantities of immigrants which were pouring into the 
 United States each year. The United States Immigration 
 Commission proved conclusively that the bulk of the more 
 recent immigrants from Central and Southeastern Europe 
 hived up in settlements of their own, where they retained 
 the customs and the languages and the ideals of the coun- 
 tries from which they came, and failed utterly to become 
 Americans. They had their own publications and occasion- 
 ally their own laws. They were too frequently the sources 
 of unrest and dissatisfaction, as well as of sedition and of 
 innumerable varieties of revolutionary and anarchistic doc- 
 trines. In the cant phrase of the day, the majority of the 
 more recent immigrants didn't assimilate. An ostrich could 
 assimilate a croquet ball or a cobble-stone with about the 
 same ease that America assimilated her newcomers from 
 Central and Southeastern Europe. Most of them seemed to 
 have been inoculated against assimilation before leaving 
 home. Their standard of living in their home countries 
 was as low as any standard of living could possibly be. If 
 it had been any lower, it would have ceased to be a standard, 
 and would have become a hole or socket.
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 5 
 
 The immigrants brought many of these standards with 
 them, and clung to them determinedly in America. No 
 matter how meager their wages might be, they lived on them 
 handily and saved money, which they sent back home. 
 That was what most of them came to America for to save 
 money and send it back home. Now there is nothing wrong 
 with the saving of money by an immigrant; and when he 
 has saved it, he is entitled to do what he pleases with it ; for 
 he has paid for the money with hard work. But it is a 
 different matter when great numbers of men, accustomed 
 all their lives to living on starvation rations, come to 
 America and take jobs at low wages and then, in their 
 determination to save money, crowd into wretched quar- 
 ters and live in squalor and filth and darkness on a fraction 
 of the money which an American workman must spend in 
 order to live decently. Such a proceeding lowers the stand- 
 ard of living in America. The 1920 platform of the Repub- 
 lican party voiced the opinion of most political economists 
 when it declared that, "The standard of living and the 
 standard of citizenship of a nation are its most precious 
 possessions, and the preservation and elevation of those 
 standards is the first duty of our Government," and added 
 that, "The immigration policy of the United States should 
 be such as to insure that the number of foreigners in the 
 country at any one time shall not exceed that which can be 
 assimilated with reasonable rapidity, and to favor immi- 
 grants whose standards are similar to ours." No prophet 
 who ever lived, and no student of immigration, no matter 
 how weighty his brain, is capable of figuring out the num- 
 ber of foreigners who can be assimilated by the United 
 States in a given period of time. If they are allowed to live 
 in the slums and Ghettos and foreign settlements in which
 
 6 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 they are now living, they can not be assimilated. There 
 isn't a chance of it. There isn't even a shadow of a chance 
 of it. Such chance as there is, would, in fact, have to stand 
 twice on one spot in order to cast a shadow. The people 
 from these foreign settlements work all day by the side of 
 other aliens. When they leave their work, they go back 
 to crowded homes in which the only atmosphere is one of 
 dirt and Europe. They come in contact with practically 
 nothing which can be regarded as an Americanizing 
 influence. So long as foreigners are permitted to enter this 
 country and segregate themselves, just so long will they 
 resist the rudiments of assimilation. Numbers have nothing 
 to do with it. In approaching the subject from that angle, 
 therefore, the Republican platform was disseminating a 
 large amount of hot air. The idea behind the hazy words, 
 however, was good. The idea proclaimed that the United 
 States, in the past, had bitten off more than it could chew 
 as regards immigrants, and that in the future smaller bites 
 must be taken. 
 
 This attitude on immigration came about as a result of 
 the immense numbers of immigrants who were entering 
 America each year during the decade before the war, and 
 the difficulty which America was finding in digesting 
 them. But the pre-war throngs which surged into America 
 do not loom so large when compared with the serried ranks 
 and the teeming multitudes which to-day are anxiously 
 awaiting the opportunity to break all surging records 
 between Europe and America. Given a free field and no 
 restrictions, they will surge to such an extent that they will, 
 as one might say, turn America into one vast surgery. 
 
 In this we are able to observe history in her favorite 
 pastime of repeating herself with almost deafening loudness.
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 7 
 
 The Napoleonic wars left Europe wallowing weakly in 
 an economic muddle of a most pernicious sort. The quar- 
 ter-century following the battle of Waterloo saw nearly two 
 million people immigrating to the United States from Great 
 Britain and Ireland alone. In 1818 over one hundred 
 years ago an English writer named Robert Holditch gave 
 the following picture of the economic wars which followed 
 Waterloo : 
 
 "The cry of distress was soon heard from all quarters, 
 and the bankruptcy of our merchants and tradesmen 
 occurred to an extent hitherto unknown. These failures 
 involved the fate of thousands connected with trade and 
 commerce; the opulent became insolvent; many of the mid- 
 dle classes descended to poverty ; the indigent filled the 
 work-houses ; the local taxes pressed with intolerable weight 
 upon those who were able to pay ; and the situation of many 
 who contributed was scarcely superior to the wretched 
 inmates of the workhouse. A frightful national debt still 
 presses, and the united demands of local and national taxes 
 have influenced, and still do influence, thousands of our 
 countrymen to abandon their native shores, and to com- 
 mence, as it were, a new existence on those of the Atlantic." 
 
 Mr. Holditch's words, except for being too mild, apply 
 to-day to every country in Europe. They apply particularly 
 to Russia, Poland, and the lands that used to be Austria- 
 Hungary. Throughout those countries the city-dwellers who 
 once were opulent are living for the most part in utter mis- 
 ery; an income which five years ago would support an entire 
 family in luxury for a year is to-day insufficient to buy a 
 single suit of clothes. Owing to the worthlessness of Central 
 European currency, and to its violent fluctuation from week 
 to week, merchants and farmers are loath to part with any-
 
 8 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 thing except for its equivalent in other commodities. The 
 erstwhile nobility has sold its furniture, its carpets, and even 
 its beds, in order to obtain food ; the poor are existing on less 
 food and poorer food than is fed to an American dog 
 which is being conditioned for a dog-show. There are 
 millions of people in Central Europe who have been unable 
 to buy clothes for years, and who will be unable to buy them 
 for years to come. They are making clothes out of window 
 curtains, carpets, meal-sacks. These people used to be 
 affluent and comfortable. They used to travel, read new 
 books, dine at good restaurants; to-day they have noth- 
 ing, they see nothing, they do nothing except hope 
 vainly for relief from their miserable existence. These are 
 the city-dwellers. The farmers are infinitely more com- 
 fortable, being self-sustaining ; and they will continue to be 
 so until the city-dwellers in desperation roam the country- 
 side in armed bands and take by force whatever the farmers 
 have. The misery which followed the Napoleonic wars is 
 a weak and puny misery compared to the malicious, fero- 
 cious, relentless old John D. Misery who has Central Europe 
 by the throat to-day. 
 
 Careful investigation in various parts of Europe has 
 shown conclusively that if the United States should remove 
 the ban on immigrants, emigration from Ireland to the 
 United States would be at least three times as large in the 
 ensuing five years as it was in the five years before the 
 war ; that five million people would emigrate from Germany 
 in the ten years following the lifting of the ban, and that 
 the majority of them would steer straight for America ; that 
 emigration from Italy to America for many years would 
 be limited only by the number of passenger steamers 
 assigned to the task of carrying immigrants to America from
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 9 
 
 Italy. The same thing that is true of Italy is true of the new 
 nations which used to be Austria-Hungary. Immigrants to 
 America from these nations would fill every ship that is 
 supplied for that purpose for years to come unless America 
 becomes permanently convinced that her chances of assimi- 
 lating this mass of humanity is even less than a humming- 
 bird's chances of assimilating a box of carpet-tacks. 
 
 Most of the top layer of the old Austro-Hungarian Em- 
 pire has become Czecho-Slovakia. Czecho-Slovakia is 
 located in the middle of Europe and has the outline of an 
 old, broken-down tennis shoe or sneaker. On the front part 
 of the Czecho-Slovak sneaker, extending from the top of the 
 instep to the tip of the toe, there is a large growth or wen 
 which was also a part of Austria-Hungary. This is the old 
 Austrian crownland of Galicia, and it is now the southern 
 end of Poland, just as it has been, off and on, ever since the 
 eleventh century. One of the most annoying features about 
 Central Europe is the way in which everything changed 
 hands every little while in the old days, so that at the pres- 
 ent time everybody claims everything in sight, whether it 
 belongs to him or not. Galicia, however, is now a part of 
 Poland; and a large percentage of the emigrants from 
 Poland to America are Jews from Galicia. 
 
 In Poland alone there are as many people desirous of 
 emigrating to the United States as emigrated to this country 
 from all of Europe during any three of the big pre-war 
 emigration years. A commissioner of the Hebrew Shelter- 
 ing and Immigrant Aid Society of America, after making a 
 trip of investigation through Poland, stated that, "If there 
 were in existence a ship that could hold three million human 
 beings, the three million Jews of Poland would board it and 
 escape to America." This is, of course, an exaggeration,
 
 10 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 but not so wild an exaggeration as one might think. And 
 out of the more than twenty million Poles in Poland, there 
 are great numbers who wish to fold their spare trousers and 
 silently steal away, or noisily steal away, or steal away in 
 any old way so long as they can get to that glad bourne 
 whence no traveler returns without upward of five thou- 
 sand dollars in undepreciated American currency reposing 
 coyly against his manly chest. 
 
 The report of the United States Bureau of Immigration 
 shows that the number of Jews entering the United States 
 in the few years before the war was very large. In 1904, 
 106,236 entered the country. The high- water mark was 
 reached in 1906, when 153,748 Jews disembarked on our 
 shores. Nineteen hundred fourteen was another good year ; 
 138,051 coming during the twelve months ending June 30, 
 1914. The tremendous influx of Jews into the United 
 States is shown in the American Jewish Year Book, which 
 estimates that in 1818 there were only 3,000 Jews in the 
 whole country, whereas in 1918 there were 1,500,000 Jews 
 in New York City alone. 
 
 A large part of this Jewish immigration came from 
 Austrian Poland, Russian Poland and German Poland; for 
 nearly one-third of all the Jews in the world are concen- 
 trated there. This is due to the fact that in the Middle 
 Ages the different nations of Europe expelled the Jews, and 
 Poland was designated as the place where they might settle. 
 When Poland was partitioned, Russian Poland was made 
 the Jewish Pale of Settlement for the Russian Empire 
 the place where the Jews could live without persecution. 
 The Jews in these districts are anxious to come to America, 
 not because they are oppressed to a greater extent than they 
 used to be, nor because they are in greater economic dis- 
 tress, but because America has been very heavily advertised
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 11 
 
 during the last few years as the source of all good things in 
 the world. The economic distress of these wretched people, 
 for one reason or another, has always been so close to the 
 extreme limit that they were dulled to distress's finer points. 
 If they lived on beans and beats in 1912, their distress didn't 
 increase if the beans were moldy and the beats decayed in 
 1920. Any lot was preferable to their own; and the most 
 preferable lot, of course, was the one which carried with it 
 the most money. The Jews of Poland have long believed 
 that any energetic person could become wealthy in America 
 by the delightfully simple method of running around the 
 streets and prying the gold coins from between the paving- 
 stones with a nut-pick. The big steamship lines had thou- 
 sands of agents scattered over Galicia. Each emigrant 
 which an agent handed over to a steamship line meant a com- 
 mission for the agent. Consequently if they could persuade 
 anybody to go to America by assuring him that American 
 hens were in the habit of laying diamond-studded earrings 
 on Mondays and platinum watches on Fridays, they would 
 gladly do so. And in many cases they did. The steamship 
 agents who stimulate emigration have vanished; but the 
 fairy-tales which they told about America are still related to 
 goggle-eyed infants by long-whiskered Galician grand- 
 fathers who still hope to choke a few diamond lavallieres out 
 of American hens before they leave this vale of tears. 
 
 The old days of having to hunt for money in America 
 have been superseded by an era during which Americans 
 force money on foreigners. The American Relief Ware- 
 house scheme, which is easily the most effective relief idea 
 ever evolved, was originated by Herbert Hoover. Ware- 
 houses have been secured all over Europe and stocked with 
 bundles of American food. Destitute persons in the coun- 
 tries of Central Europe send postals to relatives or friends
 
 12 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 in America asking for help, whereat the relatives or friends 
 buy Food Drafts at American banks in the names of their 
 European friends. The names are sent to Europe, and pack- 
 ages of food are at once delivered to the persons named. 
 
 In order to facilitate the working of this American 
 Relief Warehouse scheme, the American Relief Administra- 
 tions in different European countries got out posters 
 which at a distance, look like American flags. "Do you 
 have relatives or friends in America?" ask these posters. 
 If so, they continue, one only needs to send cards to them in 
 order to get food. 
 
 In the old days, the steamship lines got out posters for 
 European circulation depicting the glories of the life in 
 America, including a solid gold Statue of Liberty and sky- 
 scrapers edged with two-karat diamonds. These posters 
 were regarded in America as immigration-stimulators, and 
 were frowned on with a large amount of thoroughness. But 
 no steamship line ever got out a poster which was more of 
 an immigration-stimulator than the American Relief Ware- 
 house posters. They convey the distinct idea that every one 
 in America has so much money that he is willing to give 
 away a large part of it to almost any one so much 
 money that he hasn't the slightest idea what to do with it. 
 
 Even more potent than the posters, as an immigration 
 stimulator, has been the activities of the Hebrew Immigrant 
 Aid Society, which I will mention in more detail in a future 
 chapter. Excellent advertisements, moreover, for the ad- 
 vantages which America has to offer are the great amount 
 of charity dispensed throughout Europe and the large 
 amount of money sent back to Europe by those who have 
 already emigrated. In Poland, for example, there are a 
 great many large Hebrew communities which have no
 
 Copyright Fudfru-ood rf rndericood 
 
 Herbert Hoover, Secretary of Commerce, and originator of the Amer- 
 ican Relief Warehouse Scheme, The most effective relief idea ever 
 evolved.
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 13 
 
 visible means of subsistence except the money which is sent 
 back by relatives who have gone to America. 
 
 The American Consulate in Warsaw is located above the 
 Discount Bank of Warsaw. As I mounted the stairs on my 
 first visit to the American Consulate, I heard the peculiar 
 combination of wail and moan and shriek which is usually 
 made by a frightened mob attempting to escape bodily harm. 
 Investigation led me to a small balcony over the main bank- 
 ing-room of the Discount Bank. It was an ordinary bank, 
 like the average American bank. The floor was about 
 eighteen paces square, surrounded on three sides by the con- 
 ventional tellers' and cashiers' cages: and every available 
 inch of floor-space was occupied by a howling, shriek- 
 ing, pushing, squirming mass of humanity attempting to 
 collect money which had been sent from America. All of 
 them were Jews. There wasn't, so far as I could judge, 
 room for another person in the room. The component parts 
 of this howling mob were fighting to get to one of the two 
 windows where they exchanged slips of paper for money. 
 Venerable old men with long beards and faces distorted by 
 passion clawed remorselessly at women who were kicking 
 and biting in their attempt to forge ahead. Old women, 
 whose strength was insufficient to cope with that of the men 
 around them, were forced to their knees and trampled until 
 pain gave them enough strength to claw their way upright 
 again. Men who reached the grilled windows were torn 
 from their places, cursing and screaming at the top of their 
 lungs, and replaced by disheveled maniacs who were in turn 
 wrenched from their positions. A hand would shoot out 
 from the crowd, clutch a woman by the hair and haul her 
 backward until her eyes threatened to pop from her head. 
 I saw one wild man, with little corkscrew curls hanging
 
 14 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 down in front of his ears and a beard shot with gray, pull 
 back a woman in front of him by clawing at her face and 
 getting two fingers in the corner of her mouth. With 
 mouth distended and face distorted her head came back and 
 back. She stopped screaming and set her teeth on his fin- 
 gers until he in turn screamed with anguish. The place was 
 a den of wild beasts; and the stench which rose from the 
 struggling, squirming bodies was sickening. 
 
 Between ninety and ninety-five per cent, of our immi- 
 grants from Poland at present are Jews ; and the conditions 
 under which the Jews of Poland live are, to put it conserva- 
 tively, very bad indeed. They herd together in cities, and 
 the overcrowding and the filth and the squalor of the 
 Ghettos of Poland are terrible. This overcrowding, and the 
 existence of Ghettos, are usually blamed on the oppressors of 
 the Jews by sentimentalists who favor unrestricted immi- 
 gration. The sentimentalists declare that the Ghetto is 
 kept in existence by oppressors so that the Hebrews can 
 be segregated and controlled. New York's Ghetto, however, 
 is almost on a par with the Ghettos of Lodz or Warsaw as 
 far as overcrowding goes. So is London's Ghetto and 
 Vienna's Ghetto; but in none of these cities is any effort 
 made to segregate and control the Jews. They segregate 
 themselves. 
 
 The Jews of Poland never go in for agriculture. They 
 stick to the cities and engage entirely in trade. In the Mid- 
 dle Ages the Jews of Europe were prohibited by law from 
 engaging in agriculture, but they were allowed to be usurers 
 an occupation which was forbidden to Christians. This 
 is probably the reason why the present-day Jew is always a 
 trader in Poland and the near-by countries. If he is engaged 
 in any sort of work at all, he is either a usurer, a pedler, a 
 liquor-dealer, a Schieber or food-profiteer, or a small shop-
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 15 
 
 keeper. Even the most liberal-minded authorities on immi- 
 gration state that the Jews of Poland are human parasites, 
 living on one another and on their neighbors of other races 
 by means which too often are underhanded, that they con- 
 tinue to exist in the same way after coming to America, 
 and that they are therefore highly undesirable as immigrants. 
 Even now, in Central Europe, when a thing is accomplished 
 in a dishonest or illegal manner, it is spoken of as being 
 done Jiidischer Weise, or in the Jewish manner. This is 
 pointed out by Captain P. Wright in the report of the British 
 Mission to Poland a British government publication. 
 
 In the old clothes market of Warsaw the Hebrews from 
 the Ghetto daily carry on their trading operations. Hun- 
 dreds of booths are filled with tattered garments, scraps of 
 cloth, bits of rag, old shoe laces, and innumerable useless and 
 worthless objects such as broken bottles and bent tin-cans, 
 pieces of old combs, parts of frying-pans and what-not. 
 Similar piles of rubbish lie on the bare ground. Among the 
 booths and piles wander the traders poking at various ob- 
 jects with their canes, dickering with one another as to 
 prices, screaming wildly at each other in the heat of bargain- 
 ing, and carrying off little armfuls of junk which can be of 
 no possible use except as the basis of future trading opera- 
 tions.* 
 
 *Chelsea, Massachusetts, is a great center for Polish Jews. The 
 following quotation from The Boston Globe shows the striking manner 
 in which Warsaw conditions are reproduced in America : 
 
 "All down Twenty-eighth Street and extending over to Auburn, 
 Elm and Fiske Streets (Chelsea) are the haunts of the junk men. 
 Here are yards and yards and shed after shed piled high and bursting 
 with junk. 
 
 "Great piles of it rusty chains in huge mounds; mountains of 
 scrap metal; litters of decrepit wagons and dismembered autos a 
 chaos of everything under the sun or above it is here. 
 
 "In the shacks, too, it is as bad. Enormous bales of paper, bags and 
 magazines fill the place till the walls seem bulging. If a match ever 
 fell in here 1
 
 16 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 On one occasion I was questioning a crowd of Polish 
 Jews as to their sentiments in regard to going to Palestine. 
 They agreed that Palestine, of course, was the ideal place 
 to gd, but that the jobs were in America. 
 
 "Suppose," I said, "that there were an equal number of 
 jobs in America and in Palestine. To which would you 
 rather go then ?" 
 
 The spokesman, after going into conterence with several 
 others, stated that they would still choose America because 
 they had no relatives in Palestine. 
 
 I told them that more than two million were out of work 
 in America. "Suppose that you can't get a job," I said, 
 and you can't. What then?" 
 
 A voice from the crowd spoke up promptly. 
 
 "Luftgeschaft!" it said and the crowd nodded and 
 laughed. 
 
 Luftgeschaft means "air business." Among the German. 
 Polish and Russian Jews there are literally thousands who 
 have no business at all, and no regular income. They turn 
 a penny honestly or dishonestly whenever or wherever they 
 can; and even the Jews themselves will admit that they do 
 it dishonestly far more often than they do it honestly. This 
 is "air business." It is a calling which is peculiar to Jews in 
 Central Europe; and the people who follow it are called 
 
 "All in all, it is a place that is of the Old World. The people are 
 entirely Jews, or of that descent, and in the wild turmoil of loading 
 and unloading, backing and filling of the jumble of teams and arro- 
 gant auto trucks, the strange speech and movements of the workers 
 and spectators, with attendant dust and confusion, one is apt to think 
 of the old Italian, Dante, who wrote famously about a dream that he 
 had of descending into the lower regions. 
 
 "Twenty years ago one firm started in business and their success 
 attracted the huge tide of Russian Hebrew immigration to Chelsea; 
 they form one of the largest of the city's many industries to-day. 
 Through every suburb and city of Greater Boston the collectors roam, 
 and the chances are that when you sell your junk it goes to Chelsea."
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 17 
 
 Luftmenschen or "air men." They are the true human 
 parasites ; and great numbers of them are found among- the 
 emigrants from Poland to America. Landing in America 
 when jobs are hard to get they will at once start their air 
 business just as so many thousands of them have done in 
 the past. 
 
 The Ghettos themselves are depressing spectacles. The 
 streets are lined with little shops whose sign-boards depict 
 the articles on sale within. The artists are not worldbeaters, 
 and some of the pictures are rather befuddling, for they 
 make bologna sausages look like carving-knives and give a 
 woman's shoe the severe outlines of a coal-hod. At inter- 
 vals between the shops there are little archways leading 
 into dirty courtyards; and around the courtyards rise the 
 tenement houses in which the prospective emigrants live. 
 There was one tenement house in Warsaw in which three 
 thousand persons were living. It didn't look large, but every 
 inch of space was utilized. There were families sleeping 
 under staircases and living along the walls of hallways. 
 Three families of eight, ten, and even fifteen people apiece 
 were living together in one medium-sized room with no par- 
 titions of any sort to separate them. The cellar, as stuffy 
 and dark as a mine-tunnel, was crowded with people. These 
 people, and the people in scores of other buildings which I 
 visited in the Jewish quarter, lived exclusively on black 
 bread, beans, bad beets and semi-rotted potatoes. They 
 lived on such fare as this long before the war. Under the 
 Russians, the Jews of Russian Poland were oppressed in 
 various ways ; and on this oppression is blamed the poverty 
 of the bulk of them. In Galicia, or Austrian Poland, the 
 Jews had far more freedom of movement and far fewer 
 restrictions. Yet Jew has always exploited Jew so remorse-
 
 i8 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 lessly in Galicia that the majority of the inhabitants of that 
 vast Jewish reservoir are and have always been perilously 
 near the starvation-point. These are the conditions which 
 exist in all Jewish Ghettos in Poland ; and the standards of 
 life in them are the standards of life which their residents 
 bring to America with them. 
 
 In addition to the Jews who wish to enter the United 
 States from Poland, there are the Poles themselves to be 
 considered; and it should be distinctly understood at the 
 outset that no ordinary picayune considerer is capable of 
 doing justice to the Polish immigrant. In numbers the 
 Poles crowd close up behind the South Italians and the 
 Jews. Back in 1900, just a shade under 47,000 Poles came 
 to America to seek their fortune. Five years later more than 
 102,000 came. The big immigration year, 1907, saw 
 138,000 Poles entering the country; while during the year 
 1913 over 174,000 poured in. 
 
 It is difficult to obtain an estimate of the number of 
 Poles who wish to immigrate to the United States, because 
 of the reluctance of the Polish government to do anything 
 which might be regarded as encouraging emigration. For 
 one thing Poland needs young men for the army as long as 
 there is a Bolshevik menace; for another thing an agreement 
 has been made with France whereby thousands of Polish 
 laborers are being shipped to the devastated regions of 
 France under contract, to help in the work of reconstruction. 
 Those who are going to America are the wives and families 
 of immigrants who left Poland some time ago, and who are 
 now sending enough money back to Poland to enable their 
 families to join them. The wives and families of Polish 
 emigrants who are being sent for, however, are far less in 
 number than the wives and families of Jews. This is
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 19 
 
 because young Poles are returning to Poland in great num- 
 bers, lured in most instances by touching accounts of the 
 flourishing young republic of Poland which appeared in 
 many of the middle western and western newspapers soon 
 after the end of the great war, and also greatly attracted by 
 the large number of Polish marks which can be obtained 
 in exchange for each American dollar. Those who return, 
 or who plan to return in the near future, don't send back for 
 their families. The Jews, on the other hand, never come 
 back to Poland. They get out, stay out and send for their 
 families. Their one desire is to get so far away from Poland 
 that the cost of sending a post-card back to their old home 
 will be in the neighborhood of four dollars. 
 
 The Poles, many of them, come to America with the idea 
 of earning enough money to go back and buy a farm. Most 
 of them are peasants fine, upstanding, hard-working men 
 and women who, when they settle permanently in the United 
 States, with the idea of learning English and absorbing 
 American ideals, become citizens of whom the American 
 nation can justly be proud. The same thing is true of the 
 Italians who come to America with the intention of becom- 
 ing truly American; of the Slovaks and the Magyars and 
 the Serbs and all the rest of the people in Central and 
 Southeastern Europe who come for that purpose. But 
 when they come to America, as most of them do, solely to 
 get the money which will enable them to go back to their 
 own country and lord it over their former companions, they 
 sacrifice everything to money-getting. 
 
 Ninety-nine out of every hundred of the thousands of 
 Poles who have returned to Poland from America since the 
 war are, like the Germans and the Irish and the South 
 Italians and the North Italians, keenly desirous of turning
 
 20 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 around and rushing back to dear old America. Food is 
 very scarce and very expensive; and the constantly rising 
 prices and the constantly fluctuating rates of exchange play 
 havoc with the American dollars on which they depend for 
 so much luxury. 
 
 It is difficult, as I have said, to get the figures on the 
 number of Poles who would go to America in the next few 
 years if they could, but this much is certain: if America ever 
 relaxes her immigration law for a moment, the number, as 
 in Italy, will be limited only by the space which the steam- 
 ship companies allot to emigrants. 
 
 Then there is Czecho- Slovakia to be considered. 
 Czecho-Slovakia is only the top layer of the old Austro- 
 Hungarian Empire. Its area is less than one-quarter of 
 the territory which used to be Austria-Hungary ; if the bars 
 were to be let down on immigration Czecho-Slovakia alone 
 would for some years send to America as many immigrants 
 each year as all Austria-Hungary used to send unless there 
 were an insufficient number of steamships to carry the mob. 
 In the eleven years before the war, Austria-Hungary sent 
 us two and one-half million people two and one-half 
 million aliens who couldn't speak our language and who 
 knew no more about our form of government than they 
 did about the Coleoptera of the British Islands. Practically 
 all of them, viewed individually, were hard-working, well- 
 meaning, likable persons. Even the most backward, illiter- 
 ate, dirty, thick-headed peasants of Southeastern Europe 
 have their excellent points. One who lives among them 
 sympathizes with them and longs to better their lot. Taken 
 in the mass, however, and viewed from an American stand- 
 point, it is no more possible to make Americans out of a 
 great many of them than it is possible to make a race-horse
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 21 
 
 out of a pug dog. If two immigrants from backward dis- 
 tricts of the old Austria-Hungary were to be brought to 
 America and placed in an American home with two intelli- 
 gent Americans who could devote their entire lifetime to 
 Americanizing these backward aliens, they might succeed in 
 making Americans out of them and getting a genuinely 
 American point of view into their heads. They might, I say ; 
 but even devoting all their time to it they'd probably fail. 
 These people are inconceivably backward. They wear 
 clothing which seems to have ripened on them for years, 
 and they sleep in wretched hovels with sheep and cows and 
 pigs and poultry scattered among them. They have been 
 so for a great many centuries. It is almost impossible for 
 them to slough the results of heredity and environment. 
 Placed in slums, the mental outlook of the immigrants would 
 be just what it was in their old homes. Since most of the 
 immigration from the old Austria-Hungary came from the 
 most backward districts, and since it will continue to come 
 from those same districts in the future unless it is rigorously 
 restricted, that fact should be borne in mind by all who wish 
 to see a united America. 
 
 Czecho-Slovakia is a good example of a European 
 country in which various peoples lie around in undigested 
 lumps. The assimilation has been bad, and is bad and always 
 will be bad. 
 
 Assimilation hadn't been any too good in the United 
 States for the twenty years prior to the war. If more and 
 more immigrants continue to pour in, and assimilation con- 
 tinues bad, one of two things will inevitably happen : either 
 the United States will develop large numbers of separate 
 racial groups, as distinct as those which exist in Czecho- 
 slovakia, or America will be populated by a mongrel race
 
 22 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 entirely different from the present American people as we 
 know them to-day. Our climate may, as some claim, change 
 the stature of immigrants, but nothing can alter the shape 
 of their skulls or the distinct racial traits that have char- 
 acterized them through the centuries. 
 
 Races can not be cross-bred without mongrelization, any 
 more than breeds of dogs can be cross-bred without mon- 
 grelization. The American nation was founded and devel- 
 oped by the Nordic race, but if a few more million mem- 
 bers of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are 
 poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid 
 race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-noth- 
 ing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern 
 Europe. 
 
 At one end of the Czecho-Slovak state live approxi- 
 mately six million Czechs, otherwise known as Bohemians 
 and Moravians, surrounded by a ring of about three million 
 Germans or, more properly, German-Austrians. The 
 Czechs, like the bulk of the Russians, Poles, Slovaks and 
 Serbs, are Slavs; but they are the most advanced of the 
 Slavs because they have been exposed for so many years 
 to the iron rule of Austria and to Austrian neatness and 
 Austrian business methods. This statement will deeply 
 offend the Czechs in America, and many Americans of 
 Czech descent. They will bitterly resent the statement that 
 they owe anything at all to Austria. America has several 
 hundred thousand loyal citizens of Czech origin who would 
 unquestionably stand by America in case of need, just as 
 millions of loyal citizens of German origin stood by her 
 during the war. None the less, there are thousands of 
 Czech-Americans who fly into spasms of rage whenever 
 they hear any statement about Czecho-Slovakia which is not
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 23 
 
 complimentary or which does not agree with their ideas of 
 the fitness of things. They are not interested in seeing the 
 people of this country get all the facts about their mother 
 country. They only want them to have the favorable facts. 
 This is a common failing of many immigrants who have 
 become naturalized citizens of the United States. Their 
 first love is their mother country. They forget that in 
 becoming American citizens they "absolutely and forever 
 renounce all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign country." 
 Given a cause on which to unite, they have no hesitation in 
 pursuing an emphatically un-American course. Many of 
 them would be overjoyed to embroil America in a war with 
 a foreign country if by so doing they could further the 
 interests of the country of their origin. Let them get to 
 thinking they are oppressed, and they at once get together 
 and raise the roof. European oppression is usually either 
 a matter of politics, of language or of dress. Consequently, 
 when the Germans in Nebraska aren't allowed to study Ger- 
 man in American schools, they revert to their European 
 ideas and claim that they are being oppressed by the United 
 States. The chances are excellent that if our immigration 
 laws ever become lax again, and additional millions of 
 Central and Southeastern Europeans pour in on us, as they 
 inevitably will under lax laws, and find themselves required 
 by law to study English, the old cry of "Oppression !" would 
 be raised and common cause would be made against the 
 oppressors. Such a state of affairs can become highly em- 
 barrassing if the United States should happen to be in 
 close contact with European politics and squabbles. Already 
 politicians hedge here and trim there in order to get the 
 Italian vote or the Irish vote or the German vote or the 
 Polish vote in certain sections. Already freedom of speech
 
 24 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 is curtailed in America because newspapers, fearful of 
 advertisers, hesitate to print facts that may irritate Irish- 
 American readers or Jewish-American readers or other 
 nationals whose sympathies are more with Europe than with 
 America. Already the alien and alien-descendant groups in 
 America have reached a point where they consider them- 
 selves entitled to put out anti-American propaganda, but 
 question the right of native-stock Americans to put out pro- 
 tective information of their own. 
 
 The great human reservoirs of Central and Southeastern 
 Europe have only begun to be tapped. Russia, with her 
 millions of peasants, isn't even scratched. Slovakia, 
 Rumania, Serbia, the Balkan Peninsula all these places 
 and many more are crammed with people who are anxious 
 to come to America. No American can shrug his shoulders 
 and remark carelessly that eventually immigration will work 
 itself out It will never work itself out until economic con- 
 ditions in America have skidded down to a point where 
 they offer no inducements to the poorest, the most ignorant 
 inhabitant of the most backward country in Europe. When 
 that time comes, the immigration impulse will die. Mean- 
 while it will continue to flourish ; and the past records show 
 that those who come will always be lower and lower in the 
 economic as well as in the social scale. 
 
 The Czechs are surrounded by a ring of three million 
 German-Austrians ; and for centuries the German- Austrians 
 have been struggling to assimilate the Czechs. They were 
 nearly successful at one time ; but the Czechs woke up at the 
 last moment and kicked over the traces. Though the 
 Czechs and the Germans detest each other with all the stops 
 of their detesters pulled out to the extreme limit, their man- 
 ner of living is very similar. The German villages and the
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 25 
 
 Czech villages look exactly alike. They are equally neat 
 and orderly, and they all support the same brand of geese. 
 In passing through many parts of Bohemia one must fre- 
 quently question the inhabitants in order to find out whether 
 he is in a Czech village or a German village. The question- 
 ing is usually done in German ; and if it is a Czech village, 
 the person whom one interrogates usually pretends not to 
 understand German, though he almost invariably does. The 
 Czechs are inclined to be impatient of religious and political 
 restraint. They are strongly Social-Democratic; and social 
 democracy gives off a distinctly sour, bolshevistic odor. It 
 is notorious that many of the Czech immigrants are greatly 
 addicted to joining Freethinkers' societies in America and to 
 allying themselves openly with extreme Socialists and an- 
 archists. None the less, the Czechs are among the best of the 
 immigrants who come to America. For the most part they 
 have been far in advance of the other Slavic immigrants, 
 both industrially and intellectually. Of late years a great 
 percentage of them have been skilled workmen; and over 
 ninety-five per cent, of them are able to read and write. 
 
 Now all of the Slav races have certain peculiarities 
 which are apt to make them dangerous members of large 
 industrial communities. They are easily influenced; they 
 will not acknowledge one another's equality ; and they seize 
 ever}' opportunity to crush ruthlessly the people over whom 
 they have a temporary advantage. The Russian, though he 
 is a Slav, oppressed his brother Pole, who is a Slav too. 
 The Poles turned around and did the same thing to the 
 Ruthenians, who are also Slavs. The Poles and the Czechs, 
 Slavs all, consider themselves infinitely superior to each 
 other. The Czechs rate themselves far above the Slovaks, 
 while the Slovaks scorn the Rusins with unbridled vigor,
 
 26 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 though the Rusins are Slavs too. The Czechs and the Jugo- 
 slavs are doing to the Austrians and the Hungarians the 
 same thing that caused them to protest so violently against 
 Austrian and Hungarian rule. These traits make them easy 
 plucking for the labor agitator. When somebody tells them 
 that they have been frightfully oppressed by being forced to 
 accept wages of forty-two dollars a week, that the owners of 
 the steel mills are vile creatures, and that the mills really 
 belong to the workmen instead of the owners, they believe it, 
 emit a hoarse Slavic cheer of approval and hunt around for 
 bricks to bounce against the heads of the oppressive mill 
 owners. If they are assured in a loud voice that somebody 
 is trying to rob them of their deserts, whether the deserts be 
 a piece of land, a piece of pie or peace of mind, they believe 
 it implicitly, and riot and shed blood over it. Life for the 
 Slav races for centuries has been just one riot after another. 
 They have been brought up to break the laws of the people 
 who govern them, and to fight them in open and in under- 
 handed ways. 
 
 The Russian has always been rioting against the autoc- 
 racy of the Czar and the cruelty of the police. Just now the 
 average Russian is looking for a good chance to riot against 
 the stupid and insane autocracy of the Bolsheviki, while the 
 Bolsheviki are rioting against the irksome tenets of civiliza- 
 tion. The Poles have usually been in a state of revolt 
 against Russian taskmasters; the Ruthenians have been 
 wracking their brains for methods of circumventing their 
 Polish oppressors; the Czechs used every underhanded 
 means in their power to undermine the Austrian Empire ; the 
 Slovaks kicked at the shins of their Magyar rulers for cen- 
 turies; the Serbs and the Bulgars and the other Balkan 
 Slavs picked away at the governing Turk for hundreds of
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 27 
 
 years. It is the lot of ninety per cent, of the Slav races to 
 be oppressed or to think they are oppressed ; and their natural 
 state is one of indifference or hostility to law. 
 
 This attitude is slightly exaggerated in the Slavic immi- 
 grants to America by the almost universal feeling among 
 them that they are breaking our laws to get in. They know 
 about the contract labor law ; and since most of them have 
 the promise of jobs from relatives or friends in America 
 before they start, they have a vague feeling that they might 
 class as contract labor, and that if America knew the full 
 truth about them they wouldn't be allowed to land. The 
 feeling is wide-spread among them that they can break laws 
 in America and get away with it. Over against these 
 defects which are usually accentuated by the rough treat- 
 ment, the contempt and the exploitation with which the 
 Slavs are frequently received on their arrival in America 
 is the tirelessness of their labor, the readiness with which 
 they respond to kindness and the stubbornness with which 
 they support a cause that they believe to be just. America 
 can develop the good points of the Slavs if she is willing to 
 spend time and the money to do it. If she is not willing to 
 do so, and does not rigidly restrict and select Slavic immi- 
 gration to a far greater degree than it is now restricted, our 
 great mines and industries will always be at the mercy of 
 any energetic agitator who is getting paid to fill the ignor- 
 ant laborers with such bunk as, "The workers shall rule. 
 
 Now is the time to throttle your masters 
 
 Stick together and we shall tear down the system. 
 
 The courts can't touch you, for we will own the 
 
 courts " 
 
 Almost the entire eastern end of Czecho-Slovakia is 
 inhabited by Slovaks; but in the extreme eastern tip of the
 
 28 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 country dwell the very backward and ignorant Slav people 
 known as the Rusins. Along the bottom edge of the Slovaks 
 and Rusins live a thin fringe of Magyars or true Hunga- 
 rians. Thus in Czecho-Slovakia there are five distinct nation- 
 alities. Three of them are Slav peoples who are kept apart 
 by religious differences and the natural antagonism that 
 seems to spring into being when one Slavic people attempts 
 to rule another. Two of them are the former dominant 
 races, German and Magyar, which made violent efforts to 
 assimilate the other three races in years gone by and made 
 a fizzle of it. 
 
 In 1907, forty-two thousand Slovaks entered the United 
 States. In 1910, twenty- four thousand came in. Twenty- 
 five thousand came in 1911, twenty thousand in 1912, 
 twenty-one thousand in 1913 and nineteen thousand in 1914. 
 An American in Czecho-Slovakia, who was keeping very 
 careful watch on the drift of emigration from that country, 
 declared early in 1920 that the demand among the inhab- 
 itants of Czecho-Slovakia to go to America was triple, quad- 
 ruple and even quintuple what it was before the war. 
 The demand was so great, he said, that if the 
 United States were to allow the immigrants to come who 
 wanted to come and who had enough money to come, two 
 hundred and fifty thousand would go from Czecho-Slovakia 
 alone. 
 
 Of the people who were coming to the American con- 
 sulate in Prague from all parts of Czecho-Slovakia early in 
 1920 in order to get permission to go to America, seventy 
 per cent, were Slovaks. Of the Czechs who were getting 
 permission to go to America, nine out of every ten intended 
 to remain in the United States and become citizens. Of
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 29 
 
 the Slovaks who were getting permission, four out of every 
 five intended to return to their homes when they had saved 
 up the amount of money which they considered necessary 
 in order to enable them to live comfortably. 
 
 The villages in the hills of Northern, Central and East- 
 ern Slovakia are very poor; and it is from these villages 
 that the immigrants come. The villages are dirtier than 
 those in the south, and far less orderly. In many of them 
 every house built in the last twenty years was built with 
 money which immigrants sent from America; and in the 
 eastern districts there are whole Slovak villages which, 
 before the war, were rebuilt by Slovaks who had gone to 
 America. From many of the villages in Central and Eastern 
 Slovakia, literally every able-bodied man is either in America 
 or has been in America. 
 
 The following illustration shows why Slovaks leave 
 home. The town of Velka Bytca is in Central Slovakia. 
 Velka Bytca has a clock on the church tower, and therefore 
 is a town. If it had no clock, it would be a village; for that 
 is the understanding in Slovakia. It has a population of 
 about five thousand. It is on the Waag River, and the 
 mountains rise up abruptly from both sides. Like all of 
 the towns and villages along the Waag, it is very poor. It 
 has too many artisans so many that they can not earn a 
 living. Consequently, they fall in debt to the Jewish land- 
 lords and shopkeepers and usurers. Then they come to 
 America. Men from Velka Bytca are scattered through 
 New York and New Jersey. There are many in Natrona, 
 near Pittsburg, in Chicago and in Pullman, Illinois. Those 
 in Pullman and New York are skilled workers, for the 
 most part, while those in Natrona are day laborers in steel
 
 30 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 and glass works. When the men from Velka Bytca have 
 saved up a sufficient amount of money, they go back to 
 Slovakia and pay their debts, but they see no opportunity 
 to earn more money, so back they come to America and get 
 more money ; and when they go home with it they buy some 
 land and build a house. That exhausts their capital; and 
 they return to America for the third time to earn enough 
 money on which to live. This was the program followed by 
 thousands of Slovaks before the war. Nowadays the 
 Slovaks who return are complaining more bitterly than they 
 ever complained before of the high prices and the dirt and 
 the lack of amusements and the lack of freedom. 
 
 Freedom is a matter which is not rightly understood by 
 Central Europeans. They have confounded it with license, 
 to a great extent ; and those who immigrate to America are 
 greatly in need of instruction as to the true meaning of 
 freedom as understood by Americans. We misinterpret 
 oppression in the same way. Never having known oppres- 
 sion, Americans think that to be oppressed a man must be 
 bashed on the head and thrown in jail. We can not under- 
 stand it when we discover that a European's idea of oppres- 
 sion is the inability to get a high-school and college educa- 
 tion in some particular language, or to wear short white 
 pants with fringes at the bottom. In the same way, many 
 Europeans think that freedom means license to do anything 
 at all to shoot song-birds within city limits or take fruit 
 from the nearest fruit tree or hit an enemy over the head 
 with a stockingful of iron filings. 
 
 The people who went to America from Velka Bytca 
 and other Slovak towns and villages had heard a great 
 deal about the new and glorious freedom which the Czechs 
 and the Slovaks were enjoying, now that Czecho- Slovakia is
 
 .WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 31 
 
 no longer under Austrian control. They were eager to go 
 back to sample this freedom and drink it down in great gulps 
 and even pour it in their hair. They talked with other 
 Slovaks about it, and got into a frenzy of excitement and 
 threw up their jobs and stampeded to New York to get sail- 
 ing accommodations. They came back to Slovakia with 
 their eyes almost popping out of their heads in their eager- 
 ness to see the new freedom ; but there wasn't a bit of it in 
 sight. They saw the same old towns and the same old 
 buildings and worst jolt of all the same old officials, in 
 many cases, who ran things under Austro-Hungarian rule. 
 There were the same Jewish landlords and merchants and 
 usurers to take the money of the peasants; and prices, 
 instead of staying where they should have stayed, were the 
 only things in sight which had shown any freedom in their 
 movements. They had ascended miles in the air. 
 
 Beyond the Slovaks, in the extreme eastern end of 
 Czecho-Slovakia, live the Rusins ; and the Rusins are farther 
 below the Slovaks in intelligence and living standards than 
 the Slovaks are below the Czechs. They are Slavs and a 
 part of the Czecho-Slovak nation, however though both 
 the Czechs and the Slovaks hope to give the Rusins a brisk 
 kick one of these days and propel them blithely on to some- 
 body else's back. The Rusins are the same people as the 
 Ruthenians or Russniaks who live in Southeastern Poland 
 and Southwestern Russia; but the lofty slopes of the Car- 
 pathians separate the Rusins and the Ruthenes so that they 
 can't get together. In our immigration statistics, neverthe- 
 less, they are lumped with each other as Russniaks, and in 
 1914 nearly thirty-seven thousand Russniaks immigrated to 
 America. 
 
 Rusinia is a mountainous country, and the ignorance
 
 32 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 and backwardness of most of its inhabitants is the ignorance 
 and backwardness of the mountaineer .plus most of the 
 unpleasant features of the Slav. They live in huts made of 
 plaster or of stone, and with thatched roofs. The people 
 live in one-half of the hut; and in the other half live the 
 cows and the live stock. As in many of the poorer Slav 
 countries, the houses have no chimneys and no fireplaces. 
 The heating and cooking are accomplished by means of a 
 raised, home-made stove. Under and around the stove, on 
 a dirt floor, sleep the inhabitants. The smoke pours out 
 of the stove freely, but has no means of getting out of the 
 house. Consequently the people live in a haze of smoke. 
 After a Rusin has succeeded in living over forty years in 
 this atmosphere, he is little else than an animated smoke- 
 dried ham. Almost everybody has some sort of eye trouble 
 on account of the smoke in which he lives. Three genera- 
 tions of people are frequently crammed into one room of 
 the average peasant's hut. Put twelve, sixteen, or eighteen 
 people of different ages and sexes into one small room and 
 let them live their entire lives in it, and none of them is 
 mentally, physically or spiritually elevated to any marked 
 degree. Yet those are the conditions under which eighty 
 per cent, of the Rusins have been living ever since they began 
 rusing, as one might say. Their home life is complicated 
 by the presence of the cow-stall under the same roof and 
 by the fact that the pigs, goats and chickens wander into the 
 living-room at nightfall and nestle down among the sleepers 
 for their night's rest. The cow usually stands almost belly- 
 deep in mire; and the odor which emerges from a Rusin 
 peasant's home is so strong that a grown man can almost 
 chin himself on it. 
 
 The state of Rusinia was formed and an alliance with
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 33 
 
 Czecho-Slovakia effected, not through the efforts and 
 desires of the Rusins in Rusinia, but through the repre- 
 sentations which Rusins in America made to the Peace 
 Conference shortly after President Wilson's unfortunate 
 and untimely utterance concerning the self-determina- 
 tion of small nations. Having made their homeland free, 
 a large percentage of the Rusins in America are anxious to 
 go back to Rusinia to live. Since they live in the meanest 
 and most frugal way in America, it is not at all unusual 
 for a Rusin to come back with five thousand American dol- 
 lars in his pockets. When I was last in Czecho-Slovakia, 
 five thousand dollars meant four hundred thousand 
 Czecho-Slovak crowns; and in pre-war times that amount 
 of money would have meant that its possessor could buy a 
 couple of towns and be a land-baron. Most of the immi- 
 grants seem to figure in pre-war prices ; and it always proves 
 to be a crushing mistake. At the time of which I write, for 
 example, four hundred thousand crowns wouldn't go very 
 far in Rusinia. A horse which formerly cost two thousand 
 crowns had mounted in price to twenty-five thousand 
 crowns. A good two-story farm-house of the best class 
 which once sold for around three thousand crowns had 
 risen to two hundred thousand crowns. Shoes which used 
 to cost five crowns had increased to two hundred fifty 
 crowns. So the man who comes back with five thousand 
 American dollars finds that they don't go nearly so far as 
 they used to go in spite of the more advantageous exchange 
 rates. 
 
 The officials in Rusinia, as in Slovakia, are the same old 
 autocratic officials who were in power when the emigrants 
 went away before the war. The officials can't be replaced 
 because there aren't enough educated and trustworthy
 
 34 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Rusins with whom to replace them. This is a distinct bore 
 to the emigrants who had expected to boss things on their 
 return. They can't accustom themselves to the very bad 
 food conditions which have resulted from the Russian inva- 
 sion, the invasion by the Hungarian Bolsheviks and the 
 Czech occupation, coupled with the inability of the Czech 
 government to distribute food to the hungry sections. They 
 can't adjust themselves to the dirt and the stench and the 
 squalor. Business is rotten everything is rotten and 
 they want to turn right around and go back to America 
 again. Their anxiety to go makes converts of others, and 
 the others influence still others, and so on and so on and 
 so on. 
 
 Rusin officials have told me that it is their belief that 
 every Rusin, whether or not he has ever been to America, 
 wishes to go there. 
 
 And that, sketchily, is why Europe leaves home.
 
 Ports of Embarkation 
 
 THERE were three young men from the American Con- 
 sulate sitting behind a long counter in a big room at a 
 Northern European port of embarkation for America. 
 Before them passed a constant stream of emigrants from 
 Poland, from Czecho-Slovakia, from Lithuania, from 
 Rumania and from various other countries of Central 
 Europe. The stream oozed in at a double door at the end 
 of the room, wound slowly past the three young men, and 
 slowly trickled out of another double door far behind them. 
 It had flowed steadily through the room from nine o'clock 
 in the morning until noon, when it had been temporarily 
 dammed to allow the three young men to get something to 
 eat, and from early afternoon until two hours after night- 
 fall. That, incidentally, is the picture that any one must 
 always carry away with him from European ports of em- 
 barkation when immigration to America is not rigorously 
 restricted: streams of humanity oozing slowly but cease- 
 lessly out of Central Europe to America ; streams of under- 
 sized, peculiar, alien people moving perpetually through 
 consulates and steamship offices and delousing plants on 
 their way from the slums of Europe to the slums of America : 
 streams trickling through Havre and Boulogne and Cher- 
 bourg, streams flowing through Antwerp and Rotterdam 
 and Danzig, streams gnawing at the temporary barriers 
 
 35
 
 36 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 which keep them from Bremen and Hamburg and Stettin; 
 streams which swell to torrents just before the ocean liners 
 sail and dwindle again to orderly and steady currents when 
 the liners have departed, but which flow without cessation 
 under all conditions. As long as ordinary American immi- 
 gration laws are in force, and as long as they are interpreted 
 in the futile and impotent manner in which they were inter- 
 preted up to the middle of 1921, these streams will continue 
 to flow from all the ports of Europe. Unless America has 
 immigration laws which rigidly restrict immigration, they 
 will flow to-night and to-morrow; next week and next 
 month ; on Sundays and holidays. They will flow into every 
 ship that leaves Europe until every ship is filled ; and if the 
 number of ships is doubled or trebled, the streams will flow 
 with just enough added velocity to fill them all. 
 
 These three young men from the American Consulate, 
 then, were "sitting on the line" in one of Europe's ports 
 of embarkation. They were watching for fake passports 
 or false American vises or counterfeit American ten-dollar 
 consular fee stamps. That was their sole duty. All of the 
 emigrants passing before them had come from other coun- 
 tries, and had no occasion to present themselves before 
 American consular officers at the ports of embarkation. But 
 the traffic in forged passports had become so great early in 
 1921 that our consulates were forced to take men from their 
 already over-heavy duties and set them to watching at the 
 very gangplanks of the ships. It was not until early in 1921 
 that passports began to be examined at the ships for frauds, 
 but fraudulent passports had been in use for months. There 
 is no way of knowing how many thousands of persons 
 entered the United States during 1920 with forged papers. 
 
 In front of the three young men there was a little pile
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 37 
 
 of Polish passports bearing forged American vises, forged 
 signatures of J. K. Huddle, American Vice-Consul in War- 
 saw in charge of American vises, and counterfeit American 
 ten-dollar consular fee stamps. Some of the counterfeits 
 were crude; some were practically perfect. The hands of 
 the clock on the wall pointed to twenty minutes before six. 
 The young man beside whom I was sitting had been scru- 
 tinizing vises for nearly eight hours. For nearly eight hours 
 the stream of emigrants had crept past him slowly, steadily, 
 endlessly. He was plainly very tired and very nervous and 
 very much on edge from the stench of the emigrants, and 
 from their ceaseless efforts to better their positions in the 
 line by little tricks and meannesses, and from their eternal 
 and obvious falsehoods when questioned. In the space of 
 ten minutes, as I sat there, he took three passports from 
 three mean-faced, shifty-eyed Jews who were traveling on 
 Polish papers. He threw them with the other fraudulent 
 passports, motioned their bearers to come behind the 
 counter for examination, and then swung around on his 
 stool and faced me. 
 
 There were tears in his eyes a fact which was no 
 doubt due to the eight hours of exacting and unpleasant and 
 wearying labor in which he had been engaged; and in 
 repeating his words I would like to say again that the work 
 had made him very nervous and very much on edge. 
 
 "I want to tell you something," he said. "My father 
 wanted me to get my education out of a college. A college 
 is a good thing, of course; but it never appealed to me very 
 much. I had an idea that if I took a pack-horse and a few 
 books and got out into the country, I could soak up as much 
 education as I could get out of a college. It seemed to bo 
 all the same to my father; so when I had finished prep
 
 38 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 school he gave me my college money and I went out to 
 Colorado and got a saddle horse and a pack-horse. I wan- 
 dered all through that country, mountains and deserts and 
 canons. It's a wonderful country, like all the rest of our 
 country. I loved it then and I love it now " 
 
 He hesitated and looked around at the human stream 
 which moved steadily on its serpentine course before us. 
 
 "When I think," he went on, "that these people, who 
 don't know the meaning of the word 'patriotism' and who 
 have been brought up to hate every form of government, are 
 going to America to have a voice in the future of that 
 country, it makes me see red!" 
 
 One of the other young men pushed back his stool and 
 looked around at me. 
 
 "That goes for me, too," he said. "After you've seen 
 these mobs pouring over to America for a few weeks, you 
 get so fighting mad that you can't talk about it." 
 
 The third young man looked up from a scrutiny of a 
 doubtful consular fee stamp. "What do they say about it at 
 home?" he asked. "What are they letting this go on for? 
 They can't know what's going on, or they'd stop it in a 
 second. What's the matter with them, anyway? Are they 
 crazy?" 
 
 "Yes, what do they say about it at home?" asked the 
 first young man. 
 
 "A lot of people at home," I told him, "say that the 
 reports from Europe concerning the undesirability of emi- 
 grants to America and the large number that wish to go to 
 America are greatly exaggerated." 
 
 Now I very much wish that those people in America 
 who prattle so cheerfully about the desirability of European 
 emigrants and about the exaggeration which characterizes
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 39 
 
 the reports of the large numbers that wish to emigrate 
 could have seen the looks of disgust and contempt that 
 marred the features of the three young men at these glad 
 tidings. Two of them could only express themselves by 
 swearing violently. The third the young man who had 
 picked up his education among the mountains and deserts 
 and canons of Colorado glared intently at a Polish pass- 
 port on the counter in front of him and growled hoarsely, 
 "The people who say such things either don't know any- 
 thing about the conditions that exist in every port of Europe, 
 or they're rotten Americans." 
 
 That statement may seem a trifle harsh; but it is the 
 condensed opinion of every American consular official, 
 every American diplomatic representative and every Ameri- 
 can official and relief worker and business man who had an 
 opportunity of observing conditions in Europe during 1920, 
 and whose racial and business affiliations do not make it 
 necessary for him to hold contrary opinions. 
 
 The American president of a large steamship line is 
 reported to have said that the agitation against immigration 
 in America was due to greatly exaggerated stories from 
 Europe. If he was correctly quoted, his statement could 
 only have been inspired by the fear that if America restricts 
 immigration with a permanent and rigid law, as it must 
 unless its stock of wisdom and common sense is completely 
 exhausted, the steerages of his ships will not be filled and 
 the earnings of his steamship company will consequently be 
 decreased. His statement was not founded on fact, nor 
 was it based on the reports of any competent American con- 
 sular representative in Europe. If it was not inspired by 
 the fear of losing money, it could only be the result of inside 
 information furnished by a ouija board or by a Kickapoo
 
 40 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Indian herbologist and soothsayer. In return for a certain 
 amount of deft manipulation, these same authorities would 
 unquestionably assure him that the reported distance from 
 the earth to the sun is also greatly exaggerated, that the 
 porcupine can throw his quills a distance of thirty paces 
 without loss of accuracy, and that a boxing bout is being 
 arranged between Georges Carpentier and the King of 
 Greece. Whenever any person minimizes the evil results 
 which unrestricted or semi-restricted emigration from 
 Europe will have on America, a scrutiny of that person's 
 position or antecedents will invariably reveal a very con- 
 spicuous Ethiopian, so to speak, imperfectly concealed in a 
 very diaphanous wood-pile. 
 
 The discrepancy between the opinions held by the offi- 
 cials of large steamship lines and those held by competent 
 employees of the same lines is usually very great as great, 
 in fact, as the discrepancy between the opinions of prohibi- 
 tionists and of brewers. In Rotterdam for example, I 
 interviewed a director of one of the largest steamship lines 
 engaged in carrying emigrants to America. The steamship 
 line has an excellent organization through Europe, and its 
 agents feed emigrants down to the steamships with military 
 precision. This director was a large complacent man with 
 three chins, and the mere thought that America contem- 
 plated any stopping of the immigrants who proved so remu- 
 nerative to his company was highly repugnant to him. 
 Indeed, the very thought was what our leading literary 
 journals like to refer to as unthinkable until it was forced 
 on him. 
 
 "You people in America mustn't worry about immigra- 
 tion," he said, smiling fatly. "The present abnormal move- 
 ment is a purely temporary movement. In five or six or
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 41 
 
 seven years it will probably sink again to the pre-war 
 figures, so why should you disturb yourselves?" 
 
 The emigrants who pass through Rotterdam are eighty 
 per cent. Hebrew. The figures of the United States Bureau 
 of Immigration show that over one hundred fifty-three thou- 
 sand Jews entered the United States in 1906, over one 
 hundred one thousand in 1913, and over one hundred thirty- 
 eight thousand in 1914. State department reports show 
 that the bulk of these people have been unassimilatable, non- 
 productive, and economically and socially undesirable. Like 
 many other steamship officials, this official was assuming 
 that because America, with a pitiful lack of wisdom and 
 foresight, was permitting more than a million immigrants 
 a year to litter her shores before the war, she should con- 
 tinue to do so indefinitely, even though the entire million 
 proved economically and socially undesirable. 
 
 "With the numbers that are going now," continued the 
 director, softly stroking his gleaming triple chin, "our 
 steamship line will be kept busy for years to come, so that 
 any new legislation wouldn't affect us. Most of them, you 
 see, have relatives in America, and you can't keep out rela- 
 tives." 
 
 "Why not," I asked him, "when a large percentage of 
 the relatives are cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers- 
 in-law? Why should America be obliged to take them, if 
 they are undesirables?" 
 
 "Oh," he replied, "you've got to take them if they are 
 relatives." 
 
 "How do you feel," I asked him, "about the emigrants 
 who are stuck in Holland without any funds and are obliged 
 to stay here ?" 
 
 "That is very bad," he replied. "We can not afford to
 
 42 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 have them in Holland, for there is no work for them. There 
 is not a sufficient amount of work for our own people. Be- 
 sides, they are all middle-men all parasites on the com- 
 munity. They are very bad for us, and we can not have 
 them. We shall have to find some method of getting rid of 
 them." 
 
 "If you feel that way about it," I said, "how can you 
 think it so strange that America doesn't want them? We're 
 in the same position that you are." 
 
 "That's different," he said. "America is a big country. 
 You've got Texas and Oklahoma and all those places where 
 there aren't many people. Let them go there." 
 
 "They don't want to go there," I told him. "They 
 want to go to New York and Brooklyn and Chicago and 
 other large cities." 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders. "Well," said he, "you've 
 got to take them because no other country will take them." 
 And that, so far as he was concerned, closed the argu- 
 ment. 
 
 On the following day I went down to the dock from 
 which a big liner was sailing from Rotterdam for New 
 York with eighteen hundred emigrants aboard. About 
 fifteen hundred out of the eighteen hundred were Jews. I 
 selected a spot from which I could watch the stream of 
 emigrants moving slowly past the final examiners, and 
 found myself beside a husky six-footer in the uniform of a 
 ship's surgeon. His features were of the type which are 
 generally known as Celtic ; but whether he was an English- 
 man or an American there was no way of telling until I had 
 spoken to him. All that I knew about him was the fact that 
 he was employed by the same steamship line that employed 
 the director whom I had interviewed on the preceding day.
 
 Copyright Cincinnati Enquirer 
 
 A Jew of Warsaw bartering for some plums and watching the scales. 
 
 The best type of Jewish emigrants from Poland. They are holding their 
 United States vises
 
 *.v ' 
 
 Peasant houses in Poland. 
 
 A street scene in old \Yarsaw.
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 43 
 
 "What do you think about this crowd that's going over 
 to America ?" I asked him. 
 
 "What do I think about them?" he repeated. "I'll tell 
 you what I think. I think it's criminal for any country to 
 allow such a mass of people to be poured into it. You can 
 call it what you like, but I call it a crime! Nothing but a 
 crime ! 
 
 "Over in America we're getting so that the country is 
 packed with Italian-Americans and Jewish-Americans and 
 Czech- Americans and Irish- Americans ; and still we let this 
 mob go rushing in to add to the crowd that is six of one 
 thing and half-a-dozen of another thing. You might call me 
 Irish because my people came from there long ago; but I 
 don't call myself anything but American, and I have no 
 sympathy for any people that go maudlin over the countries 
 that they deserted years ago. I say it's a crime not to stop 
 these people from coming to America ; and that's what every 
 other decent American says after he has seen what they are 
 and how they act and what they believe in. I was reading 
 in a Paris paper the other day that a United States Senator 
 said that emigration conditions over here had been exagger- 
 ated. All I wish is that I could bring that bird over here 
 and give him a good look at conditions. If he didn't change 
 his mind, there'd be something wrong with it ossification 
 or something." 
 
 This expression of opinion, which might reasonably be 
 termed a mouth-full, is highly interesting when contrasted 
 with the opinion of the higher and more sheltered officials 
 of the same steamship line. 
 
 Witnesses have recently stated before the Senate Immi- 
 gration Committee that "reports of a million Jews seeking 
 to come to America were a wild flight of fancy," and that
 
 44 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 they did not believe there were more than half a million 
 Jews who wished to emigrate. 
 
 I wish to take issue loudly and firmly with these wit- 
 nesses. I have talked with emigration officials of various 
 countries, interviewed the heads of the Hebrew Immigrant 
 Aid Society in different localities, talked to steamship offi- 
 cials and employees, sat on the lines at passport and vise 
 offices at every emigration center, gone through delousing 
 plants and vaccination stations incidentally picking up a 
 choice assortment of lice myself, visited a number of emi- 
 grant hotels and barracks and concentration camps, inter- 
 viewed large numbers of American public health officials, 
 consular officers and diplomats, talked with hundreds of 
 emigrants at the ports of embarkation, and finally worked 
 back into the towns and villages which form the source of 
 all our immigration. It is only in these small towns towns 
 whose populations are frequently from eighty to ninety-five 
 per cent. Hebrew that one gets the proper idea of the over- 
 whelming masses whose sole desire seems to be to locate 
 near or distant relatives in America and borrow from them 
 enough money to get there themselves. An American visi- 
 tor to these towns is literally mobbed by the Jews who wish 
 assistance in getting in touch with their relatives in America. 
 
 The head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in 
 Paris, Mr. Chapira, stated to me that he expected "not more 
 than two hundred thousand Hebrews" to pass through the 
 Paris office of the Society on their way to America during 
 1921. The bulk of those who pass through Paris are from 
 Bessarabia and Rumania. Doctor Schluger, head of the 
 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in Warsaw, informed me 
 that a thousand Jews passed through his office every day, 
 one-third being in search of information about getting to
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 45 
 
 America, one-third waiting for replies to cables which the 
 society had sent to their relatives in America, and one-third 
 getting their tickets to America. The Jews that pass 
 through the Warsaw office are mostly from Poland. In addi- 
 tion to the Jews from Poland, Bessarabia and Rumania, 
 there are the throngs that are pouring into Poland daily 
 from Soviet Russia, and the masses who are anxious to 
 escape from the army-ridden Ukraine and who have already 
 escaped and are working their way overland up toward 
 Warsaw. Of these people, practically every one wishes to 
 go to America. 
 
 The report to the effect that a million Jews are seeking to 
 come to the United States, instead of being a wild flight of 
 fancy, as witnesses have stated to the Senate Immigration 
 Committee, is extremely conservative.* There is a great 
 difference between the numbers of immigrants that will be 
 able to reach America each year and the numbers that wish 
 to go. All of the Jews that are going are paupers and can 
 not go unless they are helped from America. Then, too, 
 there aren't nearly enough ships to provide accommodations 
 for those who wish to go. Yet in spite of these handicaps, 
 more than fifty thousand Hebrew immigrants arrived at 
 Ellis Island during the month of October, 1920 or at the 
 rate of six hundred thousand a year. 
 
 It is unfortunate that all nationalities and races can not 
 be lumped together in any discussion of immigration. This 
 can not be done, however; for some immigrants have qual- 
 
 *Information received from Danzig dated November 10, 1921, five 
 months after the Three Per Cent. Restrictive Immigration Law took 
 effect, stated : "Every Jew in Eastern Europe seems to want to go to 
 America, and it seems to be only a question of time before they will 
 be successful. Many go to Canada, but all of them have relatives in 
 the States and eventually reach the States." It is practically impossible 
 to stop this pauper, parasitic Jewish immigration by means of a per- 
 centage law.
 
 46 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 ities which others lack; and there are certain racial traits 
 which make desirable or undesirable immigrants of the 
 races which possess them. It is unfortunate that all people 
 who emigrate from Poland can not be spoken of as Poles. 
 It is impossible, though ; for the bulk of the emigrants from 
 Poland not only refuse to classify themselves as Poles, but 
 even deny indignantly that they are Poles. They state, on 
 being questioned, that they are Jews, and this reply appears 
 on passports in the space provided for the nationality of the 
 bearers of the passports. The same is true of Jewish emi- 
 grants from Russia and Bessarabia and the Ukraine and 
 Rumania and Hungary. 
 
 Every Jew who is emigrating to America from any 
 country in Europe has no love for any nation or for any 
 government and this statement will be willingly and com- 
 prehensively confirmed by every American government offi- 
 cial in Europe. 
 
 Of all the emigrants who pass through Paris, Havre, 
 Cherbourg, Boulogne, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Danzig, War- 
 saw and other large emigration centers in the north of 
 Europe, between sixty and ninety per cent, are Jews and so 
 classify themselves when asked their nationality. Yet there 
 are many advocates of unrestricted immigration who protest 
 bitterly against any mention of this fact. For example, 
 Congressmen Siegel and Sabath submitted a minority report 
 on a House Bill providing for a temporary suspension of 
 immigration; and in this report they said: "The majority 
 report is especially unfortunate in its references to the 
 number of Jewish immigrants arriving in this country. 
 Classif ication according to the religion or race of immigrants 
 is without justification. It is opposed to that Americanism 
 that prevailed in the past. . . .,. ." Congressmen Siegel and
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 47 
 
 Sabath need only to turn to the records of the United States 
 Bureau of Immigration to learn that Hebrews entering the 
 United States have always been classified as Hebrews, 
 because the Hebrews themselves have never permitted the 
 United States immigration authorities to classify them in 
 any other way. 
 
 There are many facts connected with the matter of immi- 
 gration that are difficult to face. One of the most difficult 
 is the matter of race. It is the constant cry of sentimen- 
 talists and individuals whose interest in immigration arises 
 from non-patriotic reasons that America consists of layer 
 upon layer of immigrants, and that to stop immigration is 
 to stop the growth and impair the greatness of America. 
 Such people refuse to realize or to recognize that practically 
 all immigration to America prior to 1880 was composed of 
 people of the Nordic race the tall, blond, adventurous 
 people from the northern countries of Europe : from Sweden 
 and Norway and Denmark and England and Scotland; 
 from certain sections of Germany and Belgium and Ireland 
 and France and Holland. The Nordic people possess cer- 
 tain characteristics : they have long skulls and blond hair 
 hair, that is, which is lighter than black; they possess to a 
 marked degree the ability to govern themselves and to gov- 
 ern others; and from their ranks have been recruited 
 the world's voluntary explorers, pioneers, soldiers, sailors 
 and adventurers. The early colonists of every undeveloped 
 country in modern times have invariably been Nordics. 
 America, then, was a nation of Nordics. 
 
 Since 1880 the bulk of immigration to the United States 
 has been composed of people from the other two main 
 races of Europe, known to biologists and ethnolo- 
 gists as the Alpine race and the Mediterranean race. The
 
 48 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Alpines are the stocky, slow, dark, round-skulled folk who 
 inhabit most of Central Europe and whose chief representa- 
 tives are the large part not all, but the large part of the 
 different Slav countries, the Czechs, the Poles, the Slovaks, 
 the Russians, the Ruthenians and so on. The Mediterra- 
 neans are the small, swarthy, black-haired, long-skulled peo- 
 ple which form the bulk of the population in Southern Italy, 
 Greece, Spain and the north coast of Africa. These two 
 races, plus the Hebrew, which is an Oriental instead of a 
 European race, were pouring into America at the rate of a 
 million a year during the ten years before the war; and 
 given sufficient ships and an absence of immigration 
 restrictions, they will pour into America at the rate of two 
 million a year and more for years to come. These people 
 who have been pouring in since 1880 and only since 1880 
 have displayed one marked characteristic throughout the 
 centuries. Never have they been successful at governing 
 themselves or at governing any one else. They have rushed 
 to the spot where a stronger and hardier people have estab- 
 lished successful enterprises; and by their low standards of 
 living and their willingness to subordinate everything to 
 immediate gain, they have forced out the people who pre- 
 ceded them. One of the oldest stories in history is the 
 repeated influx of Alpine and Mediterranean peoples into 
 Nordic people, and the resultant and almost invariable 
 breeding out of the Nordics by the Alpines and Mediter- 
 raneans.* To these people, who for centuries have demon- 
 strated their incapacity to govern themselves, America is 
 
 *Every American who has at heart the future of America and of 
 the race that made it a great nation owes it to himself and to his 
 children to get and read carefully The Passing of the Great Race, by 
 Madison Grant ; The Rising Tide of Color, by Lothrop Stoddard ; and 
 Race or Mongrel, by Alfred P. Schultz.
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 49 
 
 blindly and fatuously offering the keys of her cities and her 
 reins of government, and that is why Americans all over 
 Europe, after watching and studying the type of immigrant 
 that is rushing to America, are writing and cabling to their 
 people in America and to the Department of State that immi- 
 gration is a matter of life and death to the American people; 
 death if it continues unrestricted, and life if it is stopped. 
 There will be many to smile at this statement as being an 
 exaggeration. It is no exaggeration, but a matter of cold 
 fact ; and it will be upheld by every American who has seen 
 European emigration at its sources with the exception of 
 those whose racial or business affiliations have impaired 
 their eyesight. 
 
 It should be distinctly understood, however, that the 
 attitude of the Americans in Europe who protest so vigor- 
 ously against the continuation of the present immigration is 
 not inspired by antagonism to any particular race, but by 
 the desire to keep out of America all people who are 
 economically and politically unfit. There is no fear or 
 thought in their minds, for example, of a Zionist movement 
 to control and subjugate the world a matter which I have 
 investigated in almost every country in Europe, only to be 
 convinced that it is the rankest poppycock* There is, how- 
 ever, the knowledge that the people who are coming to 
 America are, from the nature of their training and their 
 environment, unassimilatable, undesirable, and incapable of 
 grasping American ideals. This is particularly true of the 
 present-day Jewish immigrant, and it is even admitted to 
 
 *This chapter was written six months before the Constantinople cor- 
 respondent of The London Timts exposed the fact that "The Protocols 
 of the Elders of Zion" was plagiarized from Maurice Joly's Dialogue 
 Aux Enfers, which was originally written to show that Napoleon 
 planned to dominate the world.
 
 50 
 
 be true by many prominent Jewish-Americans engaged in 
 relief work in Europe; but it is seldom that they will admit 
 it publicly.* 
 
 The emigrants who are passing through the ports of 
 Northern Europe to-day on their way to America have 
 certain things in common. Practically all of them are 
 paupers. This is universally true of the Jewish emigrants, 
 none of whom has a cent to his name that hasn't been loaned 
 or given to him by some person or organization in America. 
 Every one of them is going for economic reasons or to 
 escape military service. I have questioned these people by 
 the hundreds ; and while practically every one claims to be 
 going to join a near or a distant relative, and while all of 
 them speak glibly of the oppression which people of their 
 race have suffered, I have never found one who had himself 
 
 *"There exists to-day a wide-spread and fatuous belief in the power 
 of environment, as well as of education and opportunity, to alter 
 heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, 
 derived in its turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution 
 and their American mimics. Such beliefs have done much damage in 
 the past and if allowed to go uncontradicted may do even more serious 
 damage in the future. Thus the view that the Negro slave was an un- 
 fortunate cousin of the white man, deeply tanned by the tropic sun and 
 denied the blessings of Christianity and civilization, played no small 
 part with the sentimentalists of the Civil War period ; and it has taken 
 us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes 
 and going to school and to church do not transform a Negro into a 
 white man. Nor was a Syrian or Egyptian freedman transformed into 
 a Roman by wearing a toga and applauding his favorite gladiator in 
 the amphitheatre. Americans will have a similar experience with the 
 Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless con- 
 centration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the 
 
 nation The man of the old stock is being crowded out of many 
 
 country districts by these foreigners, just as he is to-day being literally 
 driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of Polish 
 Jews. These immigrants adopt the language of the native American, 
 they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to 
 take his women, but they seldom adopt his religion or understand his 
 ideals ; and while he is being elbowed out of his own home, the Ameri- 
 can looks calmly abroad and urges on others the suicidal ethics which 
 are exterminating his own race." 
 
 The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 51 
 
 suffered the indignities which he described so freely, or 
 whose journey to America was a purely sentimental one for 
 the purpose of joining relatives. It is understood among 
 the emigrants that if they can not produce letters and even 
 affidavits establishing the fact that they have relatives in 
 America, the United States will refuse to allow them to go. 
 Consequently they harp constantly on their relatives. But 
 the real reason which drives them to America is, as they 
 themselves phrase it, "rotten business" in the countries from 
 which they come. Business is rotten all over Europe, and 
 millions are out of work just as they are in the United 
 States. It is rotten in Poland because the country is over- 
 loaded with Jews who were driven into Poland by the 
 Czar's government many years ago, and because the sole 
 occupation of the mass of Jews is that of middleman a 
 maker of small business or unskilled artisans, such as 
 cheap tailors or carpenters. 
 
 The report of Captain P. Wright, of the British Mission 
 to Poland, as published in an official document of the Brit- 
 ish government, states that "poor Jews are all dealers, as 
 their ancestors have been for centuries; and for their par- 
 ticular kind of dealing, capitalists as they are with a capital 
 of a few shillings, there is every year less and less room. 
 The Jew in the country who lives by lending a few roubles 
 to a peasant and taking a chicken as interest, or who buys 
 a load of vegetables and resells them, or is a pedler; the 
 Jew in the town who is a hawker, a tout, or in some small 
 middleman's business these have greater and greater diffi- 
 culty in making a living. There must be millions of such 
 in Poland. The cooperative society and store and the bank 
 drive them more and more out of business in the country, 
 and more modern methods of distribution in the town ; and
 
 52 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 this is likely, now the economic development of Poland is no 
 longer to be artificially restricted, to go on faster and faster. 
 
 they are sweated in semi-unskilled trades when they 
 
 emigrate. They are hardly ever producers; on this point 
 every one is agreed. Poor Jews can not go into factories, 
 partly because of their Sabbatarian principles, partly because 
 Polish workmen will not work with people whose personal 
 habits are so unclean. ...... They are driven into all sorts 
 
 of illicit or fraudulent practises, and I think the Poles are 
 right when they complain that too large a proportion of 
 convictions for such offenses are Jewish. They are unfit 
 for the modern economic world, not in consequence of any 
 fault of their own, but in consequence of a long historical 
 past " 
 
 Mr. Paul Warburg, former Vice-Governor of the Fed- 
 eral Reserve Board, was recently quoted in a New York 
 paper as declaring in respect of immigration that "the 
 strongest and best man material of Europe comes here, for it 
 takes a strong heart and an ambitious character to tear itself 
 up by the roots, leave home, family and friends, and travel, 
 usually 'mid all the unpleasantness of third class, to the 
 uncertainty of a new life in a new land." 
 
 This is one of the old sentimental views of immigration, 
 and it is emphatically not true to-day. The emigrants who 
 are passing through the Northern European ports of em- 
 barkation are, as far as the great majority of them are con- 
 cerned, the weakest and poorest man material of Europe. 
 They are the defeated, incompetent and unsuccessful the 
 very lowest layer of European society. They are paupers by 
 circumstance, and parasites by training and inclination. 
 They are expedited out of their countries by governments 
 who do not want them, they are assisted to America by the
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 53 
 
 largest and best-organized society that ever assisted and 
 unconsciously stimulated immigration to America or to any 
 other country, and they invariably travel on money they 
 have begged or demanded from America. Nor do these 
 people consider that they are going to the "uncertainty of a 
 new life in a new land." They are going from countries 
 where business is rotten, taxes are high, food is scarce, 
 money is hard to get, military service is apt to seize the 
 men-folk, and armies are likely at any time to start march- 
 ing and simultaneously begin seizing all the cattle and poul- 
 try and other edibles in sight. They are going to America, 
 the world's greatest sure thing: America, where all the 
 money in the world comes from ; America, who has so much 
 money that she sends her sons all over the world to give it 
 away to people who often don't need it; America, where 
 conditions at their worst are better than conditions in other 
 countries at their best. These are the universal opinions of 
 the emigrants. Suggest to them that they are going to the 
 "uncertainty of a new life in a new land," and they will 
 wonder privately whether you are weak-minded. The land 
 to which they are going is no uncertainty; it's a leadpipe 
 cinch. The only Europeans who are taking a long chance 
 to-day are the ones that stay at home. 
 
 It is probable that the menace which unrestricted immi- 
 gration presents to the American people, American customs 
 and American ideals can never be comprehended by persons 
 who have not seen the masses of peculiar and alien peoples 
 pouring out of Europe to America in unending streams. 
 Many influences and many traditions traditions, for 
 example, like those that all men are born free and equal, and 
 that America is obliged to shelter all persons who consider 
 themselves persecuted or oppressed regardless of her own
 
 54 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 well-being 1 make it impossible to present the facts about 
 immigration without causing sentimentalists, near-Ameri- 
 cans and other sincere but misinformed persons to emit 
 deafening roars about exaggeration, race-hatred, inhuman- 
 ity, brutality, un-Christianity and retardation of the national 
 growth. The great cry of American consuls and observers 
 in Europe is: "The people at home can never understand 
 what immigration means unless they can see it as we see 
 it. They won't believe us when we send word home about 
 it.'* The ancient Romans couldn't understand it either; 
 and they imported nondescript slaves of various races from 
 the southern and eastern coasts of the Mediterranean to work 
 their huge estates. From these slaves are descended the 
 south Italians of to-day people almost as different from 
 the north Italians of Nordic descent as an alligator pear is 
 different from an alligator people incapable of self-gov- 
 ernment and totally devoid of initiative or creative ability. 
 Unrestricted immigration made a mongrel race out of the 
 south Italians. Unrestricted immigration made a mongrel 
 race out of the Greeks. Unrestricted immigration will 
 inevitably and absolutely do the same thing to Americans. 
 
 An American consul in one of the most important emi- 
 gration centers in the north of Europe made the following 
 statement to me in January, 1921 : 
 
 "Nine-tenths of all the emigrants which pass through 
 here on their way to America are from Poland; and nine- 
 tenths of those from Poland are Hebrews. They have no 
 political principles or convictions, are entirely without 
 patriotism, and usually are evasive, dishonest and incapable 
 of appreciating any responsibility toward any government. 
 Of the young men who are going, a large proportion are 
 running away from military service. The emigration is
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 55 
 
 almost entirely assisted emigration, due to the ability of the 
 Hebrews to invoke and use the assistance of relatives or of 
 the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to enable them to obtain 
 passage on steamers. The voluntary or unassisted emi- 
 grant is unable to compete with them for accommodations. 
 The United States, at the present time and under the present 
 regulations, is getting only people fit for the sweat shop or 
 for the lowest types of labor. Thousands of them only 
 escape becoming public charges because they graft on their 
 relatives, and not because they have any ability whatever." 
 
 This statement is not only true of one particular port 
 of embarkation, but of every port of embarkation in the 
 north of Europe of Cherbourg, Havre and Boulogne, of 
 Antwerp, Rotterdam and Danzig; and when the German 
 ports are thrown open to emigrants, it will be true of them as 
 well. 
 
 Paris is not strictly a port of embarkation ; but through 
 Paris flow the emigrant streams which spread out to the 
 French ports of Havre, Boulogne and Cherbourg. There 
 are little clusters of emigrants from every part of Eastern 
 Europe scattered through cheap lodging-houses in various 
 sections of Paris; but the largest numbers may always be 
 found concentrated at the headquarters of the Hebrew Im- 
 migrant Aid Society on Rue Lamarck. From its initials this 
 society is known to all the emigrants, as well as to every one 
 else who comes in touch with it, as "Hias" ; and it is to Hias 
 that they rush with all their troubles. Hias feeds them; 
 Hias lodges them ; Hias cables to America for them, locates 
 relatives whose addresses have been lost or changed or 
 never known, and gets money for them to make the trip to 
 America. Hias intercedes with the American consulate 
 for emigrants to whom the consulate has been obliged to
 
 56 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 refuse vises; Hias provides doctors to attend to the sick; 
 Hias in general acts as a parent for the otherwise helpless 
 emigrants. 
 
 Any information concerning any agency which assists 
 emigrants to go to America is flashed broadcast through 
 the countries from which the emigrants come by their seem- 
 ingly strange methods of underground communication. 
 Consequently Hebrew emigration is being stimulated by this 
 organization to an extent never before known. Letters come 
 back from America to Polish and Rumanian and Hungarian 
 towns, telling of the miracles which Hias has accomplished 
 in locating relatives. This news spreads through the towns, 
 and to adjoining towns, whereupon hundreds of Jews sell 
 all that they have for hardly enough money to get them to 
 the nearest Hias offices ; and when they have arrived there, 
 they proceed to locate their relatives in America and call 
 for money. In a later chapter I will give a more detailed 
 account of the working of a Hias office. The Hias organ- 
 ization is a remarkable and an excellent one ; and the good 
 which it does is enormous. None the less, it is the greatest 
 organized stimulator of undesirable immigration to America 
 that has ever existed. The fact that this stimulation is 
 unconscious does not make it any less dangerous. 
 
 Fifteen hundred Jews came daily to Hias headquarters in 
 Paris during the winter of 1920-1921 to get assistance of 
 some sort in connection with their journey to America. 
 Most of them were from the extreme east of Europe from 
 Rumania and Bessarabia. From fifteen to twenty per cent. 
 of them came from Poland, Czecho-Slovakia and the 
 Ukraine. 
 
 There are two fairly large courtyards around which the 
 Hias buildings are grouped; and at all hours pf the day these
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 57 
 
 courtyards were filled to overflowing with the wretchedly 
 clothed, undernourished men, women and children who were 
 waiting for money from America or boats to America or 
 information as to how to get to America, Wherever a board 
 was loose in the underpinning of a house fronting on these 
 courtyards, or wherever there was any sort of aperture, the 
 emigrants had crammed the opening with the filthy, vermin- 
 filled clothes which they wore when they arrived in Paris 
 and which they discarded as soon as they could buy, beg or 
 borrow other garments. The emigrants led me to these rag 
 deposits in order to impress upon me the condition that 
 most of them are in when they reach Paris. I asked them 
 whether the vermin didn't crawl out of the old clothes and 
 settle in the new. They scratched themselves pensively and 
 admitted that they did ; but apparently it never occurred to 
 them to burn their old clothes. 
 
 One needs only to set foot in any place where there is a 
 concentration of emigrants in order to be almost over- 
 whelmed by a rush of men, women and children eager to 
 give information or seek information. This is particularly 
 true of Jewish concentration centers, where one is so 
 crowded and jostled by the mob that the manipulation of a 
 camera or even of a note-book is literally impossible if the 
 people are not forcibly and repeatedly repulsed. The con- 
 suls, the medical examiners and the steamship people all over 
 Europe complain that the Jews are most difficult to handle 
 because of their ruthless concentration on self-interest, and 
 their determination to better themselves at some one's or 
 every one's expense in even the most trivial matters. Doctor 
 Schluger, head of the Hias organization at Warsaw, com- 
 mented to me on the "I-want-to-get-in-first" spirit displayed 
 by the thousands of Jews who were storming the Hias office
 
 58 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 in Warsaw each week. All sorts of officials have repeatedly 
 called my attention to the manner in which Poles and 
 Rumanians and Slovaks and Hungarians stolidly take their 
 places in line for examination, while in the same lines the 
 Jews, men and women both, fight and kick and scream and 
 riot for the privilege of precedence. Every Jew seems to 
 want to get there first, even though he may not have the 
 slightest idea where he's going. Consequently it was very 
 easy to locate emigrants to interview at a Hias office. 
 
 From another standpoint, however, these people are 
 very difficult to interview. This is because they are con- 
 firmed and incurable exaggerators. Doctor Boris Bogen, 
 head of the Joint Distribution Committee in Paris, which, 
 like the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is a most efficient 
 and praiseworthy Jewish-American relief organization 
 assured me that he found it almost impossible to believe any 
 Jewish emigrant because of his apparent determination to 
 exaggerate. "When he speaks of one thousand machine 
 guns," said Doctor Bogen, "he usually means one machine 
 gun." 
 
 The penchant for exaggeration works in two ways. 
 The truth is greatly embellished or greatly diminished, as 
 the occasion demands. When Hias officials wish to calm 
 the rising antagonism in America against undesirable immi- 
 gration, they blandly underestimate the numbers that wish 
 to emigrate. When a Jewish emigrant wishes to curry 
 sympathy, he exaggerates a hundredfold his virtues or his 
 sufferings or the number of his relatives or whatever he may 
 consider this strongest selling point. 
 
 For example, when I was going through the delousing 
 plant in Danzig with Captain J. H. Linson, of the United 
 States Public Health Service, we ran across a girl whose
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 59 
 
 hair, though particularly beautiful, was full of nits. "Ask 
 her," I told the interpreter, "how often she washed her hair 
 when she was at home." Without the slightest hesitation the 
 young woman replied that she washed it six times a week. 
 Thinking that she hadn't understood the question, I told the 
 interpreter to repeat it. She nodded her head and said that 
 she had understood the first time, and that she always 
 washed her hair six times a week. The other women who 
 crowded around us obviously realized that the young woman 
 had made her story a little too strong. The next woman I 
 asked a venerable lady who was also carrying a large 
 assortment of nits replied that her hair had always been 
 washed three times a week. Eight other women, all with 
 nits, owned up to washing their hair only twice a week. All 
 of them came from small Polish towns where washing facili- 
 ties are in about the same condition that they were in when 
 Adam, as the cruder army persons used to say, was a lance- 
 jack. If they washed their hair once every ten years they 
 were unusually cleanly. 
 
 During one of my visits to Hias headquarters in Paris, 
 a man whom I was questioning asked my interpreter why 
 I was questioning him. The interpreter, who was a French 
 Jew, replied that I wished to help him get to America. Since 
 I was able to understand him, and since I had no desire to 
 arouse false hopes in any one's breast, I told the interpreter 
 to tell him the truth, and asked him why he had lied. He 
 spread out his hands in hurt amazement. "What difference 
 does it make what you tell them?" he asked. "Tell them 
 anything if it will help you get what you want. If I told 
 them that you wanted to write about them, they wouldn't 
 tell you nothing but pretty sentiments." 
 
 There are several ways of getting at the truth when
 
 60 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 questioning these emigrants ; and an absolutely sure way of 
 not getting it is to question them individually in such a way 
 that they can not be overheard by any of their own people. 
 If they are led to argue among themselves over points at 
 issue, and if no official of any organization or government 
 is present, the truth usually slips out in the heat of argument. 
 
 In the many talks which I had with emigrants at Hias 
 headquarters in Paris, I was particularly struck by the keen 
 interest which the men of military age exhibited in the 
 question of whether or not they would be taken for soldiers 
 when they reached America. Several sought private inter- 
 views with me in order to settle their doubts on this matter. 
 It was obvious that they were about as anxious to serve in 
 an army as they were to lose a couple of legs. Some of 
 them claimed to have escaped military service in their 
 respective countries by bribery, while others had simply run 
 away from it. 
 
 Abram Barbald, of Doraban in Rumania, explained to 
 me that the Rumanian government was wholly bad. His 
 sole reason for pronouncing it so evil was its custom of 
 taking everybody for military service, unless he guaran- 
 teed that he was going to America. All the Rumanian Jews 
 at this Hias office assured me that this was true; they could 
 only escape the army by going to America. Barbald had 
 cousins in New York, pronounced Neffyork, by the way, 
 by almost everybody whom one encounters at the Hias 
 offices. They had written him that one makes money in 
 America, no matter at what he works. That was why he 
 was going. 
 
 One young man followed me from place to place with 
 such diligence that whenever I wanted to make a note in 
 my note-book, I first had to push him forcibly from my
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 61 
 
 elbow. He seemed always on the verge of speaking, but 
 he never spoke. I finally told the interpreter either to find 
 out what he wanted or to keep him away from me. He 
 then announced that some of his friends had told him that 
 he would be taken in the army when he reached America, 
 and demanded piteously to be told whether it was so. I 
 assured him that it was not. His face brightened tremen- 
 dously, and he shook his fist at two other young men. "The 
 robbers!" he cried. "They try always to frighten me." 
 Later this same young man came back to me and assured 
 me that he was very unhappy that America wouldn't make 
 him fight. He wanted to fight, he declared. I asked him 
 why he wanted to fight, and why he would be willing to 
 fight for America when he wouldn't fight for Poland. He 
 replied that he would be glad to fight any one that America 
 wanted him to fight, and that his reason for being anxious 
 to fight was to show his relatives in America that he wasn't 
 afraid of anything. "Well," I said, "would that be the only 
 thing that you were fighting for?" "No," said the young 
 man, "for money also." The crowd which surrounded us 
 failed to see the humor in the young man's remarks. 
 
 Among the thousands of emigrants who were pouring 
 over early in 1921, it was common knowledge that great 
 numbers of people were out of work in America. They 
 didn't care, however. They all said that they could find 
 something to do buy something and sell it again at a profit. 
 
 Mendel Sticklario, from Bucharest, was going to Phila- 
 delphia, where his cousin worked in a factory. What did 
 he care that many in America had no work? His cousin 
 had promised to fire somebody from the factory and give 
 the job to him. He should worry, as the saying went. 
 
 Abram Berkovitch, from Rahan in Bessarabia, was
 
 62 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 going to Neffyork. At home he was a butcher, but what he 
 could do in Neffyork he didn't know. One could always 
 push a cart around and sell things from it. Yes, he had 
 heard that there were two million out of work in America, 
 and he was willing to be the two-million-and-first. The 
 interpreter explained to me privately that the butcher was 
 a good feller. Anything went with him, and he didn't care 
 what he did. He had some cousins in America. Let the 
 cousins do the fretting, not ? 
 
 Miron Raynish from Transylvania, Yanko Schwartz 
 from Jassy, Yakob Korsoi from Odessa, Rubin Klug from 
 Budapest, and Mottel Polyak from Bessarabia, all knew 
 that many were out of work in America ; but they expected 
 their relatives to get work for them or loan them enough 
 money to start in business for themselves. This was the 
 universal thought of hundreds that I talked to. There were 
 many who talked a great deal about the terrible treatment 
 which they had received at the hands of the Poles and the 
 Rumanians and the Bolsheviks. Beards had been cut off, 
 they declared ; throats had been cut ; they had been thrown 
 from moving trains; they had been robbed and beaten. I 
 questioned these people carefully. The things of which they 
 spoke had not happened to them, but to people of whom 
 they had heard. I spent three days at the Hias headquar- 
 ters, and never a man came forward who had had these 
 things happen to him. 
 
 The nearest thing to it was a small elderly Jew with an 
 enormous hooked nose, little curls that hung down in front 
 of his ears and merged with his beard, and a greasy gabar- 
 dine. Shaking and white-faced with excitement, he told me 
 a harrowing tale. He had been riding in a compartment, he 
 said, with six Polish soldiers returning from the war. They
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 63 
 
 were terrible creatures, he said. They told of Jews they had 
 killed and of Jews they were going to kill of beards they 
 were going to cut off. They were bloodthirsty? Oi yoi! 
 Horrible! "But," I asked him, "did they do anything to 
 you?" The little man shook his head. "Why not?" I 
 asked. The little man threw back his head and squinted at 
 me knowingly along his hooked nose. "Because," he said 
 simply, "they didn't know I was a Jew!" Nobody could 
 possibly have mistaken him for anything else. The soldiers 
 had been frightening him. 
 
 All of those who passed through Hias headquarters 
 were going to America because business was rotten not 
 because they were oppressed. 
 
 I am reluctant to say it, but these people have the 
 obsession of oppression, just as several of the Balkan and 
 Slav nations suffer from an obsession of former grandeur. 
 I do not mean to say that they have never been oppressed, 
 because they have been; but I do mean to say that their 
 motive in going to America is not to escape oppression: 
 it is to get a better job. The Jews in Poland and Hungary 
 and Rumania who have fairly descent jobs and there are 
 many who have have little intention of going to America. 
 
 Europe has its slang, as well as America; and for the 
 three years after the war there was one slang phrase that had 
 great vogue in all Hebrew centers. When young Jews 
 meet on the street in Warsaw, in Bialistock, in Vilna, in 
 Budapest, in Vienna, in Bucharest, they clasp hands and 
 say to each other: "Wvr fahren nach America!" We're 
 going to America ! They may have no money, no prospects, 
 no immediate intention of going to America; but the sug- 
 gestion of going is ever-present ; and any emigration author- 
 ity knows that suggestion plays a very large part in the
 
 '64 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 tremendous mass-movements to America from Europe. 
 "Wir fahren nach America!" is more popular in Europe than 
 the phrases, "Believe me, kid!" or "I gotcha, Steve!" ever 
 were in America. 
 
 In Paris I had an interesting conversation with Mr. 
 Jacques Chapira, head of the Paris office of the Hebrew 
 Immigrant Aid Society. Mr. Chapira declared that America 
 could take in fifty million more immigrants and never notice 
 them. Such states as Nebraska, Texas, Utah and other 
 southern, middle and western states, he declared, were prac- 
 tically unpopulated and could easily absorb all the Jews in 
 the world. "America," he declared, "must keep her doors 
 open for the sake of humanity. The Statue of Liberty 
 signifies that America offers protection to those who suffer 
 in other lands, and where is there any people that have suf- 
 fered as much as the Jews? Some people talk about the 
 sufferings of the Armenians; but compared with our suf- 
 ferings, the Armenians haven't suffered at all. And I'd 
 like to see any body of Armenians that could be American- 
 ized as well or as quickly as an equal body of Jews. The 
 great trouble in America is that our people live in the slums ; 
 and that is a very easy thing to change. All that America 
 needs to do is to spend a little money to get the Hebrews 
 out on to the farms. It doesn't do a bit of good to spend a 
 lot of money trying to Americanize them. That money is 
 thrown away. If the country would spend a quarter of 
 the money to get them to farms, the results would be much 
 better." 
 
 At this point I interrupted Mr. Chapira. "I'm going to 
 ask you to forget for a moment that you are an official of 
 a Hebrew Aid Society," I told him, "and to remember only 
 that we are two American citizens talking together. Our
 
 PORTS OF EMBARKATION 65 
 
 country, as you must know, has become the home of a 
 larger number of unassimilatecl racial groups than ever 
 existed even in old Austria-Hungary. The recent Hebrew 
 immigrants, being entirely non-producers, present one of our 
 most indigestible problems. If you know anything about 
 our immigration troubles, you know that repeated efforts 
 have been made to establish Hebrew farming communities, 
 and you know that in almost every instance these communi- 
 ties have been complete and absolute failures. The United 
 States Immigration Commission found long ago that there 
 seemed to be something about the Jewish temperament that 
 made it impossible for him to be a successful farmer. They 
 want to live in cities, and they insist on living in cities. 
 You've seen the types that are rushing to our cities by the 
 thousands and the hundreds of thousands. America can 
 neither take care of them nor assimilate them. As one 
 American citizen to another, now, haven't we the right to 
 protect ourselves against this influx? Isn't it criminal not 
 to protect ourselves against it ?" 
 
 Mr. Chapira hesitated for a moment, and then he 
 answered my question in an indirect but none the less satis- 
 factory manner. People have an unpleasant habit of deny- 
 ing interviews ; and it is barely possible that some friend of 
 Mr. Chapira might take it into his head to deny that I had 
 quoted Mr. Chapira correctly. I wish to forestall any such 
 denial by stating that I am transcribing Mr. Chapira's 
 answer direct from my note-book, without embellishment 
 and without recourse to memory. 
 
 "If America would look to her own interests," said he, 
 "why doesn't she make it possible for the Jews to transfer 
 their emigration to Palestine? This should be done by 
 diplomatic procedure. The Jews are a miserable nation,
 
 66 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 and we should do something to change the situation. France 
 doesn't want them; England doesn't want them; no coun- 
 try wants them. If they started going to Palestine they 
 wouldn't go anywhere else. In six months or a year you 
 will see a great change, for they will start going to Pales- 
 tine in greater numbers. Palestine is capable of supplying 
 places for all the Jews if the economic situation there is 
 improved."* 
 
 The significant feature of Mr. Chapira's statement is 
 the admission that if America wishes to consider what is 
 best for America's interests, she must see that the Jews 
 go elsewhere. This is, of course, not only true of Jews 
 but also of all immigrants who come to America to sink 
 down in the slums and the foreign quarters. 
 
 *The gates of Palestine are barred to the type of Jew that has been 
 allowed to pour into America by the hundreds of thousands. Palestine 
 admits only the following classes of Jews: (i) Persons of independ- 
 ent means who intend to take up permanent residence in Palestine; (2) 
 members of professions who intend to follow their calling; (3) wives 
 and children and other persons wholly dependent on residents in Pales- 
 tine; (4) persons who have a definite prospect of employment with 
 specified employer or enterprise; (5) persons of religious occupation, 
 including the class of Jews who have come to Palestine in recent years 
 from religious motives, and who can show that they have means of 
 maintenance there; (6) travelers who do not propose to remain in 
 Palestine longer than three months; (7) returned residents.
 
 The Existence of an Emergency 
 
 Testimony taken by the Senate Immigration Committee in hearings 
 on the Johnson bill prohibiting immigration for one year has failed 
 to prove the existence of an emergency, according to Senators who 
 analyzed evidence submitted by more than thirty witnesses. One 
 member said that the bill would be side-tracked until the emergency 
 could be proved. 
 
 Cable despatch to The Paris Herald, January 14, 1921. 
 
 EMERGENCIES are frequently determined by the point of 
 view. A small American city which wakes up one morning 
 to find itself with two hundred cases of scarlet fever and 
 fifty cases of diphtheria on its hands is very apt in view 
 of the emergency to throw a series of epileptic fits, froth 
 largely at the mouth with fright, and disinfect everything 
 from the ornamental weather-vane on the Methodist church 
 to the pyramidal pile of iron cannon-balls on the front lawn 
 of the G. A. R. hall. By these and other protective measures 
 the epidemic is arrested and the emergency dies a sudden 
 and enthusiastic death. 
 
 Around the middle of January, 1921, I had occasion to 
 investigate the state of affairs in a Polish town* which had 
 a population of eight thousand. There were a number of 
 cases of typhus in the town. The residents themselves 
 didn't know how many, but they thought the number would 
 be about three hundred. That number, according to them, 
 
 *Kaluszyn, on the trunk road between Warsaw and Brest-Litovsk. 
 
 6 7
 
 68 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 wasn't worth considering. Typhus, like the poor, they had 
 always with them in the winter. There was a great deal of 
 diphtheria and scarlet fever in the town. The residents 
 couldn't tell me exactly how much; but there were several 
 hundred cases. Nothing serious, they insisted; only a few 
 hundred. Less than three miles away there was another 
 town, they explained, where things were worse. Practically 
 every family in that town had at least one case of typhus in 
 it. Up to the north and northeast there was cholera; but 
 it hadn't reached town yet. No emergency existed 
 for the people of that town, in their judgment. For them, 
 typhus and scarlet fever and diphtheria were old stories. 
 Each year a certain number of people had to have them and 
 a certain number had to die of them, just as part of the 
 potato crop had to freeze in the ground. Sickness was a 
 part of the scheme of things. The person who suggested to 
 them that they were confronted by an emergency would 
 have been responsible for a number of cracked lips. As a 
 matter of fact, a perpetual emergency existed for them. 
 
 In the same way, the United States has been confronted 
 by an immigration emergency for years. Starting around 
 1880, the immigrants who swarmed into the United States 
 were of an entirely different breed from the people who dis- 
 covered the country, colonized it, made its laws and devel- 
 oped it. These new and different people came in waves, like 
 the waves of an endlessly rising tide. Occasional waves 
 fell short of preceding waves; but in general they surged 
 to higher and higher levels. In the year 1905 more than 
 a million of them came more than forty army divisions. 
 It was the same in 1906. In 1907 the wave surged over the 
 million-and-a-quarter mark. In the ten years which ended 
 June 30, 1914, more than ten millions of these people had
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 69 
 
 entered the United States. They sank naturally into the 
 slums and the foreign settlements ; for the great percentage 
 of them had always lived in either city or agricultural 
 slums, and practically all of them had come to America to 
 make as much money as they could in as short a time as 
 possible, so that they were willing to sacrifice comfort and 
 cleanliness and everything else to the making of money. 
 American laborers could not compete with them. America 
 was protected from the dumping of cheap foreign goods on 
 her markets, but not from the dumping of cheap foreign 
 labor. America was protected theoretically from the physi- 
 cal diseases so prevalent in Europe, but not from the far 
 more prevalent European unrest and class hatred and 
 political ignorance and mental incapacity for national spirit. 
 Instead of being a great melting-pot which it was prior 
 to 1880 because of the similarity of the early Nordic immi- 
 grants America had become the dumping-ground for the 
 world's human riffraff, who couldn't make a living in their 
 own countries. These statements have been frequently 
 repeated; but the repetition is necessary because of the 
 peculiar success of unrestricted-immigrationists in making 
 America believe that all pre-war immigration was the 
 same and that because it was permitted before the war it 
 should be permitted to the same extent forever. There was 
 not, even during the ten years before the war, a single 
 argument favoring the continuation of immigration which 
 was based on the needs or the best interests of America. 
 Every argument in behalf of unrestricted immigration 
 favored special alien interests and special industrial inter- 
 ests; and in the minds of the persons who presented those 
 arguments there was no thought of the United States. 
 Emigration since the war from the great European
 
 70 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 emigration centers presented all of the evils of the pre-war 
 immigration plus several brand-new evils which exuded 
 viciousness from every cavity and pore. It was a poisoned 
 emigration. Practically every reliable American who has 
 seen European emigration as it was flowing at its principal 
 sources before our Emergency Immigration Law dammed 
 it temporarily will vouch for the truth of this assertion. It 
 will be vouched for by newspaper men, by consuls, by mili- 
 tary attaches, by representatives of the United States gov- 
 ernment sent to Europe for purposes of observation, by the 
 employees of steamship lines, by United States public health 
 officials, by the representatives of purely American relief 
 organizations, by American business men who are not 
 racially affiliated with the undesirable emigrants, and by 
 legations and embassies of the United States. Certain per- 
 sons who have seen European emigration at its sources will 
 deny my statements. These persons will be the officials of 
 steamship lines, a few large employers of labor, and the 
 representatives of certain relief organizations which have 
 special racial connections in Europe. All these persons will 
 deny them for the same reasons that a whisky manufacturer 
 fights any legislation which tends to cut down the consump- 
 tion of whisky. The whisky manufacturer doesn't care how 
 many persons get drunk on his product, waste the money 
 which should be spent on food and clothes, and lower their 
 reliability, decency and efficiency, so long as his distillery 
 continues to pay dividends. The whisky manufacturer may 
 be sincere in his attitude on the drink question: he may 
 actually believe that whisky is a food an elevator of ideals 
 a benefit to the human race. The advocates of unre- 
 stricted immigration may also be sincere; but the fact 
 remains that they get the money while America suffers.
 
 I
 
 t/3
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 71 
 
 Their sincerity is impregnated, so to speak, with a distinct 
 odor of fish. 
 
 The largest emigration center in Northern Europe since 
 the war has been Warsaw, the capital of Poland. Fifty 
 thousand vises were granted by the American consulate in 
 Warsaw to bearers of Polish passports during the year 
 1920. Later in 1920 the consulate improved its facilities for 
 handling emigrants, and during 1921 it was in a position to 
 grant at least one hundred thousand American vises to the 
 holders of Polish passports. These numbers, of course, do 
 not include the large number of people who traveled from 
 Poland to America on false passports, forged American 
 vises, and counterfeit American ten-dollar consular fee 
 stamps. 
 
 The majority of the people who travel on Polish pass- 
 ports are Jews. For some weeks the percentage of Jews 
 runs as high as eighty-five per cent., and for other weeks it 
 drops as low as, but never lower than, seventy-five per cent. 
 The number of vises granted by the American consulate is 
 only a very small percentage of the number it would have 
 to grant if all those who wanted to go to America were 
 given vises. But the Polish emigration officials and offi- 
 cials of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society have made 
 efforts to have the staff of the American consulate enlarged, 
 so that more emigrants can be expedited to America. 
 
 The Warsaw consulate, early in 1921, was working on 
 vises from nine o'clock in the morning until three o'clock 
 in the afternoon. The Polish emigration authorities would 
 have liked to have it work twenty-four hours a day instead 
 of six hours, so that Poland could get rid of her surplus 
 population, which is in the neighborhood of one million. 
 This is not my estimate, not the estimate of the Polish
 
 72 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 government; but the estimate of Doctor Dana Durand, a 
 distinguished economist, director of the last United States 
 census, and technical food adviser to the Polish government 
 for the Hoover Mission to Poland. Doctor Durand stated 
 to me that the economic condition of the Jews in Poland was 
 very bad; that there was not nearly enough work for all 
 of them, and that one million of them, in order to live, must 
 go elsewhere. "They would be very bad people for 
 America," said Doctor Durand, "and there isn't room for 
 them in Palestine. Where they are to go I don't know; 
 but they've got to go somewhere." 
 
 This argument is a trifle difficult for a layman to fol- 
 low. He can't understand why the Jews of Poland when 
 out of work must rush elsewhere ; for when 4,000,000 peo- 
 ple in America are jobless, nobody suggests that they ought 
 to migrate in a body. 
 
 Nevertheless, the million surplus population of Poland - 
 Jews all are the people that the Polish emigration authori- 
 ties are anxious to unload; and since America is the 
 favorite dumping-ground, they were making every ef- 
 fort to unload them in America in 1920 and early 1921. 
 An official of the Polish Department of Emigration stated 
 to an American government official in Warsaw that Poland 
 had more than its proportion of Jews; and that America, 
 having less than its proportion, is in duty bound to take 
 them off Poland's hands. The Polish official was no more 
 interested in the effect on America of such a transfer than 
 he would have been in the action of slaked lime on the 
 growth of New Zealand spinach. America may rest assured 
 that if she doesn't look out for her own interests in the 
 matter of immigration, nobody else will. 
 
 I had a long talk in January, 1921, with the Polish com- 
 missioner of emigration and his assistant. They declared
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 73 
 
 firmly and uncompromisingly that America, for humani- 
 tarian reasons, was morally obligated to admit every person 
 who has a relative in America. This is pure flapdoodle. 
 From 1905 to 1914, inclusive, over ten million aliens, 
 mostly from Central and Southeastern Europe, emigrated 
 to America. They came from the lowest layers of society; 
 and in these lowest layers one invariably finds the largest 
 families. Each one of those ten million aliens who emi- 
 grated to America had, at an absurdly low estimate, ten 
 relatives left in Europe. If, for humanitarian reasons, we 
 must take in a million or two million Polish Jews, we must 
 also take in a large slice of the population of Serbia, three- 
 quarters of a million Greeks, a million and a half Italians, a 
 couple of million Jews from Rumania, Hungary and the 
 Ukraine, and enormous numbers of other physically, mor- 
 ally and financially wrecked people of Central Europe. We 
 are not obligated to take in these people any more than we 
 are obligated to dig half of the unexploded shells out of the 
 battle-fields of Europe and bury them in our own farm- 
 lands for our own plowshares and harrows to explode. It 
 would, of course, be a nice thing to do ; but only a madman 
 would seriously insist that we ought to do it. Yet the con- 
 tinuance of immigration is a far more evil thing for 
 America than the planting of a few million unexploded shells 
 would ever be. 
 
 Advocates of unrestricted immigration frequently state 
 flatly, and always imply, that present-day emigration from 
 Europe is entirely wives to husbands or vice versa, and chil- 
 dren to parents or vice versa. This is erroneous and mis- 
 leading. Our immigration for the last thirty years has 
 always been an immigration of relatives because of the inex- 
 haustible European relative crop. The beet crop may fall 
 down with a thud ; the potato crop may freeze ; the whisker
 
 74 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 crop may be weak and backward ; but the relative crop has 
 always flourished and will always continue to flourish in 
 Europe with a luxuriance that will make the green bay- 
 tree, long noted for its flourishing powers, look like a wilted 
 lettuce-leaf. This fact was determined years ago by the 
 United States Immigration Commission. The relatives in 
 America advertised in their letters the soft jobs that were 
 to be had; and the relatives promptly came across, as one 
 might say. There is nothing about immigration, as the 
 present-day generation knows it, which demands any 
 excess of sympathy, or any rush of sentimentality to the 
 head. The figures of the Warsaw consulate for late 1920 
 and early 1921 show that of all the vises granted, twelve 
 and seven-tenths per cent, were granted to persons going to 
 husbands or wives; sixteen and two-tenths were going to 
 parents and of these, very few were minors; nine and 
 three-tenths were parents going to children ; forty-three and 
 three-tenths were going to brothers and sisters; sixteen 
 and seven-tenths were going to cousins, uncles, aunts; and 
 one and eight-tenths were going to such distant relatives 
 that one needed a telescope to discover the relationship. 
 
 In most cases the relatives to whom they claim to be 
 going are not citizens of the United States. A small per- 
 centage have their "first papers" a step toward citizenship 
 which can be taken on the day that the immigrants land in 
 America, which means next to nothing and which is only 
 too often not completed. There is no adequate humanita- 
 rian, economic or moral reason why the United States should 
 continue to admit the cousins, brothers, sisters, nieces and 
 nephews of non-citizens or of citizens either if, in the 
 opinion of competent authorities, they are undesirable. 
 This is exactly the opinion of competent authorities 
 except that none of them would phrase it so conservatively.
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 75 
 
 The type of passport in use in Poland early in 1921 was 
 especially adapted for the unloading of a surplus or undesir- 
 able population. It was not a passport at all, as we under- 
 stand it, but merely an identity card. It asked no courtesies 
 for the bearer; and in a majority of cases it even failed to 
 state his nationality or citizenship. In the case of Jews the 
 blank on the passport which was supposed to be filled in 
 with the nationality of the bearer was almost invariably 
 either left blank or filled in with the word "Jewish" or 
 "Israelite." In repeated instances persons came to the 
 American consulate with Polish passports which gave the 
 nationality of the bearers as Ruthenian or Ukrainian or Lith- 
 uanian or Russian-Polish. In other words, the Polish pass- 
 port authorities were issuing passports to people from other 
 countries. Such a passport is worth about thirty kopecks 
 in Soviet currency to the immigration authorities of a coun- 
 try which is attempting as is the United States to bar 
 undesirables. 
 
 A little later in 1921 the Polish authorities went a little 
 further and issued a new type of passport. It was exactly 
 like their other passport, except that there was no place at 
 all on it where the nationality of the bearer could be inserted. 
 The attitude of the Polish authorities, in the face of the 
 howl of protest which went up from the American consulate 
 over these burlesque passports, was that the mere possession 
 of a Polish passport should be sufficient to establish a 
 bearer's citizenship and nationality. Experience, however, 
 has repeatedly proved that it does neither. Yet if America 
 insists that nobody but Polish citizens travel on Polish 
 passports, the only result will be a tremendous traffic in 
 forged birth certificates and other documents capable of 
 proving conclusively that a Bolshevik from the Siberian
 
 76 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 tundras has really lived all his life in the shadow of War- 
 saw University. 
 
 Now the boundaries between Poland and Soviet Russia 
 are badly warped from the manner in which they have been 
 pushed in and out. To know where the boundary is at any 
 given moment, one should devote a matter of twenty-two 
 hours a day to a careful study of the boundary problem, and 
 flip a coin at the end of the day in order to decide whether 
 to make a five- or a ten-mile alteration in one's figures. 
 Americans in Poland declare that the train-cards which tell 
 the destination of trains leaving the Vienna station in War- 
 saw have to have new names painted on them every day, 
 depending on whether the Polish state happens to be expand- 
 ing or contracting at the moment. 
 
 In the vicinity of the boundary, none of the residents is 
 quite sure whether he is living in Poland or Soviet Russia 
 or Lithuania or the Ukraine. But when the Bolshevik 
 armies occupied this region in the summer of 1920, young 
 Jews by the hundreds from every town and city soaked up 
 the Bolshevik doctrines like sponges. The Bolsheviks have 
 been very successful in getting their ideas before the people; 
 because instead of depending entirely on pamphlets and 
 books and newspapers, they have distributed great numbers 
 of phonographs and phonograph records to pour the doc- 
 trines of Father Lenine and Uncle Trotsky into the flapping 
 ears of the proletariat. The young Jews ate this stuff alive, 
 as the saying goes. When the Bolshevik armies evacuated 
 the district before the Polish army, thousands of young Jews 
 went with them into Soviet Russia partly to escape the 
 vengeance which they feared the Poles might visit on them, 
 partly to escape being drawn into the Polish army, and 
 partly because they hoped to carry on small trading opera- 
 tions with the Bolshevik soldiers and with the people in the
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 77 
 
 Russian towns. These young men drifted back to their 
 homes during the winter of 1920-21, and great numbers of 
 them went straight to America. 
 
 A steady stream of Hebrew refugees also poured into 
 Poland from Soviet Russia, driven on by hunger and by pan- 
 ics to which the Jews so frequently fall victims. Our consu- 
 late in Warsaw is thoroughly familiar with these panics, 
 \vhich are of periodic occurrence. When they are in prog- 
 ress, the people are unmanageable. They scream and fight 
 and trample one another under foot at the consulate door- 
 way, and nothing but brute force has any effect upon them. 
 
 These people have provided a fertile field for Bolshevik 
 propaganda; for they have been against the ruling class 
 since time immemorial, and they have welcomed the Bol- 
 shevik doctrines as glad tidings of great cheer.* They are 
 going to America by every boat; and it is a poisoned emi- 
 gration. Emigration from these districts has always been a 
 very bad thing for America because of its non-productive 
 and parasitic nature. To-day it is rank poison. 
 
 A special investigation was made of the emigrant move- 
 ment by a man who started at Pinsk and worked his way 
 out. Pinsk is two hundred miles from Warsaw; and a good 
 part of that distance lies in Soviet Russia, The person who 
 made it was especially qualified to obtain information from 
 the people with whom he traveled. He found that large 
 numbers of the emigrants were young men of military age, 
 
 *Sir Basil Thompson, in charge of the Special Branch at Scotland 
 Yard, 1913-1921 ihe Special Branch being England's greatest pro- 
 tection against spies and other enemies within had this to say when 
 his war activities were over: "With the second Russian Revolution 
 under Lenine, which broke out in November, 1917, the real troubles of 
 the civilized world began. The reverberations were felt in every 
 country where discontent was seething; and since discontent is gen- 
 erally to be found among emigrant Jews, it was among the Jews in 
 every land that the Bolshevists found their first adherents."
 
 78 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 and that they came from districts which were directly under 
 the Bolshevik government. In the districts from which they 
 came were agents who provided them with false passports 
 and escorted them to ports of embarkation. At the ports, 
 if they were lucky, they got money from America. The 
 agent furnished them with all affidavits and papers neces- 
 sary for their travels, and usually shipped them to the 
 United States by way of Antwerp and Canada. Some were 
 going by way of Cuba and Mexico. 
 
 Almost every American government official in the north 
 of Europe received repeated proofs that at the time when 
 America was deporting Bolsheviks by tens, she was letting 
 them in by thousands. 
 
 The false passport, phony vise, fake affidavit and coun- 
 terfeit stamp business reached a high stage of development 
 in Poland. Large numbers of immigrants entered America 
 from Poland late in 1920 and early in 1921 on forged docu- 
 ments; and there won't be any perceptible diminution in 
 the graft and crookedness and chicanery until our immigra- 
 tion laws are so altered as to stop the indiscriminate influx 
 of Europe's human derelicts and to permit our immigrants 
 to be selected for certain purposes at the source. 
 
 The dealing in fraudulent passports and fraudulent pass- 
 port-accessories in Poland appeared to be limited entirely to 
 Jews. This was also true in Rumania and Hungary. Many 
 men were caught making and selling these false documents, 
 and they were always Jews. The hundreds who were caught 
 traveling on them were always Jews as well. This is not 
 anti-Jewish propaganda, but straight information obtained 
 from American consular officials. 
 
 Bolshevik organization existed in 1920 and 192! for the 
 sole purpose of railroading Bolshevik propagandists to 
 America by means of false passports and vises. One nest pf
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 79 
 
 seven dealers in false American vises was rounded up in 
 Warsaw, and six of the seven had recently come to Warsaw 
 from Soviet Russia. Most of the cases of false-passport- 
 dealing, however, are those of individuals or groups who 
 see an excellent chance to make money quickly and easily. 
 
 Early in January, 1921, an investigator started out alone 
 from the Warsaw consulate to locate dealers in fraudulent 
 passports. The only method which he used was that of 
 letting it be known that he was willing to pay for enough 
 false papers to get him to America. He was obliged to 
 dicker and haggle with each false passport merchant with 
 whom he came in contact ; and such dickering and haggling 
 take up a lot of time. Nevertheless, between two o'clock 
 on a Saturday afternoon and two o'clock on the afternoon of 
 the following day he secured enough evidence to arrest and 
 convict twenty-five dealers in fraudulent passports. 
 
 All of the twenty-five had been engaged in supplying 
 false passports, false American vises and false American 
 affidavits to emigrants for such a length of time that their 
 existence and their addresses were common knowledge in 
 Warsaw. There were hundreds of others in Warsaw alone ; 
 and in every other city and town in Poland there were other 
 shoals of them. 
 
 There was no examination of passports at ports of 
 embarkation until January, 1921. After building a very 
 cumbersome passport-control machine, in other words, we 
 voluntarily removed a few nuts, bolts, cog-wheels and cam- 
 shafts, and then wondered why it squeaked and rattled so 
 horribly whenever it moved. Early in January, 1921, the 
 Rotterdam consulate began to scrutinize the passports of all 
 emigrants boarding ships in Rotterdam. There was. at that 
 time, no such scrutiny at the other ports of embarkation 
 though the omission was ultimately rectified. As a result,
 
 8o WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 there were five ports in Northern Europe from which 
 bearers of false passports could embark with scarcely any 
 danger of detection. When they were stopped at one 
 port, they sent the information back to the place from which 
 they came; and those who followed them went to other ports. 
 A woman came down to Rotterdam from Poland with a false 
 American vise on her passport. After being questioned, she 
 was released and watched. Her first move was to go 
 straight to a telegraph office and telegraph to the man in 
 Warsaw who had provided her with the false vise that the 
 Americans had detected her. If they are stopped at all ports, 
 they will originate new schemes of getting to America if 
 our legislators are foolish enough to refuse to make immi- 
 gration a rigidly selective matter designed purely to meet 
 the needs of America. So long as immigration is a matter 
 of somebody in Europe getting a vise from an American 
 consulate, there will be bribery, corruption and the admission 
 of undesirables. Wherever there is a weak spot, it will be 
 found. A weak spot was found in one of our Northern 
 European consulates during 1920 by emigrants and strong 
 emigration interests, and the consulate almost had to be torn 
 up by the roots. 
 
 In the opinion of Americans who are competent to judge, 
 the emigration of Jews from Poland to America would be 
 reduced by more than one-half if the activities of the Hebrew 
 Immigrant Aid Society known throughout Europe as 
 "Hias" were to cease in Europe. Hias is not exactly what 
 its name implies. When an alien leaves Europe for America, 
 he is an emigrant. When he arrives in America, he is an im- 
 migrant. If Hias stopped with being an Immigrant aid so- 
 ciety, and confined its work to America alone, nobody could 
 have the slightest objection. When, however, it becomes an 
 Emigrant aid society and moves its activities to Europe, it
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 81 
 
 automatically becomes an artificial stimulator of emigra- 
 tion ; and stimulated emigration has always been recognized 
 by every immigration authority in America as a very offen- 
 sive and undesirable thing. It was offensive and undesirable 
 in the past because those who left their homes to go to 
 America did not do so in answer to an economic demand in 
 this country, and because America was in no way benefited 
 by them. The Jews who are coming to America to-day are 
 through no fault of their own undesirable for these 
 reasons and for several others as well. In the old days there 
 were two great stimulators of emigration in Central and 
 Southeastern Europe: the transportation agents and the 
 labor agents. The work of these agents in stimulating emi- 
 gration was characterized by the United States Commis- 
 sioner General of Immigration in 1909 as a "crying shame." 
 Hias is as much of an emigration stimulator in the sections 
 where it operates as transportation agents and labor agents 
 were before their activities became illegal and were for- 
 bidden. Hias does a great amount of good for the helpless, 
 pauperized and resourceless Jewish emigrants who are rush- 
 ing out of Europe ; but it does a terrible wrong to America 
 by assisting them to come in such great numbers. 
 
 Information concerning the activities of Hias is spread 
 through Poland by word of mouth, by letters from friends 
 and relatives who have been helped by it, and by a newspaper 
 published in Warsaw called Die Emigrant. This paper is 
 said to be published by private enterprise; but it is mostly 
 devoted to the activities of the Hias organization. Its chief 
 purpose is to provide prospective emigrants with informa- 
 tion as to how to get to America. It was first published in 
 December, 1920; and the first edition of eleven thousand 
 copies was sold in about three hours. 
 
 The American flag floats from a flagstaff above the door
 
 82 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 of the Hias office in Warsaw, and when conditions are 
 normal, as they were in early 1921 under this flag pass one 
 thousand prospective Hebrew emigrants every day. Every 
 one of the thousand is ruthlessly selfish, and is determined 
 as the Warsaw head of the Hias organization stated to 
 get there first. Nevertheless, the struggling, excited, irri- 
 tating crowd is handled quietly, expeditiously and patiently 
 by Hias. It is a remarkably efficient and excellent organiza- 
 tion ; and the work for which it exists could not be done in a 
 more capable and praiseworthy manner. 
 
 When the doors of the Hias office are thrown open every 
 morning and the struggling crowd claws and fights its way 
 up the twisted stairway that leads from the courtyard to 
 the offices, each applicant is given a green card, a red card, 
 or a blue card, depending on whether he has come to cable 
 to his relatives in America, to get money which has been sent 
 from America, or to get his passport. At the top of the stair- 
 way the applicants are separated into green, blue or red 
 lines, given numbers and passed through in order. 
 
 In the cable-room they pass before a long desk behind 
 which Hias employees take the names of the emigrants' rela- 
 tives in America and write cables asking for money. At the 
 same time the cables are registered; and a glance at the 
 Hias card-index system shows the number of a given case, 
 the date on which the cable was sent, the name of the emi- 
 grant who sent the cable, the name of the person in America 
 to whom it was sent, the name of the employee who wrote 
 the cable for the emigrant and the amount of money asked 
 for. Later the emigrant returns for the answer. He pre- 
 sents his numbered card at the cashier's window, and if the 
 Hias checking system shows that he is the right person, he 
 gets his money in American dollars. Seventy per cent, of
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 83 
 
 those who cable receive favorable replies in from eight days 
 to three weeks. 
 
 If no answer is received to the cable in three weeks' time, 
 the Hias organization takes the matter up once more. 
 Another cable is sent. If that goes unanswered the War- 
 saw Hias sends an executive cable to the New York Hias. 
 This cable goes every day, and contains the names of all 
 those who should have answered by that time, but haven't 
 done so. Thus, the Warsaw cable will contain the phrase 
 "Jacob Goldberg sent cable Samuel Goldberg for $300. 
 Locate." Samuel Goldberg may be a resident of New York 
 or of Chicago or of Detroit. Wherever he may be, an 
 American Hias office gets in touch with him and asks 
 bruskly why he hasn't answered the request of Jacob Gold- 
 berg for three hundred dollars. Samuel Goldberg's address 
 may have changed. If that has happened, the Hias 
 organization in America sends out special messengers, 
 locates his new address and tells him to hurry up and answer 
 Jacob Goldberg's cable. If he is still reluctant, Hias works 
 on his sympathies by telling him of the sufferings which 
 Jacob Goldberg is undergoing. Almost invariably the 
 money is sent; of course, through Hias. Doctor Schluger, 
 head of the Warsaw Hias, told me that during December, 
 1920, Hias paid out half a million American dollars to 
 emigrants. 
 
 It has been quite a task, occasionally, for Hias to locate 
 enough American dollars to pay out the large amounts 
 cabled to its clients. Accordingly it has entered into an 
 arrangement with the steamship companies whereby, 
 instead of paying the whole sum in cash, it pays part cash 
 and the remainder in an order on a steamship company for 
 a ticket. If the emigrant is robbed, then, he only loses a
 
 84 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 part of his money, since the steamship order can be stopped. 
 
 Great numbers of affidavits are constantly received at 
 the Hias office for Polish Jews whose relatives wish them 
 to come to America. In many cases the persons for whom 
 they are intended are not registered with Hias. In these 
 cases, through its correspondence department, Hias locates 
 them. It maintains standing advertisements in all the Jewish 
 newspapers in Warsaw setting forth, in three columns, the 
 names of the persons for whom affidavits, money and steam- 
 ship tickets are waiting. 
 
 All the detail work in connection with securing pass- 
 ports from the Polish government for Jews is done by 
 Hias. It takes the applications and the necessary documents 
 from its clients, bunches them, presents them to the proper 
 Polish authorities; and all that the clients need to do is to 
 come around on the proper day and collect them. 
 
 According to the Polish law, an emigrant must have his 
 steamship ticket before he can get his vise to leave Poland. 
 When Hias has secured the steamship tickets for its clients, 
 the clients go to the Hias office and make a formal appli- 
 cation for a vise. At the end of each day all of the vise 
 applications are tied up and carried to the Polish emigration 
 office; and there, without further inquiry or formality, vises 
 are issued to every one whose application has been presented 
 by Hias. To all extents and purposes, the Hebrew Immi- 
 grant Aid Society might as well be issuing Polish vises; 
 and the Polish government could easily cut down overhead 
 expenses without relinquishing much of its present passport 
 control by moving its emigration offices down to a corner 
 of one of the Hias offices and allowing Hias officials to 
 undertake the onerous work of shoving out both passports 
 and vises. An attempt was actually made by the Hebrew
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 85 
 
 Immigration Aid Society to persuade the Department of 
 State of the United States to allow American vises to be 
 issued by Hias officials in Europe without interference by 
 American consuls, so that Jews would not be put to the 
 annoyance of going all the way to an American consulate 
 and of standing in line in order to get an American vise. 
 
 The Hias organization is one of the smoothest and most 
 capable travel agencies that ever operated. If its operations 
 should continue to develop in the future with the same over- 
 whelming success that characterized them during the year 
 1920, and if the United States doesn't produce less talk and 
 more action as regards immigration, a majority of the 
 Jewish population of Europe will be transferred to America 
 in one of the most stupendous Cook's tours ever known. 
 The organization is so strong, so efficient and so energetic 
 that no other people can compete with the Jews in the mat- 
 ter of emigration to America. 
 
 Any ordinary quarters in Warsaw are quite incapable 
 of accommodating the howling, fighting, frantic crowds 
 that have been known to besiege the American consulate. 
 During the Bolshevik advance in the summer of 1920, 
 crowds of five thousand Jews, mad with fear of what 
 the Bolsheviks and the Poles together might do to them, and 
 made doubly unmanageable by their incredible and ruthless 
 selfishness, almost wrecked the consulate repeatedly. In 
 order to get this crowd under cover, the consulate secured 
 an enormous cement-floored, glass-roofed market known 
 as St. George's Bazaar. This is Warsaw's kosher meat 
 market. From half past three in the afternoon till night it 
 is filled with yelling, shrieking butchers and meat-sellers and 
 meat-buyers. Beeves hang from the hooks of movable 
 racks, and the floor is slippery with blood. From nine in
 
 86 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 the morning until three in the afternoon it is the vise office 
 of the American consulate. A triple line of people starts 
 in the middle of the cement floor, twists around in a long 
 queue to a staircase leading to the gallery which surrounds 
 the market, extends up the staircase, along sixty yards of 
 the gallery, and into the offices themselves.* 
 
 There is almost as much bribery and corruption con- 
 nected with the emigrant lines at the Warsaw consulate as 
 there is everywhere else in Poland. The moral breakdown 
 in Europe, coupled with the extreme need for money which 
 exists on every hand, has made bribery an accepted part of 
 the daily existence for people who want to get results in any 
 part of Central Europe. The price of a hotel room in War- 
 saw may be only two or three hundred Polish marks a day ; 
 but in order to get it one must distribute bribes ranging from 
 ten thousand to fifty thousand marks. This isn't quite as 
 imposing as it sounds; for in January of 1921 there were 
 times when one American dollar would purchase one thou- 
 sand marks, and a dinner for four people at a good restau- 
 rant frequently cost six or seven thousand marks. t Conse- 
 quently, every one needs all the money he can get in order 
 to live. Hallway porters accept bribes for a train-seat, and 
 then sell the same seat to persons who offer higher bribes. 
 The conductor will then accept a fat bribe from Briber 
 No. i and eject Briber No. 2 from his seat. When one goes 
 to his hotel at night, he bribes the hall porter to let him in ; 
 
 *Late in 1921, the sanitation authorities of the City of Warsaw re- 
 fused to allow this market to be used by emigrants to America be- 
 cause of the fact that they contaminated the meat. The vise office 
 therefore had to be moved back to the consulate, where there is noth- 
 ing to contaminate but American consular officers. 
 
 fit is impossible to keep up with the rapid descent of the Polish 
 mark. In September, 1921, one American dollar would buy 5,000 
 Polish marks.
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 87 
 
 and when he gets to his room he must slip the floor porter 
 a few hundred marks to turn on the electricity long enough 
 to let him see where the chambermaid has concealed his 
 pajamas and if he doesn't slip him enough he'll have to 
 park his trousers on the floor and feel his way to bed 
 through the murk of a Polish hotel-room, thick with a cab- 
 bage-soupy and a Noah's-arkish odor. Even carriage driv- 
 ers must be bribed to make a trip. 
 
 It is no wonder, with the existence of such an atmos- 
 phere, that there is crookedness in the consulate lines. There 
 are persons connected with the buildings in which the lines 
 assemble who sell advantageous places ; even the police, put 
 there by the government to protect the emigrants and keep 
 order among them, have been as guilty as the most grasping 
 janitor. The subordinate personnel of the consulate has 
 succumbed at times; for many of the consular employees 
 must from necessity be local talent, and are therefore some- 
 times susceptible to bribery. The consulate has done its best 
 to stop the graft and the fighting in the lines. It issues num- 
 bered cards to a certain number of applicants a day from 
 three to five hundred of them. These cards entitle the bear- 
 ers to return a few days later to file their applications for 
 vises. They are issued in series, so that any tampering with 
 the number of the card is instantly obvious. One day after 
 their second visit the applicants return and receive their 
 passports duly stamped with American vises. Thus the 
 consulate is no longer besieged by crowds too large to 
 handle. The Polish Emigration Bureau and Hias, however, 
 protest bitterly because the consulate will not employ a larger 
 staff and consequently handle larger numbers of emigrants. 
 If the Warsaw consulate employed a thousand persons on 
 vise work, Poland would still grumble because America
 
 88 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 wasn't taking- undesirables off her hands with sufficient 
 rapidity. 
 
 About twelve hours due north of Warsaw, on the Baltic, 
 lies the ancient city of Danzig, which, six or seven hundred 
 years ago, was one of the chief strongholds of the original 
 League of Nations, known as the Hanseatic League, and a 
 popular hang-out for the romantic but hard-boiled Robber 
 Knights. Danzig is in East Prussia, and East Prussia fits 
 down into the top of goblet-shaped Poland as an egg fits 
 into an egg-cup. It used to be the ancient seaport of Poland ; 
 but now it is entirely Germanized. Consequently it has been 
 made a free city, and belongs neither to Germany nor to 
 Poland. For the tourist it is a fascinating city on account 
 of its seven-hundred-year-old brick cathedral and brick 
 grain-elevator, its amber shops with amber newly fished out 
 of the BaltiCj its jazzy cabarets and restaurants. Most of 
 the Northern European cities seem cold and gray and 
 depressing to a traveler; but Danzig seems warmer and 
 more colorful possibly because of its ancient bricks and 
 the soft golds of its amber. For emigrants, however, Dan- 
 zig is a complete frost. If you tried to tell them anything 
 about its warm reds and its soft golds, they would stare at 
 you wildly and wonder whether or not you were on the 
 verge of becoming violent. 
 
 Among the emigrants especially among the emigrants 
 who have never been there Danzig has a horrible reputa- 
 tion. They speak of it with the same loathing with which 
 the members of a Maine Dorcas Society might speak of a 
 pool-room where there were Unspeakable Goings On. Emi- 
 grants in Paris and Antwerp, who had sedulously avoided 
 Danzig in their travels from Poland, fairly shook in their 
 shoes with reflected terror as they told me wild tales of the
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 89 
 
 atrocities and indignities inflicted on Polish Jews by Poles 
 on the journey between Warsaw and Danzig, and in Dan- 
 zig- itself. Mr. Chapira, head of the Hebrew Immigrant 
 Aid Society in Paris, told me that the "situation in Danzig 
 is miserable, and Jewish emigrants would rather see them- 
 selves dead than pass through Polish jurisdiction." 
 
 In 1921, nevertheless, about three thousand emigrants 
 were concentrated in Danzig every week, and between 
 eighty and ninety per cent, of them were Jews. 
 
 They travel up from Warsaw in special emigrant trains, 
 which pass straight through and are not subject to examina- 
 tion or interference. There is no mistreatment of any emi- 
 grants on these trains. The emigrants themselves state that 
 this is so, as well as all officials, American, Jewish and 
 Polish. The emigration camp at Danzig is not under Pol- 
 ish supervision, but under the supervision of the City of 
 Danzig. The officials and the employees are German, and 
 the camp is run to conform as nearly as possible to the sug- 
 gestions of the United States Public Health Service, which 
 is represented at the camp every day and all day by a watch- 
 ful and efficient American medical officer. This young 
 man is extremely unpopular, professionally, with the steam- 
 ship agents in Danzig. They are anxious, of course, to ship 
 as many passengers as possible to America, and they find 
 it very irritating when an American public health official 
 says coldly and inflexibly that unless emigrants are properly 
 deloused, he won't put his O. K. on the ships' papers. 
 Steamship agents in Europe wouldn't have the slightest 
 objection to shipping all the typhus lice in Europe to America 
 if they could ship them on steerage passengers. 
 
 When the emigrants arrive in Danzig, they are met by 
 employees of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and con-
 
 90 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 ducted to the Troyl Emigrant Camp. As they arrive in the 
 camp, they are sent at once to the delousing stations. Their 
 baggage and heavy outer wraps are put in small rooms and 
 heavily gassed in order to destroy the lice and the germs 
 that are usually present. The gassing is accomplished by 
 tightly sealing up the rooms, attaching tubes to small holes 
 in the doors and forcing hydrocyanic acid and chlorene gas 
 through the tubes. Heartrending to quote the leading 
 sob-artists scenes are witnessed when the emigrants gather 
 around the doors and almost go mad in their fear that 
 something may have happened to their favorite shawls and 
 overcoats. When the doors are thrown open, they fight 
 frantically with the guards to get in at once and claim their 
 belongings. When prevented, for fear they may be gassed, 
 their moans and tears would convince almost any passer-by 
 that they were being hideously maltreated. 
 
 No matter how late at night the emigrants may arrive 
 at the camp, the fires are kindled in the delousers and the 
 crowd is put through its first delousing. Later the emi- 
 grants are deloused a second time to make sure of the nits 
 which hatched out after the first session. I first visited the 
 Troyl Camp in the early afternoon, and there was no activity 
 in the first delousing hut at which I stopped. I asked the 
 ponderous German in charge of the boilers why business was 
 so slack. He replied that five hundred and fifty emigrants 
 had arrived at the camps on the preceding day, that they 
 started through the delousing hut at four o'clock in the 
 afternoon, and that the whole plant had been running at top 
 speed until six o'clock that morning. During the Bolshevik 
 drive in the summer of 1920 the emigrants poured into Dan- 
 zig in panic-stricken streams. The capacity of the Troyl 
 Camp is three thousand ; but at one time during that period
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 91 
 
 there were seven thousand of them crammed into every nook 
 and corner. The delousers cracked under the strain and the 
 camp got lousy. Since then they have taken as few chances 
 as possible. 
 
 The delousing to which all emigrants passing through 
 Danzig are obliged to submit appears to be one of the chief 
 reasons for the bad reputation which Danzig has among 
 Hebrew emigrants. The Jews object strenuously to being 
 deloused, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society constantly 
 brings pressure to bear on the emigrant camp officials and 
 on the United States public health officer to modify the 
 quarantine regulations or to exempt individual emigrants 
 from delousing for various reasons. The claim is always 
 made that the persons for whom the favors are asked are 
 free from lice. The claim is erroneous ninety-nine times 
 out of a hundred. 
 
 There are many ports in Europe where the precautionary 
 measures and the medical examinations are far less efficient 
 than at Danzig. Cholera had broken out in the northeastern 
 part of Poland; and during the week of January 9, 1921, 
 alone, there were thirty-two emigrants destined for America 
 from the cholera-infected districts of Grodno, Vilna and 
 Buszasz. Yet in January, 1921, there were only two 
 European ports where the question of isolating and watching 
 the emigrants from cholera districts had even been con- 
 sidered. The United States is a great and progressive 
 nation, but it has been even more flabby in protecting its 
 citizens against the filth-peril of Eastern Europe than it was 
 in preparing itself against the military peril of the Central 
 Powers when war was inevitable. And that, for flabbiness, 
 would make a dead eel look to its laurels. 
 
 There are some other jolly little diseases rolling around
 
 92 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Eastern Europe which unless the immigrant streams are 
 permanently dammed will be brought to America in due 
 season and presented to our citizens with the best wishes of 
 the World's Greatest Mess. Encephalitis is one of them. It 
 is becoming quite a popular disease in the sections from 
 which most of our immigrants come. It starts with hiccups 
 and ends with paralysis. The Plague is another that ought 
 to be due to arrive in our midst fairly soon unless our 
 legislators cease to exude hot air on the subject of immigra- 
 tion and take a few of the steps which should have been 
 taken a score of years ago. 
 
 When the men's hair has been clipped, they are made to 
 go under hot showers and soap themselves thoroughly. 
 Apparently it is the first bath that some of them ever had 
 in their lives. Many of the men are suffering from what 
 the doctors call Vagabond Disease. This is the result of 
 years of dirt and the bites of an unknown amount of vermin ; 
 and the person who has it might with reason be dubbed 
 "hard-bitten." The skin of those who have it is covered 
 with grayish-brown patches and is tough and leathery. 
 Many of the older women have bathed so seldom that their 
 skins are almost battle-ship gray in color. 
 
 One of the features of the delousing plant which a lay- 
 man can not understand no matter how often he is told 
 is the reason why men's heads are clipped to remove lice and 
 nits, but why women's heads are not also clipped and why 
 old men with luxuriant beards are not obliged to shave. In 
 the latter cases, the old men insist that they are entitled to 
 retain their beards for religious reasons. If, in the opinion 
 of delousing experts, this argument is all right, there seems 
 to be no reason why middle-aged and young men should not 
 be allowed to retain their hair and incidentally their nits 
 for sentimental reasons.
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 93 
 
 The Danzig Emigrant Camp is run by the city of Dan- 
 zig primarily as a money-making venture. Each emigrant 
 pays sixty German marks for his first delousing and another 
 sixty for his second treatment. For food each adult pays 
 thirty German marks a day, while the children are fed for 
 eighteen marks a day. There are a great many emigrants 
 who haven't enough money to meet these charges. The 
 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society has an agreement with the 
 directors of the emigration camp whereby the loss resulting 
 from inability on the part of emigrants to pay for delousing, 
 lodging and subsistence shall be met by the two organiza- 
 tions on a fifty-fifty basis. The secretary for Europe of 
 the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society informed an American 
 official late in 1920 that they had paid two such bills of over 
 half a million marks apiece, to say nothing of smaller ones. 
 
 A striking example of the infectious nature of emigra- 
 tion may be seen in Danzig. As things go in Europe, Dan- 
 zig is a pretty good city in which to live. Prices aren't out 
 of reach, and work is fairly plentiful. Yet the desire on the 
 part of the German residents to emigrate to America is prac- 
 tically universal. It is said that of the hundreds of 
 employees in the Emigration Camp, there isn't one, from the 
 surgeons and nurses down to the cooks, who isn't obsessed 
 with the idea of getting to America. They talk about it all 
 the time, and they attempt to enlist the assistance of every 
 American with whom they come in contact. 
 
 I talked with a great many of the American-bound emi- 
 grants at the Troyl Camp, confining myself mostly to the 
 men between eighteen and forty years of age. Men of this 
 age seemed to comprise about two-fifths of the entire num- 
 ber. The women and old men were usually going to join 
 close relatives, and agreed that Poland was a good place to
 
 94 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 get away from because of the difficulty of getting food 
 and clothes. 
 
 The young men were universal in declaring that business 
 was terrible, and that they were going to America for more 
 business. The fact that a few million men are out of work 
 in America means nothing whatever to them. Every one 
 to whom I talked was confident that he could find something 
 to do. Every one was going to a large city, where he had 
 a relative. One morning, at the Troyl Camp, I had a semi- 
 circle of nineteen young men in front of me answering ques- 
 tions. I asked them the question "Where are you going?" 
 and told them to answer in turn. The answers were as 
 follows: "New York, New York, Brooklyn, New York. 
 Wheeling, New York, Chicago, Brooklyn, Detroit, New 
 York, Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, New York, 
 New York, Chicago, Brooklyn, Boston, New York." If 
 their answers had ended with Philadelphia instead of New 
 York, I might have thought I was listening to a report on 
 the standing of the clubs in some sort of Big League free- 
 for-all. In the same way they told me the relatives to whom 
 they were going, and my note-book showed the following 
 answers: "Sister-in-law, sister-in-law, brother, brother-in- 
 law, cousin, sister, cousin, cousin, uncle, brother, aunt, aunt, 
 sister-in-law, uncle, sister, cousin, cousin, cousin, uncle." I 
 questioned several other clusters of young men on that day 
 and on other days, and the results were practically identical 
 with the ones I have quoted. 
 
 We spoke about schools in America. It was the general 
 understanding of the men with families that the Jewish 
 language is taught in Jewish schools in America at the public 
 expense. I told them that this was not so. They said that 
 they were very sorry that it wasn't so, and that they would
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 95 
 
 overcome the difficulty by teaching their children Hebrew 
 in their homes when the American schools were closed for 
 the day. One of the clusters with which I talked touched 
 on the subject of fighting; and its members were unanimous 
 in declaring that nothing on earth would make them fight 
 for Poland. Poland, they said, did not give them equal 
 rights with the Poles. I went into the matter with two of 
 the men who lived in the town of Myszyniecz which may 
 not be the way to spell it, but which was as much of it as I 
 could disentangle from the cloud of "y's" and "z's" which 
 they hurled at me. They said that there were many more 
 Jews in the town than Poles almost fifty Jews for every 
 Pole, but that they never tried to vote at elections for fear 
 the Poles might hurt them or something. I asked if any- 
 body had been killed in the town within their memory, and 
 they said that nobody had been. They simply didn't wish 
 to take a chance on voting. Needless to point out, we have 
 had the same situation in the South for a long time. One 
 of the pair, after a moment's meditation, remarked that he 
 had never wanted to vote, anyway. The rest of the assem- 
 blage then gave him the loud and raucous laugh. 
 
 I asked them the usual question about fighting for 
 America. They agreed that they probably would, but that 
 a great deal depended on the way they were treated. If 
 they liked the way they were treated, they would ; but if they 
 didn't like it, America would have to win her battles without 
 their help. When I asked them what constituted good 
 treatment, according to their ideas, they refused to commit 
 themselves. It was agreed among them that if they were 
 absolutely forced to decide between fighting for the Rus- 
 sians, the Germans, the Bolsheviks and the Poles, they'd 
 pick the Germans.
 
 96 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 The conversation gave one of the circle an acute pain. 
 "Why all this talk ?" he inquired pettishly. "I don't go to 
 America to fight, but to earn money." Under the circum- 
 stances, his observation seemed to be fair enough. 
 
 I wish to repeat with all possible emphasis a statement 
 which I have made many times before, and which a pro- 
 longed investigation of post-war emigration from the Baltic 
 to the Balkans has continued to confirm : The tremendous 
 movement of people from Europe to America which has been 
 in progress for the last twenty years, and the even more tre- 
 mendous one which is in prospect unless immigration is 
 restricted with an iron hand, is purely, simply and solely 
 an economic movement. It is a movement which must 
 not be misrepresented by sentimentalists and near-Americans 
 as being a movement of oppressed people in search of relig- 
 ious or any other freedom. It must not be misrepresented as 
 a sentimental journey to long-lost and passionately-missed 
 relatives. It is a movement to a better job: a movement 
 from the worst of economic conditions to the best of 
 economic conditions : a movement of people from the lowest 
 social and economic layer of Europe to a country where 
 European standards of living are a menace to workmen, 
 health and institutions. Since this emigration is what it is, 
 our lawmakers not only have every right in the world to 
 control it in every respect and to cut it down to the irreduc- 
 ible minimum, but they also owe it to their country and to 
 their people to see that it is so controlled and cut down. And 
 it might also be mentioned that they owe it to their children 
 to see that the America in which they will have to live shall 
 not be misruled and ruined by the mongrelization which 
 must inevitably result from the promiscuous cross-breeding 
 in America of every race in existence.
 
 THE EXISTENCE OF AN EMERGENCY 97 
 
 America is confronted by a perpetual emergency as long 
 as her laws permit millions of non-Nordic aliens to pour 
 through her sea-gates. When this inpouring ceases to be an 
 emergency, America will have become thoroughly mon- 
 grelized, and will no longer be the America of Washington, 
 Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, Emerson, Lowell, 
 
 Holmes The climate and scenery of America have no 
 
 more power to counteract the inevitable ruin, corruption and 
 stagnation which follow cross-breeding than the climate and 
 scenery of Central Italy had to perpetuate the genius of the 
 ancient Romans or than the climate and scenery of the At- 
 tic plain had to perpetuate the glories of the ancient 
 Athenians.* 
 
 *In the light of the above chapter, the two following newspaper 
 extracts are of marked interest: 
 
 "Washington, Oct. 12, 1921 There were 425,022 persons ten years 
 of age and over in the State of New York in 1920 unable to write in 
 any language, according to figures made public to-day by the Census 
 Bureau. The percent-age of illiteracy for ten years or over was 5.1 
 compared with 5.5 in 1910. The native whites of native parentage 
 listed as illiterates numbered 16,150, those of foreign or mixed 
 parentage 12,256 and the foreign born 389,603. Less illiteracy in the 
 rural districts than in the cities was shown. In New York City there 
 were 281,121 illiterates of whom 270,788 were foreign-born whites. 
 The percentage was 6.2. 
 
 "The population of the State in 1920 was 71.1 per cent, native white, 
 and 26.8 foreign-born white. Hardly more than one-third (36.1 per 
 cent.) of the white people in the state were native Americans born 
 of native parents, the total native whites of native parents being 
 3,668,266, while the foreign element was represented by 2,786,112 
 foreign-born whites, 2,844,083 native whites who had foreign-born 
 parents, and 873,566 who had one parent foreign-born, the other being 
 native. The population included 198483 negroes and 8,000 Orientals. 
 The Boston Transcript. 
 
 "New York, Feb. 13, 1921 Additional restrictions on immigration 
 from Europe such as Congress has been requested to impose were 
 denounced in vigorous terms by speakers at a mass meeting of 5,000 
 persons in the New York Hippodrome this afternoon. The audience 
 applauded the speakers frantically. The meeting was held under the 
 auspices of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society." 
 The Paris Herald.
 
 98 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 The future of America depends on the men she breeds. 
 God has not given to America a special brand of ozone that 
 enables her to ride triumphant over the laws of nature ; and 
 the hazy dreams of sentimentalists and the partisan desires 
 of alien societies are poor substitutes for straight thinking 
 and the inflexible rules of biology.
 
 The Remedy 
 
 AN immigration law, to be of any value to the American 
 people, must do certain things and do them in such a way 
 that Polish-American Societies and Italian-American 
 Societies and Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid 
 Societies can not, by exerting an un-American but strongly 
 efficacious influence on senators, representatives, and other 
 government officials, make jokes out of them as they made 
 jokes out of the provisions our immigration laws all through 
 1919 and 1920. 
 
 An efficacious immigration law, in order to be worth 
 more than the conventional sour grapes, must ( I ) allow only 
 a fixed number of immigrants to enter America each year, 
 (2) accept as immigrants only those persons who are essen- 
 tial to the well-being of the country, (3) keep them away 
 from the slums, and (4) get them to that section of the 
 country where they are needed. There is a simple solution 
 to this problem, evolved by a few practical American immi- 
 gration experts who have been given a more comprehensive 
 view of immigration since the war than any other American 
 immigration investigators or observers have ever had. 
 
 The first step of the solution calls for a radical change 
 in the agencies which control immigration. 
 
 Hitherto the regulation of immigration has been in the 
 hands of the Department of State and the Department of 
 
 99
 
 ioo WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Labor. The Department of State, through its consuls in 
 Europe, attends to investigating prospective immigrants 
 and to placing on their passports the vises which permit 
 them to proceed to a United States port. The Department 
 of Labor rejects or accepts the immigrants at the port of 
 entry and turns them loose on the country. 
 
 The Department of State has only been in genuine con- 
 tact with immigration since passport control of immigrants 
 came into effect with the war. The size and character of 
 the immigration didn't burst dazzlingly on it until 1920, 
 when ships formerly used for transports and hospital ships 
 were put back into passenger service and so caused immi- 
 grants to flock to consular offices for permission to go to 
 America. The flood was so sudden and so overwhelming 
 that it completely numbed the department. All through 
 1920, when liners filled with immigrants were lying in 
 rnid-stream off Ellis Island because Ellis Island was so 
 crammed with immigrants that it couldn't handle the rush, 
 the Department of State was pressing its cold hand to its 
 hot brow and wondering what was hitting it. In the sum- 
 mer of 1920 it had recovered sufficiently to realize that 
 immigration was the biggest thing it had ever tackled. In 
 the autumn it was able to sit up groggily and send one man 
 to Europe on a hurried trip to look over the immigrant situa- 
 tion. 
 
 The Consular Service of the United States in Europe is 
 an important adjunct of the Department of State. It was 
 brought to a high state of efficiency during the war, and 
 was in a position to be of inestimable value to American 
 business men and to the country at large after the war. In 
 1920, because of the enormous amount of vise work which 
 had to be done in practically every consulate, the United
 
 THE REMEDY 101 
 
 States Consular Service in Europe had degenerated into an 
 organization which was merely doing the dirty work for the 
 Department of Labor. Consular offices in Europe had 
 become places to be shunned by American business men in 
 search of information or assistance. Consular desks were 
 piled high with letters from American business men which 
 the consuls could find no time to answer. Just before the 
 emergency immigration law went into effect in the summer 
 of 1921, the American consulate in Prague, Czecho- 
 slovakia, was so loaded with vise work that practically all 
 other work had been suspended; in the Bucharest consulate 
 the office files and accounts were months out of date and 
 no commercial work whatever was being done; in the 
 Athens consulate the vise work had almost completely 
 wrecked the getting out of commercial and crop reports; 
 in Danzig the consulate had been so busy with vises that 
 the gathering of commercial reports had been impossible; 
 in Zagreb, Jugo-Slavia, the immigrants haunted the con- 
 sulate in such numbers that only the absolutely necessary 
 notarial work could be done in addition to the vise work; 
 in Warsaw at a time when Poland was making important 
 contracts with foreign countries, so that all the consulates 
 should have been devoting themselves to gathering business 
 information, the American consulate had a staff of fifty- 
 three persons, and forty-nine of the fifty-three were work- 
 ing exclusively on vises ; in Vienna no work other than vise 
 work could be done unless the entire consulate staff worked 
 at night and on Sundays. The staffs couldn't be increased 
 because the Congressional , appropriation for the Consular 
 Service had been entirely used up. 
 
 The Department of Labor ostensibly is in charge of 
 immigration. The fact of the matter is that the Department
 
 102 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 of Labor, after years of association with the subject, knows 
 no more about immigration except after the arrival of im- 
 migrants in American ports than it knows about the habits 
 of the Viviparous Blenny or the gambling systems in vogue 
 at Monte Carlo. The Department of Labor has to do with 
 labor; and immigration, as constituted in the present age, 
 has about as much in common with labor as could be placed 
 on the point of a No. 10 needle. Though the Department of 
 Labor was ostensibly in charge of immigration for many 
 years, it made no effort to acquaint itself with the changes 
 in immigration movements until it sent the Commissioner 
 General of Immigration aboard on a flying trip as late as 
 December, 1920. It has never made any effective effort to 
 remedy the glaring and obvious evils which resulted from 
 immigration. Labor, as a whole, is seldom right in its posi- 
 tions. Labor has been strongly anti-immigrant for purely 
 selfish reasons not from any idea of bettering the nation, 
 but because it wanted less cheap competition and has hap- 
 pened to take the right position. The Department of Labor, 
 under the Wilson administration, consistently refused to 
 place a broad construction on the immigration laws, and so 
 bungled matters that great numbers of people who should 
 have been kept out by our immigration laws were allowed 
 to pass freely into America. This is liable to happen under 
 any administration. There is no more reason for the 
 Department of Labor to have jurisdiction over immigration 
 than there is for a Bureau of Fisheries to have control of the 
 Prohibition Enforcement laws. 
 
 It is generally conceded by immigration authorities that 
 Italy, of all the nations, has the best emigration laws, and 
 has devoted more time and thought to the subject of emigra- 
 tion than all the other nations put together. Italy has placed
 
 THE REMEDY 103 
 
 her Bureau of Emigration under the Foreign Office (which 
 corresponds to our State Department) ; for it is a matter 
 which has to do with international relations. The idea of plac- 
 ing her emigration bureau under the Department of Labor 
 would strike Italy as an absurdity, because she has studied 
 the subject and knows that it is more than an internal matter. 
 Italy, however, is in a different position from the United 
 States as regards immigration. The movement of the 
 Italian people is, to all extents, entirely outward; whereas 
 with the United States it is almost entirely the incoming 
 masses of foreigners that are causing all the trouble. The 
 United States has nearly reached the end of her immigration 
 rope, and has got to stop immigration, even though our more 
 recent citizens of alien descent protest bitterly against the 
 stopping. If the Bureau of Immigration were under the 
 Department of State which corresponds to the Italian 
 Foreign Office and the machinery for stopping immigra- 
 tion were regulated by consuls or other State Department 
 employees, there would be constant friction between foreign 
 governments and our State Department representatives in 
 Europe. Since our State Department representatives are in 
 Europe to get various forms of information for the United 
 States, their sources of information would be gradually 
 closed to them, and their ultimate fate would be to sit 
 stupidly around their embassies and consulates and wait for 
 the natives of the country in which they were sitting to vent 
 their displeasure at America by heaving a few bombs 
 through their windows or taking a few pot shots at them 
 as the Italians did to our consul in Trieste during the latter 
 part of 1920, or as the Socialists of various countries did to 
 various diplomatic and consular officials late in 1921 over 
 the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
 
 104 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 European governments can not understand that America 
 has the right to safeguard herself against undesirable immi- 
 gration by any means she chooses to employ. America raises 
 the price of a vise in order to keep out a few immigrants : 
 European countries especially the new and fat-headed 
 ones promptly raise the price of their vises to Americans 
 alone as a retaliatory measure. America wants no more 
 shoals of foreigners cramming her slums, lowering her 
 standards of living, mongrelizing her population and sowing 
 the seeds of European instability, unrest and national hatred 
 among her population. Yet the Europeans insist on com- 
 ing; fight to come ; lie and steal and forge in order to come. 
 Their idea in coming is always to take something from 
 America : never to do anything for America. At the same 
 time the governments of European countries are urging and 
 praying that Americans will come to their countries, be- 
 cause a traveling American makes many purchases and is a 
 commercial asset to the country he is in. America makes a 
 flat rate for all foreigners and wishes that most of them 
 would stay at home: Europe discriminates against Ameri- 
 cans, yet wants them to come there and spend their money. 
 That shows their lack of understanding of the American 
 position concerning immigration, and why the Department 
 of State shouldn't be handicapped by being put in charge 
 of it. 
 
 Immigration is too big and important a matter to the 
 people of America to be controlled completely either by the 
 Department of Labor or the Department of State. As long 
 as these two Departments have control of immigration, it 
 will continue to be messed up by politics and by the hopeless 
 incompetency of political appointees whose chief knowledge 
 of the immigration problem consists of the belief that all
 
 THE REMEDY 105 
 
 male immigrants wear brown corduroy trousers and gold 
 earrings and rub garlic in their hair. 
 
 Immigration is a matter which, to be properly handled, 
 should be supervised and controlled by a federal commis- 
 sion of five or seven men who have either made a careful 
 study of immigration or who possess unusual qualifications 
 for membership in such a commission. It should be the same 
 sort of organization as the Federal Reserve Board and the 
 Interstate Commerce Commission, and it should be entirely 
 removed from politics. If politics were allowed to enter 
 into it, it would be subjected to the same apparently irresist- 
 ible pressure to which our senators and congressmen were 
 being subjected in 1920 and 1921 by so many near- Ameri- 
 cans, particularly by Jews. The commission might, for 
 example, be appointed by the president with the advice and 
 consent of the Senate; but, however it were selected, it 
 should be non-political. 
 
 The proper immigration law, then, would create a fed- 
 eral commission to have entire and unhampered control of 
 the administration of the law; and the law would clearly 
 define the commission's duties. 
 
 Now some of the persons who have approved this 
 scheme for restricting and regulating immigration believe 
 that all immigration to the United States should be stopped 
 for a term of years. They believe in absolutely stopping: 
 not in the imitation and futile "stopping" which results 
 from saying that an immigrant must be able to read his own 
 rtame and the inscription on a can of baked beans when 
 printed in one of the fifty-seven hundred existing languages, 
 dialects and lingoes, including the Choctaw and the Tierra 
 del Fuegan. None the less, these persons also recognize 
 that absolute stoppage of immigration would be next to
 
 106 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 impossible because of the tremendous pressure which would 
 at once be brought to bear on our legislators by Americans 
 of alien descent. They also realize that whatever so-called 
 "absolute stoppage" might be secured would be only for a 
 short term of years one or two or five years, and that at 
 the end of that time America would again be confronted by 
 the same old immigration problem, and by the same old 
 European influences against any restriction of immigration. 
 
 Even the extreme anti-immigrationist Americans in 
 Europe, therefore, have come to realize that the only effec- 
 tive anti-immigration laws are those which let in certain 
 people who can be of help to America. They know that a 
 law which says loudly "Nobody shall come in," and then 
 adds in a whisper "except relatives and those who signify 
 their intentions of becoming citizens," is almost no law at 
 all. That is why even the extremists favor a law which 
 shall define the duties of the proposed Federal Immigrant 
 Commission in the following manner: 
 
 A certain number of laborers, skilled and unskilled, 
 shall be permitted to immigrate to America from foreign 
 countries during each year. This number shall be restricted 
 to (say) one hundred thousand per year, shall be selected 
 at the source by consular officers of the United States, and 
 distributed in America by employees of the United States 
 Bureau of Immigration. 
 
 During the first year when this law is operative, 
 fifty thousand near relatives of naturalized Americans 
 shall be allowed to enter; and during succeeding years not 
 more than twenty thousand near relatives each year shall be 
 permitted to enter the country. 
 
 The Federal Immigration Commission, sitting contin- 
 ually, shall supervise the selection at the source of the one
 
 THE REMEDY 107 
 
 hundred thousand laborers, and shall make sure that they 
 are chiefly required to fill certain national necessities. 
 
 They will make sure after this fashion : 
 
 Every portion of the United States, from time to time, 
 suffers from the lack of certain workers. There are various 
 sorts of intensive farming which are best performed by 
 farm laborers from sections of Italy. There are other sorts 
 which are best performed by laborers from a specific section 
 of Hungary. Labor shortage is constantly occurring, let 
 us say, in the diamond-cutting industry, or among the 
 wooden nutmeg carvers or the macaroni-raisers, or in the 
 kitchens of large numbers of housewives. 
 
 The Federal Immigration Commission will employ a 
 force of statisticians. When a shortage occurs in any trade, 
 profession or calling, the persons qualified to take action 
 in the matter will notify the Federal Immigration Commis- 
 sion of the shortage and request that a certain number of 
 workers of the type required be admitted to the country. 
 
 For example, a call might come to the Federal Immigra- 
 tion Commission from the Michigan copper mining district 
 stating that five thousand skilled miners were required in 
 order that the output of the mines might be brought to a 
 specified point, that these miners could not at the present 
 time be obtained in the United States, and that the best type 
 of labor suited to their ne"eds had hitherto come from a small 
 province in Hungary. 
 
 Having received this call, the commission would call in 
 its statisticians, find out whether the statements of the 
 Michigan copper mines are true, and whether the immigra- 
 tion quota for the year will permit of five thousand workers 
 being allowed to come to America for this purpose. 
 
 If so, the commission would issue a departmental order
 
 io8 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 stating that five thousand miners were needed from a cer- 
 tain district in Hungary to work in the Michigan copper 
 mines. A copy of this order would go to the Department 
 of Labor for the Bureau of Immigration so that immigra- 
 tion inspectors at the port of entry may be informed. 
 Another copy would go to the Department of State for dis- 
 tribution to the American consulate in or nearest to the dis- 
 trict from which laborers are wanted. The consul would 
 publish his requirements in the local newspapers. On the 
 following day the consulate would be swamped with appli- 
 cants. 
 
 The applicants would be required, outside of satisfying 
 the health and literacy tests, to show proof that they were 
 laborers of the sort required and to agree to go to a specified 
 section of the United States to do the sort of work to which 
 they are accustomed. If a man were married and wished to 
 take his wife, he could do it, but each wife would count as 
 a unit in the required five thousand. Thus, if each accepted 
 laborer took his wife, the Michigan mines would get twenty- 
 five hundred men instead of five thousand. 
 
 Within six or eight weeks after the Federal Immigration 
 Commission sends out its departmental order, the workmen 
 would be delivered to the United States. The machinery 
 exists, perfected in all details by the Bureau of Immigration, 
 for shipping immigrants to different points throughout the 
 country; so that they will be delivered at the Michigan 
 mines as rapidly as trains can make the trip. 
 
 Having arrived there, they should be obliged to report 
 each week at the county court-house, which is usually the 
 place where immigrants are naturalized. Thus the author- 
 ities would keep track of them and they would become famil- 
 iar with our naturalization machinery at the same time.
 
 All hungry, all ragged, all paupers, and all with relatives in America. 
 
 A Polish cradle. It is generally one piece of wood hewn from a log, 
 and is used to rock the baby, feed the horses, wash clothes and 
 make bread.
 
 jjj^-^^jjjmjjjj&gji 
 
 o 
 
 -3 X 
 
 -a 
 
 5 15 
 
 H
 
 THE REMEDY 109 
 
 Since these laborers had agreed to work at a certain 
 task, and since they had been delivered to the spot where 
 the work exists, it is highly probable that they would do the 
 work required of them. 
 
 If farm-workers were wanted in Massachusetts and 
 Indiana and Georgia and California and North Dakota, the 
 same system would be used. Consuls would select farm- 
 workers from Italy and Poland and Slovakia and farming 
 districts in other countries, selecting only experienced farm- 
 ers who agree to go to the section of the country where they 
 are needed, and to work as farm-laborers. The same thing 
 holds true of diamond-cutters or nutmeg-carvers or cooks or 
 servant girls or macaroni-raisers. 
 
 Nobody, under this scheme of immigration, would be 
 permitted to emigrate to America except those who were 
 particularly qualified to fill particular positions; and if 
 there were a surplus of labor, as there was in 1921, when 
 five million persons were out of work in America, then no 
 immigration at all would be permitted. 
 
 Hitherto there has been a glut of immigrants capable of 
 filling all sorts of positions, and a tremendous glut of immi- 
 grants who were utterly incapable of filling any positions 
 at all ; but under our existiftg immigration laws and under 
 all other immigration laws under consideration it is impos- 
 sible to get the immigrant to go where he is needed. Thou- 
 sands of skilled Italian and Polish and Slovak farmers have 
 been pouring into America each year; but they have never 
 gone to the farms that need them. They have slipped into 
 the slums and foreign settlements where they have stub- 
 bornly retained the languages, the customs and the ideas of 
 Europe, and formed a perpetual breeding-place for discon- 
 tent, sedition and even anarchy. The tremendous numbers
 
 no WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 which have poured in well over one million a year during 
 the ten years before the war as well as the slums which 
 they formed, constituted the worst menace which America 
 has ever faced. 
 
 To make sure, however, that newcomers shall not work 
 into the slums, the first departmental order of the Federal 
 Immigration Commission might reasonably be that no 
 unskilled labor would be permitted to come to America to 
 settle in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Pitts- 
 burgh, Detroit, Cleveland, or any other large city with an 
 overabundance of foreign slums. Such an order can easily 
 be enforced by the close supervision of the immigrants for 
 which the above plans call. Immigrants who do not live 
 up to pre-immigration agreements would be deported. 
 
 By adopting such a plan, America would automatically 
 eliminate immigrants who would be parasites on the com- 
 munity. There are sections of Europe to-day which are 
 sending to America thousands upon thousands of unskilled 
 workmen whose only means of livelihood for centuries has 
 been to engage in some infinitesimal or underhanded busi- 
 ness and to subsist in the barest manner by the exploitation 
 of their neighbors and of one another. In America they 
 exist in the same way, producing nothing new, aiding not at 
 all to make America better or richer, but always struggling 
 to improve their own lot at the expense of others. It is 
 usually the cry of these people that they are being perse- 
 cuted and they are seeking political and religious freedom. 
 It is their cry in whatever country they live in; and it has 
 been their cry always. The cry is not true. Never in the 
 course of their existence have these people known any perse- 
 cution to compare in the faintest degree with that which was 
 endured, for example, by the French Protestants and the
 
 THE REMEDY in 
 
 Irish Catholics; and they seek, not religious and political 
 freedom, but more money. 
 
 By adopting such a plan, America could, if she wished, 
 tear up and throw away all the laws which have had to be 
 enacted against Japanese and Chinese immigration. Under 
 this plan, such laws would be unnecessary; and by doing 
 away with them, America could remove a source of friction 
 which some day will unquestionably prove dangerous. 
 
 There will be, as I have said before, tremendous opposi- 
 tion to any such law on the part of many foreign-American 
 societies, and especially from the Hebrew Sheltering and 
 Immigrant Aid Society and other Hebrew organizations. 
 Over against their opinions stands the opinion of every 
 American student of immigration in Europe, and of thou- 
 sands of competent men in America who have had the 
 opportunity to see the incoming flood of immigration, to the 
 effect that the question of immigration is a matter of life 
 and death for the American people. 
 
 As an emergency measure to remedy the evils of immi- 
 gration, the so-called three per cent, law was put into effect 
 on June 3, 1921. 
 
 Generally speaking, this temporary percentage law was 
 a pretty good law. It was pretty good because it cut down 
 the number of immigrants. It was an unscientific law and 
 an unfair law and a lazy man's law; but it cut down the 
 numbers and therefore it was good. It was no more ad- 
 justed to the needs of America than a pint of peanuts is 
 adjusted to assuaging the hunger of a blood-sweating 
 behemoth of Holy Writ : it was no more fitted to deal with 
 the immigration problem than a pair of sugar-tongs is 
 fitted to handle a barge-load of cannel-coal. But it gave 
 America somewhat less of a bad thing than she was getting
 
 112 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 > 
 
 before it went into effect ; and since a little poison is prefer- 
 able to a lot of poison, the Three Per Cent. Law was infi- 
 nitely preferable to any other immigration law that America 
 had ever put in force. 
 
 The Three Per Cent. Law, when stripped to the bone, 
 provided that the number of aliens of any nationality that 
 could be admitted to the United States in any fiscal year 
 should be limited to three per cent, of the number of for- 
 eign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United 
 States as determined by the 1910 census. Certain people 
 didn't count, however such people as foreign government 
 officials and their families and employees, aliens in transit 
 through the United States, tourists, aliens from countries 
 which have special immigration treaties with the United 
 States, aliens who have lived for one year prior to their ad- 
 mission in Canada, Newfoundland, Mexico, Central 
 America or South America, and aliens under the age of 
 eighteen who are children of American citizens. In no 
 month could more than twenty per cent, of a country's 
 admissible quota of immigrants be admitted to the United 
 States, except in the cases of actors, artists, lecturers, sing- 
 ers, nurses, clergymen of any denomination, professors, 
 members of the learned professions or domestic servants. 
 These could always come in, even though the month's or 
 the year's quota might have been exhausted. 
 
 The Three Per Cent. Law, in the first four months of 
 operation resulted in the following beneficial change : 
 
 During the months of July, August, September and 
 October, 1921, thirty-four per cent, or one- third, of all 
 European immigration came from the Nordic peoples of the 
 north and west of Europe. Prior to 1880, practically all 
 the immigration in the United States was Nordic in char-
 
 THE REMEDY 113 
 
 acter. After 1880 the Nordic immigration was over- 
 whelmed by the backward, unassimilatable, undesirable im- 
 migration from Eastern and Southern Europe; and during 
 the months of Jury, August, September and October, 1913, 
 which was the last normal year of unrestricted immigration, 
 only fifteen per cent, of our immigrants came from the 
 Nordic peoples of the north and west of Europe. Conse- 
 quently the Three Per Cent. Law, in the first four months 
 of operation, swung the tide of immigration back toward 
 the Nordic stock which founded, developed and wrote the 
 laws of this country. 
 
 It is not particularly pleasant to continue to harp on 
 the necessity of keeping the United States a nation of Nor- 
 dics; for there are always a large number of sentimentally 
 inclined readers, whose belief in the whimsical fairy-tale of 
 the melting pot is stronger than their common sense, who 
 write hectic and vitriolic replies to any remarks on the 
 respective merits of a continued Nordic strain of people 
 and a mixed strain. So far as I have been able to gather 
 from the letters that frequently reach me on this subject, 
 no mention should be made of racial differences because 
 all people are equal in the eyes of St. Peter. This is proba- 
 bly true; and everybody will unquestionably be delighted 
 if it is. Here on earth, however, there are certain biological 
 laws which govern the crossing of different breeds, whether 
 the breeds be dogs or horses or men. If an otter hound is 
 crossed with a Welsh terrier, the result is a mongrel. But 
 if other otter hounds are crossed with other Welsh ter- 
 riers, and the results of these crossings are mated in turn, 
 the result is an Airedale, which is a very excellent dog. 
 Excellent results can usually be obtained from cross-breed- 
 ing followed by inbreeding. But the only results that can
 
 H4 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 ever be obtained from promiscuous and continued cross- 
 breeding is mongrelization ; and a mongrel in spite of the 
 excellence of the stock from which he may have sprung 
 is a total loss. The same thing is true of humans. A mon- 
 grelized race of people is incapable of producing great ar- 
 tists or authors or statesmen or poets or architects or 
 sculptors, or explorers or warriors. A mongrelized race sinks 
 to the dead level of mediocrity. Its government becomes 
 corrupt, its art and its literature become degenerate and silly, 
 its judiciary becomes venal, its public and its private morals 
 become depraved. Nothing is left to it but the sharpness, 
 the trickiness and the cunning of its unscrupulous traders 
 and an exalted opinion of its own importance, based on the 
 records of the pure but vanished race which it supplanted. 
 These facts should be of considerable interest to a great 
 many citizens of the United States ; for so many millions of 
 non-Nordic aliens have poured into this country since 1880 
 that in several of America's largest cities the foreign-born 
 and the children of foreign-born far out-number the native 
 Americans. The inevitable result of such a state of affairs, 
 unless it is checked at once and forever, is mongrelization; 
 and many of America's large cities are already displaying 
 all the ear-marks of mongrelization. There are still many 
 millions of good Americans who hold, in the innocence of 
 their mistaken belief in the equality of mankind, that the 
 person who believes in race purity is a snob; but before 
 many years have gone by, he will be a benighted American 
 who doesn't know that race purity is the prime essential for 
 the well-being of his children and the continued existence 
 of the things that made his country great. 
 
 There are two bad features of the Three Per Cent. Law. 
 One is the way in which it still permits thousands upon thou-
 
 THE REMEDY 115 
 
 sands of pauper and parasitic aliens to be dumped on our 
 shores for no reason except their desire to earn more money 
 and their country's desire to be rid of them. The other is 
 the extreme unfairness of the law in failing to provide 
 separate quotas for countries whose population is divided 
 into distinct racial groups. 
 
 Let us look, for example, at the situation that exists 
 in such countries as Turkey and Rumania and Poland and 
 Czecho-Slovakia and when it shall be opened up Russia. 
 Under the Three Per Cent. Law, quotas are assigned to the 
 "Country or Place of Birth" of the immigrants. The word 
 "country" means next to nothing in Eastern Europe ; for a 
 very large percentage of Eastern Europeans are subjected 
 to the government of races that they hate and despise. The 
 Jews and the Hungarians who are included in Rumania's 
 borders invariably scream with indignation if they are 
 classed as Rumanians. Similarly, the Jews of Poland abso- 
 lutely refuse to allow themselves to be classed as Poles. 
 Yet the quota allotted to Rumania and Poland is computed 
 on the number of Rumanians and Poles in America, but 
 used almost entirely by Jews. 
 
 July and August, 1921, saw the following people ad- 
 mitted to America, according to the records of the Bureau 
 of Immigration, as coming from Turkey: 668 Armenians, 
 314 Syrians, 210 Hebrews, 175 Greeks and 77 other races 
 and a few Turks among them, no doubt. The Turks 
 also find little nourishment in such a situation. The only 
 fair way to apportion Turkey's quota is on a percentage 
 basis: if the population of Turkey is twenty per cent. Ar- 
 menian and ten per cent. Greek, and so on, then let twenty 
 per cent, of Turkey's quota be Armenian and ten per cent. 
 Greek, and no more.
 
 n6 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Rumania's admissible quota for 1921 was 7,414. Dur- 
 ing July and August, 1921, there were 2,104 persons ad- 
 mitted for Rumania. Of this number, 137 were Magyars, 
 226 were Germans, 271 were Rumanians, 1,411 were Jews 
 and 59 were scattered nationalities. Although the Jews in 
 Rumania are greatly in the minority as compared with 
 the Rumanians, they are given more opportunities to leave 
 the country by the Rumanian government and so leave in 
 greater numbers than the other races which inhabit Ru- 
 mania. The Rumanians, by comparison, don't have a look- 
 in and never will until the quota is divided among the races 
 on a percentage basis. 
 
 The quota for Poland for 1921-22 was 25,800. Yet 
 during July and August, 2,088 Poles came to America and 
 8,471 Jews, or four Jews for every Pole. The quota for 
 Poland was exhausted in December, 1921, and the Poles 
 were moaning bitterly because they hadn't been given a 
 square deal. Nor had they; for the population of Poland 
 is something like 17,000,000 Poles and 3,000,000 Jews. If 
 a percentage law is to apply to every one alike, then the 
 quota for Poland should be adjusted so that seventeen- 
 twentieths of it is made up of Poles and three-twentieths of 
 Hebrews. 
 
 The Czecho-Slovak quota should be divided fairly among 
 the Slovaks, the Czechs, the Jews, the Magyars, the Ger- 
 mans and the Croats who spend so much time bickering with 
 each other in that uneasy country ; while the Russian quota 
 of 34,247, unless it is properly apportioned between the 
 Russians, the Lithuanians and the Jews, will be almost en- 
 tirely filled by Jews in spite of the fact that the Russians 
 outnumber them by more than fifty to one. The Jews, 
 because of the remarkably excellent organization of the
 
 THE REMEDY 117 
 
 Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, can secure the money, the 
 passports, the vises and the steamship tickets to get to 
 America before the Russians have found out where to go to 
 get their passports. So in this case a Three Per Cent. Law 
 operates as a Twenty Per Cent. Law for the Jews and a 
 Tenth of One Per Cent. Law for the Russians. And a 
 person must have badly warped eyesight to detect any 
 signs of fairness in such arrangements. 
 
 Probably the worst feature of any percentage law, un- 
 less its percentage quotas are figured on races instead of on 
 nationalities, is the large number of Russian Jews, Polish 
 Jews and Rumanian Jews which it permits to enter the 
 country. The undesirability of these peculiar people has 
 been emphasized in preceding chapters. Their ruthlessness 
 and underhandedness in the pursuit of money is brought 
 with them to America; and constant thorns in the flesh of 
 American representatives in European countries are the 
 sharp practises and the unreliability of many Jewish-Ameri- 
 can business firms. Twenty years ago the American busi- 
 ness man in Europe would often drive a hard bargain; but 
 he had the universal reputation of being honest, square and 
 absolutely reliable. To-day, in many parts of Europe, the 
 unreliability of American business firms is notorious and 
 almost without exception the firms responsible for this repu- 
 tation are composed of Jewish immigrants from Russia and 
 Poland. An examination of the correspondence of some 
 American legations in Europe would reveal the fact that a 
 good sixty per cent, of the correspondence has to be written 
 for the purpose of straightening out the tangles caused by 
 the shady dealings of Jews who are traveling on American 
 passports. 
 
 It must not be forgotten, moreover, that the Jews from
 
 u8 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Russia, Poland and nearly all of Southeastern Europe are 
 not Europeans: they are Asiatics and in part, at least, 
 Mongoloids. California long ago realized the importance 
 of barring Mongoloids from white territory ; but while they 
 are barred in the West, they pour in by millions in the East. 
 There will be, of course, many well-intentioned persons to 
 deny that the Russian and Polish Jews have Mongoloid 
 blood in them. This fact, however, may readily be con- 
 firmed in that section of the Jewish Encyclopedia dealing 
 with the Chazars. The Jewish Encyclopedia states that the 
 Chazars were "people of Turkish origin whose life and his- 
 tory are interwoven with the very beginnings of the history 
 of the Jews of Russia." 
 
 The Chazars, briefly, occupied nearly all of South Rus- 
 sia long before the foundation of the Russian monarchy by 
 the Varangians in the year 855. The Byzantine Empire and 
 the Calif of the Ishmaelites sent envoys and sages to King 
 Bulan of the Chazars either in the year 620 or 740 in order 
 to convert him to their religions. Bulan, on his own ac- 
 count, also invited the wise men of Israel to put in a bid. 
 This they did. King Bulan then examined the envoys 
 separately, and asked each one which religion he considered 
 to be the next best to his own. The Mohammedans said 
 that the Jewish religion was the next best. The Christians 
 said the same thing. Bulan therefore adopted the Jewish 
 religion for the kingdom of the Chazars, and the people 
 eventually adopted it as well. The kingdom of the 
 Chazars was finally disrupted by the Russians and the 
 Byzantines; but the great mass of the people remained in 
 the regions around Kiev and throughout Southeastern 
 Europe, where they merged with their co-religionists, the 
 Jews.
 
 THE REMEDY 119 
 
 The immigration that came to America in the quarter- 
 century before the war is now generally admitted to have 
 been a very bad thing for the nation. Yet immigration 
 under the Three Per Cent. Law is practically the same. 
 Before the war we got a million immigrants a year: under 
 the Three Per Cent. Law we get a third of a million a 
 year. The difference is almost entirely numerical. The 
 situation is somewhat similar to one that might arise if an 
 army which was being supplied with enormous quantities of 
 spoiled food for its soldiers should protest violently to the 
 contractors, and the contractors should reply "Very well: 
 instead of shipping you one million tins of spoiled beef in a 
 given time, we will ship you only one-third of a million tins 
 of spoiled beef." 
 
 Congress has a bad habit of getting cold feet whenever 
 there is a howl from alien interests over the hardships of 
 any law that restricts immigration. When it gets cold feet, 
 it at once decides to throw away the offending measure and 
 frame up another temporary law that will bring fewer com- 
 plaints. This can't be done. If Congress wishes as the 
 country wishes a law which shall restrict immigration 
 properly, it must steel itself to complaints; for the alien 
 interests in America will always emit agonized shrieks at 
 any restrictions, no matter how mild they may be. And if 
 Congress continues, through timidity or laziness or any 
 other cause, to enact temporary immigration legislation and 
 fails to put through a scientific and permanent law that shall 
 satisfactorily settle the immigration question for all time, 
 the time may come when the people of America will forget 
 the rottenness of the pre-war immigration, and when, profit- 
 ing by their forget fulness, the alien interests and the steam- 
 ship interests and the big manufacturing interests may
 
 120 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 suddenly slip over some legislation of their own that will 
 once more open America's sea-gates to the same sort of im- 
 migrant inundations that submerged, mongrelized and 
 wrecked the great nations and civilizations of the past. 
 
 There is only one way in which the immigration problem 
 can be properly handled, and that is by providing that all 
 immigration to the United States shall be immigration that 
 is needed by the United States for definite purposes. Of 
 all the nations in the world which have first-hand knowl- 
 edge of large emigrant or immigrant movements, the United 
 States is the one nation which has not regulated this move- 
 ment of people to its own needs. Italy's admirable emigra- 
 tion laws are carefully framed to suit her own needs. Hun- 
 gary's emigration system was planned to build up the port 
 of Fiume, bring wealth back to Hungary and keep Hun- 
 garians in America from being naturalized. Bulgaria, on 
 the other hand, wishing to keep her citizens at home, for- 
 bade steamship agents in the country. Rumania puts a 
 secret mark on the passports of Jews which prevents them, 
 once they have left Rumania, from getting vises which will 
 permit them to return to Rumania again. Poland facili- 
 tates the emigration of Jews, and hinders the emigration of 
 the infinitely more desirable Polish peasant. All foreign 
 countries develop laws which accrue to their own benefit 
 and meet the peculiar needs of the different countries. For 
 the United States to delay doing so is suicidal.
 
 Waifs of An Empire 
 
 RUSSIA, during the four years subsequent to October, 
 1917, presented few, if any, attractions for Russians of 
 birth, breeding, education, wealth or unusual talent unless 
 the constant danger of robbery, torture and sudden death 
 can be classed as attractions. 
 
 It has been more or less fashionable in certain circles to 
 declare that many of the Russians who fled from the gentle 
 attentions of the Bolsheviks between 1917 and 1921 would 
 have done much better to have stayed at home. This may 
 be true. Over three million of them came tearing out 
 after the Bolsheviks broke loose ; and it is more than likely 
 that several of them would be more conveniently situated if, 
 after the Bolsheviks had appropriated their houses and their 
 lands and their jewels, and stood a few of their relatives in 
 front of open graves and turned machine guns on them, 
 they had continued to linger around the old homestead 
 and trust to luck. It is not natural, however, so to linger; 
 and after one had observed the working of the Bolshevik 
 mind during the early years of Bolshevik rule, one 
 was inclined to trust less in luck than in a set of false 
 whiskers and the rapid motion of his own legs. One became 
 thoroughly convinced that the only place to be was some 
 place where the Bolsheviks weren't, and that any risk was 
 worth taking in order to get there. 
 
 121
 
 122 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Several superior persons have spoken to me about Rus- 
 sian refugees in a disparaging manner. "The great trouble 
 with most of them," say the disparagers patronizingly, "is 
 their tendency to become panic-stricken and run away before 
 they need to." I can only say that I have talked with great 
 numbers of Russian refugees in every part of Europe ; and it 
 is my sincere belief that if those who disparage them had 
 been subjected to the same threats and the same indignities 
 and the same horrors and the same shadow of death lurking 
 in the background, they too would have gone into the pro- 
 fession of refugeeing with such unparalleled enthusiasm that 
 in their progress from one country to another they would 
 have touched only the high spots. That, I am sure, would 
 have been my simple but comprehensive program if I had 
 been in their position; and I am also reasonably sure that 
 it would have been the program of any one who possessed 
 his health and who was not a hopeless idiot. 
 
 Those who disparage the refugees have an odd habit of 
 forgetting the enormous numbers of Russians who have 
 been killed by Extraordinary Commissions and other Bol- 
 shevik agencies. These Extraordinary Commissions are 
 known to the Russians as I spell the words phonetically 
 Chesvi Chaika. Every city and town under Bolshevik con- 
 trol had its Chesvi Chaika. Any person suspected of work- 
 ing against the Soviets was haled summarily before the 
 Chesvi Chaika and given a drumhead trial. If he was found 
 guilty, he was led from the judges' chamber to a closed door ; 
 the door was opened ; he walked across the threshold and 
 was shot or clubbed to death. The Chesvi Chaika wasted 
 no time on empty formalities or useless delays. This, by 
 the way, is not anti-Bolshevik propaganda, but plain fact. 
 No approximately reliable estimate has ever been made of
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 123 
 
 the total number of bourgeoisie whom the Bolsheviks mur- 
 dered in Russia and Siberia ; but to the best of my knowledge 
 and belief, from information which I collected in Siberia, the 
 Balkans and the western fringe of Soviet Russia, and from 
 reliable observers in Bolshevik territory, the number could 
 not have been less than four hundred thousand. It was 
 probably very much larger; but it was certainly not less. 
 At any rate, a great number of people of the same type as 
 the refugees have been killed by the Bolsheviks, and the 
 person who would find fault with a refugee for being a 
 refugee might also be expected to look askance at a pedes- 
 trian for getting out of the path of a rapidly-moving auto- 
 mobile. 
 
 Since the Bolsheviks took charge of Russian affairs back- 
 in the autumn of 1917, over three million Russians have 
 poured out of the country. A large part of them consisted 
 of the so-called intelligentsia of the nation people of noble 
 birth, people of wealth, people of education, people who 
 held high positions under the old Imperial government. 
 They poured out on foot, in carriages, in rowboats, in train- 
 loads, in shiploads, on camel-back even. They poured out of 
 the north into Finland. They poured east through Siberia 
 and into Japan and Manchuria. They poured west into 
 Poland and Germany and the other countries of Western 
 Europe; and they poured south across the Black and Caspian 
 Seas into the Balkans and the Mediterranean countries. 
 Sometimes they were able to carry jewels with them : some- 
 times they were able to take a few extra clothes ; but usually 
 they emerged from Russia with the garments in which they 
 stood and nothing else. And there they are, three million of 
 them and more, penniless and friendless and helpless in com- 
 munities which as a result of after-war disorganization and
 
 124 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 depression are unable to provide work for even their own 
 people. There they are; admirals working as janitors; col- 
 onels chopping wood; princesses waiting on table; generals 
 presiding over restaurant coat-rooms or selling paper flowers 
 on street corners; countesses sewing on piece-work in attic 
 bedrooms. Those are the fortunate ones ; for they have work. 
 Then there are the other thousands the other millions 
 who have no work and who can get no work : the erstwhile 
 generals and admirals and barons and princes and counts, the 
 one-time governors of provinces and mayors of great cities 
 and university professors and merchant princes who sit all 
 day and twiddle their thumbs and subsist on the bounty of 
 others. Hundreds of thousands of the refugees have suf- 
 fered such a moral breakdown that they refuse work when 
 work is offered to them : they ask nothing but a little food 
 and a little tobacco and a warm place where they can doze 
 and talk and argue. But most of them want work some- 
 thing to do anything to do that will give them a few pen- 
 nies and freedom from the horrible and unbearable mo- 
 notony of doing nothing. 
 
 The streams of refugees which poured out of Russia's 
 human reservoirs never entirely dried up at any time, 
 because of the perpetual activities of the so-called Extraor- 
 dinary Commissions for combating counter-revolutions. 
 These commissions might more appropriately be called 
 "Extraordinary Commissions for the Extermination of 
 Decent Russians." Soviet representatives in various Euro- 
 pean countries smile deprecatingly and pityingly at the mere 
 suggestion that members of the old nobility or the old Im- 
 perial army who have fled from Russia would be treated 
 cruelly if they came within the jurisdiction of the Soviets. 
 Yet the heads of the Extraordinary Commissions have an
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 125 
 
 unquenchable hatred for the Russians who formerly held 
 positions of power and authority in the old empire. If per- 
 sons who formerly held such positions were called before 
 some of these Extraordinary Commissions, they were prac- 
 tically certain to be sentenced to death after trials which 
 were the merest travesties on justice. The Extraordinary 
 Commissions are absolute in their judgments and in their 
 powers. A Soviet representative in Constantinople might 
 sweetly declare that Prince Galitzin was at perfect liberty to 
 return from Constantinople to Moscow without danger of 
 interference. Yet the first Extraordinary Commission that 
 discovered Prince Galitzin's whereabouts, in case he did 
 return, would be quite free to run him into a dark room and 
 drop a crowbar on his head and the chances are excellent 
 that it would do so. Many members of the so-called bour- 
 geoisie remained hidden or living quietly in Russia until the 
 Extraordinary Commissions discovered their whereabouts 
 and summoned them to appear. When this happened, they 
 fled as rapidly as they could to the outside world, just as you 
 or I would flee. This accounts for the perpetual flowing of 
 the refugee streams. During a counter-revolution or after 
 a counter-revolution, or after any unusual anti-Bolshevik 
 demonstrations, the refugee streams increased to roaring 
 torrents, and adjacent countries were flooded with princesses 
 and former governors of provinces and ex-army officers and 
 erstwhile owners of large estates. 
 
 If one's imagination is insured against strain, one can 
 get a faint idea of the present Russian refugee situation by 
 imagining the government of the United States taken over 
 by a class of people who loathed with a deadly loathing the 
 persons who formerly occupied all positions of trust and 
 authority and power. Imagine all of our army and navy
 
 126 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 officers fleeing to Canada or Mexico or to Europe to escape 
 death at the hands of these people : imagine our ex-presidents 
 and our legislators and our supreme court justices, our gov- 
 ernors of states and mayors of cities and present and past 
 cabinet ministers, our college professors and railroad presi- 
 dents and big manufacturers, our bankers and merchants 
 and hotel proprietors and newspaper owners and gentlemen 
 farmers imagine all these people and everybody tainted by 
 association with them or relationship to them, with their 
 wives and their children, pouring out of New York and 
 Chicago and Cleveland and St. Louis and every other Ameri- 
 can city in panic-stricken streams, traveling in freight cars, 
 traveling on foot and hiding in ditches at night, traveling 
 on horseback and in motor-boats and in rowboats, traveling 
 for weeks and months and even for years through sections of 
 the country where all transportation had broken down, and 
 finally escaping to another country with nothing of their 
 own except the clothes on their backs. Imagine all this 
 successfully, and you will have a hazy notion of what hap- 
 pened when the Bolsheviks got after the bourgeoisie. Name 
 any man of wealth or distinction or power in America, or 
 as many such persons as you may care to name, within 
 reason editors, politicians, authors, millionaires, clergy- 
 men, surgeons or whatever you wish and I will name for 
 you an equal number of Russians of corresponding positions 
 who have either been killed by the Bolsheviks or have fled 
 from Russia with their families and are living penniless, 
 jobless and half-starved in huts or tents or dug-outs or 
 freight cars or the corners of single rooms which they share 
 with other families. There are only some twenty-three thou- 
 sand names in the last Who's Who in America out of a total 
 population of one hundred and five million. Take a look at
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 127 
 
 the size of that book, and then consider that the Bolsheviks 
 have run out of Russia practically every person whose past 
 performances entitled him to a place in a Russian Who's 
 Who, and a couple of million or so in addition. It's enough to 
 give any one a severe case of inflammation of the considerer. 
 
 The first big Russian refugee movement started in the 
 autumn of 1917, when the Kerensky government was over- 
 thrown by the Bolsheviks. The bloody reign of terror 
 which was immediately instituted drove masses of high-class 
 Russians north into Finland, west into Germany and Poland, 
 and east along the line of the trans-Siberian railway to Vladi- 
 vostok. It also drove great numbers of wealthy and highly 
 educated persons from the cities of Northern and Western 
 Russia down into Southern and Eastern Russia, where they 
 lingered and wandered for one, two and even three years 
 before they were finally reduced to such extremes of poverty 
 and fright that any place looked better than Russia to them. 
 
 Then there was the first Odessa evacuation in the spring 
 of 1919. The city was held by French troops under Gen- 
 eral d'Esperey. The Bolsheviks, working in the neighbor- 
 hood of Odessa, had succeeded in impregnating some of the 
 French troops with Bolshevik doctrines. The French 
 evacuated their troops, and many Russians left at the same 
 time. This evacuation was soon followed by the second 
 Odessa evacuation. Schilling, a Russian general who was 
 working in conjunction with the anti-Bolshevik leader, Gen- 
 eral Denikine, had occupied Odessa; but when the Bolshe- 
 viks attacked, his clutch slipped. He evacuated his army 
 and a large number of refugees, but landed his army in the 
 Crimea to join Denikine, who was backed by the British. 
 Some of the refugees also landed in the Crimea, while some 
 continued on down the Black Sea to Constantinople.
 
 128 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Early in 1920 the Denikine army cracked wide open 
 before the Bolsheviks and retreated to Novorossisk on the 
 northern shore of the Black Sea. From Novorossisk the 
 entire Denikine army and many civilian refugees were evac- 
 uated by the British to Constantinople. A great number of 
 the civilian refugees evacuated at that time had started from 
 Petrograd and Moscow late in 1917, or early in 1918; and 
 the wanderings of many of them were of a nature to make 
 the celebrated wanderings of the late Mr. Ulysses seem by 
 comparison like a honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls. 
 
 At about the same time the attempt of General Yudenitch 
 to capture Petrograd from the Bolsheviks broke down with 
 a crash, and another torrent of refugees poured north into 
 Finland. The Yudenitch disaster was closely followed by 
 the collapse of the government and the army headed by 
 Admiral Kolchak, which resulted in the flight of thousands 
 of Russians to the east across Siberia and to the south toward 
 the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea. 
 
 A little later the expedition of General Miller, which was 
 attempting to work down to Petrograd from Archangel 
 with British, French and American assistance, blew up with 
 a dull thud and released another stream of refugees, part of 
 whom made their way into Finland on foot and part of 
 whom got to Norway by boat. 
 
 At the time of the evacuation of the Denikine troops 
 from Novorossisk, the most able of Denikine's officers was 
 General Wrangel. Wrangel came down to Constantinople 
 with the Denikine army, and then turned around and went 
 back to the Crimea, which was held by General Slaschoff 
 with two thousand cavalry and three thousand infantry. 
 Wrangel took command of this small army, reorganized it, 
 added to it, and started a promising campaign against the
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 129 
 
 Bolsheviks. He was backed by the French ; and because of 
 his military ability and patriotism, the anti-Bolsheviks all 
 over Europe were convinced that he was going to succeed 
 where all the others had failed. He never had a chance to 
 show what he could do, however; for an unprecedentedly 
 cold snap froze the marshes of the Crimea early in Novem- 
 ber, 1920, and made it possible for the Bolsheviks to bring 
 their guns across them and attack him on his flank. To 
 save his army, Wrangel was forced to retreat at top speed. 
 The Crimea was full of refugees ; and they, hearing that the 
 Bolshevik troops were coming down on the heels of 
 Wrangel's army, were unable to work up any enthusiasm 
 over remaining to act as a reception committee for them. 
 So when Wrangel moved his troops aboard the ships which 
 lay in the harbors of the Crimea, most of the population of 
 the Crimea moved aboard also. There were one hundred 
 and eleven ships; and more than one hundred and forty 
 thousand soldiers and refugees crowded aboard them. A 
 few days later all of the ships lay at anchor under the walls 
 of Constantinople; and the French, British and Americans 
 in that city were wracking their brains over the problem of 
 where to put the hundred and forty thousand, and how to 
 feed them and clothe them. The adventures of these one 
 hundred and forty thousand Crimean refugees are of such a 
 remarkable nature that they will be described more fully in 
 the next chapter. 
 
 Early in 1921 the Kronstadt garrison went anti-Bol- 
 shevik and started an attack on Petrograd. The movement 
 was squelched almost immediately ; but as a result of it, the 
 refugee stream again rose to a high level, and the ice of the 
 Finnish Gulf was thickly spotted with those who were 
 fleeing to Finland from Petrograd and the neighboring
 
 130 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 territory because they preferred a penniless and friendless 
 existence in a strange land to the ruthless vengeance of the 
 Extraordinary Commissions of Soviet Russia. 
 
 Late in 1920, according to reliable information received 
 by the intelligence department of two European countries, 
 Lenine attempted to stop the vicious activities of the Chesvi 
 Chaikas by putting them out of business and transferring 
 their legitimate work to the Department of Justice and to 
 the revolutionary tribunals, which are controllable organiza- 
 tions. The Chesvi Chaikas promptly raised a fierce and 
 penetrating outcry against such interference; for the mem- 
 bers of these Extraordinary Commissions not only had tre- 
 mendous power because of their absolute control over life 
 and death, but they had also amassed great wealth by seizing 
 the property of their victims and their near-victims. Con- 
 sequently they hadn't the slightest desire to be abolished. 
 They defeated Lenine's attempt to abolish them by invent- 
 ing a plot against his life and by arresting hundreds of 
 alleged counter-revolutionaries who, according to them, were 
 parties to the plot. Lenine was so impressed with the effi- 
 ciency and importance of the Chesvi Chaikas, after this 
 striking demonstration or movie-scenario, that he ceased his 
 attempt on their existence. 
 
 As a result of all these outbreaks, and of the violent 
 activities of the Extraordinary Commissions for combating 
 counter-revolution, Europe is swamped with Russians. In 
 every city in Europe, in 1921, the traveler saw Russian uni- 
 forms and the old army caps with the oval placques at their 
 peaks. I have met Russian refugees in London, Paris, Ber- 
 lin, Warsaw, Marseilles, Monte Carlo, Rome, Athens. Sa- 
 lonika, Nagasaki, Kobe, Adrianople, Belgrade, Vienna, 
 Budapest, and every other European and Asiatic city in
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 131 
 
 which I have been in the last three years; and if by any 
 chance my travels had taken me to the North or South 
 Pole, I would have expected to find that a few Russian 
 refugees had preceded me. Constantinople, because of the 
 influx of Russian refugees, seems more of a Russian city 
 than a Turkish city. An American gazed contemplatively 
 at the scattering of fezzes and the large numbers of Russian 
 uniforms which passed his hotel in an hour's time, and then 
 announced that the foreign quarter of Constantinople looked 
 like a Siberian city which was entertaining a Shriner's con- 
 vention. Figures gathered by the American Red Cross and 
 allied organizations which are doing relief work among the 
 Russian refugees show that in Europe alone there are two 
 million, one hundred thousand of them. These figures cov- 
 ered the period to November, 1920. There are no figures 
 available on the numbers of refugees that have come out 
 of Russia through Siberia and are living in Japan, China, 
 Manchuria and in box-cars along the lines of the Trans- 
 Siberian and the Chinese Eastern Railway; but scattered 
 reports indicate that they are in excess of one million. The 
 Red Cross figures for Europe, compiled early in 1921, 
 showed that there were 1,000,000 in Poland, 560,000 in 
 Germany, 175,000 in France, 50,000 in Austria, 50,000 in 
 Constantinople, 30,000 in Siberia, 25,000 in Finland, 20,- 
 ooo in Italy, 17,500 in Esthonia, 15,000 in England, 12,000 
 in Latvia; while the remaining 140,000 were divided among 
 Switzerland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Egypt, Tunis, Greece, 
 Sweden, Norway, Czecho-Slovakia and the various refugee 
 camps which were established in the vicinity of Constan- 
 tinople after the Wrangel disaster. 
 
 In many ways these Russian refugees are the most unfor- 
 tunate people that it has ever been my lot to see. The
 
 132 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Russia which they knew has vanished from the face of the 
 earth, so that they have no government to which they can 
 turn for assistance, A large part of them are people who 
 have had no training whatever in any form of useful 
 endeavor, so that the only positions that can be offered to 
 most of them are those of porters or watchmen or janitors 
 or dishwashers or waiters or similar unskilled pursuits 
 and such positions are few and far between. For the most 
 part, too, they are people who had lived their lives in com- 
 fort, if not in luxury, until the Russian Empire went on the 
 rocks with a terrifying crash; and to-day there are few of 
 them who have anything which they can call their own. 
 Their clothes, in hundreds of thousands of cases, have been 
 given to them by charitable organizations : their food comes 
 to them in the same way, and in such a way that they never 
 know whether or not there will be food for them on the 
 morrow. For months, and in many cases for years, they 
 have been buffeted from pillar to post, and have undergone 
 such bodily and mental anguish that their morale can only 
 be discovered with a divining-rod. 
 
 Here, for example, is the not unusual case of the 
 Countess Olga Kapnist, whose husband was chief of the 
 Imperial General Naval Staff during the war. Before and 
 during the war she and her family had everything that 
 wealth and social position could bring. I met her in Rome 
 through the Princess Yousoupoff, who is at the head of the 
 Russian Red Cross there. It was the Princess Yousoupoff's 
 son who assisted the notorious Rasputine to shuffle off this 
 mortal coil, and who cleaned up a good job by dropping him 
 through a hole in the ice. Princess Yousoupoff was living 
 with friends and was not entirely wrecked. Countess Kap- 
 nist, however, was embroidering linen and making under-
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 133 
 
 wear so that she might support herself and her five children. 
 I took her off in a corner and she told me her story in a 
 flat monotonous voice which would have been more appro- 
 priate to a discussion of the proper method of cooking beans 
 than to the story which she told me. 
 
 When the Bolsheviks seized the reins of government in 
 Petrograd, the Kapnists decided that it would be well for 
 them to hunt a more retired spot. So they went all the way 
 down across Russia, past the Sea of Azov and the country of 
 the Kuban Cossacks to the foot-hills of the Caucasus Moun- 
 tains, where they had a summer home in the watering-place 
 of Essentouky. Essentouky and two near-by watering- 
 places, Piatigorsk and Kislovodsk, occur repeatedly in the 
 conversation of a large percentage of the wealthy Russian 
 refugees who fled from the north to the south of Russia 
 and were evacuated from the south ; for the three towns were 
 to Russian society what Newport and Bar Harbor are to 
 American society. People who fled from the north of 
 Russia turned instinctively toward Essentouky, Kislovodsk 
 and Piatigorsk as being so far removed from the center of 
 Russia that nothing could ever happen there. 
 
 Early in 1918, however, Bolshevik governments were 
 set up, even in these remote towns. At the beginning the 
 new authorities were quite amiable, so that the people who 
 had come down from the north for safety decided to stay 
 where they were. In the summer, the Russian cavalry com- 
 mander Schkouro, working as a part of Denikine's army, 
 began a series of cavalry raids for the purpose of freeing the 
 Caucasus from Bolshevik rule. As a result of these raids, 
 the Bolsheviks began to take hostages, to requisition per- 
 sonal belongings, and to kill the hated bourgeoisie. All of 
 the men in Essentouky who had been at all prominent in
 
 134 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 the old Imperial government were seized and thrown into 
 jail, among them being Countess Kapnist's husband. After 
 that, she explained, she couldn't leave. 
 
 In October the Chesvi Chaika had a grand clean-up of 
 hostages, as the Bolsheviks found them too hard to guard 
 and feed. In one night, fifty-nine of them were slaughtered. 
 The husband of the Countess Kapnist was decapitated with 
 an ax. Among the others who were murdered at the same 
 time were the ex-minister of justice of the Russian Empire; 
 the ex-minister of communications of the Russian Empire; 
 General Radkoumitzeff and Prince Ourousoff and his 
 brother. 
 
 This killing was followed by a series of requisitions on 
 the part of the Bolsheviks which relieved the countess of 
 all her jewels, money, silverware and other valuables, so 
 that she and her five children were entirely without means. 
 With some other equally unfortunate women she started a 
 cooperative store where provisions could be purchased a 
 little more cheaply than in the ordinary provision shops ; but 
 the Bolsheviks, finding that the venture was profitable, 
 closed it up. Two months and a half after her husband had 
 been killed, the Bolsheviks arrested her on the ground that 
 her husband had been anti-Bolshevik. Her five children 
 were left to shift for themselves. At this time a part of 
 Denikine's Volunteer Army under Wrangel was marching 
 on the Caucasus, so she and many other women of good 
 families were kept as hostages. When Wrangel's men got 
 too close to Essentouky for comfort, the Bolsheviks fled, 
 taking their hostages with them. They took them all the 
 way to Caspian Sea, where they released them. 
 
 Determined to get back to her children, the Countess 
 Kapnist rode in freight cars, on the roofs and running-
 
 Courtesy of American Red Cross 
 
 Russian refugees, during the Odessa evacuation, struggling to pass the 
 British guards and rush aboard the Navajo, American Red Cross 
 Relief ship. The Bolshevik troops had reached the outskirts of 
 the city.
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 135 
 
 boards of coaches, and even on the fronts of engines. On 
 the way she met Wrangel, who told her that he believed her 
 children had been sent on to Odessa. She kept on, however. 
 When she reached Essentouky she found that her children 
 had disappeared. The next day she came down with typhus 
 and was on the verge of death for seven weeks. Her friends 
 located her children in Novorossisk and had them sent back 
 to her. She stayed in Essentouky, living on the bounty of 
 her almost equally unfortunate friends, until early in 1920. 
 Then the Bolsheviks came again, so she and her children 
 fled to Novorossisk a trip which ordinarily takes twelve 
 hours, but which took her eleven days and nights. In 
 Novorossisk she lived in a freight car for a time; and fi- 
 nally, when the British evacuated Denikine's army from 
 Novorossisk to Constantinople, she secured a place in the 
 hold of a British ship. The weather was very cold, and she 
 and her children had to stand in water for three days; but 
 they were leaving the Bolsheviks behind them, so nothing 
 mattered. In Constantinople her son caught scarlet fever. 
 The British sent her and her children to the concentration 
 camp on Prinkipo Island, near Constantinople, where they 
 lived for four months. Then her friends in Italy sent her 
 enough money to get to Rome. When I talked to her she 
 was supporting herself by needlework, but she hoped to be 
 able to open a pension for tourists if she could ever find a 
 suitable house and somebody to back her. 
 
 The case of the Countess Kapnist is by no means an 
 unusual one. I have talked with scores of women who 
 worked down to Essentouky, Piatigorsk and Kislovodsk 
 and, after months of fearful hardships and suffering, were 
 evacuated from Odessa, Novorossisk or the Crimea. Thou- 
 sands of them escaped by the same route, and endured expe-
 
 136 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 riences which might be expected to kill any human being 
 who didn't have the constitution of a truck-horse. It speaks 
 well for the powers of resistance of the human race that so 
 few of the refugees died of exposure or privation. A great 
 many of them have gone mad because of their experiences. 
 At the Y. M. C. A. shelter in Constantinople, when I was 
 there, for example, a young mother went mad and nearly 
 succeeded in choking her baby to death before the attendants 
 could overpower her. 
 
 The Princess Sherbatoff, who is a daughter of Stolypin, 
 the former Russian prime minister, lived on very large 
 estates in Podolia. The Bolsheviks slaughtered her hus- 
 band, her sister, her sister-in-law and her mother-in-law in 
 cold blood. She herself was tremendously popular with the 
 people on her estates. They hid her from the Bolsheviks 
 and passed her from hand to hand across the border. She 
 is in a Berlin sanatorium to-day, partly paralyzed and men- 
 tally affected by her experiences. Lots of them go mad, but 
 few of them die. 
 
 General Rennenkampf was one of the most distinguished 
 Russian generals during the war. His widow arrived in 
 Rome while I was there early in 1921. She had been 
 brought to Constantinople when the Wrangel army was 
 taken out of the Crimea, and she had succeeded in getting 
 the captain of a small steamer to take her to Italy by giving 
 him her last piece of jewelry. She had tried to find work 
 in Naples, but had found the city crowded; so she literally 
 bummed, as the saying goes, her way from Naples up to 
 Rome. When she reached Rome she collapsed on the side- 
 walk in front of the railway station. A heavy rain was 
 falling, and a kindly carriage-driver picked her up and 
 bundled her into his carriage. She had no money left, and
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 137 
 
 she knew nobody in Rome. The carriage-driver finally 
 took her to his own small lodgings and let her sleep there. 
 On the following day he took her to the Princess You- 
 soupoff. They had known each other in Petrograd, but the 
 hardships which Madame Rennenkampf had undergone had 
 so changed her that the Princess Yousoupoff could scarcely 
 recognize her. Her clothes were ragged and soiled. She 
 had no stockings at all; and on her feet she wore dancing 
 slippers which had been given to her. Madame Rennen- 
 kampf is an old woman. She wants to work, but it is doubt- 
 ful whether she could do any effective work if work could 
 be found for her. 
 
 There are two Princess Galitzins in Rome. One is an 
 old lady whose husband was the head of the czar's estates 
 at Gatchina, and very wealthy. She was brought out of 
 Russia by her son and daughter after the Denikine smash. 
 They were both penniless, but the son rushed back to the 
 Crimea to fight with Wrangel. The daughter supports her 
 mother and herself by teaching, for she speaks several 
 languages, as do most of the wealthy Russians. The mother, 
 weakened by exposure and the horrors through which she 
 had passed, had only a few weeks to live when I reached 
 Rome. The other Princess Galitzin was also very wealthy. 
 She plays the piano at dancing classes, and is glad to earn 
 six lire an hour, or about twenty-five cents. Her husband 
 is very anxious to get a position as chauffeur 
 
 There are hundreds of thousands of Russians whose sit- 
 tion to-day is exactly like that of Madame Rennenkampf 
 and the Galitzins. Princess Yousoupoff, head of the Rus- 
 sian Red Cross in Rome, applied in person to the Pope and 
 begged him to allow Russian refugees to occupy empty mon- 
 asteries. The city was so crowded that even tourists were
 
 138 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 unable to get quarters, and on almost any night during the 
 month preceding Easter one could see a dozen women tour- 
 ists sleeping in armchairs in the lounge of the best hotel. 
 The Pope refused her request because the fear of Bolshevism 
 was very great in Italy, and even those Russians who had 
 risked their lives in fleeing from it were suspected of it. 
 They are the paupers of the world, and the world seems 
 incapable of providing poor-houses for them. 
 
 The Russian embassy in Paris is the headquarters of the 
 Russian refugees in France who have no money, no jewelry 
 to sell, no clothes, no jobs and no hope. The Russian 
 embassies in Europe are sad reminders of Russia's departed 
 grandeur. The grounds are seedy and unkempt. Dust has 
 settled heavily on the portraits and the mirrors and the 
 gilded chairs. The buildings are dingy and fusty and down 
 at heel. In place of the scores of liveried servants who, 
 in the old days, sprang from behind every portiere and from 
 the shadow of every piece of furniture to take the visitor's 
 wraps and to escort him from room to room there are now 
 only occasional hungry-looking attendants, in threadbare 
 civilian dress. Sometimes one even finds an ex-admiral or a 
 former general acting as door-attendant or embassy mes- 
 senger, but more often the work is done by soldier-refugees 
 in their ancient uniform-blouses. 
 
 Persons of a humorous turn of mind are able to get 
 many a merry laugh nowadays over the Russian embassies, 
 speculating as to what country or government they repre- 
 sent, and as to where they get the money on which they con- 
 tinue to do business. I have seen so many Imperial Guard 
 officers working in kitchens, however, and so many prin- 
 cesses and generals' daughters waiting on table, and so many 
 former millionaires hiding indoors until nightfall so that
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 139 
 
 they could venture out on the street without exposing their 
 ragged clothes to public view, that humorous remarks on 
 Russian embassies have lost their savor and piquancy for me. 
 The embassies represent and I think that most decent peo- 
 ple are content that it should be so the three million Rus- 
 sians who have been driven from their country by the scur- 
 viest set of knaves that ever wrecked a nation; and the 
 meager amount of money on which they exist is the income 
 on the Russian government money which was on deposit in 
 the banks of different nations when the revolution took 
 place. Permission for this money to be used by most of 
 the embassies has hitherto been given by the anti-Bolshevik 
 governments of Kolchak, Denikine, Yudenitch and Wrangel 
 as they stood weakly and temporarily on their feet or so, 
 at any rate, I have been assured. There is one, at least, of 
 these Russian embassies which is its own authority for the 
 use of the Russian money in the country where the embassy 
 is located; and the money is evidently being used for the 
 benefit of certain favored political parties and to the exclu- 
 sion of other parties less favored. Such tactics smell too 
 strongly of the old rotten Russian regime to be received with 
 any favor by disinterested American and British and French 
 organizations which are trying to help Russian refugees 
 without thought of difference in politics, race or creed. 
 There are even some branches of the Russian Red Cross 
 which need to be forcibly reminded that the question of 
 politics and favoritism shouldn't be permitted to creep into 
 relief work. 
 
 The sister of the Russian ambassador in Paris, Madem- 
 oiselle Maklakoff, devotes her entire time to assisting 
 refugees. The first time that I walked into the embassy, a 
 long line of them was waiting to see her. A young woman
 
 140 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 had just collapsed from hunger. Every woman who was 
 waiting wore mourning, and not one of them had enough 
 money to buy food for herself or her children on the follow- 
 ing day. 
 
 Badly off as are the refugees in Paris, Berlin, London 
 and Rome, they are infinitely better off than those in the 
 camps or the smaller centers ; for those who are young and 
 able and willing can usually find something to do which 
 will partly support them. The hundreds of men and women 
 and young girls who were reared in luxury and idleness in 
 Russia are helped, in the large cities, to learn trades which 
 will make it possible for them to support themselves. Thus, 
 in Paris, a committee headed by Mademoiselle Maklakoff 
 sends men refugees to a school where they learn to be 
 electricians, and mechanicians. In the same school, women 
 refugees learn dentistry, photographic retouching and weav- 
 ing. Another school teaches shorthand and typing to the 
 refugees. In Constantinople and Finland and Salonica and 
 Tunis and Egypt, on the contrary, there is nothing what- 
 ever for the refugees to do except hope for better days and 
 the person who is stuck in Europe to-day with no resources 
 except hope is even more unpleasantly situated than a man 
 in the middle of the Pacific without a boat or a life preserver. 
 
 In Paris I met a young woman whose family was a very 
 fine one and whose name is one of the best known names in 
 Russia. The authenticity of her story was vouched for by 
 the Russian embassy; but the girl herself begged me not to 
 use her name for fear that the position which she had made 
 for herself in Paris might be affected. 
 
 This young woman had the knack of designing cos- 
 tumes, though her only efforts in that direction prior to the 
 revolution had been directed toward designing her own
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 141 
 
 hats and dresses. After the revolution, when the Bolsheviks 
 decreed that all persons should work, she had taken to 
 designing costumes for the Petrograd ballet. Her mother 
 was dead; her father was killed by the Bolsheviks; her 
 brother went mad ; her nurse disappeared. She lived alone 
 in one room of her family's Petrograd apartment. There 
 was no light and no water to be had, and at night she hunted 
 through the city for fuel. She lived in this way for a year 
 and a half, during which time she was unmolested by the 
 Bolsheviks. But the life, she said, was unbearable, what 
 with the cold and hunger and the lack of her former friends. 
 So she put on the clothes of a peasant and tramped out to 
 the Finnish border. At night she slipped across the lines and 
 tramped onward until she reached a small town on the Gulf 
 of Finland. Her entire resources consisted of the peasant 
 clothes in which she stood, a pair of old ear-rings and a 
 brooch which had belonged to her mother, and a single 
 Russian sable skin which would, she knew, provide a dash 
 of richness for a suit if she could ever earn enough money to 
 buy one. The first thing about this Finnish town which 
 struck her, she said, was the frightfulness of the hats which 
 the women wore. She said that they were the lowest form 
 of hat-life. So she picked out the best-looking Finnish 
 woman that she could find, and offered to make her a hat for 
 the price of the materials and two days' food. She said that 
 she disliked to go up to a perfect stranger on the street and 
 make an offer of that nature, because such an approach 
 could scarcely be construed as highly complimentary. The 
 Finnish woman, fortunately, wasn't sensitive, and she 
 accepted the offer. The Russian girl purchased hat material 
 for ten marks, which is as little as it sounds, and evolved a 
 hat which almost made the Finnish woman weep with grati-
 
 142 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 fication. It was such a wonderful hat that it even caused the 
 woman's husband to unstrap the family sock and make the 
 girl a present of another ten marks which is an unusual 
 token of appreciation in Finland. The sight of the new hat, 
 when the Finnish woman wore it for the first time, almost 
 caused her to be mobbed by acquaintances who wished to 
 know where she got it. 
 
 The young Russian woman at this point interjected a 
 remark which will bear out the suspicions of men who are 
 obliged to pay the monthly bills of their womenfolk. 
 "Women of all classes and all positions," she said, "are 
 always interested in hats and are always ready to buy hats." 
 At any rate, the Finnish woman revealed the source of her 
 new hat, and the young Russian woman was immediately 
 flooded with orders. She made hats for practically every 
 woman in town, incidentally using up all the available hat- 
 trimming, so that expeditions were formed by heckled hus- 
 bands to shoot Finnish seagulls in order that more hat-trim- 
 ming might be provided. Out of that one town she cleaned 
 up six thousand marks. With this sum she headed for Paris, 
 where the care-free tourist willingly submits to highway 
 robbery in order to acquire the indefinable something which 
 is popularly supposed to go and frequently does go with 
 a Paris hat. She worked over to Stockholm, down to 
 Copenhagen, over to Berlin and across to Paris, stopping 
 long enough in each place to make enough money in hat- 
 establishments to pay her way to the next stop. 
 
 When she reached Paris she was broke and knew no 
 one. She went to the Russian embassy, where Madame 
 Maklakoff, after hearing her story, loaned her enough 
 money to rest for a few days, and got her a little attic room 
 in an out-of-the-way corner of the city. She started out to
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 143 
 
 hunt a job with a few sketches of ideas which she had for 
 dresses. She tried one of the best dress-makers in Paris, 
 and was hired instantly. Probably almost every American 
 woman who looked into the fashionable dressmaking estab- 
 lishments of Paris in 1921 has seen this young woman's 
 costume sketches. For working from nine in the morning 
 until seven at night and evolving five costumes a day, she 
 received two hundred seventy-five francs a month or less 
 than five dollars a week and her lunch and dinner. She 
 had a few words to say concerning the exploitation of labor 
 in France that were strong enough to fry eggs. She 
 declared that she had worked in a good many places since 
 the Revolution, but that she had never worked in a place 
 where girls were forced to work for such pitiful wages as in 
 Paris. Her sketches became so well known that she left the 
 dressmaking establishment, did her work in her own room, 
 and sold the sketches to the highest bidder. Then a woman 
 who had saved enough money to start an establishment of 
 her own made her an offer to go into partnership with her. 
 The young woman is well on her way to an independent 
 fortune to-day. She is still living in the one room that 
 Madame Maklakoff got for her, and as fast as the money 
 comes in, it is salted away in the bank. 
 
 I asked this young woman whether her experiences in 
 Soviet Russia and in escaping from Soviet Russia had 
 affected her in any way. "Not in the least," she replied. 
 "I've been too busy working; and when I'm working, I'm 
 always happy. I'm glad that I had to start working, and I 
 know that I shall never stop. Even when I go back to Rus- 
 sia I shall keep on." 
 
 It is a pleasure to chronicle this girl's experience. The 
 experiences of most of the refugees are very different.
 
 144 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Many of them are too old to be entrusted with work or to 
 undertake it if it exists. Many of them, having been trained 
 to no sort of work whatever, are unable to locate the only 
 sorts of unskilled labor of which they are capable. Many 
 of them, unfortunately, are unwilling to work at tasks which 
 they consider below their dignity. And very many of them, 
 for various reasons, are unwilling to work at all. This latter 
 class, oddly enough, is not usually recruited from among 
 the ranks of the old Russian aristocracy. The best and the 
 most willing workers among the refugees come from among 
 the aristocrats who had never done a genuine stroke of work 
 in their lives until the Bolsheviks became socially prominent. 
 The officers of the best regiments of the old Russian army 
 will accept any sort of position that will enable them to 
 live as a general rule. The officers of the Russian armies 
 subsequent to the Revolution are very different propositions. 
 I was discussing the matter with the Russian ambassador 
 in Athens Prince Demidoff. "Our greatest problem in 
 providing enterprises in which the Russian refugees can 
 work," said he, "is to make the men work. Many of them 
 won't work at all. We can't get them to work. They want 
 to sit around and be fed. The only way to handle them is 
 to put a strong man over them and drive them to work by 
 sheer force." Nearly all of the Athens refugees are officers 
 and men of the armies that fought the Bolsheviks in South 
 Russia. "The officers of the new army are a sorry lot," 
 said Demidoff. "They're lazy and impossible." 
 
 The same statement was made to me by people who 
 worked with the Russian refugees in London, Paris, Rome, 
 Finland and Warsaw. Enormous numbers of them not only 
 have the regular Russian temperament, which is the stolid, 
 dull Slav temperament exaggerated by centuries of stern
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 145 
 
 taskmasters who did all their thinking for them, but this 
 temperament has been further exaggerated by years of army 
 life, by the wanderings of the last few years and by the 
 charity on which they have existed since they left Russia. 
 
 As a result of their pauperization, the mental attitude of 
 many of them is exactly the same as that of the American 
 tramp or hobo. Europe, however, isn't so well adapted to 
 hoboing as is America, because of passport and vise restric- 
 tions, the large number of languages which one must know 
 in order to ask for food at back doors, and the general lack 
 of edibles. This mental attitude of a part of the refugees 
 can not be ignored if the Russian refugee problem which 
 has grown to such an extent that it has become an inter- 
 national problem is to be solved. Nor can Russian 
 refugees as a whole be condemned because certain of their 
 numbers refuse to work. Russian refugees exist in their 
 present number as a direct result of Russia's fight against 
 Germany in behalf of the Allies. The government which 
 led Russia into the war has gone to pot. Anybody who can 
 hold up the negative side of a debate as to whether or not 
 the Allies ought to take care of the Russian refugees is 
 entitled to the Grand Cross of the Order of the Raspberry. 
 
 In Paris alone there are enough Russian refugees of all 
 classes to populate an entire Russian city. There are pro- 
 fessors of every branch of learning, doctors, authors, 
 lawyers, judges, merchants, financiers, legislators, engineers 
 and skilled workmen of all sorts. There are also enough 
 barons and counts and princes to supply a dozen Russian 
 cities with many more titles than they need. The business 
 of titles, like the business of czar's coachman, was carried to 
 excess in Russia. Wherever my wanderings have carried 
 me in Europe, I have always been shown a czar's coachman.
 
 146 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 There is a czar's coachman in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome 
 and every other European capital. It is my belief that if 
 the czar's coachmen who are now refugees in Europe were 
 to march in review, they would take over forty-five minutes 
 to pass a given point. Evidently the czar had a fresh coach- 
 man after every meal ; and the business of hiring and firing 
 czar's coachmen must have grown to huge proportions. 
 It may be that the czar had to have a coachman whose com- 
 plexion matched each one of his uniforms, or something of 
 that nature. 
 
 The matter of titles was even worse, apparently. At 
 the Russian embassy in Constantinople a colonel of an old 
 Imperial Guard regiment was giving me some refugee 
 addresses, and he named a certain lady whom we will call 
 Princess Kokine. I stopped him. "How is it," I asked him, 
 "that there's a Princess Kokine here when there is also a 
 Princess Kokine in Paris and another in Berlin and another 
 in Warsaw and another in Rome?" He shrugged his 
 shoulders. "It's a large family," he replied. "There are 
 enough Princess Kokines to stretch all the way across the 
 Black Sea if you place them end to end." He explained 
 further that if a Prince Kokine had seven sons, each one of 
 them would be a prince, and that each son of each of the 
 seven would also be a prince, so that at the end of a few 
 generations there might easily be enough Prince Kokines 
 to form an eight-team baseball league. In certain parts of 
 Russia, notably the south, the title of prince appears to have 
 been very similar to the title of colonel in Kentucky and 
 other southern states, where it is frequently awarded by 
 tacit agreement to gentlemen who have killed more than one 
 rattlesnake or otherwise served the public in a noteworthy 
 manner. A Petrograd prince spoke to me very disparag-
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 147 
 
 ingly of princes from the Caucasus, and declared stoutly 
 that any one in the Caucasus who had more than one house 
 was a prince by common consent. This statement, I am 
 sure, is slightly exaggerated; but it is certain that among 
 Russian refugees, princes and princesses are almost as com- 
 mon as are home-brewers in America. When one first 
 comes in contact with Russian refugees, one becomes quite 
 thrilled at news of a princess working in a restaurant; but 
 after one has had a little experience with them, informa- 
 tion concerning a toiling princess is of no more moment 
 than information concerning a loafing czar's coachman. 
 No mistake should be made about the Russian aristocracy, 
 however. As loafers, they were encumberers of the earth, 
 as are most loafers, whether they're American loafers or 
 English loafers or Irish loafers or Russian loafers. As 
 workers, they are a fine lot of people. Without entering 
 into any controversy with Socialists or extreme democrats, 
 I wish to state that I have taken a careful look at Russian 
 aristocrats and Russian workmen side by side in a number 
 of refugee camps, and that, as a result, if I had to hire five 
 hundred Russians from a certain class for any sort of work, 
 whether it were ditch-digging or automobile driving or 
 farming or bookkeeping, I'd pick them from the ranks of 
 the aristocrats every time. There is a good reason for this : 
 the aristocracy of Russia is recruited mostly from the Nor- 
 dic race tall, blond, long-skulled people whereas the bulk 
 of the population of Russia belongs to the Alpine race. 
 
 A majority of these refugee aristocrats, unfortunately, 
 have the idea that when, as and if the Bolshevik regime col- 
 lapses, they are going to return to Russia to occupy their 
 former estates and take up their ornamentally useless lives 
 where they were dropped in 1917. This idea, according to
 
 148 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 the opinions of most persons who have been watching Russia 
 carefully for the past year, is about as worthless as a last 
 year's wren's nest. After the Bolsheviks have finished 
 messing with Russia, the country will need all the Nordics 
 in sight to form a decent government; but it will have as 
 little use for windy titles and limitless estates and the old 
 aristocratic regime as Harvard University would have for a 
 course in safe-blowing. The sooner that the Russian 
 refugees reconcile themselves to this eventuality, the better it 
 will be for themselves, for Russia, and for the agencies which 
 are standing between the refugees and starvation. 
 
 At the beginning of 1921 the refugees in Paris were 
 divided into three classes. The first class was made up of 
 the persons who had large estates and great wealth in 
 Russia before the revolution. Most of these people escaped 
 from Russia with a few beautiful furs and jewels which 
 they could sell in order to tide them over for a time. Some 
 could live for only a few months on the proceeds of these 
 sales, while some could live for two or three years. The 
 second class consisted of persons who earned comfortable 
 salaries in Russia, but depended entirely on their work 
 such people, for example, as professors, lawyers, teachers, 
 newspaper men, doctors, artists, engineers, bank clerks, and 
 government employees. The third class comprised the 
 skilled laborers stenographers, milliners, mechanics and so 
 on. 
 
 There are several banks in Paris which are managed by 
 wealthy Russians. A certain refugee named Porlotsoff, who 
 had factories in the Urals and was assistant to the minister 
 of foreign affairs before the first revolution, evolved a 
 scheme whereby the refugees who could prove that they had 
 property in Russia, stocks and bonds in Russian banks, and
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 149 
 
 other valuable holdings which were not accessible because of 
 the activities of the Bolsheviks, could negotiate loans from 
 French banks. The Russian-managed banks backed these 
 loans; and it was arranged that every person who could 
 prove large Russian holdings could borrow a thousand 
 francs a month for himself and five hundred francs a month 
 for each person dependent on him. These loans were to be 
 granted until March I, 1921, the understanding being that 
 the Bolshevik government was to collapse by that date so 
 that the borrowers could get at their possessions and repay 
 their debts. By Christmas of 1920 the Paris banks had loaned 
 ten million francs on this arrangement. On March I, 1921, 
 the arrangement stopped. How the first class of Russian 
 refugees in Paris is living to-day, nobody seems to know. 
 Nobody seems to know in any city how the Russians manage 
 to exist, as they so frequently do, without any work and 
 without any apparent means of getting money, and without 
 any possessions which can be pawned or sold. The wealthy 
 refugees or rather, the refugees who had wealth in the old 
 days pinned their hopes on the temporary anti-Bolshevik 
 governments as they sprang up : on Yudenitch, on Kolchak, 
 on Denikine, on Wrangel. As these governments collapsed 
 one after another, the depression and despair of the refugees 
 has been a pitiful thing to see. It is a complete mystery to 
 me why the once wealthy Russians, as they saw their wealth 
 and their homes wiped out, watched their loved ones going 
 hungry and cold, and found it impossible to locate work of 
 any sort, did not sink into the depths of neurasthenia and 
 melancholia. Singularly few of them, however, appear to 
 have done so. 
 
 The second class of refugees in Paris those who were 
 comfortably situated in Russia but did not have independent
 
 ISO WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 fortunes were, up to the first of March, the most miserable. 
 They were unable to find work in Paris which corresponded 
 to the work that they had done in Russia. Most of them 
 knew only the Russian language, so that they could not be 
 employed by French or English firms. The engineers alone 
 of this class were able to get along, because their knowledge 
 of machinery made it possible for factory-owners to employ 
 them as manual laborers. The Russian embassy in Paris 
 maintains a school for the children of this second class of 
 refugees though in time it may be enlarged to take in 
 more. It is a poverty-stricken little school, and a good part 
 of the money which makes it possible is given by Americans 
 or French. The teachers are all Russian refugees, and they 
 are paid from two hundred and fifty to five hundred francs 
 a month apiece. That's between twenty and thirty dollars 
 a month, but they say they can get along on it because the 
 bulk of the school's money needs to be spent for books. 
 This school teaches the children enough French to make it 
 possible for them to get into the French high schools. The 
 children are given lunch at the school. Those whose parents 
 have secured positions pay a hundred francs a month ; while 
 those whose parents can not find work are taught for noth- 
 ing. The cook in the school kitchen, by the way, is a Russian 
 lady from Tambof f. In Russia she was extremely wealthy. 
 When she and her three children arrived in Paris, she was 
 penniless. The two littlest children are taught and fed in 
 the school for nothing. The oldest daughter, who is sixteen, 
 helps with the cooking and thus pays for her lessons. The 
 question of education of the Russian refugee children is, of 
 course, a very serious one, as almost any family would dis- 
 cover if, after wandering penniless around the world for 
 many months, it were dumped down in a strange country
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 151 
 
 without money, without friends, without text-books and 
 without any knowledge of the language of the country 
 into which it had been dumped. 
 
 The third class of Paris refugees the skilled workers 
 had all the work that they wanted until the big strikes 
 occurred during the winter of 1920. So many French people 
 were thrown out of work by them that the French naturally 
 gave their available positions to their own people, and there 
 was less and less work for the Russians every day. Con- 
 sequently all three classes of Russians in Paris were in about 
 the same fix by the spring of 1921, and the fix was not one 
 which could by any stretch of the imagination be classed as 
 enviable. 
 
 In my note-book I find the following Parisian cases, 
 fortunate ones for the most part, of persons who were well 
 known in old Russia. 
 
 Count Hendrickoff is about sixty years old. He was a 
 wealthy man in Russia, and for forty years was attached 
 to the Foreign Office. He came out after the first revolu- 
 tion. Rheumatism in his hands makes it impossible for him 
 to work. The Russian embassy allows him the equivalent of 
 two dollars a week for a place in which to live; but its 
 resources are so limited that it can not allow him more. 
 Since it can not, it does not ask how the count manages to 
 get food. There's no use in harrowing one's mind with a 
 situation that can't be remedied. 
 
 Princess Shakoffskoi with her two daughters lives in a 
 single room at Versailles. Her husband was killed by Bol- 
 sheviks. She lives by embroidering linen, but not too well. 
 
 Madame Vesiloffskaia lived in Petrograd, where her 
 husband was in the Finance Ministry, and very wealthy. 
 She has sold almost everything she owns in order to live.
 
 152 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 She is unable to get work. She has two daughters. One 
 of them works in a bank at a very small salary. The other 
 is ill. 
 
 Princess Ourousoff is happy and reasonably successful 
 making hats and embroideries for Worth, the costumer. 
 Princess Obolensky has developed a marked knack for mak- 
 ing stylish dresses, and has been so successful at it that she 
 has never had to be helped. Princess Gargarin is one of the 
 social lights of Paris. She goes, as the phrase has it, every- 
 where ; and one sees her name constantly in the society col- 
 umns of the Paris papers. Yet her only means of support is 
 a position in a Paris office which pays her six hundred 
 francs a month, or the equivalent of about five hundred 
 dollars a year. 
 
 Though I should rather dislike to say so in the hearing of 
 any of the Russian refugees in Paris, the Paris refugees are 
 more fortunately situated than those in any other part of 
 Europe, with the possible exceptions of London and Berlin. 
 This is because Paris is a large city in which the possibility 
 of work is always present. The same holds true of Berlin 
 and London. There is always a possibility that a starving 
 refugee may find something to do in these places before he 
 slips over the divide. This is a thin possibility to dangle 
 before a starving man or woman ; but the fact remains that 
 it is a possibility. 
 
 When one moves in to Poland, however, one finds him- 
 self in a country where the bulk of the population has very 
 little decent food to buy, and an insufficient amount of 
 money with which to buy it. Early in 1921, when I reached 
 Warsaw, one received nine hundred and sixty Polish marks 
 in return for an American dollar, instead of the normal rate 
 pf five marks for a dollar. One good pair of women's shoes
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 153 
 
 cost from eight to ten thousand marks; and the wage of a 
 waitress in a restaurant was in the neighborhood of six 
 hundred marks a month. It is scarcely necessary to go 
 deeper into the economic situation to show that the hundreds 
 of thousands of Russian refugees in Poland, lacking money 
 and jobs, were in a nerve-wracking position. It should 
 always be borne in mind that these people are the only 
 wo rid- wanderers who have no government to which they 
 can turn. An American, stranded, jobless, and moneyless in 
 a strange land, can go to his consul ; and if he deserves help, 
 the consul will get him back to America somehow. The 
 Russians have no consuls to whom they can go, and no coun- 
 try to which they can return. They've got to find work; 
 and if they can't find work, they've got to beg or die. 
 
 Poland can't even feed herself. The American Relief 
 Administration, more familiarly known as the Hoover 
 crowd, is daily feeding one million, one hundred thousand 
 children under fifteen years of age with its usual energy, 
 efficiency and lack of waste motion. Older persons must 
 shift for themselves. Even the Poles find the shifting very 
 difficult; while the Russians, strangers in a strange land, 
 find it more perplexing than any Einstein theory. So 
 pitiful has been the state of the Russians in Warsaw that the 
 American Relief Administration conducted a so-called 
 "intelligentsia kitchen" in that city, and fed fifteen hundred 
 adult refugees there each day aristocrats, army officers, 
 professors, doctors, lawyers, actors. Adults have to be 
 pretty badly off when the American Relief Administration 
 provides food for them ; for it is essentially a child-feeding 
 organization. Yet fifteen hundred people is a very small 
 fraction of the whole. 
 
 To get in touch with the Russians in Warsaw, one goes
 
 154 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 to a hotel near the palace which, before the war, was occupied 
 by the governor general of Russian Poland. On the top 
 floor of the hotel, in a rather shabbily furnished room which 
 looks down on the copious snow-covered chimney pots of the 
 palace, lives Madame Ludmila Lubimoff, head of the Rus- 
 sian Red Cross in Poland. Before the war, Madame Lubi- 
 moff lived in the palace which she sees to-day from the win- 
 dows of her room ; for she was the governor general's wife. 
 Her husband was a miniature czar, holding practically 
 unlimited power over the people under him. To-day he 
 acts as secretary for the Russian Red Cross, and is paid four 
 hundred marks a month, or in the neighborhood of forty- 
 five American cents. Every little while he goes to the 
 police and receives permission to remain in Poland; and at 
 police headquarters he is always received with respectful 
 consideration, because he was a very just and kindly and 
 well-liked governor general. Before he became the gov- 
 ernor of Poland, he was the governor of Vilna and what was 
 known as a "palace master" or Hofmeister of the Imperial 
 court. As for his wife, she was a beautiful woman, 
 whose influence was great and far-reaching. Even to-day 
 she is an unusually handsome woman, with great masses of 
 molasses-candy-colored hair, and the whitest of teeth, and 
 eyes which squizzle pleasantly at the corners when she wel- 
 comes the old friends who drop in on her for sympathy 
 and help : such people, for example, as the former governors 
 of Russia's greatest provinces and former Imperial Guard 
 officers, and counts and barons and princes whose names 
 were known the length and breadth of the Empire. 
 Madame Lubimoff herself, by the way, was born a princess, 
 and was what the English-speaking Russians usually speak 
 of as "reech, reech and reech" which seems to be their
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 155 
 
 invariable manner of emphasizing richness. When she and 
 her husband fled from Petrograd, she saved a larger amount 
 of jewels than most fleeing Russians were able to save. 
 This was due to the assistance of the Persian consul in 
 Petrograd. This gentleman, who was a Pole although he 
 represented Persia, sent her jewels to Finland by courier. 
 Consequently she and her husband can exist for another five 
 or six years by selling now a jewel and again a jewel. They 
 must live frugally in one room, and they can eat only the 
 simplest fare if the jewels are to last that long. When they 
 are gone, there will be nothing. 
 
 Madame Lubimoff was somewhat delayed in her get- 
 away from Soviet Russia by the fact that her husband was 
 languishing in a Bolshevik jail awaiting execution. One 
 day she was called to the telephone. When she answered, a 
 man's voice asked whether she were Ludmila Lubimoff. She 
 replied that she was, whereupon a female voice took up the 
 conversation. It proved to be the voice of a lady with whom 
 Madame Lubimoff had gone to school many years before 
 one Angelik Balabanoff, who is one of the most notorious 
 Bolsheviks in all Soviet Russia. In addition to being men- 
 tally en rapport with the Bolshevik leaders, she is bodily 
 en rapport with a number of them as well. One might, in 
 fact, call her the star rapporter of the Bolshevik govern- 
 ment. Some time since she made a sensational trip to 
 France and back to Russia again without passport or 
 vises a fact which caused the French government much 
 anguish. Balabanoff had just learned of Madame Lubi- 
 moff's presence in Petrograd. "You will be surprised." she 
 said to Madame Lubimoff, after the two had hysterically 
 voiced their delight at hearing each other's voice after 
 so many years, "you will be surprised when you hear
 
 156 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 the name of the man who asked for you over the telephone 
 just now." Madame Lubimoff at once stated that she was 
 consumed by curiosity. "It was Trotsky," declared Bala- 
 banoff. "He is here at my apartment and he telephoned to 
 oblige me." "If he is so willing, then, to oblige you," replied 
 Madame Lubimoff, "ask him to oblige you further by hav- 
 ing my husband released from jail." And on the following 
 day Madame Lubimoff received an order, signed by Trotsky, 
 releasing her husband. She at once sold enough jewels to 
 purchase a false passport stating that her husband had per- 
 mission to go to the Ukraine to buy leather. And so they 
 came out into Poland together. 
 
 Madame Lubimoff, as I said before, is head of the Rus- 
 sian Red Cross in Poland, and it is a very fortunate thing 
 for the Russian refugees that this should be so. Late in 
 1920 the Central Office of the Russian Red Cross in Paris 
 ordered her to discontinue the activities of the Russian Red 
 Cross in Poland because of lack of funds. Instead of dis- 
 continuing, she enlarged her field of activities. "I could not 
 stop," she told me. "These are my people and they were 
 dying." So she hustles around all day, this woman who was 
 "reech, reech and reech" a few years ago, and the first lady 
 of that section of the land in which she is now doing her 
 hustling. She looks after the workshops which she has 
 started, and the feeding stations which are keeping her 
 people from starvation, and the dispensaries which look 
 after the sick; and in her spare moments she tears around 
 to the Americans or the Poles or any one at all and begs for 
 more. She has become a very accomplished beggar, and 
 is not discouraged by rebuffs. If she can not get a case of 
 condensed milk for a kitchen, she will gladly take two cans. 
 And if she can not get an automobile load of cloth for a
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 157 
 
 workshop, she wouldn't think of scorning half a dozen pairs 
 of pajamas which her workshops can make into shirts, 
 plucking out each thread and cunningly recutting them. It 
 was pleasant to hear the relief workers putting her on the 
 griddle, as one might say. "Darn her," they'd say, "she's 
 an awful nuisance! Asking for a sack of flour, and if you 
 haven't got it, asking for half a sack or a quarter of a sack ! 
 You want to look out for that woman ! Don't go near her 
 or she'll ask you for money sure as shooting. Yes, sir! 
 Come right out and ask you for it ! Can't hold on to a cent 
 while she's around, darn her!" Very ferocious and con- 
 temptuous, these young men were; and the next morning 
 they'd scratch their heads meditatively, and privately figure 
 out some way whereby they could send her a little more flour 
 or a little more milk or maybe even a few Polish marks. 
 They're a terrible lot of cynics and hard-boiled eggs, these 
 relief workers of ours. 
 
 The main idea behind all of Madame Lubimoff's efforts 
 is the foundation of workshops for Russian refugees which 
 shall pay for themselves and clear enough profit to feed the 
 people who can't work. She has a working colony of three 
 hundred skilled workmen out at Sulejuwek, near Warsaw. 
 All of these workmen are specialists in such things as fine 
 leather work, fine brass work, the making of Russian enamel 
 and so on. They make only beautiful things, and the market 
 for all that they make is a large and eager one. Then there 
 are two big sewing shops employing three hundred women 
 and equipped with twenty American sewing-machines which 
 were the gift of Americans. When I was in Warsaw, this 
 shop was working on the remaking of hospital shirts which 
 had been given to the Russians by the American Red Cross 
 on the condition that they be remade. Every stitch on the
 
 158 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 hospital shirts was picked out, and the pieces were recut and 
 resewed so that they made very natty shirts for street wear. 
 In one month this shop had shown a profit of one hundred 
 thousand marks, because the shirts produced by it were 
 eagerly snapped up. The boss of the shirt factory is Princess 
 Meschersky. Meschersky is a great name in Russia; and 
 when the Bolsheviks ran the princess out of Russia, they lost 
 a good forewoman. Prince Meschersky used to be Russian 
 consul general in Shanghai ; but in Warsaw he couldn't get 
 a job. Finally the Russian Red Cross let him peel potatoes 
 in return for his food; so he peels diligently every day, and 
 eats heartily, and seems remarkably contented with his lot. 
 Probably he bears in mind how much more unpleasant it 
 would have been if he couldn't have anything to eat. 
 
 The women who work in the sewing shops are paid one 
 hundred and fifty Polish marks a day, and are given three 
 meals a day for which they are charged thirty marks. The 
 Polish mark, at the time of which I write, stood at nine hun- 
 dred and sixty marks for the dollar. The lunch at these 
 workshops costs the Russian Red Cross twenty-two marks 
 a person, and is sold for ten marks. A modest dinner for 
 four people at either of the two good Warsaw hotels, at the 
 same period, cost between three and four thousand marks. 
 
 There are refugee shops where invalids make toys : oth- 
 ers where neat kitchen utensils are fashioned out of old tin 
 cans furnished by the American Red Cross and the American 
 Relief Administration. These shops make fine lamps out 
 of discarded cans, for example, which are sold for seventy- 
 five marks in the Russian Red Cross sales rooms; whereas 
 an exactly similar lamp in the public markets costs one 
 hundred and fifty marks. Other shops make clothes and 
 ; sweaters out of the wool furnished by the American Red
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 159 
 
 Cross. At the sales rooms one can buy a sweater for nine 
 hundred marks; a blouse for a thousand marks; a suit for 
 four thousand marks and an overcoat for five thousand 
 marks or a toy windmill for ten marks. In two months' 
 time at the beginning of 1921, the shops took in four million 
 marks, and their expenses were two million marks. It is by 
 such means that Madame Lubimoff hopes to redeem the 
 refugees of Poland. She has thousands of names on file 
 at her headquarters; and each one of them wants, but can 
 not get, work. "It is my fear," said Madame Lubimoff to 
 me, "that the American Red Cross may make an end of 
 giving to the Russians, and I spend all my days hunting and 
 hoping for machines and tools, so that more and more of 
 our people can have work. It is all they ask : work. The 
 Poles can not give to us, for they are only existing like 
 little children who are learning to stand on their feet. If 
 you will ask your people for machines or for tools for these 
 Russian people even one machine or one hoe is better than 
 none at all I beg that you will ask your people for such 
 things. We are all very great beggars now. I am sorry that 
 
 it is so It was not always so Just machines 
 
 for sewing or for working in the ground " 
 
 Let us look at some of the Russians in Warsaw. Here, 
 for one, is Prince Outomsky, who was widely known in 
 Russia as a patron of the arts. He was one of the 
 wealthiest men in that very wealthy city; and to his salon 
 came the greatest artists and authors and actors in the 
 Empire. The Russian Red Cross, learning that he was in 
 unfortunate circumstances, hunted him up. They found him 
 and Princess Outomsky occupying one-half of a tiny room ; 
 and their half was set off from the other half by a curtain of 
 torn and ancient cloth. The two of them were making
 
 160 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 cigarettes as rapidly as they could ; for if they worked very 
 rapidly all the day they were able to earn as much as twenty 
 marks a day. The investigator who hunted them up had 
 belonged to a great family in Petrograd and had known the 
 prince in the days of his wealth. "When I came to the 
 room," she told me, "this man began to cry quite like a 
 child." They had been reduced to such extremes of poverty 
 and hunger that he had begged on street corners. They 
 were taken to the Red Cross kitchens and put to work. The 
 princess started as a waitress, and was then elevated to the 
 position of cashier; and between them they now earn four 
 thousand marks a month, or the equivalent of four dollars. 
 "They are now quite happy," said my informant, "for they 
 feel that they do something for their people." Prince 
 Outomsky has large estates in Poland; but they have been 
 requisitioned by the Polish government, as have the Polish 
 estates of many other Russian refugees. Sometime, when 
 things are running smoothly, says the Polish government, 
 the Russians may be paid for the things that have been taken 
 from them. 
 
 Madame Kaswoffsky owns very large estates in Poland, 
 but she is doing office work for the Russian Red Cross for 
 twenty-eight hundred marks a month and her dinner each 
 day because her estates have been seized and she has nothing 
 else. The seizing of the estates of Russians has had some 
 queer results. The Bolsheviks robbed Prince Mirsky of his 
 estate near Minsk. He therefore organized a band of 
 guerrilla fighters and robbed his own home of his own 
 belongings. 
 
 Three miles out from Warsaw in a two-room hut at the 
 edge of a forest lives a Russian gentleman named Oblonsky, 
 who was the architect of the Imperial palaces in Petrograd.
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 161 
 
 He has now secured a position as forester, and regulates the 
 cutting down of trees and the disposition of faggots. His 
 wife was killed by the Bolsheviks. He has six children. 
 The eldest is sixteen years old and has a lame leg. Never- 
 theless this boy walks into Warsaw each morning and spends 
 the day making tin cups out of condensed milk cans. When 
 he has finished making cups, he goes to a Russian school, 
 which keeps him fairly busy until eight o'clock at night. 
 Then he can relax and enjoy life; so he gets Red Cross food 
 for his five brothers and sisters and limps out along the 
 frozen roads to the little hut in the forest. 
 
 There is a waitress in the Red Cross kitchens named 
 Stahl-von-Holdstein. She is a baroness, and is the daughter 
 of one of the wealthiest land-owners of old Russia. In the 
 words of the Russians, she was "reech, reech, reech as 
 millions." Her husband, the baron, used to be commandant 
 of Peter and Paul Fortress in Petrograd. Her home was a 
 very beautiful one, and after the revolution an offer of 
 three hundred and fifty thousand English pounds was made 
 for it. She accepted ; but instead of getting three hundred 
 and fifty thousand English pounds, she received a million 
 Soviet roubles, which is something else again. In fact, 
 almost any Bolshevik would be highly delighted to exchange 
 a million Soviet roubles for three dollars to-day, and their 
 actual value is the worth of the waste paper on which they 
 are printed. The baron and the baroness and their three 
 children came across the frontier in peasant clothes. They 
 haven't a penny to their names except the Polish marks that 
 the baroness earns by waiting on table. 
 
 The shirt factory of the Russian Red Cross has an 
 expert needlewoman in the person of Madame Herschel- 
 mann, wife of the General Herschelmann who was gover-
 
 162 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 nor general of Moscow and later commander of the army 
 in the Vilna district. Three days before I reached Warsaw 
 last winter, Madame Herschelmann arrived there in rags 
 with her nineteen-year-old daughter. They had started from 
 Oranienbaum, which is near Petrograd, for Finland; and 
 to the person who had undertaken to get them into Finland 
 they had paid thirty thousand Finnish marks. The Finns 
 caught them, however ; and as the border was closed to Rus- 
 sians at that time and as they had no permission to enter, 
 they were put back across the border. The Soviet border 
 guard immediately arrested them. Madame Herschelmann 
 had a few diamonds hidden in her clothes. With most of 
 these she bought her freedom. She immediately tried the 
 same means of escape once more, selling the remainder of 
 her diamonds and her only good clothes in order to get the 
 thirty thousand Finnish marks. On the second attempt she 
 and her daughter were successful; and from Finland they 
 begged and tramped and fought their way to Warsaw. The 
 daughter has a clerical position in a warehouse, where she 
 earns fifteen hundred marks a month. Madame Herschel- 
 mann is paid eighty marks a day or about eight American 
 cents for her shirt-making. 
 
 In the kitchen which cooks American Relief Administra- 
 tion food for Russian refugee children there is a cook named 
 Madame Koudraftseff. This lady was the wife of the vice- 
 mayor of Petrograd. He was arrested and put in prison 
 after the revolution; and on one very cold winter night an 
 order was issued that he should be moved to another prison 
 about three miles distant from the one he was in. The 
 guards started with him, but the cold was so intense that 
 they chose an easier way they shot him and threw him in 
 the Neva. His wife, who has four small children, was men-
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 163 
 
 tally unbalanced by the shock, and remained so for five 
 months. She then fled from Petrograd and ultimately 
 came to Warsaw, where she and her four children have been 
 fortunate enough to find the half of a room in which to live. 
 
 As I said before, few of them die from the horrors and 
 hardships through which they pass, but many of them are 
 mentally affected. In Warsaw, for example, is General 
 Prigoroffsky, who commanded an army corps in the Great 
 War. He had more decorations for bravery and service, 
 say the Russians, than almost any other officer; and he was 
 very wealthy. His son was killed by the Bolsheviks under 
 particularly unpleasant circumstances, and the general was 
 unable to locate the body. He consequently has what is 
 known as the idee fixe, and insists on asking all people 
 whom he meets whether they know where he can locate his 
 son. He goes up and down the streets of Warsaw asking 
 this question. For that reason it is impossible to get work 
 for him. He can not get his mind off his son. 
 
 Then there is Senator Ragowich and his wife and daugh- 
 ter. Senator Ragowich was governor of the District of 
 Kovno at one time, and he was also minister of religion; 
 and, he, too, was "reech, reech and reech." The senator's 
 wife was born a princess. He now works as a laborer in a 
 warehouse, while his wife cooks and does laundry-work. 
 The daughter was one of the attendants of the czarina. Her 
 brother was killed by the Bolsheviks; and now to quote 
 my interpreter "all the day she is quite mad, doing a dress 
 during the daytime and undoing the stitches during the 
 night-time." She is a very pretty girl, this mad daughter 
 of the Ragowichs, and is only nineteen years old. 
 
 One finds strange mixtures among these refugees, and 
 as much democracy among aristocrats as even the Bol-
 
 164 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 sheviks, with their "Comrade This" and "Comrade That," 
 can show. The Russian Red Cross has a dining-room at 
 its headquarters, and among the waitresses are Princess 
 Rukoff, whose husband, Admiral Rukoff, was executed by 
 the Bolsheviks, and two young women whose father, named 
 Juzaffsky, was butler to the czar, and went with him to 
 Tobolsk when the Bolsheviks took him there. Likewise, in 
 the shirt-making shop, working with Princess Meschersky, 
 is the wife of Denisoff, who was one of the many coach- 
 men of the czar. 
 
 An army of nine thousand men, known as "Wrangel's 
 Third Army," was formed from Russians in Poland by Gen- 
 eral Permikin, the idea being that it should advance through 
 Kiev to Odessa and go to Wrangel's assistance. It never 
 got to him, however, and it is now interned in camps in the 
 cities of Ostroff, Thorn and Lukof f. These men are in very 
 bad shape, and have little food and practically no clothes. 
 A great many of the officers can not leave their beds in the 
 daytime, because their clothes are entirely worn out, and 
 they can get no others. There is a Russian Political Com- 
 mittee in Poland which is working for the relief of these 
 men, and at the head of it is a man named Boris Savinkoff. 
 Savinkoff, under the old regime, was regarded as a wild 
 revolutionary; but the Bolsheviks consider him a dangerous 
 reactionary and are very fretful at the Poles for harboring 
 him. It was Savinkoff who organized the men who assas- 
 sinated the Grand Duke Serge and Plehve, Minister of the 
 Interior. He was very much "wanted" under the old 
 regime; and one of the men who was pounding along on 
 his trail at all hours of the day and night was Governor 
 Lubimoff. Lubimoff used to ransack every corner of 
 Petrograd for him. Savinkoff was a dear friend of Marshal
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 165 
 
 Pilsudski, Chief of State of Poland to-day; for Pilsudski 
 was an ardent hater of the old Russian regime and a con- 
 stant worker to free Poland from Russian rule. Savinkoff 
 and Pilsudski, in fact, were what might be called old prison 
 chums ; for both of them had frequently been jugged, so to 
 speak, together, and had a wide and intimate knowledge of 
 the interiors of the leading Russian jails. So it was only 
 reasonable that Pilsudski, as Chief of State of Poland, 
 should put Savinkoff at the head of the committee to look 
 after an interned Russian army. Politicians must stick 
 together. 
 
 But in this position, Savinkoff is obliged to work almost 
 daily with Madame Lubimoff, head of the Russian Red 
 Cross ; and when they so work, the secretary who takes down 
 the minutes of the proceedings is Monsieur Lubimoff, whose 
 sleuth-hounds used to bay ferociously at Savinkoff's heels. 
 It is a rare situation. "I must help this army," declared 
 Madame Lubimoff, squizzling her eyes at me, "but I am 
 quite shocked that I must speak with this man." 
 
 I went up to Madame Lubimoff's room one afternoon 
 for some information regarding refugees. The woman who 
 opened the door to me, and who brings tea for callers and 
 takes their wraps, and by so doing earns just enough marks 
 each day to keep her from starvation, is the wife of the 
 former assistant manager of the Warsaw post-office, when 
 Warsaw was under the Russians. I was followed by a meek- 
 looking gentleman in a rusty black suit, and soon learned 
 that it was Mr. Gilchin, the governor of Bessarabia, who 
 now acts as messenger boy for a Polish firm, and is very 
 glad for a monthly food-packet from the American Relief 
 Administration. Directly behind Mr. Gilchin came another 
 meek-looking gentleman who proved to be Colonel Kessa-
 
 166 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 laeff, a former Imperial Guards officer, now acting as 
 errand-boy for the Russian Red Cross. On being introduced 
 to a bevy of such people, one can not help but feel that he 
 is in a mad-house, and is frequently inclined to enter into 
 the spirit of the occasion by declaring loudly that he is 
 Oliver Cromwell or Alexander the Great. 
 
 A young woman came to the door while I was talking to 
 Madame Lubimoff and asked a question. Madame Lubi- 
 moff went to a drawer and took out a package. "A Rus- 
 sian lady," she said to me, "fled from Petrograd with noth- 
 ing but a pocketful of beads. With these, on the way, she 
 knitted a beautiful bead bag, and now she wishes to sell it 
 so that she may have something to eat. But she asks such a 
 great price for it that I fear she can not sell it." And she 
 thereupon handed the package to the young woman with 
 expressions of regret. I asked to see it. It was one of the 
 most beautiful bead bags that I have seen in all my travels 
 through the bead bag centers of Central Europe; and the 
 stupendous and overwhelming price that the maker was 
 asking for it was eight thousand Polish marks which at 
 that day's rate of exchange, amounted to little more than 
 eight dollars to an American. I told Madame Lubimoff that 
 I could surely get one of the Americans at the Hotel Bristol 
 to buy it if the girl cared to leave it with me; and with that 
 she opened another drawer in her desk and drew out a silver 
 plate a foot in diameter, encrusted on the face with designs 
 in Moscow enamel. Engraved on the back was an inscrip- 
 tion stating that the plate was the gift of the Grand Duchess 
 Anastasia to the Mother Superior of a Moscow convent on a 
 certain important anniversary in 1913. The plate was 
 almost as heavy as a frying pan. It was the most treasured 
 possession of that Mother Superior, and the only thing that
 
 WAIFS OF AN EMPIRE 167 
 
 she had been able to carry with her when she fled from 
 Moscow. She had reached Warsaw in a pitiful state of 
 poverty about two weeks previous, and had turned the plate 
 over to Madame Lubimoff to be sold. Madame Lubimoff 
 didn't seem to know the price which she should ask for it, 
 so the servant the wife of the assistant manager of the 
 Warsaw post-office was- sent out to a jewelry store to have 
 it valued. She came back and said that the jeweler had 
 offered twelve thousand marks for it twelve dollars for a 
 plate worth more than two hundred! I suggested that 
 Madame Lubimoff have it properly valued, so that I might 
 be able to help sell it, but I heard no more of it. This illus- 
 trates, however, the cutthroat prices for which destitute 
 Russians who have managed to escape with small treasures 
 of jewels or plate or furs are obliged to seJl their belongings 
 when the pinch of hunger or cold or sickness becomes too 
 great to be borne. One hears remarkable tales, in Europe, 
 of diamond tiaras bought from Russians for five or six 
 hundred dollars; of sable coats sold for the equivalent of 
 fifty dollars ; of gorgeous emeralds purchased from helpless 
 refugees for the price of a decent meal for four people. I 
 have never happened to encounter people who had made 
 these remarkable purchases, and I should think that those 
 who made them would be as reluctant to tell of them as they 
 would be to boast of stealing pennies from a dead man's 
 eyes. All of my information concerning them has been third 
 or fourth or fifth hand, and consequently worth very little. 
 I have no doubt that a great many of the stories are true; 
 and it is a fact that in almost any European city one can 
 buy jewels sold originally by Russian refugees, which have 
 passed through four and five hands and yielded a handsome 
 profit to each purchaser, and which can still be purchased at
 
 i68 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 a far cheaper price than they could be purchased in America. 
 It is also a fact that there are a lot of cheap traders from 
 Galicia and the Levant in every part of Europe who pre- 
 tend to have Russian refugee jewels at one-tenth of their 
 value, and who are feathering their nests handsomely by 
 palming off flawed diamonds and paste pearls and phony 
 sables and platinum with the accent on the tin on gullible 
 Englishmen and Americans and other kindly but avaricious 
 boobs from the outlands. 
 
 One of the most distinguished lawyers from Kiev, Mr. 
 Riekshensky, plodded into Warsaw not long ago in a ragged 
 suit and with no shoes or stockings or underclothing. Just 
 before he left Kiev the Bolsheviks killed his sister. He is 
 working in an American Red Cross warehouse...... He 
 
 has twenty Imperial Guard officers working under him 
 
 The former governor of Novgorod holds the keys 
 
 of the pantry of the Russian Red Cross Kitchen and doles 
 out the meager supplies. ...... Colonel Ivanoff chops wood 
 
 for a relief dining-room Mr. Javorsky, one of 
 
 Petrograd's leading comedians, hands out checks in the same 
 dining-room 
 
 And so it goes in England, in Switzerland, in Turkey, in 
 Finland, in Hungary, in Egypt, in Germany, in Tunis, in 
 Italy all over the civilized world. Like dead leaves, these 
 people have drifted to the four quarters of the earth; and 
 there they lie, some in heaps and windrows, and some still 
 drifting helplessly before the wind. The scum of Europe 
 pours to America by every ship with comparative ease; but 
 the Russians must move heaven and earth and the State 
 Department before they can go. Of all the sad spectacles 
 which I have seen among the wreckage left by the war, the 
 spectacle of the Russian refugees is the saddest.
 
 The Constantinople Refugees 
 
 LET us do some supposing, in order that the main fea- 
 tures- of the ensuing narrative may be firmly fixed in our 
 minds. 
 
 The city of New Haven, Connecticut, at the last census, 
 had a population of some one hundred and fifty-nine thou- 
 sand men, women and children. It is pleasantly situated on 
 Long Island Sound, so that it can be entered and left by 
 water with reasonable ease. It is the seat of a university 
 which has a wide reputation for excellence, and is conse- 
 quently inhabited by more persons of wealth and distinc- 
 tion than one would usually find in a city of its size. It 
 is also the seat of a large number of factories of various 
 sorts; and as a result it is well stocked with young men of 
 military age. At certain periods of the year, because of the 
 athletic prowess of sundry students in the university, several 
 thousand persons of varying degree of fame, wealth and 
 social prominence travel to New Haven from every part of 
 America in the hope of seeing the athletes of the university 
 administer a violent and enthusiastic walloping to the 
 athletes of another university, or of seeing them violently 
 and enthusiastically walloped, as the case may be ; or because 
 they consider it the smart and fashionable thing to do. 
 
 Let us now step on the accelerators of our supposers, so 
 to speak, and suppose that on a crisp November noon, just 
 
 169
 
 i/o WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 as the last trainloads of pilgrims were disembarking in New 
 Haven to witness one of these notable athletic wallopings, 
 word should be received in the city that an unexpected 
 revolution had taken place in the surrounding cities, and that 
 the revolutionists were marching on New Haven with the 
 avowed intention of wiping out of existence all persons of 
 wealth, all persons of high social position, all persons of 
 education, and all persons suspected of being antagonistic to 
 the revolutionists. All railroad and trolley lines had fallen 
 into the hands of the revolutionists : all roads leading out of 
 the city had been barricaded by them; every possibility of 
 relief had been cut off; and the only remaining avenue of 
 escape left for the terrified thousands in New Haven was the 
 sea. 
 
 Let us suppose, therefore, that every available vessel in 
 the vicinity of New Haven and every vessel which could be 
 reached by wireless was brought into harbor : war-ships and 
 destroyers and passenger steamers and freight steamers; 
 ferry-boats of ancient vintage , and excursion steamers in the 
 throes of senile decay, and private yachts in various stages 
 of decrepitude, and coal barges impregnated to the satura- 
 tion point with coal-dust; trawlers and tugs and towboats 
 and tubs of every description. Into these vessels piled the 
 residents of New Haven and the strangers within the city's 
 gates: men, women and children; millionaires and factor}' 
 workers and factory owners and society leaders and students 
 and clerks; doctors and lawyers and judges and university 
 professors and school-teachers and bankers and editors and 
 reporters and all the sorts and conditions of people that go to 
 make up the population of a large and flourishing city. They 
 lined the water-front in solid masses; and the ships worked 
 in to the docks, took passengers aboard until they were
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 171 
 
 crammed with humanity, and then worked out into the har- 
 bor to make room for other ships. The ships were stuffed 
 with people until it was literally impossible for another per- 
 son to find a resting-place aboard them. They were so 
 jammed on the decks and between decks that there was no 
 space for them to lie down or even sit down; and so they 
 stood in their places while the ships lay in harbor and after 
 they steamed out of the harbor and until they came to where 
 they were going. They slept standing up, for there was no 
 room to lie down, and they had nothing to eat or drink ; and 
 by the grace of God the sea was calm and the days and nights 
 were warm; for if the weather had been otherwise, these 
 people would have died like flies in an autumn frost. 
 
 Let us further suppose that since all of the other cities 
 along the American coast had been seized by the revolu- 
 tionists, the ships- bearing all the residents of New Haven 
 stood straight out to sea for a matter of two or three days, 
 and finally arrived at the small and isolated Bermuda 
 Islands. And let us finally suppose that these one hundred 
 and fifty thousand people, more or less, were set down in 
 Bermuda, where there was no work and no escape and little 
 accommodation for them, and that they dwelt there in tents 
 and in holes in the ground and in huts and in old barracks 
 millionaires and bankers and Yale students and factory 
 workers and society leaders and that they lived on the 
 bounty of the English for months and even for years: 
 ragged and half-starved and half-clothed; educated people 
 with no books to read; wealthy people with no means of 
 recovering their lost wealth ; skilled workmen with no work 
 to do and no tools to work with; parents with no way of 
 discovering the children from whom they had been sepa- 
 rated ; home-lovers parted from their homes forever.
 
 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Try all that on your supposers, if you will, and you will 
 have a weak picture of the evacuation of the Crimea after 
 the army of General Wrangel went on the rocks in Novem- 
 ber of 1920, and a faint idea of the reasons why the Russian 
 refugees in Constantinople are the most out-of-luck individ- 
 uals that have ever been frowned on by Fortune. 
 
 The Crimea hangs down into the Black Sea like a lop- 
 sided knapsack dangling from one strap. It is a beautiful 
 country, with rolling meadow-lands sloping down to the 
 water's edge and tumbling mountain ranges in the back- 
 ground. The ground is rich and black and fertile; and in 
 the spring and summer and autumn the fields are ablaze 
 with flowers and alive with song-birds and wild fowl of 
 every description. The czar had a summer palace in the 
 Crimea, and it was a favorite resort for wealthy Russians 
 from the north. After the Bolsheviks placed violent and 
 bloody hands upon the helm of the Russian ship of state, 
 many refugees, fleeing south from Petrograd and Moscow, 
 found their way to the Crimea. Then came the Odessa 
 evacuations, which sent a few more refugees over to the 
 Crimea's apparent isolation and safety; and a little later 
 Denikine was smashed at Novorossisk, and the Crimea was 
 again the goal of many refugees who had trusted vainly in 
 the protection of Denikine's army. The entire Black Sea 
 coast of Russia, with the exception of the down-hanging 
 peninsula of the Crimea, was in the hands of the Bolsheviks. 
 
 When, therefore, General Wrangel, backed by the 
 French, started his reorganization of the anti-Bolshevik 
 forces after the Denikine disaster with the intention of 
 launching a new campaign against the Soviet armies, he had 
 practically no choice except to start from the Crimea. 
 
 The Crimea is joined to the mainland by a comparatively
 
 o 
 
 =.
 
 5 
 
 CO
 
 173 
 
 narrow neck; and across the neck there is only one line of 
 railroad, and for that matter only one good carriage road as 
 well. The rest of the neck is made up of tide-marshes 
 which can not be crossed in the spring or summer or autumn. 
 Consequently a small force of men can hold the neck, under 
 ordinary circumstances, against the attacks of a much larger 
 force operating on the mainland. Wrangel, who is a brave 
 man and an ardent patriot, but very much inclined to allow 
 actual conditions to be somewhat fogged and distorted by 
 his own desires, seemed to have implicit confidence in his 
 powers to maintain a base in the Crimea and, with a force of 
 between fifty and sixty thousand men, force his way up into 
 Russia in spite of a Bolshevik army of about two million 
 men, and ultimately become master of Russia. His con- 
 fident hopes, strangely, were shared by most of the Russian 
 refugees in Europe and by many European military experts 
 who should have known better. 
 
 When the Bolsheviks ceased their military operations 
 against the Poles late in the summer of 1920, and conse- 
 quently released their best divisions for service against 
 Wrangel in the south, the American relief organizations in 
 Constantinople began to visualize Wrangel's finish with 
 great distinctness. "In January or February," they said to 
 each other, "the marshes will freeze in the Crimea and the 
 Bolsheviks will come across them and cut in on Wrangel's 
 flank. Wrangel will get it in the neck and we will get a 
 flood of refugees in approximately the same place." And 
 so the relief organizations, in spite of the optimism with 
 which Wrangel's venture seemed to be regarded in the out- 
 side world, slowly began to prepare for the arrival of more 
 refugees in January or February. Their arrival, it might be 
 added, was not looked forward to with any pleasurable
 
 174 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 anticipation; for Constantinople, being practically the only 
 outlet from the entire Near East, was already overcrowded 
 with refugees from former evacuations of Russia, to say 
 nothing of refugees from Armenia, from the interior of 
 Turkey, from Thrace and from Georgia, 
 
 And then, early in November, the Crimea witnessed a 
 combination of events that left the oldest inhabitants wag- 
 ging their beards helplessly and declaring weakly after 
 the manner of amateur weather-prophets that it couldn't 
 be true because nothing like it had ever happened before. A 
 series of extremely low tides practically drained the tide- 
 marshes of the neck which joined the Crimea to the main- 
 land, and at the same time a violent cold-snap froze the 
 marshes solidly. The Bolsheviks at once poured men and 
 guns across the frozen marshes and caught Wrangel's 
 forces in the flank. They were forced to retreat at top 
 speed; and so, at the beginning of November instead of in 
 January or February, the ports of the Crimea were filled 
 with their normal inhabitants, plus the refugees who had 
 fled from the Bolsheviks in preceding months and years, and 
 also plus the men of Wrangel's army; and all of them in 
 turn were filled with a passionate and poignant longing to 
 get away from Russia before the Bolsheviks got to them. 
 By far the largest number of people were in Sebastopol, but 
 there were also several thousand in the smaller ports of 
 Eupatoria, Yalta, Theodosia and Kertsch. There were 
 ships of the old Russian navy in these ports, and Russian 
 merchant ships and tramp steamers, and Allied cruisers and 
 destroyers, to say nothing of a strange collection of marine 
 relics and monstrosities which were better fitted for junk- 
 piles than for the transporting of human freight across the 
 Black Sea. In all there were one hundred and eleven
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 175 
 
 ships, not counting- rowboats and craft under one hundred 
 tons burthen; and the number of people who crowded 
 aboard them was not less than one hundred and thirty thou- 
 sand and not more than one hundred and seventy thousand. 
 None of the ships, owing to the exigencies of the occasion, 
 paused to print passenger lists; and the exact number of 
 people who came out in the Crimea evacuation will never be 
 accurately known. General Wrangel informed me with 
 great positiveness that the number was one hundred and 
 seventy thousand. The figures of the American Red Cross 
 show that one hundred and thirty thousand came out. 
 
 At any rate, there were at least one hundred and thirty 
 thousand of them, men, women and children ; and on most of 
 the ships they were so squeezed and jammed together that 
 during the forty-eight hours and more of the journey from 
 the Crimea to Constantinople for some of the ships were 
 fairly fast, and some were slow, and some had so little coal 
 that they could only get a few miles from land and then 
 shriek for a tow the refugees slept standing in their places. 
 It was as though, as I have said before, the entire population 
 of a fairly large American city had been suddenly shoved 
 aboard ships and transported a great distance. The ordinary 
 functions of life went on for them as they would have pro- 
 ceeded ashore ; and men and women and children died, and 
 children were born, as demanded by the agencies which 
 provide every city with a daily death rate and a daily birth 
 rate. 
 
 Practically none of these refugees had gone aboard the 
 ships with any belongings whatever in addition to the 
 clothes in which they stood, though some still had a few of 
 their family jewels- remaining. They had stood for endless 
 hours at the docks in the Crimea waiting to board the ships,
 
 176 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 so that they had no food; nor had the ships been stocked 
 with enough food or water to supply their passengers. It is 
 at this point that readers would do well to stop for a mo- 
 ment in order to contemplate the circumstances of these 
 refugees : without money, without any personal belongings 
 except the clothes in which they stood, without food, with- 
 out knowledge of the language of the country in which they 
 found themselves, without any one to whom to turn for 
 assistance, without a country, and without resources of 
 any sort. They may have been said to be the champion 
 Withouters ; for it has never been my lot to see or to hear of 
 any large mass of people that was without as much as these 
 people were without. 
 
 It is a difficult matter to imagine the conditions which 
 existed on these ships when they arrived at Constantinople. 
 There was one Russian battleship that brought in, according 
 to reliable estimates, ten thousand refugees. The relief 
 workers who went out and boarded this ship stated that her 
 decks were so jammed with people that one had to spend 
 an entire day in worming his way from bow to stern. There 
 were many wounded soldiers on the ships, and the usual 
 number of sick persons that one might expect to find in a 
 city. 
 
 Here, for example, is one typical case out of thousands. 
 Captain Constantine Pramberger of the Kaksholm regiment 
 an Imperial Guards outfit was trapped at night near the 
 Crimean town of Melytopol by Bolshevik cavalry. His out- 
 fit was badly cut up, and he was captured. The Bolsheviks 
 stripped him and fired three bullets into him, for they were 
 too busy to carry prisoners. (In 1919, by the way, the Bol- 
 sheviks killed his father and his two brothers, who were 
 twenty-one and twenty- four years old.) One of the bullets
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 177 
 
 smashed the bones in his right hand : the other two merely 
 made flesh wounds. He got some clothes from a dead man 
 and worked down to Sebastopol in time to get aboard the 
 ship which took out the ten thousand. He stood for three 
 days without sleep and without medical attention before he 
 reached Constantinople. He was a very fine pianist, and 
 now he can never play again, for the smashed bones in his 
 right hand have failed to heal properly through lack of 
 attention. I spent some time with him in the refugee camp 
 at Mekri Keoi, just outside the walls of Constantinople. 
 He is teaching English to a class of sixty-three refugees, and 
 he speaks five languages fluently; but his only worldly 
 possession is the suit of clothes which he took from the dead 
 man near Melytopol. His case is so commonplace that no 
 refugee would consider it worthy of mention. The ships 
 were full of such cases. 
 
 One of the greatest difficulties with which a person has 
 to contend in picking up information on the Constantinople 
 refugees lies in the inability of the refugees themselves to 
 see anything remarkable in the most hair-raising expe- 
 riences. All of them have been through so much that it is 
 only the commonplace that seems to arouse their interest. 
 Tell a refugee that another refugee has just arrived from 
 the Caspian after running a fifty-mile foot-race with a lion 
 and biting two sharks to death, and he will merely yawn and 
 ask languidly what the prospects are for dinner. 
 
 Jules Verne wrote a novel called Michael Strogoff, or 
 The Courier of the Czar. It was a book full of fierce and 
 thrilling adventures in the wilds of Russia and Siberia ; and 
 after timid maidens of the early eighties had followed 
 Michael's adventures for a few chapters with bulging eyes, 
 they usually felt obliged to shut themselves up in a dark
 
 i;8 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 closet for several hours in order to still the mad fluttering 
 of their hearts. There was a time when I used to consider 
 Michael's adventures to be genuine literary beef, iron and 
 wine; and after some experience with Russian refugees, I 
 got the book and read it again. I then discovered that Mr. 
 Strogoff's trials and tribulations, as compared with the 
 troubles of the average refugee, were about as thrilling as 
 those of the hero of an Arnold Bennett novel, whose life- 
 climax arrives when his wife leaves the room and forgets to 
 shut the door behind her. 
 
 Close questioning is frequently needed in order to force 
 hardened refugees to reveal the details of an occurrence 
 which seems to them quite dull and featureless. At a 
 refugee center in Constantinople one morning somebody 
 remarked that Gantzimouroff had entirely recovered and 
 hoped to start back soon. The remark seemed to have 
 possibilities, so I asked who Gantzimouroff was. Some- 
 body replied that he was a prince. 
 
 "Anything unusual about his story?" I asked. 
 
 No, they didn't think so. He had merely been a little 
 hurt, and was thinking of going back. 
 
 Well, how had he been hurt ? In a fight, or how ? 
 
 No, not in a fight ; on his way down from the Crimea the 
 boom had cracked his head open. 
 
 What boom was that? 
 
 Why, the boom on the little boat that he had come from 
 the Crimea in. 
 
 Oh, he came in a little boat, did he ? 
 
 Yes, he drifted around for three weeks and then the 
 Rumanians put him in jail. 
 
 Ah ! In jail ! Well ; this man seems to have had a fright 
 fully dull trip of it : absolutely uneventful, so to speak ; but
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 179 
 
 since there's nothing else to do, suppose you tell me his fea- 
 tureless case in detail. 
 
 And this was the way of it : 
 
 Prince Gantzimouroff is a prince of the greatest family 
 in Mongolia. The Gantzimouroff estates in Mongolia are 
 nearly as large as some European nations. He is a direct 
 descendant of Tamerlane; and the one possession that has 
 survived his wanderings is the ancient seal ring of Tamer- 
 lane himself. He is the genuine article as a prince and as 
 a fighter as well. He was badly wounded at the siege of 
 Port Arthur, where he received that coveted reward for 
 valor, the Officer's Cross of St. George; and as a result of 
 his wounds he was paralyzed for many months. In the 
 Great War he fought on the German front ; and after Russia 
 went Bolshevik he fought first in Denikine's Volunteer 
 Army and then in Wrangel's Volunteer Army. When he 
 got down to Sebastopol and had seen to getting his troops 
 aboard ships, he found that the ships were so crowded that 
 there seemed to be no corner into which he could squeeze. 
 So he and six other officers hunted around until they found 
 a thirty-five foot caricature of a yacht. Her sails had 
 rotted to pieces; and from the magnificent size of the bar- 
 nacles on her, she was built around the time that Columbus 
 demonstrated the egg trick before the Queen of Spain. They 
 got some provisions aboard her and attached her to the 
 stern of a refugee steamer with the safest-looking hawser 
 that they could find. And when they were a few hours out 
 to sea, the hawser parted. They had neither oars nor sails ; 
 so the six of them removed all but the absolutely essential 
 portions of their garments, ripped them to pieces and sewed 
 them together again in the form of a sail. Almost imme- 
 diately they ran into a squall, and the prince got his head in
 
 i8o WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 front of the boom at an inauspicious moment, with the result 
 that it cracked his head open and knocked him out. It also 
 knocked out several of his teeth. Twice they narrowly 
 escaped being driven ashore in Soviet Russia. Finally, after 
 three weeks of aimless cruising, they struck land. Not 
 knowing where they were, they hunted for some one to tell 
 them; and the person whom they found, after informing 
 them that they were in Rumania, notified the military 
 authorities and had them arrested. Rumania was at war 
 with Soviet Russia; and the prince and his comrades, after 
 their unpleasant experiences, looked like the most virulent 
 of nihilists. Consequently they were kept in jail for a 
 month, at the end of which time they established their 
 identity and were released. They at once went back to their 
 yacht, which nobody had considered worth stealing and a 
 thing has got to be pretty worthless not to be considered 
 worth stealing in Rumania. In their old home they continued 
 down the Black Sea, and after a quiet journey they reached 
 Constantinople. The prince, being penniless, hunted a job, 
 but wasn't successful. He finally announced that if he had 
 to choose between taking a chance on starving to death in 
 Constantinople and running the risk of being killed by the 
 Bolsheviks, he preferred the latter since it also gave him a 
 chance to fight. So he was preparing to go back to a Black 
 Sea port in Soviet Russia and attempt to dodge Bolsheviks 
 with enough success to work up across Russia to Siberia, 
 and then down to Urga in Mongolia where the Gantzi- 
 mouroff estates begin. 
 
 At any rate, when the first of the refugee ships slipped 
 down the Bosphorus on the fifteenth of November and 
 dropped their mud-hooks under the ancient walls and the 
 towering minarets of Constantinople, they were loaded with
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 181 
 
 a miserable mass of humanity. Nobody was ready for them : 
 nothing was prepared for them. When the first ships 
 appeared, the general estimate of the total number of 
 refugees that would arrive from the Crimea was forty thou- 
 sand or less than one-third of the number that actually 
 did arrive. This shows the lack of information that 
 existed concerning the evacuation. 
 
 The first persons to get out to the ships were the Levan- 
 tine boatmen and traders the people of the mongrel Medi- 
 terranean nationalities who live by sharp practises and shady 
 dealing. Practically all of them, the Russians said, were 
 Greeks. The refugees were very hungry and half crazy 
 with thirst ; and these Levantine rats, to the everlasting dis- 
 grace of the nationalities to which they belonged, threw 
 ropes up to them and sold them bottles of water and loaves 
 of bread for wedding rings and fur coats. When pay was 
 slow in coming, they disported themselves with the refugees, 
 pretending to tie loaves to the dangling ropes, and laughing 
 merrily when the refugees clawed at them. A number of 
 refugees told me about this fascinating exhibition of court- 
 liness and hospitality on the part of the Levantines, and some 
 of them were so stirred by the recollection that they wept 
 with rage at the mere telling of it. None of the people who 
 indulged in these gentle pleasantries were Turks. And I 
 might add at this point that a vast deal of misinformation 
 has been absorbed in the last few decades by Europeans and 
 Americans as to the relative barbarousness of Turks, Greeks. 
 Armenians and other residents of the Near East. The 
 Turk may be terrible, as advertised by various long-dead 
 poets; but when his next-door neighbor is blessed with 
 equal opportunities for terribleness, he makes the Turk 
 look like an awkward amateur or as they say in Boston
 
 182 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 a tin-horn sport. And it might also be well to add that the 
 differences between the Turk and the Greek and the Turk 
 and the Armenian are seldom religious differences; they 
 are almost invariably political. This statement, although it 
 does not agree with the persistent propaganda disseminated 
 by those industrious political agencies, the Greek and Ar- 
 menian churches, is nevertheless true. 
 
 The relief organizations, however, got under way with 
 great rapidity. The American Red Cross, from the very 
 first, did exceptionally fine work among the refugees, and 
 in such a way that the Russians in the camps and the Rus- 
 sians in Constantinople and the Russians in all the other 
 cities of Europe express their gratitude to the American 
 Red Cross and the American people with unusual feeling 
 and sincerity.* The French High Commission notified all 
 the Constantinople relief organizations that the French 
 would assume the responsibility for the relief of the refugees 
 and requested that the work of all the organizations be car- 
 ried on through the French. The British had taken charge 
 of Denikine's refugees from Novorossisk; and since the 
 French had backed and recognized Wrangel, it was felt that 
 
 *The London Times, on November 3, 1921, printed the following 
 statement : 
 
 "We have received a copy of an appeal signed by Lady Rumbold 
 (wife of the British High Commissioner in Constantinople), Mrs. 
 Bristol (wife of the American High Commissioner), Vice-Admiral 
 Tyrwhitt, and others on behalf of the Russian refugees at Constanti- 
 nople, whose condition is now critical. 
 
 " 'Until October 20,000 persons, mostly invalids, women, and chil- 
 dren, were kept alive by the French and by the American Red Cross. 
 That help has been withdrawn, and a number of refugees are dying of 
 starvation. In Constantinople itself it is impossible to provide work 
 for the refugees, and visas to other countries are refused. 
 
 " 'Help from private generosity is earnestly requested. Both food 
 and clothing are necessary. The Allied authorities are deeply con- 
 cerned by the problem, which adds seriously to their many difficulties. 
 The appeal states : "We earnestly beg that every one who can spare 
 even the smallest sum will immediately send a donation by cheque or 
 otherwise to the Constantinople Relief Fund for Russian Refugees, 
 care of Imperial Ottoman Bank. Constantinople."'"
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 183 
 
 they should look after his evacuation. The size of these 
 Russian evacuations have made it imperative that they be 
 closely supervised and controlled ; for they have been very 
 similar to the great migrations of early days which so fre- 
 quently altered the map of Europe and changed the destinies 
 of nations. If allowed to follow their natural course, they 
 would unquestionably have resulted in guerrilla warfare 
 of a particularly virulent sort, and in the complete upset of 
 the Near-Eastern schemes which have been so carefully 
 thought out and so delicately nursed by sundry European 
 nations. So the French took over the Wrangel evacuation, 
 and they found themselves with a tremendous and expen- 
 sive job on their hands. Considering the difficulties which 
 confronted them, they did a very good job indeed ; but they 
 unfortunately did it in such a manner that they antagonized 
 the Russians almost beyond endurance. They constantly 
 reminded the Russians of the help which was being given to 
 them, and they constantly threatened to withdraw that help 
 entirely. I was in Constantinople late in March, 1921, and 
 the French at that time had issued official statements declar- 
 ing that on the first of April they would cease feeding the 
 Russians. Since there was no one else in a position to do 
 it, the only inference to be drawn from these statements was 
 that the Russians were to be allowed to starve to death. This 
 naturally excites the Russians. I will explain this matter 
 more fully in another place. 
 
 The refugee ships poured into the Bosphorus in such 
 numbers that the French organization, at the beginning, was 
 unable to handle the situation. Until it could do so, the 
 American Red Cross did some very efficient work. In one 
 instance it placed two thousand rations aboard a ship in 
 twenty minutes after being notified of the ship's arrival. 
 Within a very short time it distributed one hundred thou-
 
 184 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 sand rations to the different ships; and it was constantly 
 busy supplying all of them with water. The American 
 people have every reason to be proud of the American Red 
 Cross for the relief work which it did on and after the 
 arrival of the Russian refugees in Constantinople. 
 
 A great many of the civilian refugees were brought from 
 the Crimea on American, British and French war-ships. 
 These refugees were landed in Constantinople immediately 
 on arrival and were taken care of by various Russian organ- 
 izations, assisted by the American Red Cross and some other 
 American relief organizations. 
 
 The bulk of refugees, however, came down aboard Rus- 
 sian ships ; and these ships were kept lying in the Bosphorus 
 until the French decided what to do with them. Eventually 
 they were distributed in the following way : 
 
 Wrangel's first army corps, consisting of twenty-six 
 thousand men, was sent down to Gallipoli, a twelve-hour 
 boat ride from Constantinople, and installed in a regular 
 military camp. The men lived in large tents, ninety men to 
 a tent. They received a daily ration from the French which 
 was theoretically equal to the ration received by French 
 soldiers in the field. The ration which they actually received 
 was only two-thirds of that. The men were regularly 
 drilled, and excellent discipline was maintained. Generally 
 speaking, the men at Gallipoli were as well off as they would 
 have been if they were still in the field. Near the military 
 camp there was a civil refugee camp where there were two 
 thousand more refugees. The American Red Cross gave 
 these refugees a supplementary daily ration in addition to 
 the French ration, and supplied them with necessary clothes. 
 There were three hospitals for the Gallipoli camp and all 
 of them were adequately supplied with medicines and instru-
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 185 
 
 ments by the American Red Cross. They were over- 
 crowded, however; and out of over six hundred fifty cases 
 in them in March, 1921, three hundred were typhus cases. 
 Almost straight out from the Dardanelles in the ^Egean 
 Sea, about twenty hours from Constantinople, is the large 
 Island of Lemnos. Like so many of the isles of Greece, which 
 sundry poets have misrepresented to the world at large as 
 being miniature Paradises, Lemnos is a barren, wind-swept, 
 sterile and wholly undesirable parcel of real estate. If one 
 hunted assiduously, one might possibly find a worse place 
 for a refugee camp or for any other sort of camp, but I 
 doubt it. It was made, however, the site of the camp of 
 seven thousand Cossacks of the Don corps of Wrangel's 
 army, of ten thousand Cossacks of the Kuban corps, and of 
 two thousand civilians, men, women and children, from both 
 the Don and the Kuban regions. The entire crowd was 
 lodged in small circular tents which are supposed to hold 
 ten persons apiece, but into each of which sixteen persons 
 were actually crowded. They were miserably underfed, 
 because they got only two-thirds of a French soldier's ration, 
 whereas the exposed situation of the camp is such that they 
 should have had more food in order to resist the weather 
 conditions. All of the camp's water was distilled from sea 
 water. There isn't a scrap of fuel on the island ; and barely 
 enough was brought to them on barges to enable them to 
 cook one meal a day. The camp had two field hospitals, 
 both of which were unheated ; and both of them were amply 
 provided with medicines and instruments furnished by the 
 American Red Cross. In March, 1921, there were fourteen 
 hundred patients in these two hospitals. The two thousand 
 civilian refugees received from the American Red Cross a 
 daily ration in addition to the insufficient one furnished by
 
 i86 
 
 the French. The discipline among the Lemnos troops was 
 not good, though they were still saluting their officers. 
 There had been a considerable amount of Bolshevik agita- 
 tion among them. By March, forty-two Bolsheviks had 
 been deported, and six hundred soldiers had been isolated 
 from the others as a result of Bolshevik tendencies. Feeling 
 against the French was running very high; for every 
 refugee on Lemnos had heard of the repeated official French 
 threats to stop feeding all refugees, and all of them were half 
 frantic with fear that they would be abandoned on Lemnos 
 to starve, just as the pariah dogs of Constantinople were 
 abandoned and starved to death on Dog Island in the Sea 
 of Marmora a few years ago. 
 
 Some twenty-five miles north of Constantinople is the 
 town of Tchataldja, which was the limit of the advance of 
 the Balkan allies against the Turks in the second Balkan 
 War. To camps in and near Tchataldja the French sent the 
 bulk of the remainder of Wrangel's troops a matter of ten 
 thousand men, practically all Don Cossacks with a scattering 
 of civilian refugees. From the beginning the conditions in 
 the Tchataldja camps were, to put it bluntly, a mess. In 
 some sections of the camp the men lived in dark and leaking 
 cowsheds with mud floors and Constantinople in the late 
 winter and early spring gets enough rain to supply the 
 world with mud. In other sections there weren't enough 
 tents to go around, so that soldiers and civilians too were 
 obliged to dig themselves shelters in the ground and hive 
 into them like animals. Food in March, 1921, was not being 
 brought up regularly ; and when it was brought up, it wasn't 
 brought up in sufficient quantities. Every one was con- 
 stantly hungry and cold because of lack of food and lack 
 of clothing. Very bad discipline and morale existed among
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 187 
 
 the troops. Several hundred had elected to go back to 
 Soviet Russia, not because they had gone Bolshevik, but 
 because the Bolsheviks seemed to them more preferable than 
 the camps. About sixteen hundred refugees left the Sandjak 
 section of the Tchataldja camps for Soviet Russia under the 
 influence of Bolshevik propaganda. Fights broke out at 
 these camps between the refugees and the French troops. 
 One of the reasons seems to have been that the French set 
 negro troops to guard the refugee enclosures ; and the intelli- 
 gence of these troops is such that they regard any one behind 
 barbed wire as some sort of criminal. Then, too, the 
 refugees were constantly trying to break camp and tramp 
 north to Bulgaria. For these and other reasons the French, 
 in March, were preparing to transfer the Tchataldja 
 refugees to the Island of Lemnos; and the refugees were 
 protesting bitterly against the transfer, since they felt sure 
 they would be marooned on Lemnos and left there to die. 
 
 The Jugo-Slav government was approached by the 
 French and urged to take some of the refugees. Serbia and 
 the rest of Jugo-Slavia already had a great many refugees 
 from past evacuations; but since great numbers of her edu- 
 cated people had been killed in the Balkan Wars and the 
 Great War, Serbia replied that she would be glad to take 
 a few more thousand if they were of the intelligentsia class. 
 The Jugo-Slavs and the Russians get along pretty well 
 together ; for they are both Slav peoples. The two languages 
 are not exactly the same ; but a Jugo-Slav can make shift to 
 understand a Russian, and vice versa, just as a Texas 
 rancher is able to get the general drift of a Scotch high- 
 lander if he talks slowly and confines himself to simple 
 gestures. So eighteen thousand of the refugees were 
 shipped down past Greece and up the Adriatic to Cattaro on
 
 i88 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 the Dalmatian coast, where disease broke out on the ships 
 and a very unpleasant time was had by all. The American 
 Red Cross again did some effective and efficient work at 
 Cattaro, and by the end of March all of the eighteen thou- 
 sand had been distributed through Jugo-Slavia. 
 
 Some of the most celebrated professors in the univer- 
 sities of Russia have fled from Soviet jurisdiction, and the 
 Jugo-Slav universities were enriched by such educational 
 giants as Spektorsky, head of Kieff University, who is now 
 at Belgrad; Maklezoff, professor of the Criminal Code in 
 Kharkov University, now at Belgrad; Laskareff, professor 
 of geology at Odessa University, now at Zagreb ; Sirrotinin, 
 professor of pathology at Moscow University, now at Bel- 
 grad; and Wagner, professor of zoology at Kieff, now at 
 Belgrad. Grimm, the former head of Petrograd University ; 
 Medvedieff, professor of biology in Odessa University; 
 Zavialoff, professor of zoology in Odessa, and many other 
 well-known educators are now in the University of Sofia; 
 for Bulgaria also took about three thousand of the Wrangel 
 refugees. American parlor Bolsheviks will please take note 
 that even such desirable and valuable citizens as university 
 professors find life intolerable under Bolshevik rule; and 
 they may also rest assured that in spite of their sympathy 
 for the Bolshevik cause, they under Bolshevism would be 
 among the first refugees to dodge it. 
 
 Finally, about six thousand refugees were sent to the 
 town of Bizerta, which is on the north coast of Africa just 
 south of the island of Sardinia. 
 
 The remainder of the refugees, numbering between forty 
 and sixty thousand, spilled into the city of Constantinople 
 or into camps on the outskirts of the city. There is no way 
 of discovering the exact number of Russian refugees in
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 189 
 
 Constantinople, for no system of refugee registration has 
 begun to give the number with any degree of reliability. 
 While the refugee ships lay at anchor in the Bosphorus, 
 thousands of them, unwilling to endure the hardships and 
 uncertainty of further travel, bribed boatmen with their 
 last piece of jewelry or with a fur coat or with some last 
 treasured possession to set them ashore. They slid down 
 ropes from the large ships into smaller vessels: they even 
 swam ashore at night in some cases. After the camps had 
 been established, furthermore, large numbers of them 
 soldiers, for the most part broke camp and sneaked into the 
 city. As can readily be understood, the soldiers who defied 
 the discipline of the ships and the camps were the least 
 desirable type. The civilian refugees, however, are of all 
 sorts, from princes of very ancient and honorable families 
 to the sorry rascals who pretend to positions and titles which 
 they never had in the hope that by such pretense they may be 
 able to exist without working. 
 
 Constantinople reminds me, in general shape, of a giant 
 mitten. Past the ends of the thumb-portion and the finger- 
 portion of the mitten flows the narrow Bosphorus, running 
 swiftly out of the Black Sea in a channel no wider than 
 many large American rivers the channel through which 
 passes all the wealth of the Orient in its journey to the West- 
 ern World. The finger-portion of the mitten is the old 
 Imperial city of Constantine and the Byzantine Empire, and 
 the Stamboul of the Turks. Marching along its ridge are 
 the mighty mosques of Saint Sophia and the sultans, bulking 
 proudly above the solid masses of shops and bazaars and 
 palaces and crowded wooden dwellings which comprise the 
 ancient city. It is these mosques, pale pink and gold in the 
 early morning haze, gray in the hot light of noon and soft
 
 190 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 lavender as the sun goes down, which makes the sky-line 
 of Stamboul a spectacle more striking than that of any other 
 city in the world with the single exception of lower New 
 York. 
 
 Across from the finger-portion of the mitten lies the 
 thumb-portion, which is Galata along the water's edge and 
 Pera in the higher portions. In Galata and Pera live the 
 Greeks and the Armenians, the Americans and British and 
 French, and all the other nationalities regarded by the Turks 
 as foreigners. Pera swells up abruptly and proudly from the 
 frowzy money-changing shops and cheap stores and red- 
 light districts and water-front activities of Galata; and her 
 slopes and hilltops are closely covered with modern stone 
 office buildings and shops and apartment-houses and dwell- 
 ings. 
 
 Between the thumb-portion and the finger-portion of 
 the mitten, running at right angles out of the Bosphorus, is 
 the Golden Horn, crowded with shipping and crossed by 
 the Galata Bridge, across which surges the motliest throng 
 of people that ever mottled, as one might say, a single city. 
 Whatever nationality you may seek can be found on the 
 Galata Bridge on any day in any year: men from the Far 
 North and the Far South, from the Far East and the Far 
 West, and from all the countries between: Poles, Czechs, 
 . Rumanians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Algerians, Persians, 
 Arabs, Tartars, Mongols, Cossacks of all the fifty-seven 
 varieties : Finns and Chinamen ; Americans and Hottentots ; 
 kilted Scotchmen and wilted Peruvians representatives of 
 any country that may suit your fancy. 
 
 Everywhere throughout this huge city, so magnificent 
 from a distance and so squalid when you are in it this city 
 that would be the greatest city in the world if it were under
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 191 
 
 the American or the British flag there are Russians. In 
 Stamboul and Galata and Pera, on Galata Bridge and on the 
 ships in the harbor, one's eye constantly meets with Russian 
 uniforms and one's ear constantly catches the harsh sibilants 
 of the Russian language. Scattered through Stamboul and 
 Pera there are feeding stations where they come daily by 
 thousands and get the food which they can neither buy nor 
 earn. The precipitous street which leads from the Galata 
 Bridge up to the Grand Rue de Pera is filled with Russian- 
 bloused gentry who offer you Russian money at prices that 
 make an American wonder whether this talk of a paper 
 shortage isn't all piffle: one is offered, for example, ten 
 thousand Denikine roubles for six Turkish piastres, or the 
 equivalent of four cents. One million Denikine or Wrangel 
 roubles take your pick: they're equally rotten were 
 quoted to me at ten Turkish pounds, or about seven dollars, 
 the last time I walked up that steep and narrow way; and 
 from what I knew of Constantinople salesmen, I think I 
 could have beaten them down to about three dollars and 
 thirty cents if I'd had time to waste on bargaining or had 
 needed the roubles to make paper-vests or something. There 
 are Russian restaurants, Russian newspapers, Russian tea- 
 shops, Russian gambling-houses, Russian dance-halls and 
 Russian shops of every description. Some shops drive a 
 thriving trade in good Russian vodka and fair Russian 
 vodka and Russian vodka of the sort that would dissolve a 
 life-size marble statue of the Dying Gladiator in twelve min- 
 utes, or peel the hide from a very old and very tough ele- 
 phant. The main streets of Pera are sprinkled with shop- 
 and window-signs in the odd and deformed-looking Rus- 
 sian letters. There are Russians selling flowers and toys on 
 street corners; there are admirals opening the doors of
 
 192 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 buildings to callers; there are army officers taking the hats 
 and coats of patrons in restaurants ; there are princesses and 
 the wives of former millionaires waiting on table well, let 
 us have a few specific instances : 
 
 Admiral Ponamareff has a wife and two daughters. He 
 was fortunate enough to get a job as night watchman with 
 the American Black Sea Steamship Company, which put 
 him to work watching the company's ships when they tied 
 up to the docks in the Golden Horn. He was with Admiral 
 Rojestvensky at the disastrous Russian defeat in the battle 
 of Tsushima Straits during the Russian-Japanese War. 
 During that battle he saved three hundred and fifty men 
 from the sinking cruiser Oural, and got his own ship away 
 in safety. He escaped the Japanese by entirely altering the 
 appearance of his ship, and eventually reached Madagascar* 
 For his action in the battle he received the highest honors 
 which the Russian government could bestow. At the time 
 of the Messina earthquake he was in command of the Rus- 
 sian cruiser Admiral Makaroff, and reached the scene of 
 the disaster ahead of all other war-ships. He saved ten 
 hundred and fifty men, women and children and rushed 
 them to Naples, where he came down with typhoid fever. 
 After that he became commandant of Cronstadt fortress; 
 and when the war broke out he was chief of the naval guard 
 at Peterhoff and Tsarskoe Selo a pretty good record for a 
 night watchman, all things considered. The American who 
 is at the head of the American Black Sea Steamship Com- 
 pany in Constantinople went down to the docks one day and 
 got an earful of the admiral's experiences. Having heard 
 it, he summoned a stenographer and dictated a long cable 
 to the Italian government. As a result of this message, 
 the Italian government has given to Admiral Ponamareff
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 193 
 
 and to his heirs and assigns forever a house and a piece of 
 land at Messina, and they have further provided him and 
 his family with free transportation to Messina; so the 
 admiral has nothing more to worry about except the chances 
 of another Messina earthquake. 
 
 At the crowded corner where the Rue des Petit Champs 
 runs out of the Grand Rue de Pera and around to the 
 American embassy and the Pera Palace Hotel stands a 
 flower-seller named Mandrika, He is in the uniform of a 
 Russian officer because he has nothing else to wear; and 
 on his tunic are the ribbons of various orders and cam- 
 paigns. He comes from Petrograd, where he was very well 
 known indeed ; for he was not only an officer in that excel- 
 lent regiment, His Majesty's Own Guard Rifles, but he was 
 aide de camp and general a Id, suite to the czar himself. The 
 flower business, he says, is wretched ; but a wretched flower 
 business is better than begging. 
 
 The Russian embassy, which is a large building on the 
 Grand Rue de Pera, has been partly turned into a three- 
 hundred-bed hospital, equipped throughout by the American 
 Red Cross. The food for the patients of the hospital is 
 prepared in a kitchen in the embassy basement; and the 
 chief cook of this kitchen and his staff of ten men are all 
 Guards officers. Another section of the Russian embassy 
 has for its janitor General Kontemikoff, commander of a 
 division in the Great War, and late marechal de noblesse of 
 the District of the Don. This latter job can't be translated 
 into English with any exactness; but, if my understanding 
 is correct, it is a sort of cross between the president of a 
 State Senate and a presidentially-appointed cotillion leader. 
 
 The editor and publisher of the largest afternoon paper 
 in Sebastopol is jealously guarding his newly-acquired job
 
 194 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 as hall-porter in a Pera office building. In the stables of 
 British Headquarters there are five Russian officers who 
 have been employed as grooms. The chauffeur of the 
 United States military attache was a captain in the air 
 service of the old Russian army, and shot down six enemy 
 planes. The kitchen of the Russian hospital at Harbie is 
 run by two Cossack officers, General Bobrikoff and Gen- 
 eral Beilibin. At the head of the laundry of this hospital is 
 another general; while a Princess Galitzin is one of the 
 laundresses. There are very many Princess Galitzins in 
 Europe just now. The Princess Galitzin who is the laun- 
 dress is the one whose brother was an officer in the First 
 Cavalry Guard Regiment and aide de camp to Grand Duke 
 Nicholas. 
 
 In the same outfit with Princess Galitzin's brother was 
 Baron Wolff, also an officer of the First Cavalry Guard 
 Regiment. I ran into the baron in the American embassy 
 one morning. He was a tall pleasant man with a rather 
 worried look, for which he could scarcely be blamed. His 
 clothes were very sloppy-looking, and had been given to 
 him by a Swede sailor. The baron, in addition to being an 
 aide de camp to the Grand Duke Nicholas, was one of the 
 grand duke's closest friends, and was with him constantly 
 until he left Russia. When Denikine organized his volun- 
 teer army, the baron became an officer in it ; and when the 
 army broke before the Bolsheviks and was evacuated to 
 Constantinople, he hunted around until he got a place as 
 seaman on a Russian barge. He had saved a few belongings, 
 and these he had with him on the barge. One night it col- 
 lided with a tramp steamer, and everything that the baron 
 had left went to the bottom of the Black Sea. He then got 
 a ^position as night watchman in the British warehouse at
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 195 
 
 Galata; but, as he explained with his worried look, he was 
 too young and strong to be a night watchman. So he was 
 after a job as seaman on a United States Shipping Board 
 boat ; and in order to get it, it was necessary for him to have 
 an American vise. That was why he was calling at the 
 American embassy. 
 
 Before the revolution, Count and Countess Tolstoy were 
 wealthy. They live in a little cellar room in Stamboul now. 
 The count is ill. The countess, who speaks English, French 
 and German perfectly, supports her husband, herself and 
 an old friend by teaching and by translating for various 
 foreign companies in Constantinople. 
 
 Colonel Verevkin, of the Hussars of the Guards, does 
 odd jobs in the office of the Russian Cooperative Society 
 for one Turkish pound a day. His wife, who is an excellent 
 needlewoman, does fine embroideries for English and 
 American residents of Constantinople. Between the two of 
 them they figure on being able to send their fifteen-year-old 
 daughter to Constantinople College. 
 
 Olga Petrovora Dobrovolskaya is the widow of the 
 minister of justice of the Russian Empire. The Bolsheviks 
 took him as a hostage in the town of Piatigorsk, made him 
 dig his own grave, stood him up in front of it and killed 
 him. They also killed her son and her son>-in-law. She 
 is absolutely down and out, and exists entirely on charity. 
 
 I was driving along a street in Pera one night with two 
 young men from the American embassy. "There's the man 
 that wanted the telescope," said one of them, peering over 
 at a vacant lot, "and he's got it." It seems that this man had 
 wandered into the embassy some days previous with a tale 
 to the effect that he had sold all his possessions for enough 
 money to buy a telescope, and that he still lacked ten Turkish
 
 196 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 pounds of the necessary sum. He wanted the telescope, he 
 said, to earn his living. His story was heard without enthu- 
 siasm, because heartbreaking tales are as common in Con- 
 stantinople as dandelions in America. But he was so per- 
 sistent that one of the Americans finally gave him the ten 
 pounds "to get rid of him," as Americans usually say when 
 they wish to becloud their soft-heartedness and then had 
 to fight with him to prevent him from rewarding him with a 
 trick cane which, to quote the American, was "so dressy 
 that a guy wouldn't be caught soused at a dervish dance with 
 it." And here he was, giving the boobs of Constantinople 
 a close-up at the stars for five piastres a shot. It was a 
 great relief to the American; for he had strongly suspected 
 that his ten Turkish pounds had been used to celebrate the 
 Russian Easter. Later I asked about the telescope owner 
 at the Russian embassy and found out that his name was 
 Sirdascheff, that he had been wealthy before the revolution, 
 and had attained some fame as an amateur astronomer, 
 having maintained a private observatory that would have 
 done credit to a university. 
 
 A captain in one of the best regiments of the old Rus- 
 sian army had hunted long and fruitlessly for a job. His 
 wife was about to have a baby, and they had no money at all. 
 He had collected a lot of bottles; and one afternoon when 
 I was in the American embassy he was arranging with an 
 embassy interpreter who had also been an officer in a good 
 regiment to go with him to the chief of police to get a 
 permit which would allow him to set up his bottles in a 
 vacant lot and charge the Turks five piastres for a shot at 
 them with a rock wrapped in rags. 
 
 The American Y. M. C. A. has a Russian Social Center 
 up on the Rue Broussa, which leads off the Grand Rue de
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 197 
 
 Pera. There are schools for Russian children in this build- 
 ing, and a dining-room where Russians who have jobs or 
 who have a little money left can come and get good food at 
 more reasonable prices than are obtainable in the hotels or 
 the Turkish or Russian restaurants and the prices in the 
 latter places are unusually stiff. Constantinople, with the 
 possible exception of London, is the most expensive city in 
 all Europe. In a way, it is the most expensive city in the 
 world, for there are no little places around the corner, as 
 there are in all other European cities, where one can dine 
 cheaply if the necessity arises. One must either live expen- 
 sively or very, very wretchedly; and that's another reason 
 why the Russians in Constantinople are out of luck. 
 
 I went up to the Russian Social Center for lunch one 
 noon ; and before I went up to the dining-room, I stopped to 
 get the young American who, with his wife, has charge of 
 Y. M. C. A. activities. He was busy, as are most of the 
 relief workers in Constantinople a good part of the time, in 
 wracking his brains in an effort to find work for the con- 
 stant stream of refugees who were passing before him. The 
 last one to gain entrance to his office was an attractive 
 young woman who seemed and with reason to be in the 
 depths of despair. Her husband was ill and she had been 
 unable to find work. They lived in a small room in Stam- 
 boul, the rent was overdue, and on the following Monday 
 they were to be ejected. "Now what can you do about 
 people like that?" asked the Y. M. C. A. man despairingly. 
 "It's simply impossible to find work for that woman. 
 They'll be thrown out on the street, and they'll sleep in hall- 
 ways or in some old mosque, and God knows what will 
 become of them." I hazarded the opinion that if she could 
 not get a job, she'd be forced to go on the street as so many
 
 198 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 others have been forced to do. The Y. M. C. A. man's wife 
 shook her head sadly. "Six months ago she might have 
 done that," said she, "but there's not much use now : there's 
 too much competition." And that, unfortunately, is literally 
 true, though it may sound unpleasantly cynical to the 
 prudish. 
 
 In the dining-room one sees some snappily-dressed peo- 
 ple women, sometimes, with beautiful Persian lamb or 
 sealskin coats. Usually these people are on the ragged edge. 
 Another week or another month, if they don't get jobs, and 
 their coats will have to be sold and they will become public 
 charges. 
 
 One of the prettiest girls that I ever saw was rushing 
 cabbage soup from the kitchen to the tables. She was twen- 
 ty-two years old, and her hair was the color of corn-silk in 
 early September, and her eyes were as blue as well, any 
 magazine editor who was handed a colored photograph 
 of her to use on the cover of his magazine would burst into 
 tears of gratitude. Around her neck she had a triple string 
 of pearls about as large as buck-shot. These were the genu- 
 ine articles. The young woman was the Princess Vodod- 
 skaya, a Tartar princess from Turkestan ; and I don't mind 
 saying that since I have seen her, the expression "Cream of 
 Tartar" conveys more of a picture to me than it did some 
 time ago. She came to the Y. M. C. A. for work as soon as 
 she reached Constantinople; for she said that she could be 
 happier if she worked than she could be if she lived by selling 
 her pearls. She was offered a position as dishwasher, seized 
 it joyfully and stuck to it steadily, though she had a bad 
 case of recurrent malaria. When the opening came, she was 
 given a place as waitress, which she has held ever since. Her 
 position pays her twenty-eight Turkish pounds a month, or
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 199 
 
 about twenty dollars. She gets her meals for nothing, and 
 pays eighteen pounds a month, or about twelve dollars, for 
 her room. She is a widow. Three months after she was 
 married her husband was killed fighting against the Bol- 
 sheviks. 
 
 In charge of the dining-room was a slender and distin- 
 guished-looking lady about thirty-two years old. She was 
 good-looking in a pale Russian manner; and her glossy 
 black hair was plastered close to her head and around her 
 ears in a style frequently affected by movie actresses when 
 they play Russian parts. Her name was Tokareva. Her 
 husband, who was a helpless sort of person, though awfully 
 good at bridge and pursuing the wild boar and what-not, 
 left the entire management of his huge estates on the River 
 Don to her. These estates were so large I checked this 
 statement up with several Russians, because it sounded fishy 
 to me, too that one had to drive for five days to get from 
 one end of them to another. Madame Tokareva installed 
 all sorts of improved farming machinery and made a tre- 
 mendous success of the place. That was before the Bol- 
 sheviks came. Now the estates aren't being farmed at all; 
 and Russia's loss is counterbalanced by the fact that the 
 Y. M. C. A. in Constantinople has a well-run dining-room. 
 
 Madame Strolovsky waits on table in the same dining- 
 room. Her husband also had enormous estates in South 
 Russia and was attached to the court. She and her son 
 were evacuated by the British and placed on the Island of 
 Lemnos. Her son was ill there for months and she cooked 
 his meals over an open outdoor fire. Then she was trans- 
 ferred to Constantinople. The few personal effects which 
 she had saved were lost in the transfer. And when she 
 reached Constantinople, she learned that hir husband was
 
 200 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 dead. In addition to waiting on table, she gives French 
 and English lessons, so that she may earn enough money to 
 make sttre that her son is well educated. 
 
 Russians have always been a peculiarly improvident lot 
 of grown-up children. When they have money, they spend 
 it without much apparent thought for the morrow ; and the 
 doctrine of I-should-worry was postulated long, long ago in 
 Russia in the single word "Nichevo," which might be trans- 
 lated by the phrase "What's the odds!" Tough as is the 
 lot of the Constantinople refugees, one sees the old Nichevo 
 spirit cropping out constantly. Those who have a little 
 money left are apt to spend it freely. Many of those who 
 have earned a little, and have nobody dependent on them, 
 blow in their earnings with great enthusiasm. I know of no 
 better illustration of this than the case of a dashing and 
 debonair Russian captain, who fought on every front during 
 the war, spent many months in Russian, English and Ameri- 
 can hospitals, and finally wound up his military career with 
 Wrangel. He was brought up to be a fighter, and fighting 
 is all that he knows. He got in touch with friends in 
 America and finally secured permission from the State 
 Department to go there. His American friends sent him 
 several hundred dollars by way of the embassy to pay his 
 passage. The embassy, however, refused to give him the 
 lump sum, having had experience; but he was told that as 
 expenses arose in connection with his trip, the money would 
 be advanced to him. His first need was a vise which would 
 cost ten dollars. He asked for the money, got it, and started 
 down the street for the vise. On the way he saw, in a tailor's 
 window, a gorgeous pair of military breeches. The price, 
 by some fatality, was ten dollars. The breeches were truly 
 magnificent, and he craved them. Without more ado, there-
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 201 
 
 fore, he walked into the shop and bought them. And the 
 vise? Nichevo. He should worry. 
 
 So, in spite of the terrible suffering- among the Russians, 
 there is a certain amount of merrymaking as well. Then 
 there are many Russian restaurants in which great numbers 
 of Russians have found employment; and in these restau- 
 rants there is something doing, as our grandfathers used to 
 say, every minute. Consequently if a young and good-look- 
 ing Russian girl, or for that matter a Russian girl who is 
 good-looking and not so young, has acquaintances aboard 
 the American destroyers or among the many English and 
 American business men in Constantinople, she can see some 
 pretty lively goings-on in the venerable city of the sultans. 
 The Russian refugees in Rome were both surprised and 
 shocked last February when a Russian girl came over to 
 Rome from Constantinople and expressed some contempt 
 for Roman activities. "Rome," she said, "is like a grave- 
 yard. You ought to see Constantinople : it's the gayest place 
 you can imagine !" The Romans, who were giving concerts 
 and contributing old clothes for the benefit of the Russians 
 in Constantinople, shook their heads and didn't know what 
 to make of it. They figured that the signals must have got 
 crossed somehow. But they hadn't. The young woman 
 had either been working in Russian restaurants, or had a 
 friend who had been taking her to them. And she was 
 quite right. For those who have the money to seek it, there 
 is more and brisker action in Constantinople of an evening 
 than in many other European municipalities which have 
 jazzier reputations. 
 
 The snappiest, as the phrase goes, restaurant in Constan- 
 tinople is the Muscovy; and I will even go so far as to say 
 that no city in the world can produce its like. When one
 
 202 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 enters it, one's coat and hat are taken by a Cossack colonel 
 in his long brown coat with crossed cartridge belts, his 
 wrinkled high boots and his swanky silver-hilted dagger in 
 its silver scabbard. An embassy interpreter who was a lieu- 
 tenant in one of the best Guards regiments helped me a great 
 deal in Constantinople, and he confessed that entering the 
 Muscovy was an ordeal to which he could never accustom 
 himself. He never knew whether to hop to attention and 
 peel off a military salute for the colonel, or whether to ignore 
 his uniform and rank and hand over his coat and hat. 
 
 The Muscovy's caviare and spike mackerel fresh from 
 the Bosphorus, and the snipe and pheasant and teal and 
 Chateaubriand, and salad with Russian dressing are the 
 equals of any that I have ever tasted, or even heard described 
 by Mr. Irvin S. Cobb, the distinguished bon vivant. This 
 is probably due to the fact that the head of the culinary 
 works is the chef of the late czar. The czar, by the way, 
 seems to have had as many chefs as he did coachmen. There 
 are at least eighty clubs in America and Europe that have, or 
 think they have, chefs of the late czar working for them; 
 and there are a large number of embassies, legations and 
 private families that are suffering from the same harmless 
 delusion. For my part, I am backing the chef of the Mus- 
 covy to be the real, blown-in-the-bottle goods or cheese, as 
 we say in gastronomic circles. 
 
 It isn't the food, however, which makes the Muscovy 
 unique, but the unusual brand of service which its patrons 
 receive. I don't know what would happen to the Muscovy 
 if it were located in New York, even though it served none 
 of the ruby or pale-amber-colored liquids with which its 
 Constantinople patrons love to dally; but I have an idea 
 that there would be a pitched battle on the sidewalk in front
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 203 
 
 of it immediately after its opening between the theatrical 
 managers on one side and the movie producers on the other. 
 The Muscovy employs only Russians and it is the most 
 desirable restaurant in which a Russian girl can work in 
 Constantinople; for the patrons are almost entirely Ameri- 
 cans and English, and the tips are always generous. Con- 
 sequently every refugee in the city who is young and pretty 
 tries to get a place as waitress there, and the restaurant has 
 the pick of them. It not only does some very successful 
 picking, but it gives the positions to the women who need it 
 most. And the waitresses not only wait on table ; but when 
 they aren't hustling around after food, they sit down at 
 the table with those on whom they are waiting and dine with 
 them, if it so happens that they haven't had their dinner. 
 They speak from two to five languages apiece, these young 
 women, and without exception they had either high social 
 standing or great wealth or both before the revolution. They 
 are entirely devoid of airs and graces and proud haughtiness, 
 and all of them are excellent waitresses and excellent dinner- 
 companions as well. Three of us were in there one evening, 
 and the young woman who waited on us and sat down with 
 us was a granddaughter of one of Russia's prime ministers. 
 Five American naval officers at an adjoining table were 
 being waited on by Madame Shmeman, whose home was 
 in Petrograd. Her husband was many times a millionaire, 
 and was in the Finance Ministry before the revolution. He 
 and their two children are in Constantinople now. Both 
 of the children are ill and her husband can not find work. 
 Madame Shmeman supports the entire family. Baroness 
 Franc is a very charming waitress at the Muscovy. Her 
 husband was a lieutenant in a Guards regiment. Madame 
 Shaposnekoff is another. Her husband was a millionaire
 
 204 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 tea merchant in Moscow. Madame Voskresemska is another 
 who was "reech, reech as millions," but now has nothing 
 except what her services as a waitress bring her. Another 
 is the daughter-in-law of Countess Tolstoy. She was born 
 Princess Mershersky. To give a list of the score and more 
 of waitresses at the Muscovy would be futile : they are all 
 like the foregoing. 
 
 The Muscovy has an orchestra which is conducted by the 
 first violinst of the Petrograd opera. The pianist is a con- 
 cert player whose name I couldn't get. The Americans have 
 a trick of going up beside him and whistling their favorite 
 tunes to him. He orchestrates them and has the whole 
 orchestra working on them in about five minutes. One is 
 apt to hear anything from Home Sweet Home to the latest 
 rag that ends in the middle because the ensign who whistled 
 it to the pianist couldn't remember how the last half of it 
 went. Two singers who help to entertain the diners are 
 Monsieur Pavolofsky of the Petrograd People's Opera and 
 Madame Volavatz of the Petrograd Imperial Marinsky 
 Theatre. And there is a very pretty and graceful dancer 
 who is the daughter of General Savitzky. 
 
 The only time that there has been any trouble in the 
 Muscovy was when some of the staff of the Soviet Trade 
 representatives in Constantinople went there for dinner with 
 their wives one evening, just after they arrived. A great 
 many jewels were in evidence in the Soviet party ; and one 
 of the waitresses cracked under the strain. "Those dogs!" 
 she sobbed. "They killed my brother and took all that we 
 had. How dare they come here with those jewels with 
 our jewels !" It was quite dime-novelish ; and the feelings of 
 the other diners were so pronounced and so apparent that the 
 Soviet representatives left early and didn't come back again.
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 205 
 
 The Muscovy is only one of many, but the others fall 
 below it usually far below it. These restaurants provide 
 employment for thousands of Russians who could otherwise 
 find nothing to do; but they hold no further interest for 
 Russians unless they go to them as guests of Englishmen or 
 Americans. 
 
 To see how the average Russians in or near Constanti- 
 nople spend their evenings one has to trail them when they 
 steal out at night in the tattered uniforms which they have 
 been unable to replace, and follow them to their kennels and 
 burrows high up under ramshackle roofs or in the corners 
 of moldy basements. I found myself walking behind a 
 Russian officer and his wife one evening. His overcoat 
 was torn in back at the spot where the belt is caught against 
 the coat; and through the rip, as he passed beneath a street 
 lamp, one could see that he had nothing beneath his overcoat 
 but underwear. 
 
 I found a couple of Red Cross camionettes headed out 
 for the San Stefano refugee camp one morning, so I hopped 
 aboard one of them and went along. I would like to seize 
 this opportunity to do a little boosting for the work which 
 the Red Cross has done in Constantinople. In some sections 
 of Europe the Red Cross has had some harsh things said of 
 it; but in Constantinople one never hears anything but the 
 most heartfelt praise for the work which it has done. 
 Americans, British, French and all the other nationalities 
 of that polyglot city speak of its activities with heartfelt 
 appreciation and gratitude. Practically all of the hospitals 
 and refugee institutions in the city and the camps were 
 outfitted and supplied by the American Red Cross. In 
 all it equipped one hundred and forty-seven institutions for 
 Constantinople refugees; and in the city proper for
 
 206 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 months it fed each day six thousand refugees who were 
 destitute. Of these, fourteen hundred were women, chil- 
 dren and invalids who required special feeding. It gave out 
 over ten thousand men's suits, and outfitted all needy women 
 and children. All the orphanages were equipped with Red 
 Cross clothing. Also it installed and equipped, in a palace 
 originally built for a sultan's daughter, a fine American 
 hospital with a nurses' training school attached. This is 
 something which Americans in Constantinople had been 
 vainly trying to get for seventeen years. The deep respect 
 and esteem with which all Americans are regarded in Con- 
 stantinople is due in no small part to the work of the Ameri- 
 can Red Cross. 
 
 At any rate, the camionettes careened down the hill from 
 Pera, across the Galata Bridge, up past the stately pile of 
 Saint Sophia, and out through the crowded, crazy wooden 
 houses of Stamboul to the ancient walls which for centuries 
 made Constantinople the most impregnable city in the world. 
 A short distance outside the walls, on the edge of the high 
 shores of the Sea of Marmora, stands a huddle of red 
 wooden buildings which used to be Turkish barracks. This 
 is the Lann Camp in the town of Mekri Keoi. There is a 
 pleasant outlook from the benches which the refugees have 
 built on the edge of the cliffs; for through the silvery haze 
 of the Sea of Marmora loom the blue bulks of Prinkipo and 
 Dog Island and Bulwer's Folly, and behind them the distant 
 snow-capped mass of Asiatic Olympus. The Lann Camp 
 is almost entirely a camp of intelligentsia ; and it is clean and 
 trig, and as pleasant as such a camp can be. The camionette 
 dumped me on the cliff-edge and went off about other busi- 
 ness. There were youngsters playing on the cliff, clad in 
 obviously American-knit sweaters. A few officers strolled
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 207 
 
 past me with aimless, vacant looks on their faces. A woman 
 looked around from a bench and bobbed her head at me with 
 the Russian greeting that sounds like "Sdrasch" to an 
 American and means "How do you do." I told her that 
 my Russian was bad and we spoke in German. Most of 
 the people at Lann seemed to speak two or three languages. 
 The camp was good, she said ; but there was nothing to do : 
 nothing at which one could work. One almost went mad 
 from inaction and emptiness and nostalgia. There was 
 nothing- to work with nothing. She had left Sebastopol 
 with only the clothes on her back, and those had been torn 
 to shreds on the trip down. She was wearing American 
 
 clothes thanks to the Americans. She would like to 
 
 call Captain Pramberger for me, and the Countess Kamarov- 
 sky ; for both of them spoke English as well as Russian. I 
 asked her about two girls on a near-by bench who were 
 wearing American sweaters. They were perhaps fifteen 
 years old. One was the little Princess Lilli Obolensky, 
 whose father had been head of the Melytopol District a 
 temporary government under Wrangel. The other was 
 Anna Sabouroff, the daughter of a wealthy Crimean 
 family. She and her two smaller sisters and her mother had 
 come out in the Wrangel evacuation and had had a bad time 
 of it. They had nothing to their names except the clothes 
 which the Americans had given them. 
 
 Countess Kamarovsky came and smoked a cigarette with 
 me and shook her head over the stagnation of the refugees 
 because of lack of occupation. Before the revolution she 
 had big estates near Moscow, and she went through some 
 terrible experiences in escaping experiences which she 
 asked me not to tell for the sake of certain relatives who 
 still remain in Soviet Russia. She and Captain Pramberger
 
 208 iWHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 teach French and English to the other Lann refugees. The 
 days, she said, seemed terribly long because there was noth- 
 ing at which one could busy himself ; but the evenings were 
 worse. They seemed endless, she said. 
 
 The camionette came back and we bumped to San 
 Stefano over the most horrible roads that exist, I think, 
 anywhere in the world, except for roads that have recently 
 been under shell-fire. The only automobile that seems able 
 to negotiate Turkish roads is a certain small American 
 automobile which receives frequent contemptuous mention 
 from the owners of large machines, especially when one of 
 the small ones whizzes past them in clouds of dust. Large 
 and expensive automobiles have essayed the road to San 
 Stefano, only to come limping home with broken springs and 
 a general air of dejection. The camionette, however, 
 bumped gaily onward, plunging into holes that threatened 
 to crumble the teeth of its passengers, and crawling out again 
 with cheery rattlings. Occasionally it left the road and 
 cruised at large over the barren fields on either side; and 
 eventually, squirting steam nonchalantly from every pore, it 
 drew up with an impudent flourish in the very face of a 
 small, brown-skinned French colonial trooper who was 
 guarding the gate to the camp. A pass had no effect on him. 
 The Red Cross on the camionette failed to move him. He 
 recked not that the camionette was loaded with supplies for 
 the refugees. He had evidently received orders that no one 
 was to pass, and he was unable to see any reason why he 
 should bother his head further over the matter. These 
 French colonial troops sometimes evince traits that would 
 make a saint burst into low and searing profanity, and 
 France makes few friends out of any one by using them for 
 any purpose except fighting. We finally got word to the
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 209 
 
 commandant of the camp, who ordered the gates opened at 
 once. 
 
 San Stefano camp also lies a little back from the cliffs 
 that rise from the Sea of Marmora, and the refugees are 
 housed in old gray Turkish barracks. It is a barren and 
 desolate place, and the bulk of the refugees are enlisted men 
 of the Wrangel army, though there are many civilian famil- 
 ies and many families of under-officers of the new volun- 
 teer Russian forces. There are few of the intelligentsia 
 class there, and no effort whatever seems to be made, either 
 by the French or by the refugees themselves, to keep the 
 camp clean. The space between the barracks and the edge 
 of the cliff, which would be a beautiful spot for the wounded 
 and the idle to lounge, is filled with latrines and a profusion 
 of filth; and the breezes which blow from the Sea of Mar- 
 mora serve only to disseminate an evil and sickening stench 
 through the camp. The ground was dotted with soldiers 
 who were recovering from wounds and sicknesses, and all 
 of the refugees were listless and aimless and dejected, with 
 nothing to do. A good half of the camp was given over to 
 Kalmucks who fought with Wrangel, and their families. 
 The Kalmucks are squat, brown-skinned, slant-eyed people 
 from the south of Russia, They are wonderful horsemen 
 and vicious fighters, but a very low order of people indeed. 
 The quarters in which they lived were filthy, which is 
 putting it conservatively. 
 
 I took the stories of a score of refugees at random, and 
 found them the same stories of panic-stricken dashes from 
 one part of Russia to another to escape the ever-advancing 
 march of the Bolshevik armies. Here is one of them an 
 amazing journey stripped to the bones of the narrative: 
 
 Doctor Kousmitsky was the chief medical officer of the
 
 210 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Samara-Tashkent railway. He and his wife and his twenty- 
 one-year-old daughter fled from their home in Orenburg 
 when the Bolsheviks took it, with the idea of traveling to 
 safety by rail. They reached Aktyubinsk and found that the 
 Bolsheviks were ahead of them; so they abandoned their 
 baggage, left the train and started toward the southwest. 
 They covered four hundred miles, mostly on foot, though 
 they were occasionally given rides on carts by passing peas- 
 ants. When they reached the steppes of the Kirghiz., they 
 bought a camel, paying for it with fifteen hundred Kolchak 
 roubles, six yards of cloth and one pound of tea. They 
 traveled about two hundred miles with the camel, taking 
 turns riding it. When they reached the Caspian Sea they 
 sold the camel for fifteen hundred roubles, came down the 
 Caspian by boat, worked over the Caucasus to Rostov, and 
 went from Rostov to Novorossisk. They left Novorossisk 
 in the Denikine evacuation and landed in the Crimea; and 
 then, when Wrangel smashed, they came down to Constan- 
 tinople. What do we know of adventure and hardships, we 
 people who have trains in which to travel and peaceful 
 countrysides through which to pass ? 
 
 If the Russian refugees are to continue to be refugees, 
 their most urgent need is work to do. The people who are 
 in closest touch with the situation say that until the differ- 
 ent allied nations get together on the matter and see that 
 some sort of occupation is provided, there is grave danger of 
 anarchy among these idle and crowded thousands, and the 
 formation of plague spots which will quickly spread beyond 
 control. The logical and simplest remedy for the situation 
 would be for the different Slav countries of Europe to take 
 all the refugees and distribute them, as Jugo-Slavia has 
 taken and distributed so many thousands. Unfortunately
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 211 
 
 the Slav countries are in bad shape, and are controlled for the 
 most part by inefficient, impotent and grafting governments. 
 
 Relief organizations are doing all that they can to help 
 educate the children of the refugees. There is, for example, 
 the Committee for the Rescue and Education of Russian 
 Children. This committee, which is an American organiza- 
 tion with such members as Charles W. Eliot, C. R. Crane, 
 Admiral Bristol and Frank Polk, has bought up the libraries 
 of individual Russians, secured houses in Constantinople and 
 in Bulgaria to use as schools, and is educating all that it can 
 accommodate. It has one large school overlooking the 
 Bosphorus in Constantinople, and among the men who 
 teach the refugee youngsters are Goguel, professor of Inter- 
 national Law at Petrograd University ; Petrof f, head of the 
 teaching staff of Smolny Institute; and Svetorzaroff, Min- 
 ister of Public Instruction in the Don. Goguel teaches Latin 
 to boys from fourteen to seventeen years of age; Petrof f 
 teaches Russian literature; and Svetorzaroff teaches Russian 
 history to the little children. Then the American Friends 
 to Russian Children, which has the help of the Y. M. C. A., 
 the American Mennonites and the Near East Relief, has a 
 school in another beautiful house overlooking the Bosphorus. 
 The directress of this school is Nathalie Goremykine, whose 
 father-in-law, a prime minister of Russia, was murdered by 
 the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus. 
 
 A number of Russian girls have been taken into Con- 
 stantinople College, which is a beautiful and excellent Ameri- 
 can institution for girls, high up on the shore of the Bos- 
 phorus just outside of Constantinople. Girl after girl came 
 to me at Constantinople College and told me her story 
 such girls as Zidia Senutkine, daughter of Judge Nicolas 
 Senutkine, of Poltava; Catherine Perebostchikoff, daughter
 
 212 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 of General Michael Perebostchikof f ; Princess Nathalie 
 Schakowsky, daughter of Prince Alexis Nicolaivich 
 Schakowsky ; and Anna Maximovitch, daughter of General 
 Paul Maximovitch of Tchernigoff. General Maximovitch 
 is now chief gardener at Constantinople College. The stories 
 of all of these girls were such as to cause the hair of an 
 American mother to turn gray if such things had hap- 
 pened to one of her own bairns. 
 
 I do not wish to convey the idea that the greatest amount 
 of help which is given to Russian refugees in Constantinople 
 is given by American organizations. The French govern- 
 ment, up to April, 1921, was doing the most, because it was 
 feeding the Wrangel troops and supervising their distribu- 
 tion. A large amount, too, was being done by a combina- 
 tion of Russian organizations the Russian Red Cross, the 
 Zemstvos and the Union of Towns. The two latter organi- 
 zations were formed in Russia early in the war for the pur- 
 pose of doing all sorts of war work and helping Russian 
 soldiers. Counties elected members of the Zemstvos ; towns 
 elected members of the Towns Unions. The Constantinople 
 organizations operating under these names are composed of 
 people who were elected in Russia in 1919 and who came out 
 of Russia in the Denikine evacuation. The combination of 
 the three organizations attends to the foundation and the 
 management of schools, libraries, hospitals, sanatoria, feed- 
 ing stations and workshops for the refugees, and is helped 
 freely by the American Red Cross and other American 
 organizations. Four former lord mayors of Moscow are 
 working with the Zemstvos, as well as Prince Peter Dol- 
 goroukoff and Prince Paul Dolgoroukoff and many other 
 Russians who used to be wealthy and great men before 
 Russia was wrecked, but who are now penniless.
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 213 
 
 Wherever one went in Constantinople in March of 1921, 
 one heard gloomy speculations as to the ultimate fate of 
 the refugees. This was due to the official announcement 
 on the part of the French that on the first of April they 
 would cease all refugee-feeding. It was the third announce- 
 ment of the sort that the French had made, and there was a 
 general hope that they would weaken on carrying out their 
 third threat, just as they had weakened on the other two. 
 But the French were very insistent that they meant it. This 
 time, they said, they would absolutely and definitely cease 
 to provide food for the refugees. I interviewed a French 
 official in a responsible position on the subject. Yes, he 
 said, it was quite true. All feeding would cease on the first 
 of April. The prospect was a most unpleasant one thou- 
 sands of Russians isolated at Gallipoli and on the Island of 
 Lemnos and at Tchataldja with no food and no way to get 
 food. The French official set forth the French position in 
 the matter ; and it must be said that they have some ground 
 for their attitude. At the end of the interview I told the 
 French official that the French couldn't afford to antagonize 
 the world by letting the Russians starve like rats in a trap. 
 He hedged a little. "Well," said he, "of course we'll keep 
 on for a few days after the first of April ; but after a few 
 days all feeding will come to an end absolutely." The 
 French, of course, were taking this attitude because they 
 felt that they shouldn't be forced to bear the burden of feed- 
 ing alone, and wished to force the other Allies to share the 
 burden with them. It is generally felt in Constantinople 
 that the refugee situation should be an international affair 
 rather than the job of any one nation, since the Russian 
 calamity was directly brought about by the part which 
 Imperial Russia played in supporting the Allies.
 
 214 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 The French had, up to the end of March, spent about 
 ten million dollars on the Wrangel evacuation. They had 
 also taken over all the Russian ships in which the refugees 
 were evacuated, and a large amount of Wrangel's supplies. 
 The Russians claim that the ships pay for all the help given 
 to the refugees, and leave the Russians with a large balance 
 in their favor. 
 
 General Wrangel, during my stay in Constantinople, was 
 living aboard a Russian yacht in the Bosphorus. The 
 European newspapers report him as being in a different part 
 of Europe every week; and every Monday, Wednesday and 
 Friday a rumor is spread through Constantinople that he has 
 been assassinated. When I drove down to the shore of the 
 Bosphorus to the leading-place off which his yacht lies, my 
 chauffeur informed me that he had been shot that morning. 
 It merely happened to be a conversational opening in Con- 
 stantinople, as is the weather in America. Wrangel was 
 obstinately refusing to leave Constantinople; for he was 
 afraid that if he did, his troops would be shipped to places 
 where they shouldn't be shipped. 
 
 He is a tall, erect, slender man, a good four inches 
 over six feet in height. He is semi-bald, and the remainder 
 of his hair is close-cropped. He has very fierce blue eyes 
 and a lean, deeply-lined face. He rasps out his words 
 harshly and abruptly; and even the most pleasant remarks 
 which he made to my interpreter sounded like stinging 
 rebukes. 
 
 He said that he wished to convey his own thanks, as 
 well as those of all the Crimean refugees and all the refugees 
 in Europe, to the American people for the great and gener- 
 ous help which they had given to him and those who had 
 come with him to Constantinople. He then went on to speak
 
 r.nirlfty of Aturrican Red Cro 
 
 General Baron Peter \\rangel
 
 One of Wrangel's ships coming into Constantinople. Standing on the 
 upper deck are three generals and an admiral.
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 215 
 
 of his army. He wished, he said, to keep it together as a 
 fighting force because he felt sure that the summer of 1921 
 would see the fall of Bolshevism in Russia, and because 
 when that time came there would be nothing to prevent Rus- 
 sia from crumbling into absolute anarchy unless his trained 
 troops could be thrown into the country as a police force. 
 If Wrangel's judgment of the situation which he declares 
 is based on the report of his confidential agents in Russia 
 is correct, his troops should unquestionably be held together. 
 Most observers, however, believe that the Soviet govern- 
 ment is so strongly entrenched that it will be able to hang 
 on for a long, long time. 
 
 In addition to keeping an army nucleus, he went on, he 
 was keeping a governmental nucleus as well; for he had 
 organized groups of men who would be competent to step 
 into the ruins left by the Bolsheviks, and carry on the affairs 
 of the nation without loss of time a parliamentary group, 
 an educational group, commerce and trade groups and fi- 
 nance groups. He had organized a Russian council, in which 
 were represented all of the political parties of old Russia 
 with the exception of absolute monarchists and extreme 
 Socialists. These he refused to include. He felt that he 
 alone was maintaining the last dependable forces of great 
 Russia, and that the civilized nations of the world, who 
 realized the rottenness of Bolshevism, should assist him in 
 the attempt, rather than hinder him. 
 
 The French, he said, had made three proposals in regard 
 to his troops : that they should be shipped to South America, 
 chiefly to Brazil and Peru; that they should be scattered 
 through the French Foreign Legion; and that they should 
 be sent back to Soviet Russia. He would not decide the 
 first off-hand, because many northern people, notably the
 
 216 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Germans, had declared that people from the north could not 
 stand the South American climate. As for the second, there 
 was room for so few of his men in the French Foreign 
 Legion that the proposition was scarcely worth considering. 
 The third proposal to return all his troops to Soviet Russia 
 he would accept if the French would permit his men to 
 return with arms. In that case he would go at their head 
 and they would fight their way in or die. The French 
 said that they must go unarmed ; and under no circumstances 
 would he advise his men to do this. Wrangel's own plan, if 
 he could not retain his men as the nucleus of a future Rus- 
 sian army, was, he said, gradually to send them to Serbia, 
 Hungary and other Central European countries as bulk- 
 labor for farming, manufacturing, railroad- and road-making 
 and similar enterprises. He considered that the determina- 
 tion on the part of the French to stop feeding his people was 
 an attempt to get other nations to relieve them of the burden. 
 He also seemed quite sure that it was somehow connected 
 with the establishing of trade relations between Soviet Rus- 
 sia and certain European nations. 
 
 From Wrangel I went to the high French official of 
 whom I have spoken before. He started off with a long 
 lecture on the long-standing desire on the part of Russia to 
 gain control of Constantinople a desire which was keen at 
 the time of Catharine the Great and wound up by saying 
 that it was a very strange thing that Russia is to-day nearer 
 to realizing her desires than at any other time in her history, 
 inasmuch as there is a Russian army of one hundred and 
 thirty-five thousand men under the walls of the city. He 
 must have been speaking figuratively or something ; for the 
 army, instead of being one hundred and thirty-five thousand 
 men was about fifty thousand men ; and most of them were
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 217 
 
 marooned on a desert island and a barren peninsula instead 
 of being under the walls. I told him that a Russian who 
 felt elated over the nearness of these troops to Constan- 
 tinople would need to have the top of his head opened with a 
 stone-drill so that his brain could be located and examined. 
 He looked at me with diplomatic gravity and went on to say 
 that three thousand of the men had already returned to 
 Soviet Russia of their own volition, and that the captain of 
 the ship that took them back had reported that they were 
 received with open arms by the Bolsheviks and treated to a 
 grand carousal or Russian souse-party as a welcome home. 
 I told him that the Russian General Staff in Constantinople 
 had informed me on what they considered good authority 
 that of these three thousand men, seventy- four had been shot 
 on landing, over nine hundred had been placed in the Red 
 Army, twelve hundred had been mobilized as Labor Battal- 
 ions, about two hundred had been turned loose without any 
 restrictions, while the remainder had been sent to their own 
 villages and handed over to the Chesvi Chaika or Extraor- 
 dinary Commissions for trial on the charge of treason. The 
 French official denied this with a scornful laugh, and said 
 that it was true that those who returned were told that if 
 they misbehaved, they would be sent to the Donetz mining 
 districts and put to work in the mines, but that they had not 
 been othenvise threatened or molested. The reader can take 
 his pick of the two claims : I had no means of finding out 
 which possessed the larger trace of truth. I have a hunch, 
 but hunches aren't reliable. 
 
 The official went on to say that Wrangel had been 
 repeatedly warned, since his arrival in Constantinople, that 
 the feeding would have to stop in April and that the army 
 would have to be distributed by that time; and then he
 
 218 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 claimed that no attention had been paid to the warning 
 because Wrangel always hoped that the Bolsheviks would 
 collapse on the following week. "All that they want to do," 
 he declared passionately, "is to sit on an island and do noth- 
 ing! They have thousands of excuses for not going to 
 Brazil, and say they want to investigate before they go. 
 Why should they ? Germany at the height of her prosperity 
 sent thousands of colonists to Brazil. Isn't that good 
 enough for them? When there's an urgent necessity, you 
 take the needed steps to fill the need. If the Pilgrim Fathers 
 had demanded a previous investigation of America before 
 they went there, they'd still be in England. The French 
 policy here is the same as that of the United States. We 
 recognize no Wrangel army and no Wrangel government in 
 Constantinople. Wrangel and his army are merely refugees. 
 They were disarmed : we are under no obligation whatever 
 to them : our only motive in feeding them has been that of 
 humanity. We have spent over one hundred million francs 
 on food alone not on their evacuation and transportation. 
 France is poor from the war and she can not afford to con- 
 tinue." 
 
 I reminded him that the Russians claim that the Russian 
 ships and supplies taken over by the French more than paid 
 for that expenditure. He smiled scornfully. "But do you 
 realize," he said, "the great number of millions that we spent 
 on outfitting Wrangel for his campaign?" I hadn't made 
 any attempt to realize it; for the French gambled on 
 Wrangel, and I had always thought that one should accept 
 his gambling losses without further outcry. I still think so, 
 too. 
 
 These are the two sides of the case, somewhat sketchily 
 drawn in. There was a third side, for which one had to go
 
 THE CONSTANTINOPLE REFUGEES 219 
 
 to the Soviet Trade representative in Constantinople a 
 man named Koudisch. He was a tall, slender, exquisitely 
 dressed person who affected a powerful brand of toilet 
 powder and had a pretty taste in perfumes. I had an 
 appointment with him at nine o'clock one morning and kept 
 it to the minute, to show him that a person didn't have to be 
 a Bolshevik to get up as early as half past eight and other- 
 wise show signs of being willing to do a little work occasion- 
 ally. He was in his bath, however, and kept me waiting 
 until five minutes of ten while he prinked and powdered and 
 scented himself. This ought to be a terrible blow to people 
 who visualize the proletariat as hard guys with grimy hair, 
 made-up neckties and fringes on their trousers-cuffs. If 
 this Constantinople Bolshevik representative was as repre- 
 sentative as his credentials claimed, one of the ear-marks of 
 a Bolshevik leader will soon be pink-ribboned undergar- 
 ments, peek-a-boo vests and spats with Mechlenburg lace 
 ruchings. 
 
 I asked the handsome fellow about the manner in which 
 refugees would be received if they returned from Constan- 
 tinople to Soviet Russia. "I can assure you," he told me in 
 a frank manly way, "that there will be no rancor in the 
 minds of any Russian toward the deluded men who were 
 merely obeying the orders of their officers. We shall wel- 
 come them back. But it will be different for the men who 
 led them astray the high officers who ordered them to 
 proceed against us. Those men were traitors to Russia and 
 they must be tried as traitors if they return." There is a 
 great deal of leeway in the Bolshevik interpretation of what 
 constitutes a traitor. 
 
 A few weeks after my interview with Koudisch, the 
 Allies woke up one morning to find that Bolshevik agents
 
 220 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 had placed bombs beneath most of Constantinople's public 
 buildings and good hotels. Koudisch was at the bottom of 
 it, and was ejected from the city with marked enthusiasm. 
 He was obviously an excellent representative of Bolshevik 
 ideas and ideals. 
 
 Meanwhile the refugees live on from day to day. Poor 
 people ! God help them if nobody else will !
 
 They Sometimes Come Back 
 
 MODERN GREECE is celebrated for her ancient ruins and 
 for her unscrupulous politicians who might with some 
 reason be classed as modern ruins. The remains of the 
 unrivaled temples on the Acropolis are fitting monuments 
 to the race which produced many of the world's greatest 
 sculptors, dramatists, poets, statesmen, philosophers and 
 soldiers, and which ruled the known world. The unscru- 
 pulous politicians are fitting reminders of the horrible 
 results of attempting to mix a score of races in a human 
 melting-pot. It can't be done successfully, whether the 
 attempt be made in Persia, Italy, South America, or North 
 America; and those who think that it can are entitled to 
 study history, biology and Greece, and then indulge in 
 another think. 
 
 Our steamer from Constantinople waddled across the 
 Sea of Marmora and out through the Dardanelles almost six 
 years to the day after that terrible twenty-fifth of April, 
 1915, when the British transports spewed their human 
 freight into the water under the barren Gallipoli cliffs, and 
 the German and Turkish machine guns on the cliff-edge 
 snapped out their lives in a welter of bloody foam. All 
 around that barren point the hulks of the transports were 
 still lying where the British beached them in the landing 
 
 221
 
 222 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 beached them and deliberately cut off all chance of retreat. 
 The early morning sun was bright on the flat sea, a soft 
 breeze blew out of the yEgean, the sky was silvery-blue and 
 cloudless. It was a day to make all things look pleasant and 
 harmless. But the silent and rusted transports, ranged in a 
 drunken half-circle in the calm sea at the cliff's base, were 
 the grimmest remnant of all the many grim remnants of the 
 late war that I have seen, and the greatest monument to 
 man's heroism. 
 
 In the London papers on every April twenty-fifth 
 appear columns of memorial notices which read about like 
 this: "DUBLIN FUSILIERS. In honored and grate- 
 ful remembrance of the Officers and Men of the Dublin 
 Fusiliers who won undying fame and were killed during 
 the landing from the 'River Clyde' at V Beach, Gallipoli. 
 25th April, 1915. May they rest in peace. They achieved 
 the impossible." Or, instead of the Dublin Fusiliers, it may 
 be the King's Own Scottish Borderers or the Lancashire 
 Fusiliers or the Essex Regiment or the Royal Fusiliers or 
 
 the Hampshire Regiment The awful length of the 
 
 columns tells an impressive but uncolored story of the hor- 
 rors of the Gallipoli landing; but the merest glimpse of the 
 shattered transports beneath the frowning cliffs and the 
 thought of the thousands who fought their way ashore 
 through the blood-stained water sends a sickening chill 
 through the most hardened spine. I mention these things 
 because Constantine was king of Greece when they hap- 
 pened. Constantine, King of Greece, was hindering the 
 Allies at every step and playing the German game at every 
 opportunity. And Constantine has come back from the exile 
 into which the Allies drove him, and is king of Greece again. 
 
 The steamer waddled on past the barren shores of a few
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 223 
 
 of the widely-sung" Isles of Greece, as bleak and bare and 
 inhospitable-looking as the back of an enlarged whale, and 
 crept slowly by the symmetrical white marble cone of Mount 
 Athos, that peculiar stronghold of the Greek church where 
 for centuries thousands of monks have existed, completely 
 removed from the females of all species, with the sole excep- 
 tion of insects and birds. The monks of Mount Athos have 
 never yet been able to issue an edict which would be obeyed 
 by lady fleas, flies and other winged wanderers; but lady 
 cats and dogs and horses and goats are unknown upon its 
 silent slopes. No cow mellows the twilight with her ru- 
 minative moo; no hen roams fussily about the countryside 
 to make the gentle hermits speculate on the reasons which 
 lead her to cross the road. Then the steamer turned north 
 into the Gulf of Salonika, at the northern tip of which lies 
 the city of Salonika, northernmost of the large Greek ports, 
 known to the ancients as Thessalonica. To the church of 
 this ancient city St. Paul addressed his two epistles to the 
 Thessalonians. 
 
 Now all modern Greeks, whether you find them in Con- 
 stantinople, Turkey, or Lowell, Massachusetts, or London, 
 England, or Portsmouth, New Hampshire, or Rome, Italy, 
 are politicians first and business men or laborers afterward. 
 And as politicians they are divided into two strict and pas- 
 sionate camps: they are either Royalists, shrieking wildly 
 and deafeningly for King Constantine and cursing all the 
 doings of a man named Venizelos with black and searing 
 curses; or they are Venizelists, howling hysterically for 
 Venizelos and hating King Constantine with their haters 
 wide open and hitting, as one might say, on every cylinder. 
 Many New England barber-shops and bootblack stands, four 
 thousand miles removed from the front-line cafes of Greek
 
 224 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 politics, have been wrecked during the past four years 
 because of internecine strife between their Greek owners 
 and patrons over the Constantine-Venizelos question. In 
 Greece itself this political frenzy becomes so poisonous that 
 either political party is almost willing to wreck the entire 
 nation if by so doing it can embarrass the other party. 
 
 Venizelos is a Greek from the Island of Crete. He was 
 prime minister of Greece during the Balkan Wars; and by 
 cleverly and persistently advertising King Constantine, he 
 made a national hero of him. He was strongly pro-Ally 
 during the war. When Constantine played the traitor to 
 the Allies, Venizelos headed a bloodless revolution and led 
 Greece into the war on the Allies' side. He won striking 
 victories for Greece at the Peace Conference, and showed 
 himself thoroughly able to cope with such experienced diplo- 
 mats and politicians as Lloyd-George, Clemenceau and 
 Orlando. By his unaided efforts he built Greece from a 
 small and insignificant country to a large and potentially 
 wealthy country. Venizelos and a man named Trikoupes, 
 Prime Minister of Greece off and on from 1882 to 1894, 
 are the only two statesmen produced by the entire Greek 
 nation in hundreds of years. Venizelos, so far as can be 
 discovered, is to-day the one Greek in public life who 
 possesses ideals, vision, courage and broad-mindedness. 
 
 In Salonika one gets his first glimpse of the lengths to 
 which the Royalists of Greece will go to discredit and disre- 
 gard the Venizelists. 
 
 When Venizelos was in power, he brought large numbers 
 of Greeks from the Greek Caucasus, which is a part of 
 Southern Russia lying over to the east of the Black Sea, 
 back to Greece for the purpose of populating the plains 
 of Macedonia and Thrace which had been depopulated by
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 225 
 
 the Balkan Wars and the Great War, and also for the pur- 
 pose of having a Greek population in these districts to back 
 up the claims which he might make before the Council of 
 London. These returning Greeks, all of whom were for 
 the most part poor farmers with their families, were landed 
 at Salonika, placed temporarily in the barracks used by the 
 British during the war, and distributed gradually to the 
 farm-lands of Thrace. 
 
 These colonists started returning to Greece in July, 1920. 
 Under the Venizelist government the scheme worked well. 
 In November of 1920, Venizelos was defeated at the polls 
 and King Constantine was recalled from his hideous exile 
 in a Swiss hotel that had only sixty-five palm-trees in its 
 dining-room and served ice-cream at only two meals a day. 
 Immediately, in so far as it was possible to do so, all Veni- 
 zelists were removed from power and all Venizelist plans 
 were given a swift and well-aimed kick. 
 
 Since the program of bringing Greeks from the Greek 
 Caucasus to colonize Thrace was a Venizelos program, the 
 new Royalist crowd refused to ship them from Salonika into 
 the interior. So, starting in November, 1920, these penniless 
 Greek families began to back up in the camp like a dammed 
 river. They overflowed the British barracks into a big tent 
 camp, and they overflowed the second camp into a third. I 
 came to Salonika in April, 1921. There were then five 
 camps with more than twenty-six thousand persons crammed 
 into them; and they presented one of the most shocking 
 spectacles that I have ever seen. The meager dole of food 
 that the Royalists were dribbling out to them each day was 
 insufficient to support life; typhus and almost every other 
 disease known to man were running riot through the camps ; 
 and the death rate was one hundred and eight per cent.
 
 226 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 That is to say, the people were dying- so rapidly that all of 
 them, if things continued as they were, would be dead in 
 less than one year's time. A short time before I arrived the 
 death rate had been as high as one hundred and twenty-eight 
 per cent. The Royalists left their own people to starve and 
 rot and die in these Salonika camps; while down in Athens 
 they poured out money in rivers on a pinchbeck king and on 
 glittering fetes in honor of his return and on a criminal and 
 ruinous war in the heart of Asia Minor. 
 
 I went out through these camps on a balmy April morn- 
 ing with Major Hillas and Captain Van Camp of the 
 American Red Cross, which was doing what it could to help 
 the situation, and to force the king and his rotten govern- 
 ment to take care of their own people. Salonika is a dirty, 
 desolate abomination of a city, scarred by a recent devastat- 
 ing fire and backed by barren hills. Away to the east of it 
 stretches a wide and wind-swept plain, sweeping back from 
 the water's edge; and in the middle of the plain are the old 
 wooden barracks that the British troops occupied during the 
 war. These barracks had almost no ventilation. The win- 
 dow-openings were closed with coverings of tin or wood. A 
 family of five persons was allowed a space eight feet long 
 by five feet wide. The stench in the buildings was very bad 
 and disease ran through them like fire through dead grass. 
 There were no trained nurses, and only one of the few 
 Greek doctors was of any use at all. The only sanitary 
 arrangements that existed had literally been jammed down 
 the camps' throats by the American Red Cross. Men 
 weren't considered sick in the camps until they were within 
 one day of being dead. Children with measles, scarlet fever, 
 diphtheria and other diseases ran free through the camps. 
 A family might eat dinner together on one day ; and by din-
 
 Courtesy of American Red Croig 
 Exterior of the old British barracks at Salonika. 
 
 ('oiirifty of American Red Crou 
 Greek Caucasians starving in the Salonika barracks.
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 227 
 
 ner-time of the following day the whole family might be 
 and frequently was dead. 
 
 These people were Greeks, and the people responsible 
 for their pitiful state were Greeks. It was all due to the 
 fact that the Royalists hated the Venizelists. That fact 
 should always be borne in mind. 
 
 Where the plain falls away to the water's edge, there 
 were two tent camps. On the plain above the cliff there 
 were nine hundred small conical tents with fifteen people 
 jammed into each tent. On the beach below there were one 
 hundred more tents. The beach camp was the receiving 
 station, and more unfortunates were coming ashore from 
 two steamers as we stood on the cliff's edge and looked 
 down at them. About ninety people were standing in 
 line. They were waiting to get water from the single water- 
 tap that exists in the lower camp. The British installed a 
 splendid water-supply system in these camps ; but the Greeks 
 let it go to rack and ruin. Two men walked by us with a 
 man on a stretcher between them. He was sitting up on the 
 stretcher with a wild glare in his eyes, moving his hands 
 weakly. They put him down in an open sun-baked field, and 
 he died. Just below us, at the foot of the cliff, was a white- 
 washed shed twenty feet long and ten feet wide. Four dead 
 men were sprawled alongside it. That morning one of the 
 Red Cross workers had taken forty-two bodies out of it. 
 The bodies had been slid in through the windows during 
 the night, so that the door had been jammed shut by their 
 weight and numbers. Three men had been required to force 
 the door inward. 
 
 Thousands of the people in the camps had no clothes. 
 In one tent a Red Cross worker found several women 
 huddled under straw without any clothes at all. Their onty
 
 228 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 clothes had been destroyed in the delouser. Two girls 
 among them had pneumonia. Five thousand people in the 
 camps had so few clothes that they were unable to go into 
 Salonika in the daytime. We went into the hospital of the 
 tent camp. It had no beds. Four women were lying in 
 blankets on the bare floor, dying. Thirty dead men and 
 women were carried out of this hospital on the preceding 
 day. The Greeks, implored by the American Red Cross to 
 send more doctors, replied that their doctors were needed in 
 Asia Minor. These are the barest and the least offensive 
 outlines of the Salonika situation. Colonel Olds, head of 
 the Red Cross in Europe, and a representative of the Ameri- 
 can Relief Administration visited Salonika shortly before 
 I did. They immediately wired their organizations that con- 
 ditions in these camps were a disgrace to the Greek nation 
 and that the loss of child life in them was the greatest they 
 had ever seen. 
 
 The conditions exist because Constantine, King of the 
 Greeks, came back ; and because his followers were given the 
 chance to show their hatred for Venizelos and all his works. 
 
 From Salonika to Piraeus, the port of Athens, is a day's 
 trip to the south, past barren hill-slopes almost devoid of 
 human habitations, and past mile after mile of untilled 
 fields. The Greeks, like many other people from South- 
 eastern Europe, seem absolutely incapable of developing their 
 own resources. And like the rest of the incompetents of 
 Southeastern Europe, their chief ambition in life is to rush 
 to America, where a sturdier race of people has developed 
 industries and a civilization that will provide them with a 
 maximum of money in return for a minimum of enterprise. 
 The Greek farms produce pitifully poor crops, but only 
 because the soil lacks nitrogen and phosphates. Only once in
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 229 
 
 every four or five years does the land produce a decent crop. 
 Doctor Hopkins of the University of Illinois studied the 
 Greek soil and found that if the farmers would plant a cer- 
 tain sort of white clover and turn it under, the land would 
 produce a one-hundred-per-cent. larger crop on the follow- 
 ing year. Yet the Greeks won't do it. They prefer to let 
 things happen as they have always happened. They are 
 extreme individualists, out for themselves first and suspi- 
 cious of every one else. Every Greek organization is an 
 organization of individualists, and the members may be 
 and usually are knifing one another in a week's time. 
 Every Greek politician regards his job as a means of get- 
 ting a better job, and never as an opportunity to serve his 
 country or his constituents. These statements are sweep- 
 ing; but sweeping as they are, they are true. Cooperation 
 is almost impossible to get in Greece ; and organizing ability, 
 as we know it in America, is peculiarly rare. Greece pro- 
 duces a good olive oil, for example. Yet the Greeks haven't 
 the ability to market it to advantage. They sell it to France 
 for a small profit; and the French make a large profit by 
 bottling it and selling it to the United States. They haven't 
 been able to develop the grading and the marketing of their 
 lemons and oranges. Venizelos recognized these things, and 
 had laid plans which he hoped would remedy them being 
 Greece's only statesman. With Venizelos gone, the plans 
 are discarded and forgotten, for the rest of the Greeks are 
 only politicians. 
 
 As one sails up to Piraeus, one finds it hard to believe 
 that the small green plain directly ahead, with the insignifi- 
 cant-looking city huddled around the two hills in the center 
 of it, was the Heart of the World once upon a time. The 
 plain is the Plain of Attica, and the two hills are the Acrop-
 
 230 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 olis and Lycabettus, and the city around them is Athens. 
 From the people who built this city and the other great 
 Hellenic cities, and made Greece the mistress of the world 
 fair-haired people who came down into Greece from the 
 distant north came, in the space of a few hundred years, 
 men whose names will be great so long as books are made 
 and people exist to read them names familiar to every high- 
 school boy: such names as Sophocles, Euripides, Eschylus, 
 Aristophanes, Phidias, Praxiteles, Aristotle, Plato, Hip- 
 pocrates, Pythagoras, Socrates, Demosthenes, Heraclitus, 
 Empedocles, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Anacreon, Sappho 
 and a host of others. And when Greece had become great 
 through the greatness of her soldiers and statesmen and 
 scientists and dramatists, and her cities had become rich and 
 powerful and great industrial centers, she was flooded with 
 immigrants and slaves. In the days of Philip of Macedon, 
 when Greece had passed the crest of her glory, and was on 
 the edge of dissolution, the population of Athens in round 
 numbers consisted of twenty thousand Athenians, ten 
 thousand aliens and four hundred thousand slaves. 
 
 It might be mentioned in passing that the last census 
 showed that the population of Boston, sometimes known as 
 the Athens of America, consisted of some three hundred 
 thousand native-born Americans and some four hundred 
 thousand aliens. 
 
 These aliens and slaves of Ancient Athens spoke the 
 Greek tongue and they wore the Greek dress, but they were 
 not Greeks. Citizenship was conferred on them, so that they 
 might fight the battles of Greece. The result was inevitable. 
 Any promiscuous crossing of breeds invariably produces 
 mongrels, whether the crossing occurs in dogs or in humans, 
 and whether it takes place in the Valley of the Nile or on the
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 231 
 
 Attic plain or in the shadow of Rome's seven hills or along 
 the stern and rock-bound shores of New England. People 
 whose trust in catch-words is greater than their common 
 sense are fatuous enough to believe that by pouring all the 
 races of Europe in a human melting-pot, one can keep on 
 producing the same breed of men that founded America, 
 laid down its scheme of government, wrenched its farms and 
 its cities from the wilderness, and produced its scientists, 
 statesmen, artists, pioneers, authors and explorers. It is no 
 more possible to do this than it is to turn a yapping, snarling 
 pile of Pekinese, Chows, pugs, Boston terriers, poodles, 
 beagles, collies, coach-dogs, wolf-hounds and mongrels into 
 a kennel and have them produce litters of thoroughbred 
 setters. Both are biological impossibilities; and all the 
 catch-words in the world dealing with melting-pots and with 
 all men being born free and equal only serve to make Old 
 Man Biology burst into raucous cackles of laughter and 
 proceed stubbornly on his time-honored routine. In Mexico, 
 Central America, South America and the Balkan States the 
 world has excellent samples of people who have so deterior- 
 ated through cross-breeding that they are wholly incapable 
 of self-government as Americans have known it in past 
 years but as they won't know it very much longer if immi- 
 gration should continue in the future to anywhere near the 
 same degree that the criminal negligence of our legislators 
 has permitted it in the past. The pages of history are 
 littered with the stories of great civilizations that have 
 perished because of unrestricted immigration and the mon- 
 grelization that resulted. As a result of unrestricted immi- 
 gration the Greek race, the Greek genius and the Greek 
 nation fell to pieces. In the past two thousand years 
 Greece has produced no literature, no architecture, no
 
 232 [WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 philosophy, no art, no science, and no ability to govern 
 itself or its subject peoples with any degree of success. The 
 great cities of Greece crumbled to dirty collections of 
 peasant huts. Even Athens itself, as recently as 1834, was a 
 poverty-stricken village which had to be re-discovered by 
 Western civilization. The modern Greeks like to have 
 visitors believe that they are descended straight from the 
 true Greeks of the days of Pericles; but if they are, then 
 every Greek bootblack in New England is descended 
 straight from Plymouth Colony. The Greeks of to-day 
 except on some of the Greek islands, which have been com- 
 paratively free from invasion and immigration are 
 descended from Asiatic and African slaves, Italians, old 
 Bulgarians, Slavs, Gepidse, Huns, Herulians, Avars, 
 Egyptians, Jews, Illyrians, Arabs, Spaniards, Walloons, 
 Franks, Albanians, and several other races. History has 
 an unfortunate but incurable habit of repeating itself, 
 and a word to the wise ought to be better than a jab with an 
 eight-inch hatpin. 
 
 Modern Athens is a startlingly modern city, laid out by 
 a German engineer. The Greeks are great hands for being 
 helped. The British showed them how to run their navy; 
 the French instructed them in forming their army; British 
 leaders and Albanian fighters finally won for them from 
 the Turks the horrible exhibition of barbarism and inca- 
 pacity which is dignified by the name of the Greek War 
 of Independence a war in which the Greeks displayed, as 
 they have so frequently done in recent years, at least as 
 great a capacity for barbarity as the Turks. 
 
 The yellowed marble columns on the crest of the Acrop- 
 olis most beautiful and imposing of all the monuments 
 of antiquity look down on asphalt streets, glaring white
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 233 
 
 apartment-houses and office buildings and innumerable 
 cafes at whose sidewalk tables the Greeks sit from early 
 morning until late at night, wreathed in the dust-clouds that 
 seem to whirl eternally through the streets of Athens, and 
 feverishly pouring politics into one another's ears and coffee 
 into themselves. Everybody in Greece, even in little country 
 villages which have no newspapers of their own and don't 
 even get the Athenian political pamphlets which masquer- 
 ade under the name of newspapers, lives in an atmosphere of 
 politics and intrigue. Where many of them acquire their 
 political information is a mystery to newcomers to the 
 country, who are inclined to think that they pick up some 
 sort of political germ from their coffee. But they all get 
 it, even the poorest and most ignorant ; and they can brawl 
 for hours over political matters, and drag out arguments 
 that would do credit to an extreme Socialist for resource- 
 fulness and speciousness. The spirit of faction among the 
 Greeks is incurable. Back in the War of Independence, 
 nearly a hundred years ago, every temporary cessation of 
 fighting was the signal for internecine conflicts between 
 rival Greek factions because of the rivalry of leaders who 
 thought more of their personal power and profit than of 
 the cause of Greece. There aren't so many factions to-day; 
 but they're equally willing to wreck Greece in order to gain 
 their own ends. 
 
 Sketchily, the departure of King Constantine from 
 Greece and his return occurred in the following manner: 
 
 Constantine, born in 1868, is the son of King George I 
 of Greece who, before he took the Greek throne, was a 
 Danish prince and of Queen Olga, who was a Russian 
 grand duchess. Constantine married a sister of Kaiser 
 Wilhelm, and has always been a passionate pro-German.
 
 if 
 234 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 He was convinced that Germany would win the war, and 
 consequently refused to carry out his treaty obligations and 
 his promises to the Allies. The war developed no greater 
 traitor to the Allied cause than King Constantine. He 
 assisted the Bulgarians ; he disregarded the treaty of alliance 
 which Greece had with Serbia, and permitted the Serbians 
 to be attacked and nearly destroyed without assisting them 
 in any way; and he condoned the surrounding of a detach- 
 ment of French marines in the heart of Athens by a much 
 larger detachment of Greek soldiers and the shooting down 
 of nearly one hundred of them in cold blood. He is a trick- 
 ster, a traitor and a liar ; and these words, strong as they are, 
 are far milder than they ought to be. Constantine's prime 
 minister was Venizelos, who had repeatedly proved himself 
 a great statesman. When Constantine, with his Hohen- 
 zollern wife and his German advisers, showed clearly that he 
 would oppose the Allies to the end, Venizelos went to the 
 Island of Crete and declared a revolution. He was joined 
 by the inhabitants of the Greek islands and of the south of 
 Greece. He raised an army of two hundred thousand men 
 and joined the Allies with them. The Allies then 
 demanded that Constantine abdicate in favor of his son 
 Alexander a charming young man whose chief idea of 
 the kinging business consisted of saying "Where do I sign ?" 
 and then rushing off for a motor-ride with a pretty friend. 
 Constantine finally did this though after his return he 
 declared proudly that he didn't and hastened away to 
 Switzerland with a large bevy of royal princes and 
 princesses. Venizelos then came back under King Alex- 
 ander, reorganized the government, threw out the most 
 rabid pro-Germans, and proceeded to lay out plans to make 
 Greece into a bigger, better and busier place. When the
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 235 
 
 war was over, he hastened to the Peace Conference and pre- 
 sented his claims to that august body. He is a great states- 
 man, and he had the confidence of the representatives of the 
 Great Powers. As a result, Greece got more out of the war 
 in proportion to work done than any other nation in it. 
 After an absence of nearly two years, Venizelos returned to 
 Greece and was welcomed with wild enthusiasm. In the 
 hearty Greek way there was wassail in Athens, to say noth- 
 ing of rioting, knifing and gunplay. The houses of Royal- 
 ists were smashed up. Then the Venizelists killed a very 
 popular Royalist deputy, and this started a revulsion of feel- 
 ing against Venizelos. This feeling was accentuated when 
 the Greeks learned the terms of the Treaty of Sevres and of 
 the hard bargains which the French, Italians and British had 
 driven in return for the concessions which they made to 
 Greece. The treaty, for example, provides that Greece shall 
 grant all commercial privileges in certain Asia Minor zones 
 to those three governments: everybody else is shut out. It 
 provides that Italy shall have a monopoly of the exploitation 
 of antiquities in the Dodeccanese islands which were the 
 seats of ancient Greek culture. Nobody but Italians can 
 excavate there and Italy can't even afford to excavate her 
 own antiquities properly just now. Such deals are nothing 
 more nor less than what the purists like to call dirty tricks. 
 The blame for such contemptible arrangements falls rather 
 on the statesmen who demanded them than on Venizelos. 
 Greece lost nothing by the arrangement; but when the 
 Royalists learned of them, they emitted poignant shrieks of 
 agony and cursed Venizelos loudly and ferociously. It made 
 good campaign material and helped to undermine Venizelos. 
 General elections were set for mid-October. 
 
 But about that time King Alexander died of a monkey-
 
 236 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 bite and left no heir. The elections were postponed for a 
 week, and the politicians began to boil and seethe and explode 
 on every side. Venizelos said that under no conditions 
 would he countenance Constantine's return; young Prince 
 Paul, youngest of Constantine's sons, he said, could have 
 the throne, but not Constantine or any of his nit-wit broth- 
 ers. But Paul, from the rocky fastnesses of a Swiss grill- 
 room, where he was surrounded by his traitor father and 
 his Hohenzollern mother and all his egg-headed pro-German 
 uncles and other kin-folk, refused Venizelos' offer with 
 thanks. Thus Venizelos was left looking helplessly around 
 the horizon for a king. 
 
 The Italians, who have always been pro-Constantine for 
 political reasons, though officially against him, shipped sev- 
 eral million lire into Greece to be used for electioneering. 
 Some of Constantine's pro-German cabinet ministers, ban- 
 ished by the Allies, filtered back into the country and went 
 to work for Constantine. Constantine has always been per- 
 sonally popular in Greece because of his habit of mingling 
 fraternally with the soldiers and because of a few minor 
 successes in the Balkan Wars, which were magnified into 
 great victories by the clever press-agent work of Venizelos. 
 
 As a result of these things, Venizelos was defeated in 
 the general elections by a small majority. That is to say, 
 more Royalist deputies than Venizelist deputies were 
 elected. Venizelos, declaring that it amounted to a personal 
 defeat, left the country. The Royalists, by trick work that 
 amounted to a revolution, got control of the government 
 and sent hurry-up messages to Constantine to return and 
 start wearing out the throne once more. Constantine 
 proudly and prudently replied that he couldn't unless he 
 were specifically demanded by the people.
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 237 
 
 So another election was held. The ballots contained two 
 voting-spaces: one read "Constantine" and one read "No." 
 Nearly half of the Venizelists throughout Greece refused to 
 vote at this election ; yet in many voting districts containing 
 large percentages of Venizelists, the number of votes cast 
 ranged from one hundred and ten per cent, to one hundred 
 and thirty per cent, of the registered voters. In other words, 
 every Royalist voted as often as he pleased, and he pleased 
 quite frequently. Consequently the demand for Constan- 
 tine's return appeared to be overwhelming'. In reality it was 
 nothing of the sort. Such is or are politics in Greece. 
 
 So Constantine came back with his Hohenzollern queen 
 and his attendant princes and princesses and pro-German 
 advisers. And Greece, who can't afford to give enough 
 food or medical assistance to the Salonika colonists to keep 
 them from dying like fish washed up on a hot beach, is 
 proudly throwing away the millions required to keep one 
 king, two queens, seven princes, and twenty princesses com- 
 fortably installed in their royal apartments. He came back, 
 this traitor to the Allies, to enjoy the colossal gains which 
 accrued to Greece from the victory which he did everything 
 in his power to avert. And he is enjoying them with right 
 good will. To allow Constantine to rule to-day in Greece 
 is almost as bad as to allow William Hohenzollern to occupy 
 the position of king of France. 
 
 Constantine not only doesn't deserve the recognition of 
 any decent government, but he doesn't get it or he hadn't 
 got it in the spring of 1921. Officially, Constantine doesn't 
 exist for England or France or America or Italy or any other 
 Allied government; and in that fact there lies some rich 
 and juicy musical-comedy material. Representatives of the 
 Allies aren't permitted to admit that Constantine exists. If 
 they meet him on the street, in the midst of cheering crowds,
 
 238 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 they must gaze abstractedly at the sky or look pensively at 
 their feet, or pretend to be deep in contemplation of their 
 watches; and under no conditions must they permit them- 
 selves to admit his existence by lifting their hats, waving 
 or twiddling their fingers, or emitting even the mildest of 
 diplomatic razzes, as one might say. Athens is full of 
 Allied diplomats who spend most of their time while out-of- 
 doors in running up alley-ways and hiding behind the cor- 
 ners of buildings and jumping over fences in order to escape 
 meeting the king face to face and creating an embarrassing 
 situation by refusing to see him. Constantine, on the other 
 hand, is constantly resorting to petty tricks which will 
 enable him to say that he has been recognized by the Allied 
 representatives. American destroyers, for example, have 
 been ordered to stay away from Piraeus for fear that some 
 of the officers might wander up to Athens and come face 
 to face with the king and be invited to come around to the 
 palace to dinner before they knew what was happening 
 to them. Constantine would be quite capable of it. 
 
 There's the case of Admiral O'Kelly. O'Kelly, a Brit- 
 ish naval officer, is at the head of the naval mission that's 
 running the Greek navy. He is also an officer in the Greek 
 navy, wears the Greek uniform, and receives a generous 
 salary from the Greek government. Soon after Constan- 
 tine's return, he sent out word that he wished to see O'Kelly, 
 so O'Kelly, not wishing to lose his monthly pay-check, went 
 up to the Palace and called on him. At the end of the inter- 
 view, Constantine walked to the door with him; and as he 
 shook hands with him he pressed something into the ad- 
 miral's hand. "Here's something I want you to have," said 
 the king. When O'Kelly got outside, he looked at it. It was 
 the Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer, which is
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 239 
 
 Constantine's private and pet order. But if O'Kelly had been 
 permitted to accept it by the British, it would have been an 
 admission that Constantine existed. So O'Kelly had to go 
 back next day, hand back the Grand Cross, and eat, as the 
 saying goes, crow. 
 
 One of the few social centers in Athens is the Tennis 
 Club. A short time ago a number of improvements were 
 made on the grounds; and when they were completed, the 
 club announced that it was holding open house. The 
 foreign colonies of the city turned out in force, and the entire 
 diplomatic set was posing gracefully on the front lawn with 
 its white spats, its refined accents, its low musical laughter 
 and everything, when suddenly the royal family appeared 
 unannounced on the scene. For a moment the assemblage, 
 as the early literary realists used to remark, was rooted to 
 the ground with horror. Then they pulled themselves up 
 by the roots, so to speak, and there was a general flight of 
 the different diplomatic corps over fences, around corners 
 and behind bushes. 
 
 The only governments that recognize Constantine are 
 Spain, Holland, and Rumania. Even Rumania held off as 
 long as possible, and only weakened when Constantine's 
 oldest son married Elizabeth of Rumania, at the same time 
 the Prince Carol of Rumania married Princess Helene of 
 Greece. Consequently at all functions where the diplomatic 
 corps is announced, the waiting courtiers see only three 
 ancient and pitiful specimens staggering into sight. 
 
 A few weeks after Constantine's return, the Dutch min- 
 ister died. He was the dean of the diplomatic corps. On 
 the day before the funeral the marshal of the court visited 
 his successor and stated that the king would attend it. His 
 successor begged the marshal not to permit such a thing,
 
 240 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 since it was sure to create a scene. "The king," replied the 
 marshal imperturbably, "is in his own country. He will 
 abstain only at the request of the ministers." But since 
 that would have been a form of recognition, the ministers 
 refused to make such a request. The funeral took place: 
 the diplomatic representatives of the Allied powers took 
 their seats in a body at the front of the church. Then 
 there was a blare of trumpets and the king entered, bowing 
 graciously to left and right. Not an Allied diplomat moved 
 a muscle as he passed. He was led to a seat directly in 
 front of the diplomats and facing them. Throughout the 
 service Constantine glared balefully at the ministers; and 
 the ministers stared over his head or past him or through 
 him without a trace of recognition. 
 
 This situation was not brought about solely because 
 Constantine was a pro-German during the war and did 
 everything in his power to further the German cause. 
 Some of it was due to the pride, pig-headedness and 
 avarice which prevented Constantine from admitting to the 
 Allies that he ever abdicated or that his son Alexander ever 
 actually ruled in Greece. Constantine and the Royalist 
 politicians were even anxious to declare illegitimate the 
 Venizelist government of young King Alexander, and to 
 disavow all contracts made by that government; but they 
 didn't quite dare to go through with it. Constantine claimed 
 flatly that he didn't abdicate at all, and maintained passion- 
 ately that his son Alexander was merely pinch-hitting for 
 him while he was on a pleasure trip to Switzerland. This 
 claim, if admitted by the Greeks, entitled him to collect back 
 pay for the years that he spent in Lucerne ; and he so col- 
 lected. Constantine's pride is tremendous, and he hated 
 to admit that the Allies had any cause to force him out, or
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 241 
 
 had the power to do so. Therefore he failed to announce 
 formally to the Allies that he had come back as successor to 
 his son, King Alexander; and the Allies, knowing that their 
 contracts and agreements with Alexander's government 
 were worthless until he did so, regarded him with the same 
 confidence and esteem that they might have had for a case 
 of bubonic plague. 
 
 During the first few months of the king's return, his 
 reluctance to admit that he had ever abdicated was accen- 
 tuated by the fact that Madame Manou, the morganatic 
 wife of young King Alexander, was about to have a baby. 
 If Constantine admitted that Alexander had actually been 
 king, and the baby turned out to be a boy, then life auto- 
 matically became more complex for Constantine. Such an 
 occurrence might easily start a new succession to the Greek 
 throne an eventuality which held no charm for Constan- 
 tine. The baby, born early in 1921, proved to be a girl. 
 The Venizelists, of course, claimed that a boy had actually 
 been born and a girl substituted for it. It is a point around 
 which many legends will inevitably spring up in the future ; 
 and it provides a magnificent jumping-off-place for future 
 intriguers. 
 
 The Greeks take a rather peculiar attitude on the question 
 of the non-recognition of Constantine by the other nations. 
 Some of them even men like cabinet ministers and high 
 officials say: "It is an outrage that Constantine is not 
 recognized ; and so long as diplomats refuse to recognize and 
 honor Constantine, we shall refuse to recognize or to honor 
 them." They take it as a personal affront. Others, among 
 whom is a former prime minister of Greece, adopt a defiant 
 tone. "What do we care whether the Allies do or do not 
 recognize the present government of Greece," he exclaimed.
 
 242 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 "Greece can take care of herself! She needs neither the 
 recognition nor the help of any one!" Here again stands 
 revealed the masterful and overwhelming boobishness of the 
 Greek statesman, so called. Still others are anxious that 
 the king take steps to be recognized so that Greece can get 
 from America the balance of the thirty-three million dollar 
 loan which Greece negotiated for the prosecution of the war. 
 Since the war for which it was intended was the Great War, 
 and not the paralytic, knock-kneed, ill-begotten war in Asia 
 Minor, it is to be hoped that they never get it. Almost all 
 of the Royalists talk loudly and continuously about the loan, 
 and whether Greece will get it, and how she can improve 
 her chances of getting it; but not one of them ever thinks 
 of discussing Constantine's treachery to the Allies and the 
 evil days that he has brought and is bringing on his own 
 nation. 
 
 The moves for which the king and his government were 
 responsible during the first half year of his return were not 
 such as to breed an over-supply of confidence in anybody 
 who had dealings with King Alexander's Venizelist gov- 
 ernment; for a majority of them were moves to destroy 
 everything for which Venizelos was responsible. As a 
 prime minister, the king took a foxy, narrow-minded and 
 unscrupulous gentleman named Gounaris, who was prime 
 minister before the king was forced out, and was even 
 imprisoned on the Island of Corsica by the French for his 
 dangerous and excessive pro-Germanism. He gave his word 
 of honor not to try to escape, and was consequently allowed 
 a certain amount of freedom. He thereupon broke his parole 
 immediately and escaped a fact which faintly serves to 
 reveal his delightful character. As a silent adviser, the king 
 had a German named Doctor Streit, who ran in and out of
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 243 
 
 the palace by the back door, and advised the king on matters 
 of moment. Streit went into exile with the king, and 
 returned with him. As chief of staff of the army the king 
 reinstated a General Dousmanis, who used every unscrupu- 
 lous and underhanded means in his power to smash Veni- 
 zelos and prevent him from taking any part of Greece into 
 the war on the side of the Allies. It was he who was 
 responsible for the killing of the French troops in Athens 
 and for much of the sentiment against the Allies which 
 existed in Greece. All of them together comprise the 
 gang that sold Greece out to Germany. 
 
 During the first quarter of 1921 the Greeks started a 
 flourishing war in Asia Minor against the so-called Turkish 
 Nationalist forces, which were commanded by a first-class 
 soldier named Mustapha Kemal Pasha. The exact causes 
 of this war are shrouded in mystery. Some Greeks claimed 
 that they were fighting the battles of England and France : 
 but England and France did not always agree with the 
 Greeks on this statement. Other Greeks stated that they 
 wished to crush all future organized resistance to the Greek 
 occupation of Asia Minor by Kemalist troops. Their 
 chances of doing this were and, from the nature of the 
 country, always must be about as good as would be the 
 chances of one division of badly equipped American troops 
 to crush effectively and finally all armed resistance in 
 Mexico. Several other claims were equally thin. The 
 Greek soldiers who went to Asia Minor and most of them 
 went with reluctant feet were told by their officers, and 
 believed implicitly, that they were going for the purpose of 
 capturing Constantinople and making it into a Greek city. 
 Such an eventuality would be a very distressing thing for 
 the future of Constantinople and the Near East; for the
 
 244 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Greeks will never win any high awards or any shiny gold 
 medals for their ability to control, govern or rule any dis- 
 trict or territory in which there are any subject races. 
 
 Like ninety-nine per cent, of the wars which are con- 
 stantly erupting in the new Europe, this war was nothing 
 but a land-grabbing expedition. It was unnecessary ; it was 
 wholly useless; and because of the manner in which the 
 Greeks conducted it, it was a criminal operation strikingly 
 similar to murder in the first degree. 
 
 I have no particular love for the Turk, though he has a 
 great many likable qualities that some of his neighbors lack. 
 The government of Mustapha Kemal Pasha is unquestion- 
 ably regarded by all Turks as the real Turkish government ; 
 yet the Kemalist government repudiated the obligations 
 which Turkey assumed at the time of the armistice. It 
 tied up with the Bolsheviks; it generally misbehaved itself; 
 and it deserved no sympathy in its fight against the Greeks. 
 Neither, however, did the Greek government deserve any 
 sympathy in its fight against the Turks. The Greek gov- 
 ernment brought Constantine back to Greece ; and by bring- 
 ing him back, it flouted the Allies and forced Greece to fight 
 for what she might otherwise have had without fighting. 
 In Asia Minor the Turks can keep up a guerrilla warfare 
 against invading Greeks for years on end, hiding behind 
 rocks on the hill-slopes and picking away at the Greek lines 
 in the Mexican fashion. The Anatolian mountains are rough 
 and barren; and to maintain an effective force in this 
 unpromising region, the Greeks must operate long lines of 
 communication a feat which their lack of organizing ability 
 will always make extremely difficult under the best of con- 
 ditions. No matter what successes the Greeks may have 
 against the Turks in Asia Minor, the mere task of garrison-
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 245 
 
 ing the area behind their lines and keeping a large army 
 constantly in shape to repel the attacks of Turkish regulars 
 and guerrillas must of necessity be a burden which will come 
 close to driving Greece into bankruptcy. If it does so, the 
 blame will rest entirely on the stupendous selfishness, vanity 
 and short-sightedness of Constantine and the politicians who 
 support him. If the Greeks were to be defeated in Asia 
 Minor, the Greeks would unquestionably turn against Con- 
 stantine, eject him once more from the country, and set up 
 a new dynasty to carry on the work of wasting the resources 
 of the land which brought forth the Greek Republic twen- 
 ty-five hundred years ago. 
 
 At any rate, the Greek army that went to Asia Minor 
 was commanded by Venizelist officers, since the army raised 
 by Venizelos to enter the war on the side of the Allies was 
 the only Greek army that had had any experience in modern 
 warfare. At the end of March, 1921, the Greeks started 
 an offensive against the Turks. Twenty-four hours before 
 the offensive took place, all high Venizelist officers were 
 removed from their positions and replaced by Royalist offi- 
 cers who had no experience in modern warfare aside from 
 that which they had gained by sitting heavily in armchairs 
 and talking politics. As a result, the Turks administered a 
 terrible trouncing to the Greeks and the wounded began to 
 pour back to Athens. The Greek transport system at the 
 front broke down; and the ignorance of the officers in the 
 field was so great that they were unable to use much of their 
 equipment. Their field radio, for example, they were inca- 
 pable of setting up. 
 
 The Royalists did their utmost to prevent any news of 
 the defeat and of the change in officers from reaching the 
 people. The newspaper Patris t edited by a young man
 
 246 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 named Lambrachis, was the only one that told the story. 
 Lambrachis was immediately arrested and thrown into jail. 
 The incentive to truth-telling is not high in Greece. 
 
 News of the Asia Minor shambles got abroad in the land 
 in spite of the efforts of the government to prevent it. A 
 regiment of new troops marched past the hotel in which I 
 was staying on its way to Piraeus to embark for Asia Minor. 
 Some one on the hotel porch shouted down to them "Where 
 are you going?" and several voices from the ranks replied 
 "To the abattoir!" The popularity of Constantine, too, 
 began to be somewhat dented and shopworn with the 
 soldiers. The war was a very unpopular war anyway: the 
 draft, in spite of enthusiastic reports of its success sent out 
 by the government press agency, was evaded on every side; 
 Constantine, instead of disbanding the army and sending it 
 back to its homes, as those who campaigned for him had 
 promised he would do on his return, had started a new war 
 to round out the eight years of war which Greece had already 
 enjoyed in the First, Second and Third Balkan Wars and 
 the Great War a new war which the diplomacy and states- 
 manship of Venizelos would unquestionably never have per- 
 mitted. Troops sailing from the south of Greece to Asia 
 Minor shouted to bystanders referring to Constantine: 
 "We wanted him, and we got him!" Then they would 
 smack their faces with their open hands, which is a Grecian 
 gesture meaning that they had got him in the neck, as the 
 saying goes. 
 
 Nothing in Greece was free from the rotten politics of 
 Constantine and his gang. The American Red Cross, for 
 example, established an extensive baby-welfare organization 
 in Greece. The Greek Patriotic League assumed the 
 responsibility for it, and the Red Cross appointed the women
 
 247 
 
 who should be in charge. Some of these women were 
 Royalists and some were Venizelists; and the Red Cross 
 told the Greek government plainly and bluntly that politics 
 were to be kept out of it. When Constantine came back, 
 Queen Sophie immediately began to mix in the affairs of 
 the Patriotic League. She demanded the resignation of all 
 Venizelists. The Red Cross served notice on the Greek 
 government that if there were further changes or forced 
 resignation in welfare organizations, the Red Cross would 
 withdraw from Greece. Sophie will find a way to beat the 
 Red Cross; because Sophie is a Hohenzollern and a poli- 
 tician ; while the Red Cross, thank God, is neither. 
 
 This same political acrimony, coupled with the lack of 
 organizing ability for which the Greeks are noted, had pre- 
 vented the formation of nursing or welfare organizations to 
 look after the wounded who were pouring in daily from the 
 Asia Minor front. Athens is the best equipped city in all 
 Greece ; but in the best and biggest hospital in Athens, while 
 I was there, four hundred and thirty wounded soldiers were 
 being attended and wretchedly attended by four nurses 
 and eight doctors. All of the cabarets and the danscmts 
 were packed to the doors every afternoon and evening. 
 
 Every school-teacher in Greece who was known to be a 
 Venizelos sympathizer was removed from her job and 
 shifted to a distant section of the country. Many of the 
 teachers suffered a series of shifts, so that to all extents and 
 purposes they were entirely thrown out of employment The 
 number of teachers that were thus shifted ran into the thou- 
 sands; and as a result of this charming manifestation of 
 patriotism and political probity, the entire school system of 
 the nation was thrown into disorganization for at least one 
 year, while more than half of the schools had to be closed.
 
 248 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 As soon as Constantine came back, his gang effected 
 the dismissal of fifty-two professors from the University of 
 Athens on the ground that they were Venizelists which 
 they unquestionably were. Among these fifty-two were 
 many of the most distinguished teachers in the university 
 one, for example, being Coryllos, a professor of surgery and 
 a cancer specialist who is a friend of such men as the Mayos 
 and Alexis Carrel. Nobody was too high and nobody was 
 too low for the Royalists to wreck their political hatred on. 
 One of the cases that came to my attention was that of a 
 widow with four children who held a position as door-tender 
 in a public school. Her husband had been killed in action in 
 the Balkan Wars. She was fired from her job after Con- 
 stantine's return, because her sympathies were known to be 
 with Venizelos. 
 
 The Venizelist politicians were pretty bad, but they 
 were angels compared with the Royalist politicians, who 
 without exception were either incompetent, dishonest, or 
 worthless. Venizelos himself is a man with ideals, with 
 patriotism, and with that very rare virtue, common sense. 
 In many of his leaders he inspired the same sentiments that 
 he himself possessed. The Venizelist party was largely 
 composed of people who believed in siding with the Allies 
 because that was the side of decency, justice and honor; 
 whereas the Royalists believed in sticking with Germany 
 because they thought Germany had the biggest guns and 
 the largest money-chest. The Venizelists were not only in 
 the position of revolutionists against their ruler's policies, 
 but they were also fighting the greatest war in history 
 against the most terrible foe in history. The Royalists were 
 mostly pro-Germans; and the Venizelists were fighting 
 Germany with the Allies. Consequently the Venizelists took
 
 
 Copyright rndtrtcood if Tndtnrood 
 Venizelos, former premier and virtual dictator of Greece.
 
 Copyright Underwood & Underwood 
 King Constantine of Greece before he left Lucerne for Athens.
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 249 
 
 steps to silence the worst and the loudest pro-Germans, just 
 as we did in America. They fired five professors from the 
 university for being dangerous pro-Germans, and for giving 
 aid and comfort to the enemy. The Royalists, on their 
 return to power, retaliated by firing fifty-two professors 
 for being Venizelists. So works the Greek mind. 
 
 During the days when Venizelos was in power as prime 
 minister to young King Alexander, pictures of King Con- 
 stantine could be found nowhere in the country, while 
 pictures of Venizelos were displayed everywhere. After 
 Constantine's return, almost every window held a gaudily- 
 colored picture of Constantine in a plumed helmet and a very 
 Kaiserish mustache. Shops which neglected to display pic- 
 tures of him were usually peremptorily ordered to do so by 
 the police. Anybody who had displayed a picture of Veni- 
 zelos would have been arrested. I had to go to more 
 trouble to get a photograph of Venizelos than I would 
 have to undergo in buying a drink of Scotch whisky in 
 Kansas. 
 
 And speaking of pictures, the walls of buildings and bill- 
 boards in Athens, while I was there, were covered with 
 colored reproductions of the American flag about two feet 
 long and a foot wide, with the words BON-AMI splashed 
 across them in clear black letters. The American flag is put 
 to many strange uses in foreign lands. 
 
 No mention of Constantine's return would be complete 
 without some mention of the Princess Anastasia, who used 
 to be Mrs. Leeds before she married Constantine's brother, 
 Prince Christopher, and of Princess Anastasia's eighteen- 
 year-old son, William Leeds, who is somewhat jestingly 
 spoken of in Athens as the Duke of Piraeus or Lord Leeds. 
 Young Mr. Leeds arrived in Athens by airplane with his
 
 250 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Chinese valet, and promptly became engaged to the Grand 
 Duchess Xenia. The Leeds millions, made in America, are 
 so tied up by the will of the late tin-plate king that Princess 
 Anastasia and young Mr. Leeds can touch only the interest 
 on them. The Leeds jewels, however, are not tied up by 
 the will ; and since their value is in excess of ten million dol- 
 lars, the hard-up Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucks- 
 burg family of Denmark, Switzerland and Greece will prob- 
 ably never starve to death as long as there is a ready market 
 for diamond stomach chevrons and other service-decorations 
 for successful profiteers. The Greek royal family denied 
 indignantly that Princess Anastasia provided the slush fund 
 which financed Constantine's return; but it is an estab- 
 lished fact that two hundred thousand dollars of Leeds 
 money oiled the route along which the return was made. 
 The extreme reluctance of Constantine's family to allow 
 young Mr. Leeds out of their sight until his marriage was 
 safely consummated and the Leeds money was securely 
 attached to needy royalty was, to put it conservatively, very 
 repugnant to all Americans in Athens. The work of royalty 
 can be very coarse ; and in this particular case' it was coarse 
 enough to make a Chicago safe-blower blush for his pro- 
 fession and think seriously of taking up a more refined pur- 
 suit, like murder. The Leeds money is going to be badly 
 needed by Constantine's family if it continues to permit the 
 bone-headed political atrocities that have marked its every 
 move since its return; and what the family needs, it will 
 work hard to get. There is a certain amount of poetic jus- 
 tice in the thought of a fortune being made by an American 
 tin-plate king and being wrecked by a Greek tin-horn king 
 
 if you know what I mean. 
 
 The Greek royal family, as far as looks go, fulfils all the
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 251 
 
 requirements of people who like to look at kings and their 
 pomps. Constantine is tall and magnificent-looking. His 
 pants buckle under his boots, and on his broad chest he 
 wears seventeen pounds of jeweled decorations, gold braid 
 and miscellaneous hardware. Queen Sophie has a haughty 
 and regal air, as though her nostrils were constantly assailed 
 by an offensive odor. The princesses are pretty and stylish : 
 especially when they pass the observer at the rate of 
 thirty-five miles an hour in one of the royal automobiles. 
 The Greeks love to hang around on street-corners and wait 
 for His Majesty to pass. Crowds of them wait two and 
 three hours to see him go by; and as he passes, saluting 
 sloppily and condescendingly, a feeble cheer goes up from 
 the crowd. It must be a great comfort to have a king who 
 throws away the taxpayers' money and brings his country 
 into disrepute before the eyes of the world. The Greeks 
 take comfort in strange things, anyway. Full-grown he- 
 men walk briskly around Athens dangling short strings of 
 amber or bone or wooden beads in their hands. These are 
 known as conversation beads. Silk-hatted and frock-coated 
 politicians, deep in conversation on a street corner, fiddle 
 nervously with strings of beads as they talk. Taxi-drivers, 
 when not engaged in running their machines, sprawl in 
 their seats and finger strings of beads. I attended a session 
 of the Greek Chamber of Deputies one afternoon. In the 
 front row sat the distinguished, so to speak, members of the 
 Cabinet. Most of them were running strings of beads 
 through their fingers, while those who had left their beads 
 in their other clothes were scooping sunflower seeds out of 
 paper bags, cracking them and throwing the shells on the 
 floor. One Greek told me that strings of beads, in Greece, 
 took the place of walking-sticks in America. It may be so ;
 
 252 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 but I'd hate to try to hold off a pickpocket by swinging a 
 string of beads on him. 
 
 After I had been in Greece for a short time, I had 
 accumulated a number of questions that simply had to be 
 put up to the king. Kings have odd ideas about being 
 approached nowadays, and one gains nothing by running up 
 to the front door of the palace and asking for the king 
 nothing, that is, except causing a royal retainer to drop dead 
 with horror. So I asked some Greeks what to do, and they 
 replied that I should get the American minister to take me 
 over to the palace and sign the king's visitors' book for me, 
 and tell the court chamberlain that I had never been caught 
 stealing spoons from any royal palace to the best of his 
 knowledge and belief, and ask the court chamberlain to ask 
 the king whether he would deign to receive me in audience 
 two weeks from next Friday. This advice was worthless, 
 however, for in the first place the American minister had 
 resigned, and in the second place the officials of the Ameri- 
 can Legation were not permitted to know that such a person 
 as King Constantine existed, and in the third place I was in 
 a hurry to get out of town. So I wrote a brief, chatty, 
 modest letter to the court chamberlain and asked him to date 
 me up with the king. Two days elapsed, during which no 
 reply came from the chamberlain probably because of the 
 press of chamberlaining duties. So I wrote another letter, 
 more brief, less chatty and much less modest; and this 
 time the court chamberlain dropped his chamberlaining 
 long enough to attend to my case. 
 
 "Royal Palace, 27 March /g April, 1921," ran the reply 
 to my note the Greeks use two dates, instead of daylight 
 saving and standard time as we do "Dear Sir: In reply 
 to your demand, I hasten to inform you that His Majesty
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 253 
 
 will receive you in audience to-morrow morning, Sunday the 
 28 March /io April at 12 o'clock. I feel obliged to inform 
 you beforehand that His Majesty, in granting this audience, 
 to not intend to give an interview on the present political 
 situation. MERCATI, MARSHAL OF THE ROYAL COURT." 
 
 This had a poor sound ; for if the king didn't intend to 
 talk any politics, he would be forced to confine his conversa- 
 tion to such subjects as "Why Excavated Statues Have No 
 Arms" or "Why I Prefer the Hop to the Poppy." 
 
 At noon on the day of my appointment a large blue- 
 plush footman, who spoke German as though he had never 
 been in Greece, admitted me and ushered me into an 
 antechamber where a startled young woman was standing 
 with a lighted cigarette behind her back and smoke clouds 
 oozing out on every side of her. She evidently didn't want 
 me to know that she smoked. We eyed each other warily 
 while the smoke clouds grew thicker. Count Mercati for- 
 tunately appeared before the cigarette burned down to the 
 young woman's fingers and ushered me into an inner ante- 
 chamber. Then he left me, returned, and led me into an 
 even innerer antechamber which had a large oil painting of 
 the king on the wall. Then he went out again and stayed 
 some little time; and when he returned he whispered sadly 
 in my ear: "The king is waiting to receive you." He 
 couldn't have had a more melancholy air if he had been 
 announcing that my entire family had been destroyed or that 
 my two dogs had run away and couldn't be found. He led 
 me down a long corridor and up to a mahogany door in 
 front of which stood a man in an olive-colored uniform, 
 bushy blue-black whiskers and a malevolent frown. 
 
 "You must not speak to the king on political matters," 
 said Count Mercati; and he looked at me with unutterable
 
 254 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 melancholy, while the bush-bearded door-guard stared at 
 me venomously, as though he had selected the spot where 
 he was going to ventilate me with the dagger which he 
 unquestionably carried under his armpit or down the back 
 of his neck or in his whiskers. 
 
 "There's nothing to talk to him about if I can't talk on 
 political matters," I protested. "There's nothing in Greece 
 but politics. What do you expect me to do in there, any- 
 way?" 
 
 "Personal impressions only," whispered the count sadly, 
 "personal impressions only." 
 
 He dragged me along toward the door, and the man with 
 the bushy beard showed his teeth at me viciously. "I don't 
 want any personal impressions," I protested. "What's the 
 use...." Just then the door opened, and the king was 
 standing just inside it. Our argument came to an end and 
 I tried to twist my face into a polite smirk. The count 
 mumbled a few sad words and faded from sight. The king 
 shook hands briskly, looked pleasant, urged me to sit down, 
 and took a seat behind his desk. 
 
 Constantine, as I have said before, is a highly impressive 
 person. He is six feet three inches tall and correspondingly 
 broad. His eyes are blue and his smile is attractive and the 
 glitter of the medals on his chest is soothing to the eye. He 
 is fifty-three years old, but looks about forty and he talks, 
 I might add, with as little regard for accuracy, truth and 
 judgment as though he were fifteen.* But he certainly makes 
 
 *Over a month after the original publication of this interview, the 
 following despatch appeared in the New York Times: 
 
 "WASHINGTON, Oct. 14. The Greek Legation to-day is- 
 sued an official statement, on instructions from its government, 
 denying certain statements alleged to have been made by King 
 Constantine of Greece to an American magazine writer, in which, 
 the Legation declares, Constantine was made to appear to have
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 255 
 
 a natty-looking king. When he appears in public, he usually 
 tops himself off with a plumed hat of about three quarts 
 capacity. When he removes his headgear, his strangely 
 knobby, elongated and naked head fascinates the beholder. 
 It is a true dome of thought, large enough to hold the brains 
 of three or four fairly brainy people though there is no 
 evidence to show that it holds more than enough for the king. 
 
 made 'highly discourteous remarks about the American political 
 regime.' 
 
 " The Greek Legation.' the statement read, 'is in receipt of 
 instructions from the Hellenic Government to deny outright cer- 
 tain statements alleged to have been made by the King of the 
 Hellenes to an American journalist, Mr. Kenneth Roberts, who, 
 in the Saturday Evening Post of September 10, published an ar- 
 ticle mentioning an interview with King Constantine, in which the 
 King of the Hellenes is made to appear as having uttered certain 
 highly discourteous remarks about the American political regime. 
 
 " 'By the expressed desire of His Majesty, the Hellenic Gov- 
 ernment denies in a most categorical way that King Constantine 
 ever made, either to Mr. Roberts or to any one else, any remarks 
 about the American form of government, or about the former 
 Premier, Mr. Venizelos. 
 
 " The words attributed to His Majesty have never been 
 uttered.' " 
 
 In the denial, to put it bluntly but accurately, His Majesty appears 
 in his characteristic role. 
 
 The interview as here printed is exactly as it was originally writ- 
 ten. It is an accurate transcription of the conversation between Con- 
 stantine and myself. Nothing that Constantine said to me was said in 
 confidence ; and he was fully aware at the time that he was talking 
 for publication. On the day of the interview and en the following day. 
 for the purpose of checking up the statements which Constantine made 
 to me, I went over the more important portions of the interview with 
 several prominent Greeks, and also with Mr. W. L. Lowrie. American 
 Consul General in Athens. Mr. James Mills, the Associated Press 
 correspondent in Athens, Director Hill of the American Archaeological 
 School in Athens, Ex-Mayor McClellan, of New York, and Prince 
 Demidoff, Russian Ambassador in Athens. It was generally known 
 in Athens that the king had talked freely and unwisely; and nobody 
 was surprised; for his tongue is hung in the middle, as was the ex- 
 kaiser's; and even the Greeks who like him have a proverb to the ef- 
 fect ^ that he opens his mouth too wide and keeps it open too long. 
 He is a thoroughly bad king, as the Allies have already discovered to 
 their great cost in men and treasure, and as Greece herself will dis- 
 cover to her greater and greater cost as time goes on. 
 
 K. L. R.
 
 256 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 It is the shiniest head that I ever saw, and it wouldn't have 
 surprised me at all to learn that his valet goes over it every 
 morning with an oily rag. 
 
 On the wall behind the king's desk hang two small 
 autographed photographs one of the czar, who was over- 
 thrown and killed, and one of the kaiser, who is an exile and 
 a greatly despised man 
 
 One observes certain etiquette with a king, or runs the 
 risk of having His Majesty summon a royal retainer to give 
 one a royal boot out into the royal sidewalk. When address- 
 ing him, one says "Your Majesty" unless one forgets. One 
 also doesn't burst right out with some conventional remark 
 like "Aren't you putting on weight, King?" but preserves a 
 decorous calm until His Majesty shatters the silence. And 
 when the king rises from his chair, it's a sign that the 
 audience is over, and that one needn't hang around any 
 longer in the hope of getting an invitation to lunch : con- 
 sequently an interviewer has to work fast because of his 
 constant fear that the king will get up before all his ques- 
 tions have been asked. 
 
 After the king had made the usual opening of asking 
 how long I had been in Athens, I told him that I wouldn't 
 have taken up his valuable time if I had known that Count 
 Mercati had requested him not to talk to me on any political 
 matters. That, I told him, left us nothing to talk about but 
 Prohibition. 
 
 "It is not necessary to talk about Prohibition," said Con- 
 stantine, who speaks English perfectly. "What were some 
 of the questions that you wanted to ask me?" 
 
 I told him that I wanted to hear what he had to say 
 about his failure to recognize that his son, Alexander, had 
 actually been king of Greece.
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 257 
 
 "I never gave up the throne," said Constantine. "I do 
 not admit the right of the Powers to come here and tell me 
 \\hat to do, any more than England would recognize my 
 right to throw Lloyd-George out of office if I didn't like his 
 policies. Alexander wasn't king because I never stopped 
 being king. What difference does it make, anyway?" 
 
 "For one thing," I told him, "the Powers are afraid 
 that their agreements with Alexander's government may be 
 repudiated if his government is declared illegal." 
 
 "Ah," said the king, "then it's all a matter of money. 
 Well, under no circumstances would we repudiate any of the 
 agreements made with Alexander's government. The whole 
 business of suspecting me and my government of doing such 
 a thing is a crazy idea that sprang up during the war a 
 crazy idea like the idea of democracy. Take America, for 
 example, and all her talk of democracy: why, there's no 
 more democracy in America than there is in my boot " 
 
 I told him that there was probably more democracy in 
 America than he realized, and that the reason for his lack of 
 realization was possibly due to his lack of familiarity with 
 democracy as practised in America. "Your government has 
 just jailed Lambrachis, the editor of Patris," I told him, 
 "for publishing the reasons for the Greek defeat in Asia 
 Minor a few days ago. That is a thing that couldn't happen 
 in America, and a thing that makes every American warm 
 under the collar." 
 
 "Yes, that is correct," said Constantine. "You see, 
 Lambrachis wrote things that upset the people. All of the 
 things that he wrote were lies. We can not permit the people 
 to be upset." 
 
 I told Constantine that my information on the battle in 
 Asia Minor, drawn from three official and reliable sources,
 
 258 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 confirmed every word that Lambrachis had written; and I 
 reproduce the conversation exactly as it occurred in order to 
 show Constantine's sloppy cerebration. 
 
 "It was not the truth : not at all," said Constantine. 
 "The newspapermen are unreliable for the most part, and 
 they lie to the people in order to stir them up against me." 
 
 "Are they successful?" I asked. 
 
 "No, not at all," said Constantine. 
 
 "Do the people become upset at their attempts?" I asked. 
 
 "No, no, no !" said Constantine emphatically. 
 
 "Then why put them in jail?" I asked, having worked 
 the king around to denying that Lambrachis had done the 
 thing for which he had claimed he was imprisoned. 
 
 Constantine was unaware of having slipped. "We put 
 them in jail to teach them to be reliable," he replied calmly. 
 
 "Why doesn't the Greek government tell the people the 
 truth about the Asia Minor campaign ?" I asked. 
 
 Constantine stared at me with innocent baby-blue eyes. 
 "Why," said he, "we issue official communiques to the 
 people." 
 
 "Yes," said I, "but they're worthless." 
 
 "Oh, no," said Constantine. 
 
 "Oh, yes," said I. "Take the matter of mobilization, 
 for example. Before coming here, I saw a Reuter despatch 
 in a London paper declaring that there was great enthusiasm 
 over the mobilization of troops for the Asia Minor War. 
 On reaching Athens, I learned that there had been no more 
 enthusiasm over it than over a funeral. I went to the Reuter 
 correspondent about it, and learned from him that the lying 
 despatch had been sent by the Greek Press Bureau to the 
 Reuter office in London, and accepted by the London office 
 as a bona fide statement."
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 259 
 
 Constantine shrugged his shoulders. "There was 
 enthusiasm over it," he said. 
 
 "Then Your Majesty is the only one who thinks so," I 
 told him. 
 
 I asked him why he, as a military man, should have per- 
 mitted so many experienced officers to be removed from 
 their commands just before the offensive against the Turks 
 and to be replaced by swivel-chair officers a move that was 
 largely responsible for the crushing Greek defeat. 
 
 "That isn't true," said Constantine. "A few officers 
 have been removed in past months ; but none were removed 
 just before the offensive." 
 
 I told him that this was directly contrary to the knowl- 
 edge possessed by the representatives of the Great Powers 
 in Athens and by foreign correspondents. 
 
 Constantine looked at me reproachfully. "You have 
 been talking to Venizelists," said he. 
 
 "I've been talking to Venizelists, Royalists, Americans 
 and Englishmen," I replied. "I have talked to a great many 
 Greeks of different stations in life and I find it almost 
 impossible to find one who doesn't lie to me." 
 
 "That is true," replied the king, looking at me thought- 
 fully. "They are hard to find." 
 
 "If Diogenes had lived," I hazarded, "he would still be 
 hunting." 
 
 The king looked at me blankly. "The Venizelists espe- 
 cially," he said at length, "are great liars. Venizelos him- 
 self was a terrible liar and deceived every one." He then 
 launched into a vituperative tirade against Venizelos which 
 was only valuable in so far as it showed the pettiness to 
 which t the ruler of a nation could descend. I told the king 
 that the best informed statesmen of Europe and America
 
 260 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 held views exactly opposite to his own, and that Venizelos 
 was considered a patriot, an idealist, an honest man and the 
 only genuine statesman that Greece possessed. 
 
 "If America thinks that," said the king wrathfully, "why 
 in hell doesn't America take him and use him? Maybe 
 you can tell me how Venizelos came to Athens a poor man 
 in 1910, and how he has been able to leave Athens owning 
 two houses, to travel all over the world, to have a villa at 
 Nice and to stay at the best hotels when he travels." 
 
 The facts are these: Venizelos was presented with a 
 house one house in Athens by an ardent admirer and 
 supporter. He owned no other. When he left Athens, he 
 sold the house ; and on the proceeds from the sale he has been 
 living ever since. I was in Nice when Venizelos was there, 
 and he was staying in the villa of a friend. These facts are 
 known to Royalists and Venizelists alike. I said as much 
 to Constantine, and he merely shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "Has Your Majesty heard," I asked, "that Venizelos 
 intends to go to America and Japan ?" 
 
 "Yes," said he, with a sneer, "I hear he's going to fix 
 up the differences between the two countries. When he fin- 
 ishes with that, America'd better send him to Mexico to fix 
 up a few things there, too." 
 
 I asked him what Greece intended to do for the twenty- 
 seven thousand starving and disease-ridden Greek colonists 
 at Salonika. "Oh, yes," said he, "I understand the situation 
 is bad there; but Demidoff has recognized these people as 
 Russian subjects. There is some money left over from the 
 Kolchak government; and since Demidoff has recognized 
 them as Russians, the money will be applied to them. Con- 
 sequently their condition will be greatly improved." 
 
 As I have said, these people are Greeks, though they
 
 THEY SOMETIMES COME BACK 261 
 
 come from the so-called Greek Caucasus, a part of Russia. 
 They were brought by the Greek government which pre- 
 ceded Constantine's. The careless and cynical manner in 
 which Constantino washed his hands of them sounded sus- 
 picious ; so when I left the palace I went straight to Prince 
 Demidoff, who is the Russian ambassador in Athens. I 
 told him what the king said, and he was horrified. 
 
 "Of course," said he, "I was willing to recognize them as 
 Russians for humanitarian reasons. They are Greeks from 
 Old Russia, and the Greeks are letting them die by thou- 
 sands. The money that we can apply to their relief is the 
 merest drop in the bucket, but it's better than no relief at 
 all. It was a Greek scheme, and the burden of it is on the 
 Greeks. Neither the king nor the Greek nation can crawl 
 out of their obligations in any such way. If the king wishes 
 you or the world to believe that there is enough Russian 
 money materially to better the lot of the Salonika colonists, 
 he is doing a very evil thing." And that answers the king's 
 answer to me. 
 
 I asked the king about the public-school situation. 
 "Why," I asked him, "do you permit your minister of edu- 
 cation to wreck the school system of your entire nation?" 
 He replied that the school situation was rather unfortunate 
 and that the minister of education had possibly been a trifle 
 over-zealous toward the Venizelists. "Then why don't you 
 remedy it?" I asked. "You can do it with a word." The 
 king smiled pleasantly and replied that these things would 
 quickly straighten themselves out. Can you beat it! as 
 Henry James used to say. 
 
 We discussed a great many interesting matters, and in 
 practically all of them Constantine revealed an almost bound- 
 less capacity for soaking up misinformation and exuding
 
 262 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 deliberate falsehoods. Never, in a fairly wide experience 
 with persons in high positions in America and Europe, have 
 I met a man who lied and evaded the truth as easily and as 
 consistently as the king- of Greece. 
 
 He laughed heartily at the manner in which the foreign 
 correspondents had gone astray on the November elections. 
 "All of them," he chuckled, "wrote to their papers that it 
 would be a Venizelos victory. You see, these reporters are 
 crooked. All of them were under instructions from their 
 editors as to what to write; so they wrote lies." Wouldn't 
 it, in the words of the English professors, get your goat ? 
 
 I asked him whether he had heard from the kaiser 
 recently. He said that he hadn't. He even said that he 
 hadn't received a copy of the kaiser's defense, worked up by 
 the kaiser in diary form and sent out to his friends to prove 
 that he had no part in starting the war. He had never even 
 heard of this document, he claimed, and if he was telling the 
 truth, it helps to show his failure to keep track of events in 
 the outside world. 
 
 At the end of the notes of my interview with Constan- 
 tine are jotted the rough impressions which his talk made on 
 me : "This short-sighted individual," they read, "has abso- 
 lutely failed to profit by his own past experience and the 
 experiences of his brother monarchs. Instead of getting 
 together the warring factions of his country and stepping on 
 the cheap grafters and crooks, he lets his petty spite and his 
 momentary desires regulate his conduct. The king of 
 Greece is about as big, mentally, as a pint of snow-water 
 half poured out." After plenty of time for contemplation, 
 these impressions still stand unrevised. There are only a 
 few kings left in the world ; but there are still too many of 
 them. Sometimes they come back , but not for long.
 
 The Beer Worshipers 
 
 THE Briton of to-day is the descendant of Saxons and 
 of Northmen who came out of the north with the most 
 highly developed capacity for malt liquors ever seen outside 
 of tank-car circles. The early chronicles of England are all 
 splattered with beer-nights and keg-parties and ale-assem- 
 blies of a most generous and comprehensive nature. The 
 old Saxon fighters looked with contempt and loathing on 
 the mollycoddle whose early training had not fitted him to 
 drain a two-quart flagon of ale without pausing for breath ; 
 and the genuine hearty feeder of ancient England invariably 
 sucked up at least four gallons of home-brew between the 
 bringing in of the roast ox and the final fist-fight between 
 the dinner guests. The enormous amounts absorbed by the 
 members of every class of society in the early days of Eng- 
 land have sometimes caused scientists to venture the opinion 
 that their bodies must have been accordion-pleated. 
 
 This passionate addiction to alcoholic beverages on the 
 part of the Britons did not stop with the earliest representa- 
 tives of the race. The Normans, that unsavory aggregation 
 of thieves, murderers and pirates who have become very 
 popular as ancestors in spite of their offensive personal 
 habits, came over from France and conquered the Saxons. 
 The Saxons absorbed them and taught them how to absorb 
 
 263
 
 264 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 beer, which they did as though to the manner born. The 
 Norman barons, in their baronial halls, drank themselves 
 purple in the face each night, quaffing the nut-brown ale 
 until their quaffers were completely submerged. They 
 couldn't get up in the morning without a stoup of Malmsey, 
 and they shuddered at the thought of riding out for a pleas- 
 ant afternoon of robbery and arson unless they were forti- 
 fied with a two-quart nip or stirrup-cup of spiced wine. 
 Whenever they tarried for a moment to tighten a saddle- 
 girth or to hew off the head of a serf whose looks they 
 didn't like, all of the adjacent residents came running out 
 with buckets of mulled ale for the barons and their gallant 
 retainers. Everybody was ready to drop everything and 
 settle down to several hours of steady drinking at a moment's 
 notice. Kings and clowns, barons and bakers, archbishops 
 and actors and archers, princesses and publicans and prel- 
 ates and pot-boys drank whatever they could get whenever 
 they could get it, so long as it possessed an alcoholic con- 
 tent. Water as a beverage was viewed with marked abhor- 
 rence. The Lord Chief Justice of England in the reign of 
 King Henry VI states that "the inhabitants of England 
 drink no water except at certain times, on a religious score 
 and by way of penance." In other words, one of the most 
 severe punishments which an Englishman could inflict on 
 himself, short of death or mutilation, was water-drinking. 
 
 Down through the centuries, from Hengist and Horsa 
 to Haig and Haig, the Britons and their drink have been as 
 inseparable as Damon and Pythias or Abelard and Heloise. 
 They have believed that strong men need strong fare. They 
 have eaten great masses of heavy, soggy, boiled foods and 
 washed them down with a veritable Johnstown flood of 
 beer and ale and stout and bitter and stronger beverages.
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 265 
 
 History fails to tell us where the Saxon chieftains and the 
 Norman barons obtained the apparently inexhaustible sup- 
 ply of beer and ale with which they saturated themselves 
 each day; but it is safe to say that all of them maintained 
 commodious breweries on their premises so that in case 
 of siege their beer wouldn't be cut off. It was always 
 believed that a two-fisted Briton might as well be deprived 
 of his legs and his eyesight as of his beer. 
 
 The example which these early Britons set to succeeding 
 generations was not wasted. To-day there are three thou- 
 sand one hundred and forty-eight breweries in the United 
 Kingdom; and in the year 1919, during which alcoholic 
 beverages could only be sold for a few hours every day, 
 the sturdy Britons lapped up one million, one hundred and 
 sixty-three thousand gallons of beer, or nine thousand three 
 hundred and four million one-pint glasses. When one 
 plunges boldly into the mystic realm of statistics and bandies 
 these overwhelming figures about in the manner peculiar to 
 statisticians, one begins to realize that the early Saxons and 
 Normans, determined and hardened drinkers though they 
 may have been, couldn't hold a sponge to their present-day 
 descendants. If converted into rain, for example, there 
 would be enough moisture in these nine billion glasses of 
 beer to provide a five-week rainfall for the entire Sahara 
 Desert. If mixed with water and run through a one-inch 
 hose and directed against the planet Mars, there would be 
 enough liquid to fill all the Martian canals with one per 
 cent. beer. With more than nine billion glasses of beer 
 consumed by the British people in one year's time, the 
 person who nicknamed England a "tight little island" is 
 entitled to commend himself highly for his conservatism in 
 using the word "tight."
 
 266 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 In England and Wales alone there are eighty-four thou- 
 sand public-houses or pubs, as they are affectionately called 
 by the English. In addition to the pubs, there are over 
 twenty-two thousand places which have off licenses. At 
 a pub anybody can get whatever sort of liquor he wants and 
 pour it down his throat or in his hair or into a bucket, 
 depending on how he feels at the moment of purchase. At 
 an off license, however, he can only buy it to take away with 
 him and drink around the corner or up an alley or in the 
 privacy of his own chambers. Besides the pubs and the off 
 licenses there are, in England and Wales alone, over eight 
 thousand clubs in which kindred souls may assemble and 
 accumulate skinfuls of alcoholic beverages in emulation of 
 their gay and care-free progenitors, the Saxons and the 
 Normans. 
 
 Thus, in England and Wales, there are one hundred 
 and fourteen thousand places where drinks can be obtained. 
 Every seventh shop, throughout England and Wales, is a 
 drink-shop. There is one drink-shop for every fifty-seven 
 dwelling-houses. During the year 1919, the sturdy citizens 
 of the United Kingdom spent for drink alone the enormous 
 sum of three hundred and eighty-six million pounds, or, 
 with the pound sterling at par, one million, nine hundred and 
 thirty thousand dollars. During the year ending March 
 31, 1920, the estimated expenditure on intoxicants in the 
 United Kingdom was four hundred and ten million pounds 
 or more than two billion dollars if the pound sterling is 
 figured at par. It was expected to run above two billion, 
 five hundred million dollars during 1921. Two billion, 
 five hundred million dollars is a large slice of money for 
 the people of any nation to toss away lightly. It would be 
 a large slice if England were an excessively wealthy nation.
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 267 
 
 Just at present England is a debtor nation, burdened with a 
 war debt that makes the most willing taxpayer lie awake 
 late at night bathed in a cold perspiration. There are some 
 pessimists, staunch Britons too, who talk darkly of bank- 
 ruptcy for England. Every one agrees that if England 
 wishes to regain her pre-war position, she must save and 
 produce. Yet not even an ancient Saxon, drowsing under 
 his dinner table, with suds on his long flaxen mustache and 
 an overdose of green beer under his belt, would be so 
 muddled as to think that the expenditure of two and one- 
 half billion dollars by Britons for drink in one year's time 
 was either economical or productive. 
 
 For many years the English working man has been 
 spoken of by many sorts of observers as "sodden with 
 drink." The Scotchman who rolls out on the streets of 
 Glasgow of a Saturday evening and gets himself lit up, as 
 the saying goes, like an ocean liner, refers pityingly to his 
 English beer-drinking brother as "sodden with drink." 
 Journalists, temperance workers, army surgeons, Scotch 
 whisky manufacturers, big employers of labor, have repeat- 
 edly applied the phrase "sodden with drink" to the English 
 laborer. The English resent the phrase. Even the Eng- 
 lish temperance workers are inclined to think that the 
 English aren't so sodden as the Scotch. A Scotchman and 
 an Englishman will argue for hours as to whether the Scotch 
 or English are the more sodden ; and a listener is almost in- 
 evitably forced to the conclusion that all Scotchmen and all 
 Englishmen are drunk all the time a conclusion which is 
 entirely erroneous. Yet England boasts a thousand brew- 
 eries and eighty thousand pubs and a population which 
 spends billions of dollars each year on billions of glasses of 
 beer. The English may not be sodden with drink; but a
 
 268 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 comfortable percentage of them are constantly surrounded 
 by a distinctly beery atmosphere and possess beer breaths 
 of such virility that coats and hats may almost be hung on 
 them. 
 
 I fell into conversation one day with a solicitor from the 
 flourishing city of Reading, and the subject of Prohibition 
 came up between us, as it always does nowadays between 
 an Englishman and an American. He was a total abstainer ; 
 but the idea that England might ever go Prohibition struck 
 him as highly ludicrous. He had presided at a number of 
 working men's meetings, he said, and he knew from observa- 
 tion the violent attachment which existed between an Eng- 
 lish working man and his beer. "Why," said he, "the Eng- 
 lish laborer worships his beer. He worships it, I tell you !" 
 Then he told me a venerable story that had to do with an 
 English laborer who was standing in the bar of a pub dally- 
 ing with a beaker of suds. A friend, in the hope of pro- 
 voking a fight, came to him and indicated a third laborer. 
 " 'Arry, there," explained the friend, " 'as been carryin' on 
 wiv yer wife." The first laborer frowned heavily. " 'E 'as, 
 'as 'e, the bloomin' tyke," said he darkly and threateningly, 
 "I'll drink 'is beer!" This teetotaler from Reading assured 
 me that in England you could do anything you wanted with 
 beer. "You can buy all the votes you want with it," he 
 said. "The English laborer worships it ! He worships it !" 
 
 These are, of course, strong words. There are many 
 British labor leaders and labor unions that have declared 
 themselves strongly in favor of Local Option and Temper- 
 ance measures, and that would no more think of worshiping 
 beer than they would of worshiping an antique egg. But 
 every day, in every one of England's eighty thousand 
 pubs, one can find many a man, and many a woman too
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 269 
 
 for that matter, whose overwhelming admiration for beer 
 is the nearest thing to worship that they will ever know. 
 
 Naturally enough, the beer-sopping in which Englishmen 
 indulge so freely is very gratifying to the individuals who 
 manufacture the beer and the individuals who sell it; but 
 it is deeply annoying to several classes of people, prominent 
 among whom are those who believe that a nation is morally 
 weakened by drink and those who believe that a nation is 
 economically handicapped by a heavy consumption of 
 alcoholic beverages. In England, as in every country in 
 the world, there have been large numbers of Temperance 
 advocates in evidence for many years; but their strength, up 
 to the last few years, has not been such as to cause the brew- 
 ers and the distillers and the publicans to toss restlessly on 
 their mattresses. 
 
 The war, however, put a different complexion on the 
 Temperance movement, or the Prohibition movement or 
 whatever you may wish to call the movement which is mak- 
 ing the Liquor Trade of England moan sepulchrally in its 
 sleep. In place of its pale, anemic complexion, the Tem- 
 perance movement suddenly developed a rich, healthy, rosy 
 complexion. Instead of moving slowly and painfully, with 
 creaking joints and many a pause for breath, it began to 
 leap hither and yon with all the briskness of an Alpine 
 chamois. This new lease of life was due firstly to the war 
 spirit, which made Englishmen face facts which they ordi- 
 narily refused to face; secondly to Prohibition in America 
 and to the fear that Prohibition would so increase America's 
 efficiency that England would be unable to compete with 
 her; and thirdly to the elections in Scotland in November, 
 1920 elections at which, for the first time in history, voters 
 resident in the British Isles were able to cast a vote on the
 
 270 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 question of whether or not the districts in which they lived 
 should be wet or only damp. In Scotland the people voted 
 on Local Option for the first time in 1920. In England the 
 voters not only have never had the opportunity of expressing 
 their desires in regard to liquor, but they are having trouble 
 in persuading Parliament to pass a bill which will give them 
 the right to vote on this question in two or five or seven or 
 an indefinite number of years. The Temperance societies 
 and the Prohibition societies in England are not fighting for 
 Prohibition, nor for anything which even resembles Prohi- 
 bition from an American view-point, but for the passage of 
 a bill which will permit a man to vote on whether or not 
 public-houses shall continue to sell alcoholic beverages in 
 the district in which he lives. 
 
 The English public-house system, I believe, is not gen- 
 erally understood in America. It is a quaint and piquant 
 system and must be explained before the arguments of the 
 Temperance workers and the Liquor advocates are intro- 
 duced. Class distinction is inextricably mixed up with it, 
 just as it is mixed up with so many things in England. 
 
 Americans to stumble from the subject for a moment 
 are greatly bewildered by class distinctions when they go to 
 England for a brief visit ; but Americans who have lived in 
 England for a year or so, claim that they can distinguish 
 between the different English classes at a glance, just as 
 some English claim to be able to do. In my rude, boorish, 
 American way, I question the accuracy of this statement. 
 Mr. H. G. Wells has said that there are more than two hun- 
 dred classes to English society. Some of the delicate dis- 
 tinctions between different English classes are such as to 
 give many persons a slow shooting pain at the base of the 
 brain. There is a distinction for example, between a grad-
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 271 
 
 uate of Oxford University and a graduate of London Uni- 
 versity. The latter belongs to a lower class than the former. 
 There is a distinction between an Episcopalian, or Church of 
 England clergyman, and a Baptist or Congregationalist or 
 Presbyterian minister. The Episcopalian belongs to a 
 higher class than the Nonconformist ministers. Working 
 men are divided by rigid class distinctions. Certain trades 
 are classed far higher than other trades. The barrister, who 
 argues a case for a client, is in a much higher class than 
 the solicitor who approaches the barrister for the client and 
 persuades him to accept the case. If a member of the 
 so-called upper classes undertakes to sell stoves or cheese 
 or canned goods, he falls from the class which he originally 
 occupied to a lower class. If, however, he chooses to sell 
 automobiles, stocks and bonds, or land, he remains in his 
 original class and is not lowered. Those three pursuits are 
 exempt from the stigma which attaches to trading in all 
 other commodities. I question, however, whether an Ameri- 
 can or an Englishman, or Little Bright Eyes the Indian 
 Control, or any other agency known to man, can tell at a 
 glance that one man belongs to a certain class because he 
 sells stock in the Hotair Oil Company of Rumania and that 
 another belongs to a lower class because he sells steel safes. 
 That, however, is quibbling. The basis of English 
 classes is the racial instinct of self-preservation an instinct 
 that has only recently begun to develop in America. There 
 are certain broad, well-defined classes in England which, 
 generally speaking, can be recognized at a glance by an 
 Englishman. He has an uncanny faculty of knowing at 
 once whether as a middle-class Englishman put it to me 
 he should be polite or rude or merely decent to the persons 
 with whom he comes in contact. I pressed this Englishman
 
 272 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 for further information. "Well, look here," said he, "sup- 
 pose a chap comes in here dressed like a juke." He meant 
 duke, but he said juke. "What I mean, you might have 
 trouble in knowing whether he was a juke or a butler or a 
 clerk or what-not, what?" I acknowledged that such was 
 indeed the case. "What I mean," he went on triumphantly, 
 "you wouldn't know until you had talked with him because 
 you're a blooming American; but I'd know as soon as I 
 clapped eyes on him; and directly I'd done so I'd say 
 politely: 'Beg pardon, but is there anything I can do, sir?' 
 or I'd say roughly: 'Sit down over there and wait your 
 turn,' depending on whether he was one of the upper classes, 
 or one of the servant class. I'd know at once." 
 
 This man was a little of a snob, but not so much of a 
 snob as he'd appear in the eyes of the average American. 
 There is class distinction in England, and the distinction is 
 recognized and acquiesced in by every class. The lower 
 the classes, the more rigid the distinctions. I have heard 
 it said that there are only two sorts of people who can 
 mingle without embarrassment with every class of English 
 society, from the top to the bottom : one is an English duke ; 
 the other is an agreeable American. As regards the duke 
 and the American, there is no envy and no jealousy. They 
 are at their ease with all classes, and since they are not sus- 
 pected of snobbishness or pride, all classes are at ease with 
 them. But let a member of the English middle or lower 
 classes get out of his class, and he's as uncomfortable and 
 ill at ease as a cat in a shower-bath. 
 
 The English public-house, therefore, is constructed in 
 such a manner that an Englishman of any class that fre- 
 quents one can buy himself a beaker of so-called nut-brown 
 ale with the minimum of mental anguish.
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 273 
 
 Instead of containing one bar, as was the case with that 
 practically defunct American institution, the saloon, the 
 English pub contains a whole flock of bars, carefully divided 
 from one another by high sturdy partitions, and entered by 
 separate doors. 
 
 The height of elegance and luxury in pub circles is the 
 saloon lounge, which is a bar with carpets on the floor, glit- 
 tering mirrors on the walls, and around the walls leather or 
 plush-covered divans on which the weary beer-drinker may 
 seat himself with his dish of hops in sybaritic luxury. Next 
 below the saloon lounge is the saloon bar, which is a smaller 
 edition of the lounge, and furnished with the same rich 
 elegance. The same class of people enter the saloon bar that 
 enter the saloon lounge ; and some of the poorer pubs in the 
 cities dispense entirely with the saloon lounge and all the 
 heavy British opulence that goes with it. Every pub, how- 
 ever, has its saloon bar; and to that saloon bar flock the 
 very cream, or hcait ton, of the drinking fraternity. 
 
 Next below the saloon bar is the private bar, which is a 
 cross between the glittering elegance of a saloon bar and the 
 sawdust-floored unostentation of the public bar. The public 
 bar caters exclusively to the lowest classes, such as dock 
 laborers and cabmen and teamsters and unskilled laborers 
 generally. The saloon bar caters to a rather indefinite 
 lower middle class salesmen and stockbrokers' clerks and 
 other white-collar men which is as high as the pubs need to 
 go in the catering line, since the upper classes and the upper- 
 middle class do their drinking in their homes and at clubs. 
 The private bar, therefore, purveys liquid refreshment to a 
 class between the two skilled laborers and hard-boiled 
 white-collar men. In addition to all these different depart- 
 ments into which the bars of English pubs are divided
 
 274 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 there is one more: the bottle and jug department. The bot- 
 tle and jug department is an appendage of the public bar; 
 and to it come the hoarse-voiced gentry in need of a little 
 something on the hip, or the ancient crones who wish to 
 take away with them a few shillings' worth of gin to solace 
 them during the long night watches, or those youthful and 
 active individuals delegated to rush the growler, as the say- 
 ing goes, for their more slothful parents. 
 
 There is a slight difference in price between the drinks 
 which one gets in the different divisions of an English 
 pub. In a public bar, for example, one gets a large glass of 
 dejected-tasting beer for fourpence ha'penny which, trans- 
 lated into American money at the 1921 rate of exchange, is 
 seven cents. In the private bar the same large glass of so- 
 called beer costs a ha'penny more. In the saloon bar, sur- 
 rounded by plush and elegance, one pays the same price for 
 a glass as in the private bar; but the glass is much smaller 
 and thinner sweller, as the patrons of the saloon bar 
 explain. 
 
 That, then, is the English drinking-machinery. Each 
 pub has its saloon bar, its private bar, its public bar and its 
 bottle and jug department; and if it is sufficiently large, it 
 crowns them all with a saloon lounge or super-bar. Into 
 these different divisions its patrons fall with absolute and 
 unfailing certainty. A man whose social position entitles 
 him to enter the saloon bar would never enter the public 
 bar; and a regular patron of the public bar wouldn't dream 
 of entering the saloon bar. If he were to do so, no objec- 
 tion would be raised by the bar-maids or the other bar- 
 flies; but his own discomfort at being out of his element 
 would be excessive. In the course of an exhaustive exam- 
 ination into the pubs of London and environs, I collected
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 275 
 
 four young men from the public bar of a Camberwell pub 
 and led them to the saloon bar of a pub on the next corner. 
 They were typical young men from the London slums. They 
 were runty and thin, with bad complexions and buck teeth 
 and mufflers around their necks in place of collars, and 
 tiiey were violently attached to an offensively bitter dark- 
 brown fluid known to them as stout. One of the young men 
 had served in France. He alone of the four followed me 
 into the saloon bar and he wasn't wholly at his ease by any 
 means. The other three stood outside and wouldn't come 
 in until they were dragged in by main strength. Even after 
 they were safely in, with glasses of stout clutched in their 
 right hands and with their narrow chests pushed firmly 
 against the bar, they felt and looked uncomfortable because 
 they were in the saloon bar instead of in the public bar 
 where they belonged. 
 
 There are eighty thousand pubs in England, to say 
 nothing of eighty thousand statisticians busily engaged in 
 proving that the eighty thousand pubs are either the salva- 
 tion or the ruin of the nation. A good Prohibition 
 statistician can take a column of figures and demonstrate 
 conclusively with them that unless England stops drinking 
 in eleven years she will be occupying a pauper asylum. An 
 anti-Prohibition statistician can take the same column of 
 figures and prove with them that if England should stop 
 drinking, she would have to convert her navy into coal 
 barges and subsist entirely on boiled parsnips and suet 
 pudding. One of these statisticians has announced that 
 in England there is one drink shop to every two hundred 
 adults of twenty years of age and upwards. I can not 
 vouch for the reliability of these figures, since a long expe- 
 rience with golf -hand icappers and Central European politi-
 
 276 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 cians has convinced me that the man who remarked that 
 there were lies, damned lies and statistics remarked a mouth- 
 ful. My investigations into London pubs, however, have 
 more than once made me think that if there is one pub to 
 every two hundred adults, one hundred and ninety-eight of 
 the adults must frequently spend their evenings in the pub 
 attempting to absorb the entire beer-output of the country. 
 Unless a foreigner has made a round of the pubs in an 
 English city, he will have difficulty in realizing the hold 
 which drinking has on the English people. Drinking in 
 England reached a higher stage of development centuries 
 ago than it reached in America even during the hectic 
 period when young ladies removed and checked their corsets 
 on arriving at dances, and were unable to be their natural 
 selves unless they had about a pint and a half of whisky 
 beneath their girdles. Drinking in America was a sort of 
 sideline; but in England it was for hundreds of years and 
 still is an accepted portion of the daily routine. The pro- 
 fessional man, the business man almost every man whose 
 income is of any size at all, has beer or whisky-and-soda 
 with his lunch, and is inclined to follow it up with a glass 
 of port. With his dinner he has champagne or a light wine 
 or a whisky-and-soda, as his fancy dictates, and again tops 
 off with a glass of port. Go to any of the countless quiet 
 hotels in England to-day; and in every dining-room you 
 will find austere elderly ladies sucking up bottles of cham- 
 pagne with their dinners. As people grow poorer they get 
 down to beer; but it isn't much of an exaggeration to say 
 that all England drinks with its meals. There never has 
 been the sentiment against drinking in England that existed 
 in America. It is not at all unusual for English business 
 men, after lunch, to be the proud possessors of penetrating,
 
 
 
 
 f 
 
 Copyright Tndtnrood <f rndrrwood 
 William E. (Pussyfoot) Johnson
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 277 
 
 sixty-candlepower beer or whisky breaths; but if my mem- 
 ory does not fail me, the average American business man, 
 even in the days when our large cities boasted a saloon on 
 every prominent corner, would have had an apoplectic 
 seizure if two or three of his employees had come back from 
 lunch exuding even the faintest of groggy odors. I know 
 a New England town, for example, where, as recently as 
 1916, sentiment against alcoholic beverages was so strong 
 that the town's social leaders wouldn't eat salad dressing 
 made from claret vinegar if they knew it. Such a state 
 of affairs wouldn't exist in England. As I have remarked 
 elsewhere, the English have been sopping up beer and ale 
 and everything else of an alcoholic nature that they could 
 find ever since the days of Hengist and Horsa. In that 
 celebrated book on English public-school life in the early 
 '40*5, Tom Brown's School Days, you will find a description 
 of a Saturday-night singing at Rugby. On Saturdays the 
 boys had a double allowance of beer with their supper. They 
 saved it and took it to the schoolhouse hall and lapped it up 
 in concert ; and the older boys, of the ripe old age of seven- 
 teen, brought in bottled beer and shared it with the younger 
 boys of ten and eleven when the school beer had been con- 
 sumed. And Brooke, the hero of the school, made a speech 
 in which he advised the boys to keep away from the bad 
 spirits and punch of the public-house because "you get 
 plenty of good beer here, and that's enough for you." Beer 
 has always been regarded by the English as being a harm- 
 less nay, a healthful and almost essential part of their daily 
 life, like soggy vegetables and damp bed-sheets. 
 
 It is in the pubs that one finds the British Beer Wor- 
 shipers practising their most mystic rites, subject to the regu- 
 lations of the Liquor Control Board which, during the war,
 
 278 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 ordained that pubs should be open for two and one-half 
 hours at noon and for three hours in the evening. And I 
 would like to state once more that even with these restricted 
 hours, the yearly post-war liquor bill of the United King- 
 dom is over two billion dollars more than triple the entire 
 national expenditure of England in 1907, which was an 
 expensive pre-war year. 
 
 To an American, the most striking feature of the Eng- 
 lish pubs is the enthusiastic and whole-hearted manner in 
 which the women join with the men in all their ground and 
 lofty drinking. Possibly I have selected the wrong phrase 
 when I say that the women join with the men. In some 
 cases men and women enter the pubs together a man and 
 his wife, or a young man and his sweetheart and then 
 again a woman comes in alone and tosses down a couple of 
 drinks; or a couple of women come in together and call for 
 two Burtons, and lean up against the bar and discuss what 
 Ella said to 'Arry, or the cost of hostrich plumes, punctuat- 
 ing their remarks with long silent draughts, and paying no 
 attention to the male drinkers around them. 
 
 Lest this matter be misunderstood in America, I wish 
 to make it plain that drinking is far more general in Eng- 
 land than it ever was in America, and that if women of cer- 
 tain classes in England happen to prefer a glass of beer or 
 ale or port or sherry to a cup of tea, they drop into a pub 
 and get it, just as they would drop into a tea-house for a 
 dash of orange pekoe ; and nobody thinks any the worse of 
 them for it. You see all sorts of women in the pubs of 
 English cities. In some sections of London you see painted 
 ladies and drabs leaning against the bars : in others you see 
 quiet young business women in neat tweeds snatching a 
 solitary glass of beer or sherry : you see venerable ladies in
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 279 
 
 their best silk dresses, and dowdy housewives with ratty 
 false fronts projecting from under their frowzy hats, and 
 women of the slums in greasy dresses and ragged shawls, all 
 getting their stout or their bitter or their Burton across the 
 bar and hoisting the brimming schooners with the aplomb 
 of a longshoreman. A great many of the women who drink 
 in the pubs are all right; and a great many of them make 
 beasts of themselves, just as the men do. Generally speak- 
 ing, there are four men convicted for drunkenness in Eng- 
 land each year for every woman that is so convicted. Nearly 
 eleven thousand women were convicted for drunkenness in 
 England during 1919 and the number convicted is neces- 
 sarily only a small percentage of the number who were 
 drunk. The number, too, was small because of the war- 
 time restrictions on the sale of liquor which were still in 
 force. In 1913 the number of women convicted for drunk- 
 enness was nearer forty thousand. 
 
 My first pubbing expedition in London was made on a 
 Sunday in company with a consul from the American con- 
 sulate-general. Sunday is a great day in England for 
 steady drinking among the working classes ; for there is no 
 work to distract their minds from the matter in hand. The 
 men and women flock to the pubs, which are so crowded 
 that one must fairly fight his way up to the bar. If the 
 woman is unfortunate enough to be handicapped by a baby- 
 in-arms, she can not settle down to an uninterrupted drink- 
 ing bout, but must catch her drinks on the fly, so to speak. 
 The English government allows almost everything in the 
 drinking line; but it ungallantly refuses to allow a woman 
 with a baby in her arms to line up at the bar of a pub, nor 
 will it permit children under fifteen years of age to enter a 
 pub for liquid refreshment or for relaxation and amuse-
 
 280 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 ment or for any other reason. If a mother who has a small 
 baby is also fortunate enough to possess a baby-carriage, 
 she can and frequently does park the baby-carriage out- 
 side the pub while she herself goes in to hoist a few scuttles 
 of suds with the other members of her sewing circle. If 
 she does not own a baby-carriage, she must hang around 
 the door of the pub while a friend goes in and gets a great, 
 big, cold, wet glass of ale and brings it out to her. 
 
 The pubs closed at three o'clock on Sunday; and when 
 three o'clock struck, my consular companion and I found 
 ourselves in the public bar of a pub in the slums which lie 
 just beyond Hyde Park and the Marble Arch. We were 
 with five English laborers all of them undersized, under- 
 nourished and unhealthy-looking as a result of the undi- 
 gestible food and the oceans of beer which they and their 
 ancestors had consumed and at the direction of the pub 
 owner the seven of us took our glasses of Burton and stood 
 on the sidewalk outside the pub in the pale smoky sunshine 
 of a London autumn afternoon. Five feet from us, as we 
 stood and talked about Prohibition and the peculiarly nasty 
 taste of quassia which the British brewers had succeeded in 
 imparting to all their beer, stood a woman with a baby over 
 her left shoulder and an enormous glass of stout in her 
 right hand. A friend, also nursing a glass of stout, stood 
 beside her; and while the fond mother buried her nose in 
 the stout, the friend cooed and glugged at the baby, poking 
 a tentative finger into its cheeks, pushing a penny into its 
 fat fists, and breathing warmly on it with her stout-impreg- 
 nated breath. Beyond this mother there were two other 
 mothers with babies in their arms, both drinking busily ; and 
 there were five other apparently unattached women, all bur- 
 dened with huge glasses of beer. The children of the neigh-
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 281 
 
 borhood played among them joyously ; and altogether it was 
 a scene of great peace and contentment. When the beer had 
 been consumed, the owner of the pub came out and collected 
 the glasses, and the little gathering slowly dispersed. 
 
 The pubs, on the whole, are infinitely more quiet and 
 orderly than similar institutions ever would have been in 
 America. The drinks in English pubs except in the public 
 bars of the poorest pubs are dispensed by maidens of vari- 
 ous ages; and their presence appears to have a refining and 
 chastening influence on the clientele. I call them maidens 
 because they are known generically as "Miss." They neither 
 understand nor answer to any other term of address. Di- 
 minutives, terms of endearment, or familiarities, such as 
 Ducky, Sister, Sweetheart, Little Honeybunch and Kid, are 
 received by them in stony and contemptuous silence. If you 
 want anything from them, you must call them "Miss." 
 "Two stouts, Miss, Jrif you please!" or "Miss, two Burtons," 
 are the phrases that echo through every English pub without 
 cessation. During crowded hours, the frequent repetition of 
 "Miss, Miss, Miss" that rings out on the beery air occasion- 
 ally attains the proportions of the angry hissing of a second- 
 gallery audience at an unpopular play. In the larger pubs 
 the staff of Misses is ruled by a Miss of wide experience and 
 mature years. She is supreme behind the bar; and beneath 
 the bar she usually maintains a very large glass. Whenever 
 a customer fails to drink his entire drink, the residue is 
 poured into the glass of this duenna of Misses. When it is 
 filled, she repairs to a spot where she is comparatively free 
 from observation and drinks it hastily. Usually she has a 
 false front, a hard yet watery eye, and a nose that inclines 
 toward ruddiness and bulbosity. Whenever a customer 
 becomes over-familiar in his manner of addressing one of
 
 282 .WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 the younger Misses, the duenna is summoned. She surges 
 majestically to the scene of hostilities and opens on the 
 unfortunate offender with the verbal ammunition which she 
 has acquired through years of careful attention to barroom 
 conversation. The offender usually lasts about three sec- 
 onds, and is then led away by his friends, if he has any 
 left 
 
 The pubs reopened at six o'clock on Sunday evening and 
 remained open until nine o'clock. We resumed pubbing at 
 six o'clock, working from the poor district known as Ele- 
 phant and Castle out to the equally poor district known as 
 Camberwell and pronounced Camel. The pubs were 
 jammed with people and there were no other sorts of shops 
 open, except candy shops and tobacconists. Movies can be 
 open on Sunday evenings also; but in the large amount of 
 territory which we covered on that particular Sunday we 
 didn't happen to see a single moving-picture theater, though 
 we passed and entered scores of pubs. In every pub there 
 were women; and outside of almost every pub there were 
 little children waiting for their mothers to come out. At 
 a little before nine o'clock we found a corner pub in Cam- 
 berwell with four entrances. In each of three of the en- 
 trances, on the cold stone step, were seated two little girls; 
 and crowded on the step of the fourth entrance were three 
 little girls. I spoke to each one of the nine in turn, asking 
 who they were waiting for. The answer in each case was 
 "My mama." They were all attractive-looking children, 
 surprisingly well-dressed. There was nothing unusual about 
 this incident. You can run across such spectacles in any 
 section of any English city on any night in the year 
 except the nights when the pubs are closed. 
 
 I have seen large masses of working people in many
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 283 
 
 large cities of America, Asia and Europe; but I have never 
 seen more universally miserable-looking specimens of hu- 
 manity such runty, stunted, malformed, buck-toothed, 
 obviously mal-nourished, diseased and generally wretched 
 specimens as those I saw among the lower classes of Eng- 
 land in my tours of the English public houses. These people 
 are the people who worship beer. They are the working 
 people ; and the English records show that out of the four 
 hundred and ten million pounds which were spent on intoxi- 
 cating liquors in the United Kingdom in 1919, two hundred 
 and seventy million pounds were spent by the working 
 classes. The climate may have something to do with their 
 physical state ; the soggy, vilely-cooked food which they eat 
 in such vast quantities may have something to do with it; 
 the bad housing and the lack of healthful recreation may 
 have something to do with it ; but if any man can go among 
 the Beer Worshipers while they're at their devotions and not 
 blame most of their troubles on beer, he is, to put it 
 conservatively, singularly unobservant. 
 
 The fight against liquor in England dates back to 1853, 
 when the United Kingdom Alliance, an Association of Tem- 
 perance and Social Reformers, was formed in the city of 
 Manchester with the sole and avowed purpose of dealing a 
 deadly wallop to the Liquor Traffic by means of public 
 opinion, working through Local Option. England, as I 
 have said before, has no option in the matter of liquor. 
 Licenses to sell liquor are granted by licensing justices 
 appointed frequently for political party service by the 
 lord chancellor. The people of a neighborhood in which a 
 license is requested have no effective voice in saying whether 
 or not the license shall be granted. 
 
 The fight of most of the Temperance workers of Eng-
 
 284 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 land, to-day as in the past, is a fight to permit the people of 
 England to express themselves on the subject of liquor. 
 The fight of the Liquor Interests or of the Trade, as it is 
 always spoken of more or less affectionately in England 
 is a fight to prevent the people of England from expressing 
 themselves. 
 
 The United Kingdom Alliance has been the father of 
 practically all the Temperance organizations which have 
 sprung up in Great Britain and her colonies. It was the 
 father of the Scottish Permissive Bill and Temperance Asso- 
 ciation, which succeeded in obtaining Local Option for 
 Scotland. It was the father of Alliances in Canada, Aus- 
 tralia, New Zealand and South Africa which places in 
 1921 had either gone dry or were about to go dry with 
 harsh, dusty crashes. In 1908 the United Kingdom Alliance 
 nearly got a Local Option Bill made into law. The Bill 
 struggled through the House of Commons successfully; but 
 when it went gaily and innocently up to the House of Lords, 
 the noble lords being deeply interested in breweries and 
 having large quantities of the family currency or jack 
 invested in them drew long keen knives from their boots 
 and cut the bill to shreds. 
 
 The United Kingdom Alliance is a political as well as 
 an educative organization. It fights the Liquor Trade and 
 representatives of the Liquor Trade and candidates who 
 sympathize with the Liquor Trade. Then there are other 
 strong organizations which keep out of politics and limit 
 themselves to putting out books and pamphlets and posters 
 showing the evils of drink, or to persuading people to sign 
 the pledge. Among these are such organizations as the 
 National Temperance League, the Temperance Council of 
 the Christian Churches which is headed by the Archbishop
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 285 
 
 of Canterbury and the Archbishop of Westminster the 
 British Women's Temperance Association, the Women's 
 Total Abstinence Union, and many other active organiza- 
 tions. 
 
 The United Kingdom Alliance has worked always for 
 Local Option, and has devoted its energies exclusively to 
 that. When, during the war, Great Britain was adopting 
 strong measures to stop waste and increase the efficiency 
 of the nation, another organization whose efforts were 
 directed against the Liquor Trade came into being. This 
 was known as the Strength of Britain Movement. In the 
 beginning it was composed of business men who recognized 
 the fearful waste caused by the production and consumption 
 of intoxicants, and who demanded in rude and raucous tones 
 that the government stop the production and the sale of 
 liquor for the duration of the war and for six months after 
 who demanded, in other words, that the strength of 
 Britain be conserved. Business men swung in behind this 
 movement in tremendous numbers, and subscribed enough 
 money for an advertising campaign. The first advertise- 
 ment showed a huge tank labeled "Britain's Strength." 
 There were three little leaks in the tank, entitled "The 
 Pleasure Motoring Leak," "Coal and Electric Lighting 
 Leak," and "The New Clothing Leak." The government was 
 noticing and plugging these leaks. Then there was a fourth 
 enormous leak out of which Britain's strength was pouring 
 in a mighty flood. That, labeled "The Big Alcohol Leak," 
 was the leak which the government couldn't see at all. The 
 Strength of Britain Movement gave the Liquor Trade in 
 England the greatest fright of its life, because its state- 
 ments were both true and unanswerable. Incidentally, if its 
 statements were true in 1916, they were equally true in
 
 286 
 
 November of 1920, when the government of Great Britain 
 had been warned by Sir George Paish that unless neces- 
 sary steps were taken within the immediate future, Great 
 Britain herself would be in financial difficulties within 
 twelve months. In 1916 the Strength of Britain Movement 
 demanded war-time Prohibition from the government. The 
 demand came within an inch of being granted. At the last 
 moment Lloyd-George refused to take the whole step; but 
 he consented to reduce the beer output by two-thirds, cut 
 down the spirit output by one-half, stop distillers from mak- 
 ing whisky, and greatly curtail the hours during which the 
 pubs could be open. As a result of this, food was conserved, 
 efficiency was increased, and the number of convictions for 
 drunkenness was cut from one hundred eighty-eight thou- 
 sand in 1913 to twenty-eight thousand in 1918. 
 
 Now a great many of the members of the Strength of 
 Britain Movement only advocated Prohibition during a 
 period of national stress. Some of them were Beer Wor- 
 shipers, a lot of them liked a little jolt of port before crawl- 
 ing into bed at night, and an appreciable number said 
 emphatically that life was scarcely worth living in this 
 beastly climate unless one could have a bit of a peg with his 
 lunch, what? Consequently many of the Strength of Britain 
 people left the organization flat on its back at the end of the 
 war and took no more interest in Prohibition than they 
 would have taken in a fund for indigent German subma- 
 rine captains. The Strength of Britain Movement grew 
 weaker and paler day by day. Finally a campaign was 
 started to unite the United Kingdom Alliance and the 
 Strength of Britain Movement. It progressed nicely for a 
 time, until the leaders of the Alliance, hearing that the 
 Strength of Britain movement had been on the verge of
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 287 
 
 disbanding, refused to make any concessions to the other 
 side. It chanced, however, that there were one or two 
 Scotchmen connected with the Strength of Britain Move- 
 ment ; and it also happened that the Secretary of the Move- 
 ment, who was a very capable young man, didn't happen to 
 have another job to step into. So the movement suddenly 
 developed unexpected tenacity of life, and started spas- 
 modically off on the up-grade again. I mention these things 
 not because I take pleasure in rattling dry bones in an 
 ancient grave, but because the rebirth of the Strength of 
 Britain Movement marks an unnecessary split in the Tem- 
 perance workers of England. The United Kingdom 
 Alliance still advocates and fights for Local Option. The 
 Strength of Britain Movement says that Local Option is 
 futile and hopeless and strongly advocates a bill which will 
 permit a vote on three questions, to wit : whether or not the 
 manufacture and sale of spirits shall be prohibited ; whether 
 or not the output of beer shall be limited to one-half the 
 pre-war quantity ; and whether or not there shall be a further 
 gradual reduction of the beer output until it entirely ceases 
 at the end of five or seven years. 
 
 The argument of the Strength of Britain people is not 
 unsound. Local Option, as advocated in England and as 
 in use in Scotland, allows a city to vote on the liquor ques- 
 tion by wards; and each ward is a unit by itself. Thus, if 
 there are ten wards in a city, and nine wards vote over- 
 whelmingly dry while the tenth ward votes wet by a very 
 narrow majority, the tenth ward continues to sell liquor, 
 though the total vote of the city has been dry. Conse- 
 quently the Strength of Britain people claim that even 
 though the people of England were given the right to vote 
 on Local Option, they would be fifty years or more in get-
 
 288 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 ting a dry England. That opinion was also echoed by most 
 of the Prohibition leaders in Scotland. "The English will 
 never vote to give up their beer," they said. "They're 
 soaked in it sodden with it. Only a miracle can make 
 England dry!" So the Strength of Britain people scoff 
 at Local Option, and demand a bill which will make it 
 possible to return to the conditions which existed during 
 the war conditions which cut the convictions for drunken- 
 ness from one hundred and eighty-eight thousand to twenty- 
 eight thousand and gradually to better those conditions. 
 
 There is a third class of Temperance workers whose 
 efforts are directed in still another channel. These are the 
 people who advocate Nationalization or State Purchase of 
 the Liquor Traffic. Some of the advocates of State Pur- 
 chase are genuine Temperance enthusiasts, and they believe 
 implicitly that State Purchase would be a stepping-stone to 
 Prohibition. There are other rooters for State Purchase, 
 however, who do their rooting because they are very sure 
 that if the government owned the Liquor Traffic, it would 
 need the money so badly that there would never be any 
 decrease in the amount of liquor manufactured and conse- 
 quently no Prohibition. Some, indeed, go so far as to say 
 that the original suggestion for State Purchase came from 
 the brewers. There are still other State Purchase enthu- 
 siasts who hold their views because they belong to the little 
 coteries of serious thinkers that believe in the National- 
 ization of everything. At any rate, all the other Temper- 
 ance workers give the State Purchase advocates the bird or 
 razz. Local Optioners burst into hoarse and contemptuous 
 guffaws at the idea of State Purchase; and some very 
 pungent remarks are thrown off about the chancellor of the 
 exchequer going into the Liquor Trade, about a minister
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 289 
 
 for drink in the Cabinet, and about attempts to make the 
 State a minister of evil to the people. 
 
 These three classes of Temperance workers, though 
 seeking results in different ways, have constantly dinned into 
 the ears of the English the great truths about the use of 
 alcohol that it impairs the efficiency of a nation, wastes 
 the resources of a nation, and increases crime, poverty and 
 disease and the thousands of lesser truths about the use of 
 strong drink. Consequently a good part of their work is 
 efficacious. Until they unite entirely in their aims, however, 
 their efforts will always have less strength than the efforts 
 of the Liquor Trade, whose sole object is the defeat of any 
 movement which will tend to decrease the manufacture, sale 
 or consumption of beer, wine or spirits. 
 
 At the close of the war the English people were heartily 
 sick of the many infringements on their personal liberty 
 which the war had brought about. An Englishman is a 
 veritable glutton for his personal liberty. He talks about 
 it constantly during political campaigns ; and whenever there 
 is any alteration in policemen's uniforms or a change in rail- 
 road schedules or a proposal to muzzle dogs or any talk of 
 increasing the size of the grandstand of the football field in 
 the town of Mushroom-under-Glass, Herts, he always views 
 the project with deep suspicion as being a possible infringe- 
 ment on his personal liberty. What the government did to 
 the Englishman's personal liberty during the war almost 
 comes under the head of a crime ; so when the war ended, all 
 Englishmen were anxious to do away with all war-time 
 regulations and restrictions. The manufacture and the sale 
 of liquor had been tampered with by the government, and 
 the people had benefited tremendously by the tampering. 
 Nevertheless, the people wanted to get back to a pre-war
 
 290 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 basis in that as in everything, because they considered that 
 their drinking was a part of their personal liberty. As a 
 result, at the end of the war, nobody was paying much 
 attention to the arguments of the Temperance workers, and 
 the chances of Prohibition looked as thin as boarding-house 
 consomme. 
 
 At this juncture there were alarums and trumpets with- 
 out, and Pussyfoot Johnson entered from America. 
 
 Pussyfoot Johnson is a tall, thick-set, neutral-tinted per- 
 son with a soft soothing voice, an air of surprised and wide- 
 eyed innocence, an enormous store of facts of a nature to 
 disturb a supporter of the Liquor Interests, and a nervous 
 giggle which he interjects unexpectedly after ridding him- 
 self of a statement particularly damning to an anti-Prohibi- 
 tionist. His name is as well-known in some sections of 
 America as is that of George Washington or Babe Ruth or 
 Charles Chaplin. In other sections it is hardly known at all. 
 In England there isn't a town or a village or a tiny ham- 
 let that doesn't know about Pussyfoot Johnson. From the 
 chalk cliffs of the Channel and the unpronounceable coal- 
 mining districts of Wales up to the wild islands off the coast 
 of Scotland where the natives weave their Harris tweeds in 
 the mingled atmosphere of acrid peat reek and Scotch 
 whisky, the name of Pussyfoot Johnson is a household word. 
 He has become the sign-manual of the Temperance forces 
 and the living embodiment of Prohibition. When the Wets 
 attack the Prohibition movement they attack it through 
 Pussyfoot Johnson. His name has become the generic term 
 for every variety of Temperance worker and Prohibitionist. 
 A Prohibitionist is a Pussyfoot. So is a Temperance 
 worker. The verb "to Pussyfoot," in England means to 
 engage in Prohibition work.
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 291 
 
 Pussyfoot Johnson did his first big- anti-liquor work- 
 as Chief Special Officer of the United States Indian Ser- 
 vice, charged with suppressing the illegal selling of liquor 
 to the Indians on Indian Reservations. He was a game 
 fighter and a two-fisted fighter and a gun-fighter to boot 
 when the occasion demanded it. He got his nickname from 
 the silent manner in which he would gumshoe from place to 
 place and then drop like a ton of lead-pipe on the unsus- 
 pecting head of a law-breaker. The stories of some of his 
 fist-fights and gun fights in New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah 
 and Minnesota are of the type to make the fiction of Old 
 Sleuth and Old King Brady sound as innocuous as the 
 Flaxie Frizzle books. Soon after he left the Indian Service 
 in 1911 he became the Managing Editor of the American 
 Issue Publications, which are the publications of the Anti- 
 Saloon League of America, He visited Russia and wrote 
 the best existing account of the Vodka monopoly, and in 
 other ways made his name known in Europe as a highly 
 successful Temperance worker. 
 
 In the summer of 1918, when Prohibition in America 
 was almost as sure as death and taxes, the Prohibition forces 
 in Scotland wrote to Johnson and asked him to assist in the 
 Scottish Local Option campaign. He at first refused. 
 Then, later in 1918, the Anti-Saloon League of America, 
 looking around for more wetness to conquer, conceived the 
 idea that the time was nearly ripe for starting an interna- 
 tional society to war against the Liquor Traffic. It was 
 further determined to send Johnson over to England to see 
 whether England offered fertile ground for the planting of 
 an international Dry seed; so Johnson decided to strangle 
 two Wet birds with one sponge, as one might say help the 
 Scotchmen and look into the prospects for the International
 
 292 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Prohibition Society. The Anti-Saloon League of America 
 paid Johnson's salary; the Scottish Permissive Bill and Tem- 
 perance Association paid his expenses. Neither his salary 
 nor his expenses were particularly large, in spite of the 
 claims of the Liquor Trade that the "American Agitators" 
 were paid "fabulous sums." 
 
 So Johnson for three months helped the Scotchmen by 
 making speeches which told the good things that Prohibition 
 had done for America. Then he went down to London and 
 started work on his international society. The Drys, he 
 said, snapped at it; and the result was the World League 
 against Alcoholism. Johnson is a sort of press agent and 
 special investigator for this organization. He has an office 
 in the heart of Fleet Street, which is the big newspaper 
 street of London ; and the inscription on the big plate-glass 
 window, at the level of the second story of the passing 
 double-decked busses, reads "American Issue Publishing 
 Company." The American Issue Publishing Company, 
 remember, is a subsidiary Company of the Anti-Saloon 
 League of America. 
 
 Shortly after Pussyfoot Johnson's arrival in London in 
 1919, a representative of The London Daily Mail saw him 
 and wrote a long interview in which Pussyfoot was quoted 
 as saying that the Anti-Saloon League proposed to take an 
 active part in British elections and show the British Temper- 
 ance organizations how to make the country dry. Johnson 
 assured me that he was misquoted in that interview and 
 that he said no such thing. I asked him whether he had 
 remonstrated with the reporter who wrote it, and he said 
 that he had not. He did, however, get a long interview into 
 The Manchester Guardian soon afterward, explaining care- 
 fully and at great length that neither he nor the Anti-Saloon
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 293 
 
 League had ever had the slightest intention of interfering 
 in any way with British affairs, and that they intended to 
 take no part whatever in any British elections. 
 
 Whether he said what The Mail said he said, or whether 
 he didn't, the harm had been done. The interview raised a 
 hue and cry which broke all records for hue-and-cry raising. 
 The hue was raised about three miles higher than a hue had 
 ever before been raised, while the cry was raised so high 
 that it hasn't come down yet. There were passionate howls 
 to the effect that America was sending an army of workers 
 and millions of dollars to England to interfere with the per- 
 sonal liberty of the British people. There was a violent con- 
 centration of public interest in the Prohibition question. 
 The name of Pussyfoot was feverishly hated on every side. 
 Pussyfoot made speeches in various parts of the country 
 and was greeted with what the less refined elements of 
 English society know as the bird, and what corresponding 
 elements in America delight to term the razz. Finally at a 
 Prohibition debate in London, some University of London 
 students, by way of a jolly little undergraduate prank, 
 started a riot against Pussyfoot. The riot spread and 
 became unmanageable. Police reserves were called out; 
 and just as the reserves were about to rescue Johnson, some 
 one threw a rock which put out his right eye. Johnson is, 
 and always has been, a game fighter. He suffered intense 
 pain for many days, but never had a word of blame for any 
 one. An evening paper started a popular subscription for 
 him, and Johnson asked that the money be turned over to 
 St. Dunstan's Hospital for blinded soldiers. There was a 
 great revulsion of sentiment in- his- favor. 
 
 The interest in Prohibition continued to grow, and the 
 Liquor Interests in England began to be more and more
 
 294 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 worried. The definite arrival of Prohibition in America 
 afflicted them with some extremely poignant pains. The 
 rumbles of the Local Option campaign in Scotland were 
 distinctly audible in England, and added appreciably to the 
 spiritual unrest of the Wet element. The evident success 
 of Prohibition in America put an enormous amount of 
 valuable anti-drink propaganda into the hands of the United 
 Kingdom Alliance, the Strength of Britain Movement and 
 all the other British Temperance organizations. Most 
 important of all, influential British business interests began 
 to get firmly fixed in their heads which are slow to get a 
 new idea and very reluctant to let go of an idea which has 
 once been grasped the idea that a Wet England can not 
 compete with a Dry America. 
 
 It thus became the duty of the higher Interests to con- 
 vince the people of England that Prohibition would be a 
 very bad thing for them, and that their general health, pros- 
 perity and well-being would be promoted by a continued 
 indulgence in liquor. Their chief method of doing this 
 was to attack violently the interference of America in 
 British affairs, to hint darkly that vast quantities of money 
 were being poured into England by American Prohibition- 
 ists for some presumably ulterior motive, and generally to 
 imply that the people of England should fight Prohibition 
 because it was a foreign movement which was striking at 
 their sacred liberty. 
 
 One of the first and most widely circulated posters 
 which the Wet Interests got out was a crude affair headed 
 "Pussyfoot Nosey Parker from Across the Sea," It showed 
 a funereal-looking person standing on the shores of the 
 United States. His tremendously long nose stretched all 
 the way across the Atlantic and was thrust neatly into a
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 295 
 
 house labeled "John Bull : Private." On his head he wore 
 a Stars and Stripes hat, and in his hand he carried a valise 
 labeled "Dollars for Dirty Work in England." 
 
 On thousands of bill-boards throughout England in the 
 autumn of 1920 there appeared a poster showing a large 
 John Bull holding up a glass of beer in one hand and pluck- 
 ing a diminutive Uncle Sam out of the beer with the thumb 
 and forefinger of his other hand. "Lor* lumme!" John 
 Bull was exclaiming, "there's a microbe in my beer!" The 
 principal Liquor organizations, when I attempted to get 
 copies of this poster, denied any definite knowledge of its 
 source. They said that the poster had been originated and 
 posted by an obscure organization of brewers, and that it 
 had been ordered down by the Liquor people as likely to 
 cause ill-feeling between the English and American people. 
 
 A small pink hand-bill put out by the Liquor people made 
 some very mysterious insinuations which were doubtless 
 intended to bring a hot flush of shame to American cheeks 
 and to convince Englishmen beyond cavil that the Prohibi- 
 tion movement is one of singularly sinister import. 
 
 "What is the game ?" asks this hand-bill without circum- 
 locution. "Do the Yankee Prohibitionists want to provoke 
 a revolution in Britain?" There, indeed, is a question cal- 
 culated to make any Englishman upset his beer in consterna- 
 tion. "Results of shortage of beer and spirits:" continues 
 this valuable document. "During the war there was a great 
 shortage of beer and spirits, and the Home Secretary, Sir 
 George (now Lord) Cave, stated in the House of Commons 
 that it had led to unrest, discontent, loss of time, loss of 
 work, and in some cases even strikes were threatened, and 
 indeed caused, by the very fact that there was a shortage of 
 beer. These are serious facts."
 
 296 [WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Serious, maybe ; but wait until you read further. 
 
 "What," asks this Pink Paper, "what is the game of the 
 Yankee? In many parts of the country active disturbances 
 took place. That was due to shortage in war-time. What 
 would be the position if, in the piping days of peace, well- 
 organized teetotalers were to jockey the nation into seizing 
 the supply altogether? Many thoughtful men believe it 
 tvould spell revolution. 
 
 "Can it be in the interests of some Americans to foment 
 a great upheaval of trade in the United Kingdom ? Scrutiny 
 of the list of subscribers to the huge cost of this campaign 
 of interference in the every-day life of another nation might 
 supply the answer. 
 
 Is it to ruin our industries? The American speakers 
 are preaching the doctrine that if the Briton will give up his 
 liquor greater efficiency will be secured. We seem to 
 remember that the abolition of vodka in Russia had a very 
 different result, and during the war the shortage of liquor 
 was the main cause of great industrial unrest. The Home 
 Secretary admitted it. 
 
 "Do strikes, loss of work, loss of time, unrest, and a gen- 
 eral feeling of discontent lead to efficiency? 
 
 "But isn't it, to say the least, a strange thing that Ameri- 
 can manufacturers, who contribute so large a part of the 
 funds for this invasion, should be so anxious that our effi- 
 ciency be improved so that we may be better able to compete 
 with them, for the world's trade? We had never before 
 regarded them as so altruistic. 
 
 "What is the little game? Think it over." 
 
 For one hundred per cent, piffleism, this gem of Wet 
 thought would be difficult to beat. None the less, it goes 
 big with the sturdy Briton when, with four or five glasses 
 of stout swashing around in him, he gives it the benefit of 
 his undivided attention.
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 297 
 
 I procured a set of anti-Prohibition pamphlets at Na- 
 tional Trade Defense Headquarters the organization which 
 looks after the interests of the entire Liquor Trade. These 
 pamphlets usually depict a clear-eyed, perfectly proportioned, 
 nicely dressed British working man or working woman in 
 close juxtaposition to a bottle of ale, engaged in an alterca- 
 tion with a cadaverous-looking, frock-coated, gloomy-faced 
 Temperance worker. The pamphlets assure the honest Brit- 
 ish working man that the Prohibitionists are, among other 
 things, sour-visaged, jaundiced old ladies of both sexes, 
 fussy zealots, professional propagandists, fanatics and artful 
 dodgers. Pamphet No. 13 declares: 
 
 "It is just at this time that a horde of Yankee merce- 
 naries have come over to assist our sour-visaged Prohibition- 
 ists to make the United Kingdom 'bone-dry.' They propose 
 
 to do it by stages Local Veto is to be one Make no 
 
 mistake. Local Veto is the first step toward prohibition 
 as it was in America and should be resisted now if you 
 want to avoid wide-spread poverty. There are employed in 
 and dependent on the liquor trade, and trades dependent 
 upon it, about 1,000,000 persons. If you allow anti-drink 
 fanatics to have their way, you will rob that vast army of 
 their living. Imagine the competition there would be for 
 jobs! Can it be doubted that the result would be a large 
 and general decline in wages? Don't sell yourselves into 
 slavery at the dictation of jaundiced teetotalers. Preserve 
 your freedom and self-respect. Vote against Local Veto 
 the first step that would put you on the slippery slope to 
 Prohibition. Write to your M. P. and tell him that if he 
 supports Local Veto, you won't support him." 
 
 The Wets insist continually that the people of England 
 can not preserve their freedom and their self-respect if the 
 country goes dry. Their reasons for this statement are
 
 298 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 somewhat obscure, but the sturdy Briton who worships his 
 beer wastes very little time asking for reasons. 
 
 Another favorite argument of the Wet pamphlets is that 
 which begs the voter to consider the analogy between prohib- 
 iting drink because a few get drunk, and prohibiting shoes 
 because some are too tight or similar instances. 
 
 "What would you think," virtuously asks pamphlet No. 
 27, addressed particularly to working women, "if a silly 
 man said : 'Some women squander a hundred pounds on a 
 dress; the remedy is for all women to go without'? That 
 
 is what teetotalers say about drink If you let these 
 
 busybodies have their way, the next move will be against 
 your tea, or your husband's tobacco as in America." 
 
 This same pamphlet assures the working woman that 
 the Prohibitionists "have huge sums of money which they 
 are spending to bring about Prohibition" and states that 
 "these people have now got the help of scores of Yankees 
 highly-paid agitators who have come over with unlimited 
 funds to interfere in a matter that does not concern them. 
 Teetotal fanatics pour out an endless stream of half-truths 
 and 'downright lies' " 
 
 I collected a handful of anti-Prohibition pamphlets issued 
 by the National Trade Defense people, and not one of them 
 has recourse to statistics that tend to disprove any of the 
 countless charges against drink which the Prohibitionists 
 have made. All of them appeal to class-hatred or use argu- 
 ments which only seem to bear on the subject. 
 
 Here, for example, is pamphlet No. 19. 
 
 "Doctors by the score warn us that excessive tea-drink- 
 ing is more harmful than excessive use of excisable bever- 
 ages. Are we to have polls on the question of prohibiting
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 299 
 
 the importation and use of tea? Milk is the most deadly 
 beverage known. Tuberculosis, typhoid fever and scarla- 
 tina are milk diseases. Are we to poll in every parish on the 
 question of prohibiting milk, or reducing the number of 
 dairymen's shops? Thousands are slaves to drugs par- 
 ticularly since whisky became so scarce. Is the remedy to be 
 found in polls on the question of closing chemists' shops? 
 Thousands smoke to excess, and do themselves much harm 
 thereby. Must we poll on the question of prohibiting the 
 use of tobacco? Absurd! you will say. So it is. But it is 
 the same plan that is proposed by teetotal faddists." 
 
 Such stuff is, of course, a particularly rich specimen of 
 drivel. If a country prohibits the carrying of concealed 
 weapons because there are too many murders, it does not 
 necessarily follow that that country will attempt to abolish 
 the ocean because a man was drowned in it 
 
 The statements of the Wet interests in England arc 
 extremely inaccurate, and are frequently put out with the 
 evident intention of misleading the people of England in 
 regard to the results of Prohibition in America. One of 
 the best-known distillers in the United Kingdom took full- 
 page advertisements in the English magazines in the late 
 summer of 1920. "Prohibition in America," said this adver- 
 tisement, "is the rankest hypocrisy. This Company is con- 
 stantly asked to send whisky to America, but it refuses 
 because it will not deal with hypocrites." Sir Andrew 
 Walker, another very large distiller, recently made the 
 statement that "he was unable at present to supply the 
 American demand." During the first week in November 
 the manager of one of the largest distilleries in the United 
 Kingdom the same one, by the way, that refused to deal 
 with hypocrites stated that he was shipping one thousand 
 gallons of whisky to the United States each week, and that
 
 300 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 the total shipment of whisky from the United Kingdom to 
 America was larger than it had been before Prohibition took 
 effect. Statements similar to this have been given to the 
 English press by the Liquor Interests throughout 1920. I 
 checked the figures for the exportation of spirits from the 
 United Kingdom to the United States, just out of curiosity. 
 I checked them from the British government figures, and 
 from the figures 1 at the American consulate-general for no 
 liquor shipments over one hundred dollars in value can be 
 made to America without an American consular invoice. 
 Both the British and American figures showed that a matter 
 of thirty-five thousand gallons of spirits had been shipped to 
 America from the United Kingdom during the first nine 
 months of 1920, and that one million two hundred and thir- 
 ty-nine thousand seven hundred and fifty proof gallons had 
 been shipped in 1916. Mr. Robert P. Skinner, the American 
 Consul-General in London, laughed at the statement that 
 more whisky was being shipped to America than before 
 Prohibition took effect. "Our consular figures are correct," 
 said he, "and the statements of the whisky people are foolish, 
 because when they make their figures larger than ours they 
 presuppose an impossible chain of illegality. They presup- 
 pose illegality on the part of the shipper, the buyer, the 
 British bonded warehouse people, the customs officials and 
 the bank which gives the seller the money for his shipment 
 on presentation of the consular invoice. One or two or three 
 men in a chain might be crooked enough to make our figures 
 worthless, but when you work the number up to fifteen or 
 twenty and include bank employees and customs officials, 
 you're getting beyond the bounds of probability."* 
 
 *The Scotch distilleries ship to Canada, and the Canadian dealers 
 and bootleggers, working with the American dealers and bootleggers, 
 jnost of whom are foreign-born, re-ship the whisky into the United
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 301 
 
 Every melancholy incident which can be connected with 
 America and Prohibition is eagerly seized by the Wets and 
 circulated quickly throughout England. The English are 
 told that America is turning to new forms of intoxicants 
 which destroy the reason and the stomach-lining at one 
 fell swoop. Doctors, they are told, spend all of their wak- 
 ing-hours writing drug-prescriptions for those who are 
 obliged to satisfy their wild appetites for stimulants. One 
 London paper recently published a story to the effect that 
 three New York physicians wrote one and one-half million 
 prescriptions for drug addicts within a period of six months. 
 This statement provoked loud cries of delight in Wet circles 
 until some skeptical soul pulled out his pencil and figured 
 that three physicians, to write one and one-half million 
 prescriptions, would have had to work twenty- four hours a 
 day, Sundays included, for six months. Prohibition has 
 done some strange things, but it hasn't yet made it possible 
 for physicians to go without sleep for six months. 
 
 The Englishman believes that every American home is 
 equipped nowadays with hot and cold water, a private still, 
 electric lights and a miniature brewery. The English are 
 assured that America is troubled with furious strikes on the 
 part of men deprived of their beer, and that her citizens are 
 frightfully unhappy and morose because of their beerless 
 state. Great emphasis is laid on the report that America 
 went dry because the dry legislation took place unknown to 
 the people. Ancient stories are disinterred, and dead bones 
 are rattled feverishly. Visiting Americans are questioned 
 closely regarding the results of Prohibition ; and usually each 
 
 States. When the Scotch distilleries ship "to America," they arc 
 actually shipping to Canada (or the West Indies) and knowingly con- 
 niving at breaking the American laws.
 
 302 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 visiting 1 American drains his cocktail glass with evident 
 enjoyment and says, "My boy, Prohibition is a great thing! 
 I never believed that they could slip it over on us; and I 
 wouldn't have voted for it for five dollars; but it's done 
 now and, believe me, it's great stuff! I'm for it; and if I 
 ever had another chance to vote for it, I'd vote the Prohibi- 
 tion ticket straight. Yes, sir! George, bring us a couple 
 more of those cocktails and just spear that cherry with a 
 toothpick, will you?" Then the Englishman who is ques- 
 tioning him shakes his head in a dumb, puzzled way and 
 decides ponderously and irrevocably, after the British fash- 
 ion, that the American is a liar and a hypocrite. 
 
 The Wets defend themselves chiefly by attacking Pussy- 
 foot Johnson and stirring the working man to vote against 
 the American invader. Pussyfoot Johnson is a good fighter 
 and an agreeable man; but his presence in England is the 
 best anti-Prohibition argument in the Wets' bag, and a con- 
 stant irritant to the British. The average Britisher thinks 
 that Johnson was sent to England by the American nation 
 to interfere with England's affairs. He doesn't know that 
 Johnson is employed by the Anti-Saloon League and that 
 the Anti-Saloon League is scarcely regarded as a govern- 
 ment organization in America and that he came to Great 
 Britain at the invitation of Britons. The Wet interests 
 encourage the average Britisher's erroneous beliefs. Most 
 of the English Prohibitionists, for that matter, resent John- 
 son's presence and think that the Anti-Saloon League would 
 be wiser to keep him at home. Most Americans would think 
 so, too, if they knew the irritation which has been stirred 
 up against Johnson and America by the anti-Prohibitionists. 
 On Guy Fawkes day November fifth each year the Eng- 
 lish children burn Guy Fawkes in effigy for his Gunpowder
 
 THE SLAVERY BELL. 
 
 Teetotal FanaHc-"Walrh me ring 
 hheBell,BroHierf 
 
 BriHsh Workman "I DONTTHINK!" 
 
 As the workman is supposed to sec it
 
 ONE DEATH 
 
 FROM ALCOHOL 
 
 EVERY EIGHT MINUTES 
 
 Drink is one Cause of Not Less Than 
 
 60,000 Deaths Every Year in the 
 
 United Kingdom. 
 
 DO NOT LET US GO BACK TO 
 PRE-WAR CONDITIONS. 
 
 Advocating the status quo
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 303 
 
 Plot against the Houses of Parliament. During the last few 
 years, however, many of them found Guy Fawkes too tame, 
 and started burning more concrete enemies of England. 
 During the war, they burned the Kaiser. In 1919 they 
 burned Lenine or Trotsky. On November 5, 1920, large 
 numbers of them burned Pussyfoot Johnson in effigy. 
 
 The Temperance workers of England are confronted by 
 a political situation which would make even a Pollyanna 
 burst into tears and kick the shins of any one who could 
 find any gladness in it. In order to get Local Option, which 
 is the measure for which the majority of the Temperance 
 workers yearn, the Temperance workers must get through 
 Parliament a bill which permits the people of England to 
 vote on the liquor question. 
 
 The present Parliament, however, is very kindly disposed 
 toward strong drink. There are a couple of bars in the 
 House of Parliament, and the members go in keenly for 
 their grog. One of the most conservative of the Temperance 
 leaders assured me mournfully that the present Parliament 
 lapped up more liquor than any Parliament in history. It 
 is a Coalition Parliament, and the Coalition whip or boss 
 is Sir George Younger, owner of Younger's Scotch Ale. 
 In addition to Sir George Younger, there are twenty-seven 
 other members of Parliament directly connected with the 
 Liquor Trade, either as distillers, brewers or sellers. The 
 introduction before these gentlemen and their colleagues of 
 a bill aimed to remove the brew from the breweries and the 
 still from the distilleries would leave them more or less 
 cold. It would, unquestionably, cause them to burst into 
 hoarse, blood-curdling peals of English merriment and to 
 destroy utterly the features of the bill before it left their 
 presence. Mr. Lloyd George, the present prime minister,
 
 304 
 
 is personally in favor of Prohibition; but ministerially he 
 refuses to be either for or against it. As an individual he 
 made the statement early in 1920 that if America kept dry 
 for ten years, England would have to go dry as well because 
 England could not afford to give America the benefit of the 
 ten per cent, advantage in efficiency which Prohibition 
 would bring. As prime minister he will not commit him- 
 self. If he did, Sir George Younger, the Coalition Whip, 
 would according to the dope dispensed by both the Wets 
 and the Drys round up his gang and leap gaily on Mr. 
 Lloyd George, leaving him bruised and jobless on the cold 
 pavement. 
 
 In short, the Temperance people don't dare to ask any- 
 thing of the present Parliament for fear that they may get 
 something which they don't want a Local Option bill, say, 
 which would permit them to start voting in the year 2020, 
 and oblige the Temperance people to poll seventy-five per 
 cent, of the registered votes in order to obtain any success. 
 Consequently they are devoting all their efforts to educating 
 the voters so that when the next Parliament is elected in six 
 months, or a year, or two years, it may contain men who 
 are more favorably disposed toward the suppression of the 
 Liquor Traffic. 
 
 The Temperance people have put out a large amount of 
 excellent propaganda since America went dry; but oddly 
 enough the most striking and useful piece of anti-drink prop- 
 aganda has just been published by the Board of Education 
 at the government's expense. This is called The Hygiene of 
 Food and Drink; a Syllabus of Lessons for Use in Schools, 
 and Notes for the Assistance of Teachers. It is published 
 by His Majesty's Stationery Office in London, is distributed 
 free to schools, and may be purchased for two pence. What
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 305 
 
 this pamphlet does to old John L. Barleycorn is little short 
 of criminal. It goes into the matter deeply in a cold, 
 detached, unemotional British way and proceeds to show 
 with great vigor, eclat, elan and bluntness that alcoholic 
 beverages result in (a) uncritical self-satisfaction of the 
 individual with his words and actions; (b) disregard of 
 occurrences and conditions normally requiring caution of 
 word and act; (c) trespass of rules and conventions pre- 
 viously respected; (d) impaired appreciation of the passage 
 of time; (e) talkativeness; and (f) an argumentative state 
 of mind ; quarrelsomeness. One might think, if he were a 
 careless thinker, that alcoholic drinks, outside of these few 
 bad features, were all right; but the pamphlet proceeds to 
 show that their use weakens the heart and the body, dimin- 
 ishes the power and capacity to work, lowers the resistance 
 of the body to disease, causes under-nourishment, causes loss 
 of bodily heat in cold weather and predisposes to sunstroke 
 in hot weather. 
 
 Having thus warmed gradually to its subject, the pam- 
 phlet figurativety removes its coat and vest, rolls up its 
 sleeves and as the saying goes hops to it. The United 
 States is a Prohibition country ; and in presenting the argu- 
 ments of the Board of Education my intention is not to 
 discourage home brewers in their pleasant pursuits or to 
 wean the perfumery-drinker from his secret vice, but to 
 show that though the working classes of England may be 
 Beer Worshipers, the children of the Beer Worshipers are 
 being educated to follow other gods. 
 
 "The man who drinks to excess," says this plain-spoken 
 government document, "even if he is never intoxicated, 
 degenerates in character and capacity. He becomes unfit 
 to work, and in many cases unemployable. Diligence and
 
 3o6 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 application become distasteful to him. Ill-health, and not 
 infrequently disease, follows such excess, and he becomes 
 pauperized and even a burden on his family, and to the State. 
 Even moderate drinking may, in certain circumstances, 
 impair the full development of a man's mental capacity. 
 Thus the drinker may suffer socially, physically, mentally 
 and morally. Further, a person who is intemperate in one 
 way is likely to be intemperate in other ways ; the loss of 
 self-control in one respect indicates a predisposition to moral 
 weakness in other directions also. Sexual immorality is 
 often dependent on alcoholic intemperance. Moreover, a 
 person who takes too much alcohol becomes unfit for a good 
 day's work, and is among the first to be discharged when 
 employment slackens. Intemperance, therefore, leads to 
 pauperism. The association of alcoholic excess with crime 
 is well known ; the effects produced in the home and family 
 life are disastrous. 
 
 "The children of drunken parents start life with many 
 disadvantages. With their physical health and energy below 
 the average, they lack the care, nourishment and protection 
 which all children require if they are to grow up well and 
 strong; they are accustomed to squalor, poverty, and a low 
 standard of comfort, and therefore often have no desire or 
 ambition to aspire to better things, and, being thus badly 
 equipped from the outset both in mind and body, their 
 chances of leading happy and useful lives are greatly les- 
 sened 
 
 "The evils of drinking too much are not limited to the 
 man himself and his family. He may also influence others 
 to follow his bad example, and the harm done by one man 
 may thus be wide-spread. One degraded or ill-conducted 
 worker will demoralize a whole family ; one disorderly fam- 
 ily inexplicably lowers the conduct of a whole street; the 
 low-caste life of a single street spreads its evil influence 
 
 over the entire quarter; and the slum quarter subtly 
 
 deteriorates the standard of health, morality and public spirit 
 of the whole city.
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 307 
 
 "We must therefore consider the effects of intemperate 
 habits on the nation as well as on the individual. Money 
 spent by the nation on drink must be reckoned as money 
 which is largely wasted, because there is no proper return 
 for it. The expenditure of four hundred million pounds or 
 more in a year is a drain on the resources of the nation and 
 the direct cause of not a little national poverty. 
 
 "While these facts demonstrate the grave evils which 
 may arise from the drinking of alcoholic beverages to excess 
 and it must be remembered that unsober nations have to 
 compete with sober nations they do not prove that the 
 moderate use of such articles always does harm, though it 
 is obvious that for many persons the only certain way of 
 avoiding all risk is to abstain altogether from the consump- 
 tion of alcohol. Some States have for this reason sought 
 to prohibit the consumption of alcohol; others have sought 
 to restrict its use by law or regulation temporarily or per- 
 manently. During the European war, restrictions were 
 introduced into most areas of Great Britain with the result 
 that there was a remarkable decline in convictions for drunk- 
 enness (by eighty-five per cent.) ; cases of delirium tre- 
 mens; deaths from alcoholism." 
 
 The thought that the statements in this booklet are to be 
 taught in the schools of England for years to come almost 
 makes the Liquor people actively ill. They were raising pro- 
 longed, wolf-like howls about it when I was in England. 
 Most of the Liquor people were blaming the booklet on 
 Pussyfoot Johnson. Some of them said that he wrote it 
 and all of them said that he inspired it. As a matter of 
 fact he had no more to do with it than he had to do with 
 inspiring or writing Down where the Wursburger Flows. 
 The Wets blame Pussyfoot Johnson for everything. If 
 England goes dry in ten years the Wets will blame Pussy- 
 foot, though he will be very little to blame. The Wets
 
 308 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 think that Pussyfoot is a sort of magician, with strange 
 occult powers, whereas he is nothing but a good-natured 
 plugger against liquor, with a lot of horse sense and bull- 
 headed nerve. The gambler at Monte Carlo almost inva- 
 riably plays a system ; and when he goes broke he blames the 
 system instead of the gambling. The Wet advocate in Eng- 
 land is always ready to blame his troubles on anything 
 except drink. 
 
 The Prohibition workers have excellent propaganda 
 pamphlets, though their lack of money causes them to get 
 them out in very restricted numbers. Their greatest diffi- 
 culty lies in reaching the drinking public. The Wets reach 
 the drinkers through advertisements in the pubs an avenue 
 which is practically closed to the Drys. 
 
 They have pamphlets showing the improvement in con- 
 ditions which has taken place under Prohibition in America. 
 One reproduces messages from the governors of twenty- 
 seven states in the United States. One the Governor of 
 New Mexico stated : "I believe that every decent Ameri- 
 can is in favor of the closing of the saloon, but when we go 
 further than the teachings of Christ and say that a man 
 shall not take a drink, we are adopting a law which is and 
 always will be a failure." Twenty-six governors had 
 sent enthusiastic messages in favor of Prohibition. 
 Booklets show how the hiring of non-drinkers in certain 
 plants has eliminated waste and inefficiency, produce figures 
 to show how alcohol increases accidents, give figures on 
 drunkenness, go into the economic side of the drink ques- 
 tion and show the tremendous yearly expenditure on drink, 
 give all the figures on the capital involved in the Liquor 
 Trade, give the results of Prohibition in countless cities, 
 states and industries in America, and jump suddenly and
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 309 
 
 heavily on the Wets who make false statements. The 
 Brewers' Journal quotes an authority as saying that "the 
 use of alcohol is beneficial if partaken of moderately, at 
 sufficient intervals, and adequately diluted." The United 
 Kingdom Alliance at once gets out a broadside declaring that 
 this statement does not occur in the quoted authority, calls 
 The Brewers' Journal a liar in a quiet way, and asks it to 
 put up or shut up. Lord Dewar returns from America and 
 quotes Henry Ford as saying that he has seen no benefits 
 from Prohibition, and that Prohibition has made millions 
 of lawbreakers. The United Kingdom Alliance at once 
 cables Mr. Ford and asks whether Lord Dewar had quoted 
 Mr. Ford correctly. Mr. Ford cables back "Statement 
 relative Mr. Ford is not correct." Thus Lord Dewar is 
 left, so to speak, holding the sack. The Drys get out all the 
 details concerning Lord Rowallen's estates seven thousand 
 houses with thirty thousand people in them, not a pub 
 allowed among them, and applications for houses pouring in 
 by every mail ; concerning Toxteth Park in Liverpool where 
 nearly thirty thousand people live without complaint in a 
 restricted area which allows no pubs; about Letchworth 
 Village, a garden city, where thousands of workmen live and 
 express themselves so strongly against pubs that none is 
 allowed ; of the mining community near Nottingham whose 
 inhabitants subscribed money to keep out pubs because they 
 owned their own houses; of the estates of Arthur Balfour, 
 where pubs aren't allowed though he himself is a strong 
 supporter of the Liquor Traffic ; of Usher's Whisky estates, 
 where pubs are not permitted; and of many other similar 
 examples. They remind you of the words of Mr. Justice 
 Bailhache who, after passing sentence on a man who had 
 confessed to a particularly revolting murder, said to the
 
 310 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 crowded court : "You have just witnessed the trial of a man 
 of good connection and of good upbringing. You have 
 seen to what a pass drink has brought him. I want to beg 
 you, with all the force I can put into my words, to take 
 warning by his example, and for God's sake to keep away 
 from drink." And the Dry pamphlets name over the ever- 
 growing list of the big bankers and shipbuilders and mer- 
 chants and manufacturers and labor leaders who are 
 insisting strongly that England must either go dry or have 
 Local Option. The Dry arguments, supported by facts and 
 figures, would more than fill this book, and most of them 
 are unanswerable by the Wets. 
 
 The man in the pub, however the genuine soaked-in- 
 the-malt, soused-in-the-suds Beer Worshiper hasn't a very 
 good idea what you're talking about when you talk Prohibi- 
 tion to him. Usually he laughs heartily at any mention of 
 Prohibition, conceiving such mention to be the height of 
 facetiousness or a reference to a delicious drollery like tun- 
 neling to China. Sometimes he takes it seriously and takes 
 his lips away from his stout long enough to curse Pussyfoot 
 Johnson fluently. My consular companion and I bought 
 a number of drinks for an out-of-work carpenter in 
 a pub about three hundred yards from Marble Arch. We 
 then broached the subject of Prohibition to him. He could 
 not get the word at all, though each of us bawled it into 
 his ear in turn. He didn't know what it meant The only 
 Pro he knew anything about was Pro-German. However, 
 our efforts got him started. He had had his drink, he said, 
 ever since he was able to stand up at the bar and take his 
 own. Some drinkers, now, make a great mistake, because 
 they go without all the week and then hog it down on Sat- 
 urday. He had never made that error. He always got his
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 311 
 
 regularly five or six times a day. He needed a shot of beer 
 at ten-thirty every day, and now that the pubs weren't open 
 until noon, he never felt right in the morning. These new, 
 outlandish closing hours, he observed, were awful on the 
 bus drivers and the other early workers, who suffered 
 keenly unless they could get an early-morning drink. He 
 brooded over this to such an extent that he began to cry, so 
 we came away and left him. 
 
 We interviewed scores of working men on Prohibition, 
 and out of the number we found only one who had a good 
 or a thoughtful word to say for it. That one man said that 
 he'd just as soon it would come as not : if it came he might 
 be able to save money a little faster and get over to Canada 
 sooner, where a feller had a chance. The rest confined 
 themselves to complaining bitterly because of the restricted 
 hours for selling liquor, and to cursing the weakness of the 
 beer. Before the war it was five per cent alcohol, during 
 the war it was three per cent., and at present it is four per 
 cent, alcohol. One man advanced the clever theory that 
 Germany had actually won the war because Germany sells 
 beer at all hours, whereas England only sells it for five 
 hours a day. As yet the English Beer Worshiper isn't 
 educated on the subject of drink. 
 
 An English club-man gave me a good average Wet 
 English talk when I asked him about Prohibition. "What 
 I mean," said he the average Englishman is troubled with 
 the what-I-mean affectation just at present : he likes to start 
 a new sentence with what-I-mean even though nothing with 
 any meaning at all has preceded the remark "What I 
 mean, it's a terrible thing for a rich country like America to 
 inflict such a horrible thing on the rest of the world for 
 money, you know. What I mean, the general effect of the 
 idea is deplorable, what?"
 
 312 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 "Just what has this, if true, got to do with Prohibition ?" 
 I asked. 
 
 "Look here, old chap," he said, "what I mean, this John- 
 son intervention of yours is an idealistic humanitarian inter- 
 vention and all that sort of rot, what ? for the good of man- 
 kind, isn't that so, old chap? Now don't be angry, you 
 know ; but you American chaps are so touchy, what I mean, 
 you hate criticism and all that sort of thing; but really, old 
 fellow, you won't mind this, will you now, what?" 
 
 "Go as slowly as possible, and don't mind me," I begged. 
 
 "What I mean," he continued firmly, "you pretend to be 
 idealists, you know, but you don't come to us with clean 
 hands. You say that whisky is poison, and then you turn 
 around and perform your good deeds for all humanity by 
 sending this poison out of your country and into other coun- 
 tries, and by taking payment and profit on it. What I 
 mean, if it wrecks every home it enters, you should pour it 
 down the drain and not send it to us, as you do, old chap. 
 What? What I mean, how can you expect us to enthuse 
 over Prohibition if it works that way with you?" 
 
 "Do I understand you to say," I asked, "that the Anti- 
 Saloon League is sending bad whisky to England ?" 
 
 "Oh, my dear chap ; no, no !" he said. "No, no ! What 
 I mean, America sends it, and also sends Johnson, what? 
 It won't do, old fellow: really, you know, it won't wash, 
 what I mean." 
 
 Now it was no use to carry this conversation to greater 
 lengths. Early in 1920 there were shipments of bad Ameri- 
 can whisky to England. These shipments were stopped in a 
 very short time. Yet great numbers of educated Englishmen 
 have somehow succeeded in twisting this fact firmly into 
 their heads, and constantly use it as an argument as to why
 
 THE BEER WORSHIPERS 313 
 
 England should scorn and spurn the Prohibition movement. 
 It does no good to shriek and tear out handfuls of hair; for 
 the Englishman at once becomes very superior and remarks : 
 "What I mean, you know, you Americans do so resent a 
 little criticism." 
 
 The Scotch Temperance leaders say that English work- 
 men are so sodden with beer that the country will never vote 
 itself dry. The Temperance people in the Strength of Bri- 
 tain Movement say that if England depends on Local Option 
 to go dry, it will be a fifty-year task. Pussyfoot Johnson, 
 who is a good Prohibition dopester, predicts a Dry England 
 by 1930. 
 
 And here is what two big Englishmen say : 
 Lord Leverhulme, a millionaire soap manufacturer, says : 
 "One of the results of prohibition is that America is now 
 saving four hundred million pounds a year through Prohibi- 
 tion. England owes America about two billion pounds, and 
 if we were to save on our drink bill at the rate America is 
 doing we should pay off our debt in five years. Now the 
 lender of money is saving millions, and we are spending it. 
 This policy is the reverse of what it should be. England's 
 position is very much like that of a young man with a heavy 
 mortgage on his home. He should cut down all unnecessary 
 waste and concentrate upon production, with no waste. 
 
 "While I should prefer that alcohol should be obtainable, 
 and that through strength of will, rather than by strength of 
 law, it should not be consumed, I believe the policy of going 
 dry in America means that in the world's race America has 
 thrown away a heavy weight, and we, who are already 
 behind in the race, are adding to our weight." 
 
 Sir James Hope Simpson, Director and General Manager 
 of the Bank of Liverpool and Martins, Ltd., has recently
 
 314 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 returned to England from a visit to America. He was 
 amazed by the benefits which Prohibition had brought. "I 
 was impressed above all," he said, "by the enormous indus- 
 trial advantage which the Americans have already begun to 
 reap from their policy of the prohibition of drink. In my 
 judgment, Prohibition has made America the most formid- 
 able industrial competitor that we have in the world." 
 
 The prime minister of England has said that if America 
 stays and really stays dry until 1930, England will have 
 to go dry as well. He knows that his country can not com- 
 pete with a more efficient dry America in the markets of the 
 world. The big business men of England are rapidly wak- 
 ing up to the same fact. It might take the Beer Worshipers 
 of England fifty years to vote themselves dry. If America 
 stays dry, however, the Beer Worshipers will never be 
 forced to suffer from an epidemic of writer's cramp from 
 voting on that question; and the New Yorkers who lost 
 money betting that Prohibition would never come can recoup 
 their losses by putting their money on Lloyd George's dope 
 sheet for the Prohibition sweepstakes.
 
 Scotland for Scotch 
 
 THE student of Scotch whisky and of the actions and 
 reactions of Scotch whisky taken in conjunction with the 
 Scotch people is somewhat handicapped by the haziness of 
 early Scotch history, which is as muddled and messy as 
 though it had been written by a lowland Scotchman laden 
 internally with about three quarts of that potable spirit 
 known as Highland malt. 
 
 In the extreme background of the earliest reliable facts 
 which can be discovered concerning Scotland, one finds 
 rumors of a fluid known as usquebaugh or water of life 
 usquebaugh or Uisgebcatha being the Celtic word which was 
 later contracted to whisky by persons who were more suc- 
 cessful at drinking than at pronouncing. Thus, one finds 
 the Irish coming over to Scotland and fighting with the 
 Scots away back in the dawn of Scotch history. The Irish 
 brought their own usquebaugh with them, and the Scotch 
 had their own private blends. When they weren't hitting 
 the usquebaugh, as the phrase goes, they were hitting each 
 other, and vice versa. At this late date the historian is 
 unable to determine with any accuracy whether they fought 
 because they had been drinking usquebaugh, or whether they 
 drank usquebaugh to quench the thirst which resulted from 
 the fighting. 
 
 315
 
 316 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Back of that the investigator loses himself in the haze. 
 There are very ancient stones in Ogam, Scotland, bearing 
 inscriptions which yield no sense in any known Indo-Euro- 
 pean language ; but a great many of the leading Scotch con- 
 troversialists, accustomed by training and instinct to find 
 controversies in stones, controversies in running brooks 
 and controversies in everything, claim that these unde- 
 cipherable inscriptions are recipes for making what is tech- 
 nically known among whisky experts as a big whisky with 
 a full peaty flavor. 
 
 One Scotch controversialist, whose revenue is partly 
 derived from a flourishing distillery, professed to have a 
 large amount of inside information concerning the tonic 
 qualities of Scotch whisky on the early inhabitants of his 
 country; and he insisted on taking me to his Glasgow 
 club where he could get at a pencil and paper and a private 
 bottle of a fine old Islay malt whisky with an ethereal bou- 
 quet strong enough to bring tears to the eyes of an ammonia- 
 maker. At his club he demonstrated by diagrams, dates and 
 drinks how Scotch whisky had changed the entire history 
 of Scotland. 
 
 He claimed I answer for none of his claims because it 
 is my belief that controversialists are apt to claim everything 
 in sight, especially if they are in danger of losing money 
 he claimed that whisky was invented by the Picts, who were 
 a runty, tough, hardy race of people concerning whom 
 nobody knows much of anything except that they occupied 
 the Highlands of Scotland for many centuries. He claimed 
 that the reason why the Picts were originally able to whip 
 double their weight in wildcats and three times their weight 
 in Romans and Scotchmen was because they drank vast 
 quantities of a home-distilled brand of whisky of sufficient
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 317 
 
 potency to remove the paint from a battle-ship. Early in 
 the ninth century, he claimed, gradually freeing the kinks 
 from his claimer and making it work with more fluency, the 
 Scandinavian sea rovers landed in Scotland, seized a little 
 rich land along the shores and started in to do some farming, 
 varying the monotony by their favorite indoor and outdoor 
 sport of beer-drinking. The Picts, coming down from their 
 highland fastnesses full to the brim of whisky and desire to 
 knock the eye-teeth of the Scandinavians out through their 
 ears, saw the passionate delight which the Scandinavians 
 took in their beer-drinking and began to wonder how the 
 beer tasted. They accordingly submerged their differences 
 and fraternized with the Scandinavians. 
 
 When they recovered from their headaches they secured 
 the recipe for making beer from the Scandinavians and took 
 it back home with them. It became fashionable among the 
 Picts to drink beer. 
 
 As a result, the remarkable strength and cunning which 
 the Picts had developed because of their long and single- 
 minded devotion to whisky was diffused and weakened. 
 Being naturally small in stature, they became much inferior 
 to the Scotchmen, who were fine large men with knobby 
 knees. When, therefore, they were attacked in the year 860 
 by Kenneth MacAlpine of Kintyre, King of the Dalriad 
 Scots of Argyll, the Picts were subjugated for the first time. 
 
 This energetic and comprehensive claimer further 
 claimed that the Picts, having been thus weaned from 
 whisky, gradually became extinct. Their conquerors and 
 successors, the Scotch, divided their attention between 
 whisky and ale for many years, and consequently failed to 
 maintain those mental and physical heights to which they 
 might have won had they specialized on whisky.
 
 318 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 In the- twelfth century, for example, every religious 
 house and every barony in Scotland had at least one brew- 
 ery. Things didn't go well for Scotland. Then, according 
 to the claims of this fluent controversialist, the Scotch began 
 to give up ale and beer and devote their finest efforts to the 
 consumption of Scotch whisky. "What," demanded the 
 controversialist pregnantly, "what has been the result?" He 
 threw a prehensile upper lip over his glass of Islay, closed 
 his eyes, tossed down half its contents, shuddered slightly, 
 and then answered himself. "For many years," said he, 
 "Scotch whisky has been the national drink of Scotland. 
 Aye, the national drink. And who is it that's at the head 
 of English banks and English businesses, and English fac- 
 tories to-day? The Scotch! Aye! Who is it that's at the 
 head of the big projects in England's colonies? The Scotch ! 
 Aye, the Scotch, God bless 'em ! That's what Scotch whisk) 1 
 has done for Scotland! Give the Scotch enough Scotch 
 whisky and they'll rule the world!" He hiccupped loudly, 
 and gazed affectionately at the bottle which had so recently 
 held a quart of Islay with a flavor reminiscent of a fire in 
 a peat stack. 
 
 In one respect at least the controversialist was correct. 
 The Scotch, like the English, have been accustomed to dally 
 with alcoholic beverages with the utmost freedom ever since 
 the dawn of Scottish history; and the national drink of 
 Scotland is whisky, just as the national drink of England is 
 beer. More whisky is drunk per capita in Scotland than in 
 any other country in the world. The English are determined 
 and efficient drinkers, and the Englishman all over the world 
 is noted for his attachment to whisky-and-soda. Yet the 
 English, per capita, drink about one-half as much as do the 
 Scotch. This works out year after year in a persistent
 
 The Wets of Scotland warn the people of the horrors of Prohibition.
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 319 
 
 manner. In 1891 the per capita consumption of spirits in 
 England and Wales was nine-tenths of a gallon and in Scot- 
 land it was one gallon and eight-tenths. In 1900 Old Man 
 Per Capita consumed just short of one gallon in England, 
 while in Scotland he sucked up just short of two gallons. 
 In 1914 the figures for England showed two-thirds of a 
 gallon consumed per capita; and one and one-third gallons 
 was the corresponding figure for Scotland. There are one 
 hundred and twelve distilleries doing a rushing business in 
 Scotland as against seven distilleries in England. During 
 1919 the Scotch lapped up 3,282,000 imperial proof gallons 
 of whisky and spent over eighteen million pounds or sixty 
 million dollars at the normal rate of exchange in so doing. 
 Two Scotchmen who have had even the slightest experience 
 in drinking sit down at a table and split a quart of Scotch 
 whisky with the same insouciance with which two frugal 
 Americans, in the old days, might have split a bottle of beer. 
 The imperial proof gallon, with which one is constantly 
 coming in contact when moving in select British alcoholic 
 circles, should be explained at this juncture. An American 
 gallon contains seven-tenths as much liquid as does an impe- 
 rial gallon. A proof gallon is the basis of taxation of spirits 
 in the United Kingdom ; and a proof gallon of whisky con- 
 tains fifty-seven per cent, by volume of absolute alcohol. All 
 spirits sold in the United Kingdom must be, by order of the 
 Liquor Control Board, thirty per cent, under proof. This is 
 a war measure. To change one hundred gallons of proof 
 whisky into whisky that is thirty per cent, under proof, one 
 adds 43.9 gallons of water getting 142.8 gallons because 
 of the peculiar contraction of bulk which takes place when 
 alcohol and water are mixed. The alcoholic strength of a 
 thirty per cent, under proof whisky is forty per cent
 
 320 ;WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 The majority of Scotch drinkers are unable to explain 
 the proof gallon or the alcoholic content of a thirty per cent, 
 under proof whisky. They attempt it frequently and get 
 themselves badly twisted, and occasionally break down and 
 cry over the subject, especially after dallying with a few 
 glasses of it. Every Scotch whisky-drinker, however, 
 assures the investigator that a thirty per cent, under proof 
 whisky is so weak that it has about as much effect on the 
 drinker as goat's milk. He will make this assertion with all 
 solemnity at moments when the bar is revolving before him 
 in a slow and stately manner as a result of the action of 
 thirty per cent, under proof whisky on his eyes. There have 
 been a number of canards circulated concerning the weak- 
 ness of thirty per cent, under proof whisky; but after con- 
 stant experimenting with gentlemen who kindly offered me 
 their services for experimental purposes, I can state confi- 
 dently that ten quick drinks of thirty per cent, under proof 
 whisky will usually cause the drinker to pick a fight with the 
 nearest trolley-car or compose himself for slumber in any 
 convenient gutter. 
 
 As a result of their persistent tampering with hard 
 liquor, the Scotch are able to produce some very finished 
 specimens of the souse family. Saturday night, in any 
 Scotch city or town, sees more whole-hearted ossification 
 and spifflication than it sees anywhere else. There is, 
 indeed, a belief in many parts of Scotland that Scotch water 
 has an evil effect on the teeth; and strangers are urged 
 warningly to "look what it does to iron." The Scotch also 
 believe that water rusts and eats away the veins and the 
 arteries and the internal organs, while whisky purifies and 
 toughens and preserves them. If this is so, there are some 
 Scotchmen who ought to live to be a million years old.
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 321 
 
 Down in England there is constant talk of this Scotch 
 enthusiasm for hard liquor, and one is urged if he thinks 
 that the English are sodden with drink to go on up to 
 Scotland and look 'em over. The Scotch readily admit that 
 there are some gorgeous souses among their number; but 
 they maintain heatedly that England is really more alcoholic 
 than Scotland. The English, they say, suck away at their 
 beer every day and are sodden with it; whereas the Scotch 
 go out two or three nights a week, or on Saturday night, 
 and get themselves lit up like a summer hotel on the Fourth 
 of July, and then don't touch the stuff again for several 
 days. This, of course, is one of the controversial subjects 
 with which the Scotch love to toy. The English say that 
 they are not sodden, but that the Scotch are sodden: the 
 Scotch say that for soddenness the English are without 
 peers. It is a case of sodden, sodden, who's got the sodden, 
 so to speak 
 
 "Glasgow," said Englishman after Englishman to me. 
 "is the drunkennest city in Scotland. Go up to Glasgow on 
 a Saturday night and walk up and down Argyle Street and 
 you'll see some sights !" 
 
 So I went up to Glasgow, which the Scotch call Glesca ; 
 and I walked up and down Argyle Street on a Saturday 
 night. I also walked up and down Sauchiehall Street 
 which is pronounced Soaky-all, probably in honor of all the 
 soaks that do their soaking there and thereabouts and I 
 took a daunder down Sautmarket and dawdled through 
 Cowcaddens and Bridgeton, which are about as shimmy 
 slums as ever I hope to see. I went through these places on 
 Saturday night and Sunday night and holiday nights and 
 ordinary week-day nights. I went through them with 
 Scotch newspaper men, and I went through them with a
 
 322 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 young woman, and I went through them with two American 
 officers from the Army of Occupation in Germany, and I 
 went through them alone ; and it was my opinion after each 
 trip and after all the trips together that the people who call 
 Glasgow the drunkennest city in Scotland have expressed 
 the situation neatly but sketchily, whereas those who call 
 Glasgow the drunkennest city in the world have, to quote 
 the rude patois of Manhattan Island, said a mouthful. 
 
 The Scotch, of course, wax controversial over the ques- 
 tion. The Glasgow Scotchmen say that there is a lot of 
 drunkenness in the city too much by far; but that there is 
 a more virulent and concentrated form of drunkenness in the 
 adjacent city of Greenock, the manufacturing and shipbuild- 
 ing center whence came Jamie Watt, who made steam 
 famous. The Greenock Scotchmen smile dourly and say 
 that Glasgow has the bonniest drunks aye! and that Edin- 
 burgh runs Glasgow a close second. The Glasgow citizens 
 also claim that there is more misery from drink in Edin- 
 burgh than in Glasgow. The Edinburgh citizens deny it 
 indignantly, and award the palm for all-round tipsiness to 
 Glasgow. 
 
 During the first sixteen weeks of 1920, the number of 
 persons who were convicted of, or who forfeited pledges 
 in Glasgow for offenses involving drunkenness, was 6,077 
 males and 1,344 females or a total of 7,421 hard-boiled 
 souses in less than one-third of a year. This number was 
 smaller than during a pre-war year because certain war- 
 time restrictions still applied; but it was very much larger 
 than in 1918 and 1919, when Scotland's liquor supply was 
 greatly restricted at the source. For the corresponding 
 period in 1918 there were only 1,779 convicted drunks of 
 both sexes in Glasgow; and in 1919 there were only 1,426
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 323 
 
 of them during the first sixteen weeks of the year. As the 
 war-time restrictions were removed, the drunk came into 
 its own again with a loud wet splash. 
 
 The first thirty-two weeks of 1920 showed 17,177 con- 
 victions for drunkenness in Glasgow, or one conviction for 
 every twenty-three men over twenty-one years of age. 
 When a Glasgow citizen of the wet persuasion begins to 
 wave his arms wildly and deny that Scotchmen are particu- 
 larly heavy drinkers, it is easy to give him the^gentle razz by 
 reminding him that Glasgow alone spends as much on drink 
 every week as would build one hundred and eighty cottages 
 at seven hundred and fifty pounds per cottage. 
 
 It should be understood that the number of persons con- 
 victed for offenses involving drunkenness has no bearing at 
 all on the number of persons who are drunk. I have never 
 had any Scotchman explain to me what one must do in addi- 
 tion to being drunk in order to be arrested for drunkenness 
 in Glasgow ; but it is my impression that one can sop up all 
 the whisky one may be able to hold and roll around in the 
 streets and howl and yell and cuss and finally be dragged 
 home by friends, and the police will look on with a benignant 
 and imperturbable eye so long as one doesn't attempt to 
 murder a cab-driver or set fire to a house or otherwise 
 become a trifle rough in one's actions. 
 
 On a Thursday night I walked through the crowded 
 mobs of Argyle Street, from one end to the other and back 
 again. During the walk I saw only five policemen, four in 
 pairs and one alone. There were literally hundreds of 
 drunks. They weren't men that were slightly under the 
 influence of liquor: they were in that condition which is 
 vulgarly known as stewed to the ears. They were clinging 
 to doorways and tumbling up against the passers-by and
 
 324 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 falling off the sidewalks into the gutters and supporting 
 each other in abortive attempts to proceed in some definite 
 direction which could neither be determined by a casual 
 observer nor by a scientist equipped with instruments for 
 plotting the curve of their footsteps. I saw two drunks, 
 dragging between them a third drunker drunk, stagger 
 crazily under the very nose of a lone policeman. He gazed 
 at them broodingly; and as they staggered onward he 
 wearily turned his eyes away in search of more interesting 
 matters. 
 
 On another night I saw two men with monumental jags 
 pitch out of a doorway just where Argyle Street runs under 
 the Central Railway Station, and where the crowds are so 
 thick between eight and ten o'clock every night that one 
 must use force in order to get through. They were fighting 
 industriously. They plunged off the curb ; and their impetus 
 carried them to the street-car tracks. The wheels of a 
 double-deck tram passed a fraction of an inch from the head 
 of one of them, and after it had passed a stranger rolled him 
 back from the car-tracks into the gutter. 
 
 I saw a man and a woman, fighting drunk, start slugging 
 each other with their fists in the middle of Main Street in 
 the Bridgeton section of Glasgow. The woman seemed to 
 be getting the best of it when another man came running 
 up and hit her under the left ear; so that her attack, in a 
 manner of speaking, broke down. I saw scores of drunken 
 women, some of them with their babies wrapped in their 
 shawls in the peculiarly Scotch manner; and a number of 
 drunken girls about seventeen or eighteen years old. 
 
 And out of all the nights that I walked the streets of 
 Glasgow, I saw not one arrest for drunkenness. Therefore 
 I say that the number of persons convicted for drunkenness
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 325 
 
 has no bearing on the number of persons who are drunk. 
 Certainly and though I believe my estimate to be unneces- 
 sarily conservative, the Wets will call me seventeen sorts of 
 liar for the statement certainly there are more than one 
 hundred unarrested drunks in Glasgow for each one that is 
 arrested. 
 
 I have witnessed a large number of souse-parties, rang- 
 ing from the hectic celebrations in college towns after big 
 football victories to the fireworks which resulted when two 
 thousand American soldiers were turned loose to lap up 
 Japanese Scotch whisky in Hakodate, the fishing metropolis 
 of Northern Japan ; but never have I seen more degrading, 
 depressing, sickening drunkenness than I saw in one night 
 in the city of Glasgow. 
 
 Glasgow's largest and most influential newspaper, shortly 
 before the 1920 elections, stated editorially that for the 
 people to vote to retain public-houses "would mean that for 
 at least three years more we should witness that excess of 
 drunkenness on our streets which is an index to the misery 
 of thousands of women and children and to an amount of 
 self-inflicted inefficiency in industrial life which shames our 
 boasted civilization." This newspaper, by the way, was the 
 only influential paper in all Scotland and England too, for 
 that matter which came out flat-footed in favor of Prohi- 
 bition. The English newspapers took it to task severely for 
 its attitude; and one staunch and representative English 
 journal referred frequently to the editorial stand of the Glas- 
 gow paper as "that unedifying spectacle" and spoke of the 
 anti-Prohibitionists as "the forces of common sense and 
 decency," and of the Prohibitionists as "bigoted and wrong- 
 headed people working in a bad cause." 
 
 The slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh, which produce
 
 326 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 by far the largest percentage of Scotch souses, are the equals 
 of any slums in the world. The slum districts, in many 
 instances, are composed of houses which were old when 
 Mary Queen of Scots was complaining about the Scotch 
 climate and getting ready to be beheaded. From the old 
 town of Edinburgh down to the turreted walls of Holyrood 
 Palace runs a straight steep street about a third of a mile in 
 length known as the Canongate. The Canongate, and the 
 narrow alley-ways and courtyards and holes-in-the-wall 
 which lead from it alleys and holes known in Scotland as 
 wynds and closes make up the principal slum district of 
 Edinburgh. The houses which abut on the Canongate and 
 its dark offshoots are towering buildings of dingy gray 
 stone, eight, ten, twelve and even fourteen stories high.* 
 These buildings are known as lands; and in the old days 
 they were inhabited by Scotland's best. Poets, statesmen, 
 scholars, clergymen, philosophers and belles of the Assembly 
 Rooms passed one another daily on their narrow staircases. 
 Here lived the most powerful and famous of the Scotch 
 nobility the Dukes of Queensberry and Hamilton, the 
 Marquis of Argyll, the Earls of Dalhousie, Moray, Breadal- 
 bane, Haddington, Panmure the list is long and impressive. 
 John Knox's house adjoins it, and Blackfriars Street, for- 
 merly Blackfriars Wynd, on which were built the homes of 
 cardinals, archbishops, princes and above all the princely 
 house of St. Qair, Earls of Orkney and Rosslyn. When 
 Earl William headed this family, the Scotch records show, 
 his lady never rode out of Blackfriars Wynd and down the 
 
 *Various Scotch correspondents have sneered at me viciously for 
 stating that Edinburgh has fourteen-storey lands. They told me flatly 
 that I was a liar. They had never counted them, however; and I had. 
 Sevenson speaks of seventeen-storey Edinburgh lands; but I couldn't 
 find them.
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 327 
 
 Canongate but she was accompanied by two hundred belted 
 knights; and when she came home late at night, she didn't 
 come in the dark ; for eighty pages, all of noble birth, held 
 torches on either side. She was attended by seventy-five 
 gentlewomen, of whom fifty-three were daughters of noble- 
 men, all clothed in velvets and silks, with chains of gold .... 
 
 To-day the lands of the Canongate are the abodes of 
 misery. Six, eight, ten and even more people huddle in 
 dark, squalid, filthy cubicles of rooms. The spare money 
 of the families or rather, the money which should be spent 
 on decent clothes and decent food is spent on whisky. The 
 children who dart in and out of the wynds and closes have 
 neither shoes nor stockings in many instances, even in the 
 raw and biting weather of a late Scotch autumn; and their 
 clothes are of the meanest and sleaziest materials, and often 
 ragged to boot. 
 
 Doctor Littlejohn, Medical Officer of Health for Edin- 
 burgh at a time when more than five million dollars was 
 spent on housing and in clearing away the haunts of poverty 
 and wretchedness, made the following statement: "The 
 greatest obstacle to the improvement of the homes of the 
 working classes has been intemperance, leading to improvi- 
 dence and poverty. Wherever a home is found in a wretched 
 condition, out of repair and unwholesome owing to squalor 
 and filth, in ninety-nine out of a hundred the cause is the 
 use of alcoholic liquors. Until the habits of the working 
 classes undergo alteration, it is impossible to expect that 
 they will be decently housed. The temptations by which 
 they are surrounded in the shape of spirit shops are such 
 that good resolutions are easily broken down, and the efforts 
 of social reformers are completely frustrated. Our great 
 scheme of city improvement has been rendered almost
 
 328 .WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 nugatory, so far as the housing of the poorer classes is con- 
 cerned, by the prevalence of intemperance." 
 
 The last time I passed Blackfriars Street, out of which 
 used to ride the lady of the house of St. Clair with her two 
 hundred belted knights, there were three gray-haired Scotch 
 women, drunk, staggering down it arm in arm through a 
 cold rain. 
 
 One of the great causes of infant mortality in Scotland 
 and England is what the British call "overlaying." A 
 mother, stupefied by liquor, rolls over on her baby in her 
 sleep, and the baby strangles. That is "overlaying." In 
 the last pre-war year 1,226 babies were killed by "overlay- 
 ing." America has never known this form of child-killing; 
 but it is common in Scotland. 
 
 The public-houses of Scotland are more like the bar- 
 rooms of America than the pubs of England. The women 
 don't bulge up to the bar, as they do in England; and in 
 more refined drinking circles there is a pronounced belief 
 that when a woman wants a drink, she should get it as incon- 
 spicuously as possible. Consequently there is a back room 
 in most Scotch pubs, and the women steer for the back 
 rooms. In the slum districts, however like the Canongate 
 in Edinburgh, for example the women go into the bar with 
 the men. I dropped into one bar on the Canongate in 
 the pursuit of knowledge, of course and when the bar- 
 keeper slipped me a jolt of Glenlivet, he had to pass it over 
 the head of six lady patrons who were roasting the weakness 
 of thirty per cent, under proof whisky with such venom that 
 one might have thought they had to drink a gallon apiece 
 in order to get a glow. 
 
 One marked difference between the bars of Scotland and 
 the bars that America knew lies in the manner of dispensing
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 329 
 
 whisky. In a Scotch bar one never sees a bottle probably 
 because the premises would soon be so cluttered up with 
 bottles that there would be no room for anything else. In 
 a Scotch bar all the whisky is draught whisky. The whisky 
 casks usually hang high above the bar and are connected 
 with the bar by pipes ; so when a cluster of boon companions 
 drifts in and calls for mugs of Scotch, the barman simply 
 turns a spigot and lets it run. 
 
 Once a man is soused and shows it, the doors of all pubs 
 are closed to him until he has lost his jag. The Scotch pubs 
 and the English pubs as well are very strict on this point: 
 for the publican who ignores it stands an excellent chance of 
 losing his license. When, therefore, the old prune-juice 
 reaches a drinker's brain and he begins to make noisy 
 announcement that he can lick each or all of his fellow- 
 drinkers, he finds himself seized by the back of the collar 
 and the slack of the pants and hurled out on the cold bricks 
 with such force as to telescope or pulverize several of them. 
 
 I do not wish to convey the impression that everybody 
 who walks the streets of Glasgow and Edinburgh and other 
 Scotch cities on Saturday night is burdened with a skinful 
 of hard liquor. The population of Glasgow, for example, i> 
 one million; and the percentage of that number which is 
 drunk on any given night is very small. Even on Hog- 
 manie, which is the Scotch name for New Year's Eve, when 
 thousands of drunken citizens of Glasgow congregate in the 
 Cross, where the Trongate and the Gallowgate converge, and 
 pepper the statue of King William III with empty bottles, 
 the percentage of drunks to the rest of the population is 
 small. None the less, I repeat that Glasgow is the drunk- 
 ennest city in the world, and that there are several other 
 Scotch cities which crowd it close for premier honors.
 
 330 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Conditions of this sort are the ones that the people of 
 Scotland fought in the elections of November, 1920, and 
 the ones that they have been fighting since 1853, when the 
 State of Maine passed the first Local Option law. In 1853 
 the people of England and Scotland began to fight for a 
 Local Option law of their own, based on the Maine law, 
 which should give them the right to express an opinion as 
 to whether or not the community should be saddled with 
 the public-house. England is still fighting, and is almost as 
 far from gaining her objective as she was in 1853. Scotland, 
 however, was luckier. On August 13, 1913, the Temper- 
 ance (Scotland) Act was passed into law by Parliament, 
 after a fight on the part of the Scotch Temperance workers 
 which had lasted for sixty years. The Liquor Interests, 
 however, fought nearly as hard; and before the Act was 
 passed they had slipped so many knives into it and forced 
 so many compromises on the Temperance advocates that it 
 was one of the weakest, palest, sickliest Temperance acts 
 that ever caused a brewer to burst into hilarious and derisive 
 laughter. 
 
 The Act, for example, gave to the people of Scotland 
 the right of Local Option at the end of seven years. Though 
 the Act became a law in August, 1913, the people of Scotland 
 couldn't vote on the question involved in the law until 
 November, 1920. Thus the brewers and the distillers and 
 the public-house owners had seven years of grace in which 
 to make their fortunes if they had not already done so, or 
 to change their occupations if they were sufficiently foolish 
 to think that the Act would ever result in putting any 
 barkeepers or distillers or brewers out of business. 
 
 The Act provided that when voting-time finally arrived, 
 no voting area could vote itself no license by a bare majority.
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 331 
 
 Unless fifty-five per cent, of the voters voted for no license, 
 the area remained wet Moreover, the fifty-five per cent, 
 must represent at least thirty- five per cent, of the total num- 
 ber of electors in the voting area. In other words, if a bare 
 majority of a district voted to make the district dry, the dis- 
 trict remained wet in spite of their wishes. This very thing 
 happened repeatedly in the 1920 elections. If the Wet-and- 
 Dry portions of the election had been settled by a majority 
 vote, twice as many areas would have gone dry as actually 
 went In using the word "dry," I am using it in the Scotch 
 sense, which allows more latitude than the American inter- 
 pretation. 
 
 The Act also provided that towns with populations less 
 than twenty-five thousand should vote as a unit; but that 
 larger towns should vote by wards, and that no ward should 
 be affected by the votes in other wards. This situation can 
 be better realized if one imagines New York voting for 
 Prohibition measures under such an act. If most of New 
 York were to vote itself dry by large majorities, but if a few 
 districts refused to do so, those few districts would be 
 unaffected by the majority vote and would continue to dis- 
 pense liquor as before. Not only would they dispense 
 liquor as before, but they would also dispense it to most of 
 the rum-hounds from all the districts which had gone dry. 
 Now, an optimistic Prohibitionist may regard such a state 
 of affairs as effectively prohibitive ; but the most active bar- 
 flies of America would regard a city with one wet ward as a 
 haven of refuge and a Paradise of Golden Opportunity. 
 
 Finally the Temperance (Scotland) Act is so framed 
 that when a voting area goes no-license, the licensing of 
 inns, hotels and restaurants for the sale of drink is not 
 affected ; and there are hundreds of thousands of people in
 
 332 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 America those, by the way, who are raving the loudest 
 against Prohibition who would consider that a city whose 
 inns, hotels and restaurants could sell spirituous liquors was 
 as wet as, if not wetter than, the Atlantic Ocean. 
 
 This Act, it must be understood, is not the act which 
 the Prohibitionists and the Temperance workers wanted. 
 They wanted a very much stronger act one which would 
 close the distilleries and hit the traveler and the wealthy 
 citizens the same brutal wallop that it would hit the work- 
 ing man. They couldn't get it, however. Even after the 
 Act had been passed into law in 1913, the Liquor Interests 
 claimed that it was a dead law because of the handicaps 
 which they had caused to be imposed on the Temperance 
 workers. It is not a dead law, though ; and it has frightened 
 the Scotch distillers and brewers and the Liquor Trade of 
 the United Kingdom generally into a series of violent con- 
 vulsions. 
 
 The so-called Prohibition fight in Scotland I say so- 
 called because the fight was not on Prohibition as America 
 understands it, but on the evils of the public-house and the 
 question of licensing or not licensing public-houses was 
 waged on the Dry side by the Scottish Permissive Bill and 
 Temperance Association and by the National Citizens' 
 Council. The Scottish Permissive Bill and Temperance 
 Association is the association which struggled for sixty 
 years to gain for the people of Scotland the right to vote 
 on the sale of liquor in the districts in which they live. It 
 is the organization which persuaded Pussyfoot Johnson to 
 come to Scotland to help the Dry campaign by telling 
 Scotchmen about the good things that Prohibition had done 
 for America. The National Citizens Council is a compara- 
 tively new organization formed, according to its officials.
 
 
 
 n 
 o 
 
 : 
 
 -r 
 
 v 
 
 | 
 
 r 
 Z 
 
 
 o 
 
 1H
 
 4 'DRY' AMERICA HAS RAISED THE 
 
 PRICE OF SUGAR TO ITS PRESENT 
 
 HIGH FIGURE 
 
 because of her enormous increase in the 
 
 use of so-called "temperance" drinks 
 
 and candies. 
 
 IF THERE IS PROHIBITION 
 IN THIS COUNTRY 
 
 THE PRICE WILL RISE 
 
 and with many other household 
 
 necessaries will become a luxury 
 
 only for the rich. 
 
 VT "NO CHANGE" 
 
 The inscription on the paper bags in which all the grocery stores of 
 Scotland sent out their supplies during the Prohibition campaign.
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 333 
 
 "on the widest basis of citizenship for the purpose of edu- 
 cating the public as to its rights and duties with regard to 
 the new Act." Among the officials of the National Citizens 
 Council are such representative Scotchmen as Lord Rowal- 
 lan, a leading Scottish peer; Sir Joseph Maclay, the shipping 
 controller ; William Graham, a Labor member of Parliament 
 from Edinburg; Sir Samuel Chisholm, Lord Provost of 
 Glasgow; Sir Edward Parrott, a member of Parliament 
 from Edinburgh and head of the Nelson printing firm ; and 
 Bishop Walpole of the Scottish Episcopal Church. 
 
 The brains and heart of the Wets and the lungs and 
 limbs and viscera as well is the Anti-Prohibition Cam- 
 paign Council. This council is composed of three brewers, 
 three distillers, three liquor retailers and a secretary. It 
 represents all the distillers of Scotland, all the brewers, all 
 the wine merchants, retailers and allied traders. Over one 
 hundred associations such, for example, as the Whisky 
 Association (Scottish Branch) 1 ; the Brewers' Association of 
 Scotland ; the Scottish Licensed Trade Defense Association ; 
 the Scottish Licensed Trade Veto Defense Fund are 
 affiliated with the council. Through the Anti-Prohibition 
 Campaign Council the licensed Liquor Trade of Scotland 
 fought as one body; and it is a safe bet that if the Scottish 
 Liquor Trade had not organized as it did and fought as it 
 did, Scotland to-day would be so spotted with Dry areas 
 that if they were shown on a map the general effect would 
 be that of a bad case of measles. 
 
 Each of the one hundred affiliated associations of the 
 Anti-Prohibition Campaign Council had election agents, 
 competent secretaries and large working committees com- 
 posed of both men and women. In every voting area these 
 associations set up the usual Parliamentary electoral machine
 
 334 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 and did their campaigning under the guidance of the Anti- 
 Prohibition Campaign Council. 
 
 The headquarters of the council, in Edinburgh, had a 
 large staff of workers, enormous masses of literature, pos- 
 ters and propaganda of various sorts, and a corps of trained 
 anti-Prohibition speakers. Fifty of these anti- Prohibition 
 speakers were ex-army officers who were trained in London 
 for their particular task by the English Liquor Interests, 
 who maintained a school for the purpose. The speakers, the 
 literature and the posters were distributed from Edinburgh 
 in such a manner as to reach the places where they were 
 most needed at times when they were most needed. The 
 machinery of the Anti-Prohibition Campaign Council 
 deserves to be described in detail; for its excellence was 
 responsible for the overcoming of an almost overwhelming 
 sentiment in Scotland against the public-house and indis- 
 criminate drinking. 
 
 The Anti-Prohibition Campaign Council in its seven 
 months of active fighting prior to and during the election 
 issued more than twenty-five million pamphlets dealing with 
 the subjects of Prohibition from all points of view except, 
 of course, those points favorable to Prohibition. The 
 figures which I quote, by the way, were given to me by the 
 very capable and industrious secretary of the Anti-Prohibi- 
 tion Campaign Council. The council published a two-sheet 
 newspaper once every month, and distributed two hundred 
 and fifty thousand copies of each issue. It printed and 
 distributed eighteen million bottle labels, and saw to it that 
 no bottle containing an alcoholic beverage should reach 
 a consumer without one of the labels pasted on it. The 
 sentiments conveyed by these labels were short and sweet, 
 such as :
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 335 
 
 "Prohibition destroys Liberty : Vote No Change." 
 "Prohibition means more Taxation : Vote No Change." 
 "Prohibition increases Cost of Living. Vote No 
 
 Change." 
 
 "Prohibition is 'Dry'-Rot. Vote No Change." 
 "Prohibition means Unemployment. Vote No Change." 
 "Temperance is Strength; Prohibition is Slavery. Vote 
 
 No Change." 
 
 "Prohibition Robs the Worker, but will not empty the 
 
 Rich Man's Cellar. Vote No Change." 
 
 It printed eight million cards which were slipped into 
 the hands of people on the streets by Wet workers. On 
 these cards were printed select anti-Prohibition remarks by 
 great writers. Samples that were given to me quote John 
 Stuart Mill to the effect that so monstrous a principle as 
 Prohibition is far more dangerous than any single interfer- 
 ence with liberty; there is no violation of liberty which it 
 would not justify. 
 
 This quotation is probably correct, though both the 
 Wets and the Drys in Scotland have an unpleasant habit of 
 quoting the same people to prove their cases. The Wets 
 quote Mill to show that Prohibition is a horrible infringe- 
 ment on liberty; the Drys quote him to show exactly the 
 opposite. The Wets quote Abraham Lincoln to show that 
 they are being abused: the Drys quote Abraham Lincoln 
 to show that the suppression of the Liquor Traffic was a 
 thing which he ardently hoped to accomplish as the crown- 
 ing feat of his career. The Wets quote Sam Gompers and 
 so do the Drys. Both of them quote Theodore Roosevelt in 
 support of their arguments; and each side claims Oliver 
 Cromwell and quotes him extensively. 
 
 The Anti-Prohibition Campaign Council purchased
 
 336 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 two million five hundred thousand paper bags in two sizes 
 and issued them to grocers all over Scotland. Grocers sell 
 bottled goods and the Temperance (Scotland) Act affects 
 them, so that they are glad to use all the bags that are 
 given them. On one side of each bag was printed : 
 
 "To Housewives. 'Dry' America has raised the price 
 of sugar to its present high figure because of her enormous 
 increase in the use of so-called 'temperance' drinks and 
 candies. If there is Prohibition in this country the price 
 will rise still higher and with many other household neces- 
 sities will become a luxury only for the rich. Vote No 
 Change." 
 
 This bag, which was carried into every home in Scot- 
 land before the campaign was over, was excellent propa- 
 ganda; and the propaganda was damaged very little by the 
 fact that sugar, during the last part of the campaign, was 
 considerably lower in price in America than it was in Eng- 
 land. 
 
 The council distributed two hundred and sixty thousand 
 big posters limited to printing, sixty thousand colored pic- 
 ture posters, and twenty thousand enormous sixteen-sheet 
 colored posters of the same designs as the sixty thousand 
 smaller colored ones. Every hotel, public-house and licensed 
 grocery covered its windows with the council's posters ; and 
 in many cases the entire front of a public-house would be 
 covered so that no house could be seen. A cartoon in an 
 Edinburgh paper showed two Scotchmen standing in front 
 of a mass of posters on a busy corner. "Whaur's the pub, 
 Tarn?" one of them is asking the inference being that 
 every public-house completely screened itself with posters. 
 Every bill-board and hoarding in Scotland was covered with
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 337 
 
 these posters for six months before the election. There were 
 Wet posters in every railway station in the country. The 
 council contracted with street-car companies, so that the 
 cars carried strip-posters twenty feet in length along their 
 sides. They contracted with moving-picture houses so that 
 throughout every afternoon and evening every silver screen 
 in the land warned the people against the perils of Prohibi- 
 tion. Wet slogans appeared on the football result cards 
 which hang in all public places, and on the programs of all 
 theaters and athletic events. At big football parks the 
 council painted anti-Prohibition signs two hundred feet long 
 and thirty feet deep on the tops of grandstands and Scotch 
 football parks hold as many as one hundred and twenty 
 thousand people. Wherever it could rent the end of a 
 house or a private fence it painted thereon a powerful blast 
 against Prohibition. 
 
 The council carried on a seven-months advertising cam- 
 paign in all the important newspapers in Scotland, a house- 
 to-house campaign for distributing anti-Prohibition litera- 
 ture, and a personal canvass of all electors. It held meetings 
 in many places each day from the middle of August to the 
 end of November; and for speakers at these meetings it 
 provided members of Parliament, clergymen, barristers, 
 ex-members of Parliament and the ex-army officer of 
 whom I have already spoken. These ex-officers were 
 usually spoken of as "fighting a new battle for freedom and 
 liberty." They were also fighting for an excellent salary. 
 
 There is no question but that the Dry Interests would 
 have been far more successful if the Wet campaign had been 
 a little weaker or had started a little later. The people of 
 Scotland were deeply aware of the evils of drink and wanted 
 to stamp them out. But the assurance on the part of the
 
 338 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Wets that Prohibition meant increased taxation and increase 
 in the price of necessaries of life set a lot of the housewives 
 to wabbling; and when they wabbled, their men-folk 
 wabbled wiffle-waffled, as the Scotch say. The Drys 
 assured me that if the elections could have taken place three 
 months earlier, they would have won some striking victories. 
 Some of the Wet leaders confirmed this statement. 
 
 The Drys could not counteract the Wet advertising cam- 
 paign because their resources were much smaller than those 
 of the Wets and also because they were unable to get their 
 propaganda into the voters' hands with the same surety. 
 They could not, for example, reach the housewives who car- 
 ried home provisions from the groceries in paper bags which 
 assured them that Prohibition would send the price of sugar 
 beyond their reach. The grocers, being Wets by nature of 
 their business, would throw all possible obstacles in the path 
 of those who attempted to show that this statement was 
 untrue. The Drys couldn't get their propaganda into the 
 pubs and so reach the working men. At the lowest esti- 
 mate, the cost of the Wet campaign was ten times the cost of 
 the Dry campaign. The Wets probably spent much more 
 than ten times as much as the Drys, because a majority of 
 the Prohibitionists and Temperance workers do their work 
 for love or in the interests of humanity ; whereas I have never 
 happened to encounter an active worker in the anti-Prohibi- 
 tion cause who was working for anything except his bank 
 account. 
 
 The campaign of the No-License workers the Scottish 
 Permissive Bill and Temperance Association and the Na- 
 tional Citizens' Council was an educative campaign carried 
 on by means of posters, pamphlets, a fortnightly newspaper, 
 a few newspaper advertisements and a number of speakers.
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 339 
 
 Pussyfoot Johnson, on the invitation of the Secretary of the 
 Scottish Permissive Bill and Temperance Association, spoke 
 in behalf of No License in all parts of Scotland. One other 
 American speaker participated in the campaign; and these 
 two speakers comprised the "horde of Yankee agitators" to 
 which the Wets made such frequent reference. 
 
 The Drys set themselves to prove and did prove conclu- 
 sively and to the satisfaction of all persons not congenital 
 nit-wits, not slaves to the drink habit, and not financially 
 interested in the Liquor Trade that drink was the cause of 
 an undue amount of crime, disease, poverty, bad housing 
 conditions and national inefficiency. 
 
 The Wets set themselves to prove that the contentions 
 of the Drys were not true, and to convince the people of 
 Scotland that they were voting on Prohibition instead of on 
 a No-License resolution which was no more akin to Prohi- 
 bition than beefsteak is akin to a cheese omelette. They 
 clouded the issues with extreme skill; and they made innu- 
 merable statements with just enough basis of fact to enable 
 a determined quibbler to defend them against the accusa- 
 tion of being liars such statements, for example, as that 
 Bolshevism in Russia was the result of Prohibition, and 
 that Prohibition in America was the reason for the high 
 price of sugar in the late summer of 1920. 
 
 One of the spots at which the Wets kept hammering in 
 their propaganda was the connection between America and 
 the No-License movement in Scotland. By stretching the 
 facts the Wets were able to convey to the bulk of the Scotch 
 people the belief that America was officially interested in 
 thrusting Prohibition on them, and that she had some secret 
 advantage to gain by so doing. The Wets could prove in 
 court, with every evidence of injured innocence, that their
 
 340 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 posters have never said such things in so many words ; but 
 their posters and their pamphlets conveyed that impression 
 and stirred up a tremendous anti-American sentiment among 
 the working classes. One Wet poster, for example, shows a 
 giant British workman lying bound on the shores of Scot- 
 land, while a small figure by his side waves an American 
 flag. From the distant sky-line of New York, a huge stream 
 of dope-packages, patent-medicine bottles and chewing-gum 
 boxes is flying toward Britain's shores. "Are you going to 
 allow British Commerce, British Labour and your own per- 
 sonal liberty to be bound and gagged ?" asks this poster. 
 
 A hand-bill, headed "The American Pussyfooters' 
 Intrusion," warns all good Scotchmen not to get chummy 
 with the American adventurers. Since the invaders are 
 classed by suggestion with Germans, it is to be assumed that 
 the Wets wish their adherents to tap the Americans lightly 
 on the heads with trench-clubs or bung-starters by way of 
 greeting. 
 
 "You remember," says this amiable little document, "the 
 German efforts at peaceful penetration and what it cost you 
 to shake the country free of it ? 
 
 "Do you wish to take another dose of peaceful penetra- 
 tion from adventurers and cranks from another foreign 
 nation ? 
 
 "The American Pussyfooters are here to try some more 
 peaceful penetration upon you. 
 
 "They brag that they are going to 'butt in' at your elec- 
 tions to influence politicians and the newspapers, and to 
 make teetotalers of us all by promoting the prohibition of 
 the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic liquors. 
 
 "They boast that they are paid highly for the job out of 
 funds collected principally from American capitalists. 
 
 "This is only the beginning of the intrusion. There are
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 341 
 
 other prohibition movements on foot in America the pro- 
 hibition of smoking, theatres, dancing, and of Sunday 
 recreation. 
 
 "American adventurers are coming- over here to earn a 
 living by agitating to filch more of your liberties from you, 
 and so your freedom may be stolen bit by bit. 
 
 "Turn down this prohibitionist business at once, and so 
 put an end to this dangerous interference in your domestic 
 affairs. 
 
 "It is the act of a traitor for any Britisher to encourage 
 or tolerate these American prohibitionists. 
 
 "Aliens have no right to put us to the trouble of defend- 
 ing liberties we have enjoyed for centuries. 
 
 "VOTE NO CHANGE." 
 
 The Anti-Prohibition Journal, to quote another example, 
 mentioned that the United States Internal Revenue Board 
 was considering the seizing and selling of all foreign ships 
 that violate the Prohibition law, and then quoted an editorial 
 from the Dundee Advertiser which stated that the current 
 American patriotic creed is the possession of the biggest 
 mercantile marine in the world, and that to confiscate 
 foreign ships for "wetness" would be "just the kind of 
 measure to appeal to our cousins, who are great altruists 
 especially when altruism can be combined with good busi- 
 ness for themselves." 
 
 A newspaper advertisement two columns wide and a 
 page deep, put out by the Wets, attacked the anti-liquor 
 forces in the* following detached and restrained manner : 
 
 "We don-'t want the marks of the Pussyfoot all over 
 Scotland ! 
 
 "Without any assistance from Yankee faddists and 
 fanatics, Scotsmen have succeeded in making a splendid 
 mark in every field of human endeavour, at home and 
 abroad.
 
 342 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 "Their achievements are the clearest proof that they 
 know how to look after themselves so as to secure the best 
 results. 
 
 "They are the most competent judges to decide what 
 individual and social habits are most suited to their national 
 character, to their environment and to the development of 
 their capacities. 
 
 "They have claimed, fought for and secured the right to 
 be free and independent, both as Scotsmen and as individ- 
 ual human beings. 
 
 "Are they now to be ruled, regulated and regimented by 
 prohibitionists infected by a foreign germ? Will the inde- 
 pendent Scotsman allow himself to be made over according 
 to an American pattern and placed under nursery govern- 
 ment by a grandmotherly officialdom? 
 
 "In the matter now at issue that of their freedom to 
 drink what they choose will they submit to be treated as 
 though they were a half crazy collection of inebriates ?" 
 
 The advertisement winds up with a statement in large 
 black capital letters declaring that "We can keep our own 
 house in order." 
 
 This statement is not an unreasonable one. The people 
 of any nation are easily aroused against the reformers from 
 another nation, irrespective of the merits of the reform 
 measures which they may be advocating. The most potent 
 ammunition possessed by the Wet forces was their claim of 
 American interference. The Drys in any country have 
 enough arguments on their side to defeat the Liquor Inter- 
 ests if the facts are properly presented and distributed ; for 
 there are no sound arguments in favor of drink. The Drys, 
 therefore, handicap themselves when they import speakers 
 from a foreign country and give the Wets an opportunity to 
 cloud the issue by advertisements such as the one I have 
 quoted advertisements which cause the man in the street
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 343 
 
 to growl that he isn't going to have any blooming American 
 run his affairs. 
 
 If the Anti-Saloon League of America wishes to assist 
 the Liquor Interests in their fight against the Temperance 
 people in England and Scotland, it can best do so by con- 
 tinuing to allow American speakers to go to Great Britain, 
 and by agitating in America for a Puritan Sunday, the 
 abolition of smoking and lower heels on women's shoes 
 as the Scotch Wets say it is doing. These are points that 
 stir up more antagonism to the Prohibition movement in 
 Scotland and England than all the other Wet arguments 
 put together. 
 
 Since America is the largest Prohibition country in the 
 world, both the Wets and the Drys turned to America to 
 prove their contentions. All of the evidence brought from 
 America by the Drys tended to show that Prohibition has 
 made the United States into an ideal country where life is 
 one grand sweet song. The Wets, however, tapped a very 
 different source of information, and all of their reports 
 indicated clearly that Prohibition had tremendously 
 increased crime, law-breaking, vice, Bolshevism, anarchy 
 and other unpleasant matters. 
 
 The Dry evidence starts with such glittering words as 
 those of a Louisville, Kentucky, minister, who declares com- 
 prehensively and rhapsodically that "life in Kentucky is the 
 nearest tiling to Heaven since the arrival of Prohibition." 
 The Dry propaganda then goes on to quote the governors of 
 states, chiefs of police, secretaries of labor organizations, 
 wardens of jails and presumably unbiased observers in 
 America to the effect that the benefits of Prohibition have 
 been incalculable, and that sentiment in America is almost 
 unanimous against returning to the pre-Prohibition days.
 
 344 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Prohibition in America, according to the Drys, is a magnifi- 
 cent and inspiring success. 
 
 The Wet evidence brings forward voluminous reports of 
 illegal traffic in liquor in America and the failure of the 
 Prohibition law to prohibit, of the increase in crime and the 
 dope evil, of the growing number of drunks which infest the 
 streets of leading American cities, and of an almost unani- 
 mous sentiment against Prohibition. The Wet evidence 
 quotes influential Americans to the effect that the Dry law 
 in America is doomed. Prohibition in America, according 
 to the Wets, is an unparalleled and overwhelming failure, 
 and, instead of making the country into a near-Heaven, it 
 has made it into a hell of a place. 
 
 It is scarcely necessary to point out that both the Wets 
 and the Drys are correct in most of their contentions. Pro- 
 hibition has been an unmixed blessing for many sections of 
 America; and it is also giving rise to an enormous amount 
 of law-breaking, bootlegging, whisky-running and home- 
 brewing and distilling. But even the average great Ameri- 
 can boob who connives at illegality by separating himself 
 from a ten-dollar bill in return for about seventy-five cents' 
 worth of fire-water will, when pressed, admit that the 
 United States without the saloon is a better place in which 
 to live, so far as most people are concerned, than it was when 
 the 'saloon was dispensing jags, headaches and hooch in 
 equal proportions. Students of the American temperament 
 say that the wide-spread making of home-brews will grad- 
 ually begin to pall on the makers as they continue to con- 
 template the awful mess that they make of their kitchens 
 and the meager results which they get in return. These 
 same students declare that the people of America go in 
 whole-heartedly for things rioting, for example, and
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 345 
 
 drinking and graft and misgovernment ; and when they are 
 through going in for them, they are through in a whole- 
 hearted manner. The time to judge the effects of Prohibi- 
 tion on America, say the students, is in 1925 or 1930 or 
 whenever it is that our most interesting circles cease to 
 think it smart to restrict their dinner table conversations to 
 the subject of manufacturing and obtaining liquor. 
 
 The Wets shrieked and tore their hair and frothed at the 
 mouth in rage because of Pussyfoot Johnson's presence in 
 Scotland; and I have already reproduced a few of their 
 more poignant ululations against American intervention in 
 their private hooch problems. They bawled deafeningly 
 that Scotsmen "are the most competent judges to decide 
 what individual and social habits are most suited to their 
 national character, to their environment and to the develop- 
 ment of their capacities" and I wish to interject at this 
 point the observation that the individual habits of Scotsmen 
 at this writing are certainly suited to the development of 
 greater capacities than I have ever encountered even in a 
 wide experience with the most capacious capacities in Bos- 
 ton political circles, which possess some of the snappiest and 
 most commodious capacities known to science. And then, 
 in spite of their shriekings and their bawlings and their evi- 
 dent nausea at the unspeakable lowness of the Drys in 
 importing an American speaker, the Wets imported two 
 American speakers of their own. 
 
 The principal American speaker on behalf of the Wets 
 was C. A. Windle, of Chicago, of whom The Anti-Prohi- 
 bition Journal said, "The Honorable C. A. Windle is 
 recognized as the most brilliant debater in America. His 
 command of language, ovenvhelming personality and abso- 
 lute sincerity make him at once a convincing and fascinating
 
 346 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 speaker." The other was Mrs. Minona S. Jones, also of 
 Chicago; and of Mrs. Jones The Anti-Prohibition Journal 
 declared that, "She has done yeoman service for the cause of 
 freedom and liberty in America and understands the Pro- 
 hibition question from beginning to end." When The Anti- 
 Prohibition Journal refers to "the cause of freedom and 
 liberty in America," it is not speaking of the American 
 Revolution or the Civil War, as one might suppose, but of 
 the cause of Old John B. Booze. 
 
 The Honorable C. A. Windle, in the parlance of the Big 
 Time circuit, knocked 'em off their chairs ; and when he got 
 through telling about the awful results of Prohibition in 
 America, strong men felt moved to doff their coats and vests 
 in anguish, while women almost wept to think that any one 
 could be so cruel as to deprive them of their grog. One of 
 Mr. Windle's most frequently-quoted statements was that 
 "the only three places where Prohibition has proved to be 
 a success are the penitentiary, Turkey and hell." Mr. Win- 
 die's statement was taken at its face value, though he never 
 produced figures either on hell, Turkey, or the penitentiary. 
 
 Harry Earnshaw, Secretary of the Anti-Prohibition 
 Campaign Council, was particularly anxious that I should 
 give Mr. Windle a full measure of credit for the 1920 
 defeat in Scotland of the Prohibition forces; and I am glad 
 to comply with Mr. Earnshaw's request. "Windle," said 
 Mr. Earnshaw, "was the most prominent single factor in 
 our defeat of the Drys. We permitted him to be our banner- 
 bearer, or standard-bearer, as you call it in America. What 
 I mean, it is utterly impossible to give Windle too much 
 praise. He undoubtedly opened the eyes of the Scottish 
 people on the evils of Prohibition. It is the consensus of 
 opinion in Scotland that there isn't a man living who is 
 capable of standing on a platform and debating the matter
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 347 
 
 with him. He is the finest soldier that ever fought in any 
 campaign. I got him accidentally, but it was the best d; 
 work that I ever did." 
 
 Mr. Winclle for the Wets and Mr. Pussyfoot Johnson 
 for the Drys had some violent differences of opinion as the 
 Scottish campaign neared an end ; and the most violent alter- 
 cation arose over the question of crime in Chicago. Briefly, 
 Mr. Windle claimed that murder increased in Chicago dur- 
 ing the first year of Prohibition. Mr. Johnson promptly 
 said that Mr. Windle was elected to the Ananias Club by 
 acclamation. Mr. Johnson said that there was less murder 
 in Chicago during the first year of Prohibition. Mr. Windle 
 threw aspersions on Mr. Johnson's veracity and put up a 
 thousand pounds as a wager that Mr. Johnson couldn't prove 
 what he said. Mr. Johnson discovered that Mr. W'indle 
 was including in his figures the persons killed during the 
 Chicago race riots. This, he claimed, wasn't fair. Mr. 
 Windle continued to declare coldly that Mr. Johnson could 
 not prove what he said about the decrease of murder in 
 Chicago. This is one of those delicate questions which 
 disrupt families and cause spite fences to be built. The 
 people of America, of course, can see at once who was right, 
 just as did the people of Scotland. Those who want tin- 
 Eighteenth Amendment to die a sudden but painful death 
 will see probably that Mr. Windle was right; while those 
 who wish America to stay dry or as dry as possible will 
 at once perceive that Mr. Johnson was correct. 
 
 An interesting statement made by Mr. Windle was 
 crossed over at a meeting in Dundee. He said that if Pro- 
 hibition had been popular in America, President Harding, 
 who had admitted that he owned breweries, would never 
 have been elected with a majority of six million votes. 
 
 So far as I have been able to run down this statement,
 
 348 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 President Harding in the old Marion printing 1 days once 
 printed some advertising for a Marion brewery. Being 
 short of money, the brewery handed out two shares of its 
 stock in payment. Therefore President Harding owned 
 breweries. Following the same line of reasoning, a man 
 who inherits two shares of International Mercantile Marine 
 stock is the owner of several ocean liners. 
 
 There was a great deal of quoting of American authori- 
 ties in the campaign by both sides ; and frequently quotations 
 ascribed to the same man by both sides were in direct opposi- 
 tion to each other. Mr. Earnshaw of the Wets, for example, 
 quoted Bird S. Coler, Commissioner of Public Charities in 
 New York, as saying on August 18, 1920, that the number 
 of cases for alcoholic treatment in Bellevue Hospital, New 
 York, equaled those of pre-Prohibition days. Mr. Johnson, 
 for the Drys, quoted a letter from Mr. Coler, dated August 
 26, 1920, to show that the general medical superintendent of 
 the same hospital reported one hundred and seventy-five 
 alcoholic patients per month during the first eight months 
 of 1920 as against a thousand a month prior to 1916. It is 
 fairly obvious, therefore, that somebody was indulging in 
 some ground and lofty prevarication, and that the poor 
 voter who was attempting to get at the truth of the matter 
 would, after reading the claims of both sides, find his brain 
 reduced to the general texture of corned beef hash. 
 
 The most effective poster used by the Wet forces was a 
 brilliantly colored affair decorated with a picture of Sam 
 Gompers. This, in two sizes, one a single-sheet poster and 
 one a sixteen-sheet poster was plastered all over Scotland. 
 It was headed "America and Prohibition : The warning of 
 'The Little Giant' of organized Labor in America." And 
 it ran on in the following chaste phrases :
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 349 
 
 "Sam Gompers, President of the A. F. of L. says: 'I 
 have always contended that foisting Prohibition on this 
 country was a blunder a blunder charged with danger 
 and loaded with disastrous probabilities 
 
 " 'Prohibition has risked wrecking the social and 
 economic fabric of the nation 
 
 " 'We have invaded the habits of the working man we 
 have upset the man and unsettled him 
 
 ' 'He meets other men restless and discontented like 
 himself they rub together their grievances and there are 
 sparks, sometimes fire 
 
 ' 'I believe that Bolshevism in Russia began in Prohibi- 
 tion 
 
 " 'Is Prohibition worth such a price?' ' 
 
 The campaign provided a controversial debauch for 
 hardened Scotch controversialists ; and for weeks prior to the 
 elections the newspapers were sprinkled with letters from 
 Wets and Drys, in which each side rammed dirks into each 
 other up to the hilt until the weary editor, in the Scotch 
 fashion, wrote across the bottom of a letter "This corre- 
 spondence is now closed." 
 
 The Wets had eleven stock arguments as to why the 
 Scotch voters should not vote for the abolition of public- 
 house licenses. 
 
 The Wets claimed that men can not be made sober by 
 act of Parliament. 
 
 The Drys replied that the act of Parliament which cut 
 down the production and sale of whisky and beer during 
 the war reduced convictions for drunkenness in England. 
 Scotland and Wales from 223,000 in 1913 to 36,000 in 1918. 
 
 The Wets claimed that the provisions of the Temperance 
 act would merely drive the Liquor Trade out of one area 
 and leave it in another.
 
 350 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 The Drys replied that conditions would promptly become 
 so bad in the remaining Wet areas that they would vote dry 
 at the next elections for self-protection. 
 
 The Wets claimed that the better-class districts would 
 go dry; while the slums, which needed dryness most, would 
 never accept it. 
 
 The Drys replied that the slums would eventually see 
 that it was to their interests and the interests of their chil- 
 dren to go dry. 
 
 The Wets claimed that districts which voted out liquor 
 would vote it in again. 
 
 The Drys replied by producing figures from the United 
 States and Canada to prove that districts which once went 
 dry stayed dry. 
 
 The Wets claimed that hardship would be inflicted on 
 liquor sellers and thousands deprived of a living. 
 
 The Drys replied by quoting American and Canadian 
 bartenders to the effect that Prohibition was the best thing 
 that ever happened to them. 
 
 The Wets claimed that to vote Scotland dry would injure 
 trade and commerce. 
 
 The Drys replied that in America and Canada, Prohibi- 
 tion had caused drink money to flow to retail stores for 
 clothing and food for families previously neglected. 
 
 The Wets claimed that the abolition of the Liquor Trade 
 would flood the labor market and depress the wages of all 
 workers. 
 
 The Drys replied that other and better trades would rise 
 on the Liquor Trade's ruins. 
 
 The Wets claimed that Prohibition doesn't prohibit. 
 
 The Drys replied that it does prohibit.
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 35 1 
 
 The Wets claimed that the State would lose its revenue 
 and that taxes would rise. 
 
 The Drys replied that the State spends more each year 
 to repair the evils caused by drink than it takes in revenue. 
 
 The Wets claimed that Prohibition is an unwarrantable 
 interference with personal liberty. 
 
 The Drys replied that nobody can have a personal liberty 
 which runs contrary to the well-being of the community. 
 No man has liberty to murder or steal ; and no more should 
 he have liberty to subject himself and his children to the 
 tyranny of drink. 
 
 The Wets claimed that the Temperance (Scotland) Act 
 is a rank piece of class legislation, taking drink from the 
 working man but not interfering with the rich. 
 
 The Drys replied that they had been forced to accept the 
 terms of the Act in order to get any act at all, and that any 
 measure which reduced the Liquor Traffic was a good 
 measure. 
 
 It was my impression, after dragging through most of 
 Western Europe the trunkful of Prohibition and Anti-Pro- 
 hibition propaganda that was forced on me in Scotland 
 propaganda, by the way, which caused me to be regarded 
 with deep suspicion in the hotels of such noticeably non- 
 Puritanical centers as Paris and Monte Carlo it was my 
 impression, I repeat, that the Wets and the Drys got out 
 enough propaganda to make fifty-seven volumes of the size 
 of The Bartenders' Guide; and I am reasonably certain that 
 one of the two parties was responsible for statements of a 
 type that will keep the Recording Angel busy with his add- 
 ing machine until next August. 
 
 Burdened with this mass of information and misinforma- 
 tion, then, the men and women of Scotland went to the
 
 352 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 polls, not on one day but on scattered days through Novem- 
 ber and part of December, 1920. The sentiment against the 
 continuation of existing drinking conditions had been very 
 strong; and the Scottish Labor Party was officially com- 
 mitted to a No-License policy. In spite of this, the Drys 
 were badly defeated. 
 
 A voter could use his vote in three ways: for a No- 
 Change Resolution, which meant that public-house licenses 
 would stay as they were; for a Limiting Resolution, which 
 meant that licenses would be reduced by one-quarter; and 
 for a No-License Resolution, which meant that all licenses 
 in the area should be revoked except in inns, hotels and 
 restaurants. In order for a No-License Resolution to be 
 adopted, fifty-five per cent, of the votes cast had to be in 
 favor of it instead of a bare majority; and this fifty-five 
 per cent, had to represent thirty-five per cent, of the total 
 number of registered voters. Votes cast for No-License, if 
 No-License failed, were added to the votes for the Limiting 
 Resolution; and a bare majority of the votes cast were 
 sufficient to carry Limitation provided they represented 
 thirty-five per cent, of the registered voters. 
 
 The city of Glasgow was one of the first places in Scot- 
 land to vote. There are thirty-seven voting areas in Glas- 
 gow. Four of these areas all of them suburban residential 
 sections went No License by very narrow margins; nine 
 more areas, also suburban, narrowly failed to get the 
 required fifty-five per cent, and went into the Limitation 
 column; and the remaining twenty-four areas, including all 
 of the slum districts, voted firmly for No Change. Out of 
 the 1,604 licenses in the city, only ninety-nine were sup- 
 pressed. The Glasgow Herald, leading morning paper of 
 the city, commented on the result by remarking "it is espe-
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 353 
 
 cially disappointing that the working-class population has 
 so consistently voted No Change. They are the chief suf- 
 ferers from the culpably excessive manner in which tempta- 
 tions are crowded upon them; their homes are darkened, 
 their lives embittered and their brains impoverished by con- 
 ditions which, however created and perpetuated, are now 
 controllable by their own agency. It is a dismal reflection 
 on democracy that, when the chance is offered for escape 
 from Egyptian bondage, it can not rise above habits that are 
 enfeebling and always degrading." 
 
 The Temperance workers had made their hardest fight 
 in Glasgow; and the result, to put it bluntly, was a com- 
 plete fizzle. Not a single bad ward went dry; so that in 
 1924 since three years must, by the provisions of the Tem- 
 perance Act, elapse before these same areas can vote again 
 on the question there will be no shining example of Prohi- 
 bition's benefits at which the Drys can point with pride. 
 
 The Drys declare that they are not down-hearted. They 
 say that their first year of voting brought them more and 
 better results than were ever obtained in any country on a 
 first Local Option vote. They point proudly to the Glasgow 
 figures: 182,860 for No Change; 8,449 f r Limitation and 
 142,328 for No License. All they need to do, they point out. 
 is to swing ten per cent, of the Wets over to the Dry side in 
 order to effect a tremendous swing to the Prohibition side 
 of the fence. The same thing was true of all Scotland. 
 
 Two hundred and fifty-three voting areas had voted 
 when I left Scotland. Two hundred and six had voted No 
 Change; twenty-four had voted Limitation and twenty- 
 three had voted No License. 
 
 The Wets lost a few districts, but they always had good 
 explanations for all their losses. In fact, they out-alibied
 
 354 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 Alibi Ike. They were badly jolted when the town of Cam- 
 buslang, heavily populated by steel workers and miners, 
 went dry. I asked them about it. They explained by saying 
 that in the first place the laborers were peevish at the pub 
 owners for not selling them all the liquor they wanted during 
 the war, and that they had consequently voted No License 
 to spite the pub owners. In the second place, extreme labor 
 agitators had got among the workmen and filled them with 
 radical notions. The Wets have it firmly fixed in their heads 
 that the extremists see Social Unrest in Prohibition, and that 
 in Social Unrest the extremists see the desired revolution. 
 Consequently the extremists use Prohibition as the means to 
 their end. Kilsythe, inhabited largely by coal miners and 
 industrial workers, is a hotbed of extreme Socialism, say 
 the Wets. It went dry, they claim, because the labor leaders 
 openly preached using Prohibition as a stepping stone to 
 revolution. One ward in Clydebank, the big shipping town 
 where the Aquitania was built, went dry. The Wets swear 
 that it was the one radical, red-hot Bolshevik ward in the 
 town. 
 
 Auchterarder is a pleasant agricultural and fruit-grow- 
 ing town and is the home of Lord Haldane, Lord Chancellor 
 of Great Britain when the Temperance (Scotland) Act 
 became a law. Auchterarder turned up in the dry column. 
 The name sounded intriguing, so I took it up with the Wets. 
 "This place must be a hotbed of Bolsheviks, don't you 
 think?" I asked them. 
 
 They doubted it. 
 
 "Then why is it dry?" I asked. 
 
 The Master of Explanations for the Wets stepped briskly 
 to the fore. "In Auchterarder," he said, "they just simply 
 couldn't see any reason for fear. They didn't think there
 
 SCOTLAND FOR SCOTCH 355 
 
 was a possibility of the town going dry. Auchterarder was 
 just like America; and that's why she got it in the throat, 
 as you Americans say. Do you know, it wasn't until two 
 weeks before the election that the Liquor Interests in Auch- 
 terarder made any sort of fight. What I mean, they 
 wouldn't just actually wouldn't. They couldn't conceive 
 of anything going dry. There are four license holders in 
 Auchterarder, and two of the beggars actually forgot to go 
 and vote! Couldn't do a thing with them, what I mean. 
 Then the ministers there are very strong oh, very strong. 
 And a residential district in the main. Beastly situation, 
 what?" 
 
 I went over to see the Drys about Auchterarder. I ran 
 into a conclave of Scotchmen who eyed me calmly. 
 
 "They tell me that the Wets made no fight in Auchter- 
 arder," I informed them. 
 
 "Did they so?" replied one of the Scotchmen. 
 
 "I'm asking you," said I. 
 
 "They did," said the Scotchman. "They made a gude 
 fight, if you want to call it that. They had the place fair 
 covered with posters saying we intended to make Scotland a 
 place where there'd be no smoking or dancing or football or 
 theaters, and all the rest of their stuff. They held open- 
 air meetings, and they called us as many names as they'd 
 call us on Argyle Street." 
 
 "Then why did you win ?" I asked. 
 
 "Well-nigh pairfect organization," replied the Scotch- 
 man. "Well-nigh pairfect organization!" 
 
 His statement bears out in part a summing up which 
 an unaf filiated resident of Glasgow made for me ; and this 
 is the summing up :
 
 356 WHY EUROPE LEAVES HOME 
 
 If Scotland had gone dry, America would stay dry with- 
 out any question. If America goes back to wetness, or even 
 to dampness, there is scarcely any power on earth that can 
 make Scotland dry. If America stays dry and the Wets 
 slacken their fight, Scotland will go dry as sure as shooting 
 in Central Europe. If the Wets hadn't been so well organ- 
 ized, Scotland would have gone dry in 1920. And if the 
 Drys ever have access to half as large a campaign fund as 
 the Wets and America still stays dry then farewell. 
 Scotch whisky. 
 
 THE END

 
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