32 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The demand for rough unskilled laborers has steadily increased with 

 our wonderful industrial growth. It is generally admitted that this 

 demand cannot be supplied by native American applicants. Of all for- 

 eign laborers none is better qualified for this work than the Slavs. 

 Eighty-five per cent, of the male Slavs are unskilled laborers, and nearly 

 ninety-five per cent, come to this country between the ages of fifteen 

 and forty-five, when their economic value is greatest. 



These people do not crowd the tenements of our large cities, but 

 tend to establish themselves in little homes of their own in the country 

 or in the suburbs of manufacturing towns and cities. 



The Slav is popiilarly supposed to be mentally slow and without 

 energy or ambition. This is not entirely true. In comparison with 

 the Hebrews who transact nearly all the business in Poland and Gali- 

 cia, the Poles (in business acumen) seem as children. The Slovak 

 appears mentally slow compared with the alert Magyar, but it must be 

 remembered that the Hebrew in business makes other races than the 

 Slav seem slow, and that, while almost all Magyars can read and write, 

 one third of the Slovaks are illiterate. This seeming mental deficiency 

 and absence of ambition in the Slav is due mainly to lack of education 

 and to centuries of subjection to tyrannical masters. It is hard to con- 

 ceive how a peasant in Eussia under existing conditions could develop 

 such a quality as ambition, and judgment as to the Slav's energy and 

 his intellectual possibilities must be suspended until his children in 

 this country have had a chance to show that American schools and 

 American environment can quicken the slow apathy of the serf into 

 the energetic activity of the freedman. 



The Slavic immigrant fills a place in the industrial fields of this 

 country in which he hears no call for such attributes as ambition, en- 

 ergy and mental brilliancy, a place which no American envies him, and 

 where he is as necessary to American advancement as the coal and iron 

 that by his labor are mined and made ready for the American mechanic 

 and manufacturer. 



