156 ANDREW J. SHIPMAN MEMORIAL 



well be proud. Although Count Beldy and his three compan- 

 ions, Boloni, Wesselenyi and Balogh, settled in America in 

 183 1, immigration to the United States from Hungary may be 

 said to have set in, after the revolution of 1848-49 in Hun- 

 gary, by the coming of Louis Kossuth to the United States, in 

 December, 185 1, on the warship Mississippi, after the failure 

 of his struggle for Hungarian liberties. He was accompanied 

 by fifty of his compatriots and many of these remained and 

 settled in various parts of the country. During the Civil War 

 and the wars between Germany and Austria, m.ore and more 

 Hungarian immigrants arrived, but they were then for the 

 most part reckoned as Austrians. 



It was not until 1880 that the Hungarian immigration really 

 set in. Between 1880 and 1898 about 200,cx)0 Hungarians 

 came to America. The reports of the Commissioner of Immi- 

 gration show that the number of Hungarian (Magyar) immi- 

 grants from the year 1899 to July, 1909, amounted to 310,869. 

 The greatest migration year was 1907, when 60,071 arrived. 

 There are now about three-quarters of a million of them in 

 the United States. They are scattered throughout the country 

 from the Atlantic to the Pacific and fill every walk in life. 

 This immigration, while caused in a great measure by an ef- 

 fort to better the condition of the Hungarian of humbler cir- 

 cumstances, has been largely stimulated by the agencies of the 

 various European steamship companies, who have found it a 

 paying business to spread tales of easily earned riches among 

 dissatisfied Hungarian laborers. Peculiar political conditions, 

 poverty among the agricultural classes, and high taxes have 

 contributed to cause such immigration. But it cannot be said 

 that a desire to emigrate to other lands is natural to the real 

 Hungarian, for his country is not in the least overcrowded and 

 its natural resources are sufficient to afiford a decent livelihood 

 for all its children. There are but few Hungarians emigrating 

 from the southern, almost wholly Magyar, counties. They 

 come either from the large cities or from localities where the 

 warring racial struggles make the search for a new home de- 

 sirable. While a very large part of this immigration to the 

 United States is Catholic, yet the combined Protestant, Jewish, 

 and indifferentist Hungarian immigrants outnumber them, so 

 that the Catholics number not quite one-half of the total. The 

 Hungarians in the City of New York are said to number over 



