GREEK CATHOLICS IN AMERICA 187 



masters of Pennsylvania were quick to avail themselves of the 

 new and less costly labor. This was before any of the present 

 contract labor laws were enacted. The Slav was willing to 

 work for longer hours than the English-speaking laborer, to 

 perform heavier work, and to stolidly put up with incon- 

 veniences which his predecessor would not brook. He came 

 from a land in which he had originally been a serf (serfdom 

 was abolished in Austria-Hungary in 1848, and in Russia in 

 1861), then a degraded poverty-stricken peasant with hardly 

 anything to call his own, and it was no wonder that America 

 seemed to offer him boundless opportunity to earn a living and 

 improve his condition. At first he was a cheap man ; but in 

 the course of a very short time the Slav became not a mere 

 pair of strong hands, but a skilled worker, and as such he 

 drove out his competitors, and his success drew still more of 

 his countrymen across the sea. In the anthracite coal region 

 of Pennsylvania there were in 1880 but some 1,900 Slavs; in 

 1890, over 40,000; and in 1900, upwards of 81,000. The same 

 proportion holds good of the bituminous coal-mining districts 

 and of the iron regions in that and other States. Taking sim- 

 ply the past four years (1905-1908), the immigration of the 

 Slovaks and Ruthenians, both of the Greek Catholic Rite, has 

 amounted to 215,972. This leaves out of consideration the 

 immigration (147,675) of the Croatians and Slavonians for 

 the same period, though a considerable portion of them are also 

 of the Greek Rite. These Slavs brought with them their Greek 

 Catholic rites and practices, but they were illiterate, ignorant, 

 the poorest of the poor, and knew nothing of the EngHsh lan- 

 guage. Herding together in camps and settlements, and work- 

 ing like serfs at the most exhausting labor, they had but little 

 opportunity to improve themselves or to learn the language, 

 customs and ways of the Americans around them, while both 

 American and foreign-born Catholics failed to recognize in 

 them fellow-Catholics, and so passed them scornfully by, and 

 the American of the older stock and anti-Catholic prejudices 

 too often held them in supreme contempt. Yet as soon as they 

 gathered some little substance and formed a settled community 

 they sent for their clergy. When these arrived, they, too, were 

 often imbued with national and racial prejudices, and knew 

 too little of the English language and American ideas and cus- 

 toms to initiate immediately the progress of their people, yet 



