The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1910-07-09
.SLAvS AS FARMERS
Why Few Slavic Immigrants Take to Farming-Suc- cess of Those that Settle In the Country Their Methods of Living and Ours Contrasted.
Emily Greene Balch.

Emily Greene Balch.
 Associate Professor of Economies.
 Wellesley College.
 1 Why do peasants from Bohemian
 beet fields or Croatian vineyards be- ! take themselves in America to mines ] and foundries, making no use of the experience of lifetime and of a skill | which if often primitive is sometimes l of a high order. It is not because ! they are eager to taste city life but because of the hard necessity of the case.
 At home the immigrants either had no property or probably more com monly owned tiny piece of land. The money they are able to raise is hardly more than enough to bring them to America. They-e>-rfnot think of buying a farm here. The position of farm laborer pays less than other employments that are open and it lasts only part of the year, so neces- sarfly they settle in the city. By the time a family has saved the sum needed to buy land, it's members are accustomed to city life.
 Also the obstacles of language are far more serious on the farm than in the factory. A man having once been
 
 ly organized work is once for all ini- tiated and there is likely to be a fel- low countryman at hand to interpret if need arises. On the farm, there is constant change of tasks and end less oportunity for mistakes from in- ability to understand orders.
 Farm life is made forbidding to the foreigner by the strange food, the lack of his own church, and, above all by his separation from those of his
 own speech and ways. In Europe country life Is for the most part will
 a cluster of houses with a church and an open place where perhaps the boys and girls dance on Sunday after moons and all about 1t fields stretching out on every side. The isolation of 1 the American farmhouse is a draw back to life either as a farm hand or as an independent farmer.
 | The immigrant sometimes really fears the hostility or the over-reach- l ing greed of American neighbors. A Bohemian guidebook advises settlers that in certain localities they will find no fellow countryman "so that the immigrant must settle among perfect
 strangers. in great part cunning and capable of any thing, and might easily, in consequence of his ignorance of the
 language be deprived of the land he has taken up.' Among a group of
  strangers together in a strange land, there Is an especial degree of mutual helpfulness and comfort. This has great economic value. For instance, in a Nebraska county which lost near
 ly 2,000 of it's scanty population in the three bad years that followed the pam
 ic of 1873. the Bohemian and German
 homesteaders held out, as the Ameri-
 cans could not, against the grass
 hopper plague, the drought and the hard times. And the reason for this
 was that the Bohemians were more ready to help one another than were the Americans
 In spite of all the difficulties, we do find considerable numbers of our Slavic population on farms. There are about 100000, the majority being independent farmers. They are fairly widely scattered, for twenty-six states each have at least 200 of them. Wis consin has the largest number, with over 1S 900, and South Dakota the lar ges proportion, with about II per cent of its whole farming population be- longing to the Slavic group. Bohemi- ans and Poles doubtless make the great majority of the Slavic farmers in the United States
 When the Poles and more especially the Bohemians began to come in the fifties and later, they went to the states where they could then get land 5. Consequently they settled first in Wis consin, Michigan and Minnesota, where it was necessary to cut timber to clear the land, and somewhat lat CT in the prairie states farther west, in Iowa. Nebraska and the Dakotas. | The first years were hard ones. It is said that in parts of Wisconsin ten years ago every other Bohemian farm was mortgaged while today not one in seven is so encountered. The roomy farm houses of wood or yellow brick, | with rows of poplars about the yard, ] the big well-built barns, the thrifty | fields, and the cheese factories are | signs of prosperity that it is pleasant l to see and they make the hard old times far behind.
 A most striking settlement is that | at Old Hadley in Massachusetts. Here | where Goffe, the Tegicide. is said to have once helped beat off an Indian | raid, all up and down the beautiful | elm-shaded street the old colonial l mansions are occupied by Poles Prob | ably one cause of the attractfveness | of these New England farms is the | western settlements, with each man on his isolated quarter section.
 The typical case here is the inmi- grant who begins as hired man at | a monthly wage. He learns to raise tobacco and onions, the staples of the QlStr1cL, ana dILer LlIne may 0lCner | buy or hire land, or take it on shares, in which case the landlord supplies fertilizer and half the seed. This plan makes it possible to begin with al- most no capital. Many buy outright l when they have only $200 or $500, bor- rowing the rest often from relatives who generally take no interest on loans to one another.
 One of the most interesting aspects of the facts here presented is the con- siderable degree to which Slavic pea sants are taking root in the land without any artificial stimulus apart from the efforts of those who wish to sell land. There seems to have been no concerted effort to promote their distribution-nothing, at least, !com- parable to what has been done to open opportunities for agricultural life to Jews and Italians. This is no doubt because the Slavs presenting no such problem of congestion as do the Jews, do not render Americans un- easy, nor have they a body of wealthy men to aid the poorer among them. Neither does any home government concern itself to forward their inter ests as Italy concerns herself for her expatriated citizens.
 AS to the quality of Slavic farming one naturally hears different reports. I suspect that the American often thinks the Pole or Bohemian a poor farmer because he works on a diff