Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 November 1894 — LIVE LIKE BEASTS. “Tote” Not a Negro Word. Single Eyeglasses Prohibited.' [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

LIVE LIKE BEASTS.

“Tote” Not a Negro Word.

Single Eyeglasses Prohibited.'

FRIGHTFUL STATE OF AFFAIRS IN PENNSYLVANIA. European Brigands and Cut-throats Filthier than the Digger Indians and More Murderous than tho Awful Mollie Maguires—Two Murders Every Week. Barbarians in America. The people of the anthracite coal count.es of Pennsylvania—Luzerne, Carb .n, Lackawanna and Schuylkill—make up such an ethnological crazy quilt as hardly can be matched in any district of corresponding size in the world, says a Wilkesbarre correspondent. Arabs, Turks, Gieeks, biavs, Boies, Italians, negroes, Germans, French, English, Irish, Scotch, Yankees a bewildering composite of race, color and creed tre ail crowded together in a little territory as small as many of the continental principalities. The confusion of t.agues heard on a Saturday ni ht on the streets of any mining town of the counties mentioned is ike what a con.ersa tone might have been at the base of the Tower of Babel. in the actual work of mining the Slavs, Boles and Ita ians are principa ly engaged. With the downfall of that organization of murderous scoundrels, known as the Mollie Maguires, cam: a series of changes which eventually resulted in the supplanting of Iri.-h, Welsh find Scotch labor in the mines. Natnf ally it was from tho very lowest strata of si c ety in these European c untries that tho ranks of the new stock of miners were lecruited. When a wretch had committed such deeds of villainy that even the recesses of the Sicilian and Calabrian mountains ceased to i e a refuge for him, he male his way o. e the seas and found a safe haven in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, screened and guarded by his fellow-c untrymen. It was not all done in a day, but the era of cutthroat terrorism and high wages opened by men of English-speaking races has at la t absolutely given wav to an era which might almost be called one of human vbrmin and low w-ages. ■Livi- o i i'i th Vermin. Human vermin hardly seems too strong a term to one who'takes even a cursory view of the manner in which they exist. An Italian b arding shanty along the lines of railroads or that of ihe Croton viaduct in New York while it was in course of construction was bad enoi gh: but an Italian boardinghouse of that variety is luxurious compared with one in the mountains, here, such as the miners live in. The stories told of the filth, the vice, the bruta ity in the e stews by those who have been familiar with them for years are ai-

most beyond belief. Ad" zen men and women are packed promiscuously into one room barely large enuugh for two to live in with decency. The meals are served in an ordinary washb wl or dish pan, into whic .i the boarders plunge their hands or their spoons, conveying their food to their- m uths without the intervention of plates or knives and forks. Babies and dishes are all washed in the same water. When sickness Jails on ono of the poor wretches and he seem, likely to die he is ilted from his bed and carried out of doors to breathe his last, in order that the living may not havle the bother of a dead man around, or incur the expense i f a funeral. It is but fi£r to sav ihat in this respect of treatment of the dead and dving there is a di tinct difference between the, Italians and the Slavs, gre.it v to the advantage of the former. The 11 alians will spend the last cent to pay for a doctor s attendance on a sick relative'or to ecure a dead friend a Accent burial. The Slavs will re-

sort to any device to get a dead or dying man off their hands without expense. But it is not so much their aboriginal ideas touching the decencies of life, their filth and their bestial habits which have made these wretched people more and more abominable in the eyes of communities on which they hare been implanted like social ulcers. In respects, it is true, the Digger Indians would figure to advantage by comparison. But it is their criminal pro; ensities, their murderous savagery, which have been steadily growing, until they have seriously

raised a question as to the possibility of forever enduring their presence in the region. Two Murders Ev*»rv Week. During the past eighteen months there has been an average of a murder a week, while of murderous assau.ts with deadly weapons, many of which terminated fatally, the average has been two er three a week. And yet, during all that time, there have been only two convictions of murder in the first degree, and neither of these was a Pole, a Slav or an Italian. Tnere is no longer any hope in police protection. The officers of the law, in fact, have been literally paralyzed by the rising tide of murder which has swept over the region. Tens of thousands of dollars and weeks and months of time have been spent in elfo ts to bring just a very few of these red-handed butchers to justice, and yet not in two years has one of them been hanged. It is true that a few have been lodged in the penitentiary, the notorious Mutz gang of Italian assassins being a conspicuous instance of last year's work. But where ten are caught and punished, ninet r are never even apprehended. While probably there is no re > mar organization of murderers, like the MoTie Maguires, the Mollies themselves never worked more zea - ously or more cunningly to conceal their murderers and suppress all evi> dences of their crimes.

In nothing is the student of American folk-speech so liable to error as in assigning geographical limits to a word or phrase. The English local dialects were pretty thoroughly mixed. One gained a little more dominance in one place, anoiher in another, but a stray provincial term is prone to turn up in places the most unexpected. “Tote” has long been regarded as a word of African origin, confined to certain regions where negroes abound. A few years ago Mr. G. A. Stephens, in a story, mentioned an “old tote road” in Maine. I wrote to inquire, and he told me that certain old portage roads, now abandoned, bore that name. I find the word used in a “Remonstrance” from the people of Gloucester County, Va. ; preserved in the Public Record Office in London. This paper bears date 1677, when there were four times as many white bond servants as negroes in Virginia. “Tote” appears to have been a well-under-stood English word in the seventeenth century. It meant then, as now, to bear. Burlesque writers who represent a negro as “toting a horse to water” betray their ignorance. In Virginia English the negro “carries” the ho/se to water by making the horse “tote” him I .—The Century.

Single eyeglasses are prohibited in the German army. Even if a soldier has one good eye, yet needs glasses, he must perforce cover both eyes with them.

SLAVS AT A MEAL IN THE PENNSYLVANIA MINING DISTRICT.

GETTING RID OF A RICK BROTHER.