The result is that while the Government is closing up the schools because, as the Minister of Agriculture says, "an important political and social principle is endangered" when students begin to hope and dream of a higher and better situation in life than that in which they were born, the masses of the people are emigrating to America in order to better their condition.
At Fiume I had an opportunity to study at close range what I may call the process of this emigration. I had, in other words, an opportunity to see something, not merely of the manner in which the stream of emigration, flowing out from the little inland villages, is collected and cared for at Fiume until it pours into and is carried away in the ships, but also to get a more definite idea of the motives and social forces that are working together to bring about this vast migration of the rural populations of southeastern Europe.
In no country in Europe, not even in Italy, has emigration been so carefully studied, and in no country has more been done to direct and control emigration than in Hungary. At the same time I think it is safe to say that nowhere else has emigration brought so many changes in the political and social life of the people. At one time, indeed, it seemed as if Hungary proposed to make emigration a state monopoly. This was when the Government, in granting to the Cunard Steamship Company a monopoly of the emigrant business at Fiume, made a contract to furnish that line at least 30,000 emigrants a year. At that time there were between one hundred and two hundred thousand emigrants leaving Hungary every year, most of whom were making the journey to America by way of the German lines at Hamburg and Bremen.
It is said that the Hungarian Government, in order to turn the tide of emigration in the direction of Fiume and swell the traffic at that port, directed that all steamship tickets should be sold by Government agents, who refused permission to emigrants to leave the country by other than the Fiume route.
Since then, however, Hungary has, I understand, modified its contract with the Cunard Company in such a manner that it does not appear as if the Government had actually gone into the business of exporting its own citizens, and, instead of attempting to direct emigration through Fiume by something amounting almost to force, it has rather sought to invite traffic by creating at this post model accommodations for emigrants.