mercantile establishments. In Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago, wire
and tinware factories established with Slovak capital and conducted with
Slovak labor are securing the cream of this trade in the country. For
centuries the tinware of Europe was made largely by the Slovaks. They
have a high position also for electrical designs and other skilled work.

[Sidenote: Organizations]

They are a great people for organization. The National Slavonic Society
was organized in Pittsburg in 1890, with 250 members; it now has 20,000
active members and 512 lodges. It is primarily a beneficial
organization, but has done a valuable work in educating its members and
inducing them to become American citizens. The society requires its
members, after a reasonable time, to obtain naturalization papers and
thus promotes Americanization. It has paid out nearly a million dollars
in death benefits, and much more in sick benefits; has aided students in
this country and Hungary, and national literary and patriotic workers as
well, besides coming to the rescue of Slavs in Hungary persecuted by the
government. Many other societies have sprung from this parent
organization, including a Presbyterian Slavistic Union, and hundreds of
literary, benevolent, and political clubs, so that there are between
100,000 and 125,000 organized Slovaks in the United States.

_IV. The Magyars or Hungarians_

[Sidenote: Conquerors of Hungary]

The Magyars belong properly in a division by themselves. These people,
who are Hungarians proper, do not class strictly with the Germans and
Slavs of Hungary. They drove out their Slavic predecessors or subjugated
them in the ninth century, and became masters of the Danubian plains.
Roman Catholicism became the state religion about the year 1000, but
during the Reformation period the Lutheran and Reformed types of
Protestantism gained a large following and were granted liberty. This
was afterward denied them, and bloody struggles followed, as in Bohemia.
Protestants were again placed on equal footing with Roman Catholics in
1791. The Magyars number over eight millions and comprise a little more
than one half the population of Hungary.

[Sidenote: Good and Bad Qualities]

There are at present between 250,000 and 300,000 Hungarians in America.
They have a fair degree of education, are generally reputed to be
honest, and as compared with the Slavs (with whom they are commonly
confused) are more intelligent and less in