Another point on which this system may have some bearing is the devotion of the Italian women to the Church compared with the indifference of the men. In most civilized countries the women are more inclined to be religious than the men, but in Italy this is accentuated, and the separation is growing, as the skepticism to which I have referred spreads.
All over southern Italy one hears a bitter reference to the decime, the one-tenth of a man’s money which is claimed by the Church each year; and though this often works out as not a literal allotment of one-tenth, there are many parishes, where the principal priests are keen business men, that more than one-tenth is extracted, and the tithes take form in labor, vegetables, wine, fruit, fees, etc., but are nevertheless valuable.
It is not a matter of economics and does not pertain to this consideration, if the peasantry of southern Italy are such good Christians as to give to the use of God one-tenth of their all; but it certainly comes within the scope of this study when that enormous fund goes to support that portion of the priesthood which is unworthy and is nothing but an army of hypocritical parasites.
Before leaving the subject of conditions in and about Rome, the vagabondi should be mentioned. As I have said, the government considers no man a pauper so long as he is able to beg, and the tourist centres have gradually drawn a great collection of professional beggars, who are really artistic in their methods of appeal. They are not satisfied, as is the beggar of Naples, with a crust of bread, a sip of wine, and a stone treasuring sun-warmth on which to stretch at night, but go in for better things. At all the points of interest in the way of ruins and the like, which lie in the Roman zone, their representatives will be found. The liberality and apparent great wealth of the American tourists have inspired many of these to save enough to emigrate to America, but they have found begging a very poor occupation here, and in several instances of which I have heard have gone to work and are prospering.
In many districts where there are clay banks, sand banks, and other spots where earth materials have been extracted for building or plastic art work, the extraction has been done as if cutting out arched caves, and in these and in the arches of ruins, with boarded-up or plastered-up fronts, thousands of poor families live, making their living by digging in the pits, acting as guides about the ruins, begging, or working on the land as hired laborers.
CHAPTER VI
IN THE HEEL AND TOE OF THE BOOT
It is a very nearly safe prophecy to say that the heel of the Italian Boot, or rather southern Molise and Apulia, shall yet pour forth the greatest flood of southern Italian emigrants bound for America which has yet been witnessed in the varying exodus from southern Europe. There have been times when it seemed as if these provinces were about to rise and distance Campania and Sicily, whose flow has generally been the largest; but the great mass of the peasantry of the Apulian plain has not yet started toward America, and will not until the status of the Italian emigrant in America becomes similar to that of the Irish in 1878–79, a quantity respected and duly reckoned with, or until the steamship companies make Bari, Brindisi, or Taranto ports of direct departure for the United States.
As remarked previously, the fluctuations of the volume of emigration, as viewed in retrospect and from this side of the water, are hardly understood, though a social crisis in Russia always produces an outpouring of the Jews, good crops in the Northwest an increase in Scandinavians, and a period of strikes in the United States an augmented Polish immigration. The figures for the past twelve years, taken from June till June, compared with the relative wage rate, are interesting:
| Year | Immigrants Arrived | Average Daily Wage in U. S. |
|---|---|---|
| 1891 | 489,407 | $1.00. |
| 1892 | 579,663 | 1.00.30 |
| 1893 | 439,730 | .99.32 |
| 1894 | 285,631 | .98.06 |
| 1895 | 258,536 | .97.88 |
| 1896 | 343,267 | .97.93 |
| 1897 | 230,832 | .98.96 |
| 1898 | 229,299 | .98.79 |
| 1899 | 311,715 | 1.01.54 |
| 1900 | 448,572 | 1.03.43 |
| 1901 | 487,918 | 1.05.62 |
| 1902 | 648,743 | 1.04.93 |
| 1903 | 857,046 | 1.03.89 |
It will appear that there are other and less understood influences at work, to cause the swelling or diminishing of the flood of immigrants, than the wage rate in the country. In a previous chapter I have noted the bearing of the prospect of more stringent immigrant legislation on the flood of 1903, and in the section of the country now under discussion we found abundant evidences of the effects of the news spread far and wide that people who did not get into the United States soon would find it more difficult than ever to get in.