The humble owners of the land in Malta, as we have tried to show, are naturally a thrifty, hard-working people, neither rich nor poor. The reader would be surprised to see how much of seeming plenty, comfort, and contentment exists among these sturdy natives under such adverse circumstances. Notwithstanding their uncultured condition, the lowly country people have a genius for poetry; indeed, all Eastern tribes who speak the Arabic tongue are thus endowed. This talent finds expression in a sort of improvisation, by which means two persons will hold earnest converse with each other, asserting and denying in something very like epic poetry. They chant their words in a wild, Maltese sing-song, which appear exactly to accord one with the other, though the music seems to be equally improvised with the ideas of the singer. However unconventional the words and the music may be, there is still a certain rude harmony in both, evidently animated now and then by gorgeous gleams of fancy.
These Maltese are a prolific race, marry quite young, rear large families, and are very fond of their children. Brides only thirteen years of age are common among the working classes. It is a touching sight to watch these childlike mothers with a crude instinct gently fondling their tiny babes,—dolls, we were about to write. It recalled far-away Japan, where the daily life of the humbler classes presents similar domestic tableaux. Japan is a land of babies, where the annual crop is marvelously sure. In both instances, these youthful mothers, as may naturally be supposed, grow old in appearance at a comparatively early age. It requires no prophet to declare that premature maternity entails premature old age.
We do not intend to convey the idea that ignorance and its natural consequences do not prevail among the Maltese peasantry, when we say that there is much of seeming comfort and contentment to be found among them. As an average class, these children of the soil exhibit only too clearly their want of culture and intelligence. The priests oppose all efforts to improve them by schools. Education is virtually tabooed by the church, it being held that devotion to the Roman Catholic religion is all that is necessary for their spiritual or earthly welfare. Said a famous English general: "Thinking bayonets are dangerous. What we require in a soldier is a machine that knows just enough to obey orders." So it is with the followers of the Roman Catholic faith; people who can read and reason for themselves are "dangerous," so far as putting trust in that bigoted creed is concerned. What the church requires is machines which will obey orders, and yield up their hard-earned wages to support the priesthood and the regal Romish palace of the Pope at Rome. Any unprejudiced observant traveler in Spain, Italy, Mexico, or South America will bear witness to the truth of this statement. Not one twentieth of the inhabitants of this Maltese group can read and write. In populous, overcrowded China, eight tenths of the inhabitants can read and write, and yet the Western nations look upon them as semi-barbarians.
Can any one indicate another people on the globe, eight tenths of whom can read and write? Education is not only compulsory, but it is the only stepping-stone to high preferment in the civil service of the government. Our venal politicians would do well to profit by the example of China.
It will be remembered in this connection that since the suppression of the Pope's temporal power in Italy Malta has been looked upon as a possible future residence for the head of the Romish church. An influential section of the councils of the Vatican has favored the idea, and it would seem to be well suited for the purpose. Were this to occur, Malta would eventually become the Mecca of Catholicism. We may not expect to see such a change brought about in our day; if it should ever happen, it would add but one more to the strange vicissitudes in the history of Malta.
The wages paid to ordinary laborers in these islands are insignificant in amount, though there has been an improvement in this respect during the last decade. Boatmen in the harbor demand but nine-pence, English money, for rowing a person to or from a ship lying a quarter of a mile from the landing. Equally moderate terms prevail for pleasure excursions, according to the service and the time occupied. Women employed in field labor receive twenty-five cents per day, and men one third more. The P. & O. Steamship Company pay to colliers half a dollar a day; the same men get forty cents per day at the wharves. Blacksmiths, carpenters, stonemasons, boat-builders, and sail-makers rarely earn more than seventy-five cents per day. The drivers of the street vehicles in Valletta are quite reasonable in their demands, and a shilling will pay one's fare to any part of the city. The little one-horse vehicles called carrozzellas are well adapted to their purpose.
The same economic conditions are found here as prevail in India and China. The multiplicity of seekers for employment keeps the prices which are paid for services at a minimum rate. So, in over-populated Barbadoes, a plantation hand can earn but twenty-five cents for a day's work continued through ten hours. To be sure, that sum will more than feed him; and as to clothes and shelter, these are of secondary consideration in the tropics, where only conventional ideas require the native race to wear clothes of any sort. Idlers swarm about the landings and in the open squares of Valletta, who, it would seem, might be better employed upon the soil inland. An organized effort of capital and official influence to this end would accomplish the object, and render many a square mile of the now sterile ground not only beautiful to the eye, but also exuberantly productive. All over the civilized world the most useless and idle portion of the people leave comparatively comfortable homes in the country, where at least good food and shelter can nearly always be earned, to crowd into cities, attracted thither by the glamour of vice and fast life which always prevails more or less in populous centres.
The arrival of a P. & O. steamship in the harbor of Malta, with a goodly number of passengers bound either east or west, is a harvest time for the beggars, who know very well how to challenge the generosity of strangers. They have made a careful study of the business; they have elevated it, as De Quincey would say, to the dignity of a fine art. The "Nix Mangare Stairs" of Valletta are the congregating place of an army of mendicants of every species, men, women, and children, who exhibit all manner of deformities, both real and artificial, as well as every grade of dirt and squalor. In landing and making one's way up to the main thoroughfare of the city, it is necessary to run the gauntlet of this horde of poverty-stricken people. At the base of these "nothing to eat stairs," the longshoremen and fishermen also congregate. It was just here that Midshipman Easy and his companion procured the boat in which they escaped after the "triangular duel." The evil odors permeating the atmosphere in the vicinity are what might be expected from a people reveling in garlic and eschewing soap. The daily food of the class one sees in this section of the city is a slice of black bread and a raw onion. The traveler's disgust and sympathy are both wrought upon to an extreme degree, while amid all the clamor and whining appeals the practiced eye pauses for a moment to note the picturesqueness of mingled colors and of ragged humanity. The same recalls to mind the broad stone steps leading up to the Capo di Monti from the Piazza di Spagna, in Rome, where the artists' models assemble, clothed in a "congress" of colors.
When it is remembered that the violence of the winds which sometimes blow over these islands is such that in any other part of the world they would be called hurricanes, the successful results achieved by the Maltese gardeners and agriculturists appear more surprising. In order to furnish protection from these fierce winds, high and solid stone walls surround every grain, vegetable, and fruit field, all of which are purposely made small in area. These yellow walls, wearisome, monotonous, and unlovely to the eye, are often ten feet in height, not only sheltering, but also hiding vegetation, so that when the island is first observed from on shipboard, while a few miles away, it appears like a huge stone quarry. Nothing could possibly seem more uninviting. Under these circumstances, scarcely a tree or shrub of any sort is visible, with the exception of an occasional slim and solemn-looking cypress, or a straggling old olive-tree raising its isolated and twisted head above the arid rocks. Some of these walls are redeemed from utter dreariness by the pendulous cactus which hangs from their tops, fringed with yellow bloom. It is a strange though common plant, consisting of a succession of bulbous formations, quite flat and an inch or more thick, which serve the double purpose of stalk and leaves. The incurious traveler is thus impressed, by these screening walls, with an incorrect idea of the true nature of the island.
A passenger once said, in our hearing, replying to a friendly query: "No, I did not land at Malta, and had no desire to do so. It is nothing but a bare rock, with a few dwelling-houses inside of big lines of fortifications. I saw quite enough of its barrenness from the deck of our ship to disenchant me."