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IMPORTED AMERICANS

The Real Problem

IMPORTED AMERICANS
The story of the experiences of a disguised American and his wife studying the immigration question ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧

By Broughton Brandenburg

With sixty-six illustrations from photographs by the author

NEW YORK · FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY · PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1903, 1904,

By Frank Leslie Publishing House

Copyright, 1904,

By Frederick A. Stokes Company

This edition published in August, 1904

This volume is dedicated to my brave little wife, who endured with heroism conditions that, while not unbearable for me, were superlative hardships for a woman of delicacy and refinement.

B. B.

Clay Place, Mamaroneck,

June 23, 1904.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I
THE IMPETUS AND THE METHOD

That there was a tremendous increase in immigration in prospect was announced by the agents of the great immigrant-carrying lines of steamships as early as January of 1903. All Europe seemed stirred with that tide of unrest. It was to be a great year for the departure from the Continental hives of the new swarms, and an authoritative foreign journal prophesied that the sum total would be 1,500,000 for the twelve months.

In America the cry was redoubled that the doors of the United States should be altogether closed or rendered still more difficult to pass. The Shattuc bill was about to find favor in the House of Representatives, the Lodge bill was cooking in Boston, and in every newspaper or periodical of the land articles and editorials were appearing that attacked or defended various phases, conditions or proposed remedies of immigration. Even in the German and Italian papers, which speak for Germany, Austria and Italy, the most fertile immigrant-producing grounds, there was but the barest trifle printed that was from the point of view of the immigrant himself. In the American papers there was absolutely nothing.

One day I was in the Grand Central station in New York, ready to take a train for New Haven, and as I came up to the gate I saw, passing through before me, a group of more than twenty newly arrived Italians, following the leadership of one short, black, thick-set prosperous-seeming man who spoke Italian to the left and broken English to the right. They were tagged for Boston and other New England towns, and, bearing their heavy burdens of luggage and bundles, with faces drawn with weariness, eyes dull with too much gazing at the wonders of a new land, with scarce a smile among them except on the faces of the unreasoning children, they were herded together, counted off as they passed through the gate and taken aboard the train, much as if they had been some sort of animals worth more than ordinary care, instead of rational human beings. Here they were in charge of the conductor, who grouped them in seats according to the towns to which they were destined.

When I was seated and had unfolded my paper the first thing that caught my eye was an article in which a noted sociologist was liberally quoted recommending the total suspension of immigration for three years and then new laws admitting only those who would come with their families and were trained in some work demanding skill. The arguments were specious, but as I looked over the top of the paper at the poor creatures huddled in the car seats about, very thinly dressed for so cold a January day, it occurred to me that the true light, the revelation of the natural remedies and the only real understanding of the immigrant situation lay in seeing from the underside, in getting the immigrants’ point of view to compare with the public-spirited American one.

That was the leaven and it grew. The idea ramified into a plan, and this plan was laid before Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of Leslie’s Monthly, and very soon it was decided that I was to go seeking the immigrants’ point of view and was to take my wife with me.

All of the intricacies of how, where and just what, evolved slowly, but this in brief was our general plan: First of all we must choose the ground for our investigation. Since Italy sends not only three times more immigrants than any other country, but a larger proportion of the sort that are objected to in America, it was plain that our work lay among the Italians. We must know the language well enough to ask questions and understand answers; we must know the conditions of Italian life in America in order to know what good and what evil things to trace to their sources. To understand the people properly, we must live with them and be of them, and, to get the fullest grasp on the process of their transmutation we must become immigrants ourselves and re-enter our own country as strangers and aliens.

Therefore we must take up our abode in the Italian quarter, and, when duly prepared and informed, voyage to the home land with some of the returning Italians and, having learned the actual conditions there, come back in the steerage and pass through Ellis Island, bringing with us some typical immigrant family whose exact circumstances we had fully learned in their native community. Using them as a central strand we would weave a story of small things that should be worthy of being taken into reckoning by thinking minds, as a new and important fund of information.

Though we knew full well the hardships which we must endure for many long months, the difficulties which would arise like forbidding barriers, I am free to say that the things on which we had counted and against which we had armed ourselves did not come to pass for the most part; while a multitude of things happened that were as unexpected as gold in breakfast food.

Work began at once, by the book, on the language, and while in the wilds of Yucatan in February we were studying Italian. In March we landed in New York late one night from the Ward liner Monterey, and the very next day went into the Italian quarter seeking a place to live. When we had been in the reeking streets, amid the tumult of innumerable children, and had entered a few of the tenements, my wife turned pale and sick and said:

“Don’t think I am faltering at the threshold; but, please, if we must go through all this, let us have a week of comfort and preparation. Then we will take the plunge.”

Thus I knew how much harder it was for her, with all her love of comfort and her accustomedness to it, to forsake it for any purpose, however important or worth while, than it was for me, who, manlike, enjoy “the fare of the field, and the habit of the strange land.” And thereafter, particularly when we were in the steerage of the Prinzessin Irene and were bound home, actually counting the half-hours of the twelve-day voyage amid utter wretchedness, never did I hear one complaint from her lips or did she give other sign of failing.

At the very outset we had difficulty in gaining admission to any all-Italian house. In the tenements where several rooms were to be had, the Italian real-estate agents eyed us with suspicion and averred solemnly that they were all full, even to the roof. This they asserted, notwithstanding empty apartments to be seen from the street and “Rooms to Let” signs without number. In the boarding houses we were met with a very cold reception even before it was known what we wanted. In the Italian hotels it was the same way with the exception of one south of Washington Square, and there the proprietor kindly offered to let us in at twice the ordinary price, according to the rates tacked on the room doors. At last, however, we came to the domicile of the Chevalier Celestin Tonella. Here we found our haven.

It was some time after we were settled before we learned that we were under the roof of a nobleman. If we had been familiar with the nice distinctions of Italian caste, however, we should have known it instantly. The three houses Nos. 141, 145, 147 West Houston Street, entered by the door of No. 147, seemed to us very little different from many of the other tenements in which we had been, and indeed they were not. The difference all lay in the master not in the mansion. If I had known before paying my rent in advance that my landlord had a title, I should have demurred, thinking that in his house there would be life a little too high in grade for the real Italian quarter; but before I knew the Chevalier’s station, I had learned that we were in the proper element and surrounded by the very atmosphere we sought, though the same at meal times would have almost killed a strong man in his prime.

Just before we gained admittance to the desired quarters we were in the office of a real-estate man who has an exclusively Italian custom in the lower West Side quarter, renting to people of his own race and tongue houses owned by wealthy people up-town. When he had refused to give us an opportunity at anything on his lists I said to him:

“See here. We have been hunting rooms all day. We have been frustrated from Mulberry Street to Fifteenth. I have got money and can give references, but nobody seems to care about either. What is the matter? Why can we not get into an Italian house?”

“Scoose me, mister, bot wye youse want to?”

“We want to live with Italians in order to learn to speak Italian properly.”

“Yes, all ri—ght. I don’ know wye.” A shrug of the shoulders and a side glance with dropped eyes. “Mebbe Eyetayun peoples sink-a youse try to fin’ a out somesings, mebbe don’ a want somebodys fin’ youse. Youse knows deys-a only dirty dagoes.”

This last was said with a bitterness which showed clearly how well the Italians understand the tolerant, semi-contemptuous regard of Americans towards them and how keenly they resent it. I understood at once how and why they suspected us because we, who were obviously “Americans proper” as they nicely express the difference between the native and imported American, desired to come and make our home among them. Only a knowledge that the persons are still living and a wholesome respect for the libel law prevent me from telling how well founded were the suspicions among the Italians of the “Americans proper” who lived about us later.

Thus, to begin with we were met by the barrier of suspicion and misunderstanding raised against us by all our neighbors. We had to overcome it carefully or do our work in spite of it.

CHAPTER II
LIFE IN A NEW YORK ITALIAN TENEMENT

Our room was about seven feet wide and twelve long. It was half of a room of ordinary size that had been cut nicely in two by a partition, and had a sort of small extension at the back that looked out on the rear of the house. It was barely possible to get by the bed in order to pass from the door to the rear window. The bed itself, while not being a geometrical point, had neither length, breadth, nor thickness. In one corner was a small cook-stove, that should have been under pension. There was a small table in the tiny extension, covered with a dark-patterned piece of oilcloth. A careful inspection of it showed me that dark oilcloth has certain advantages over light. A kerosene lamp with a discouragingly short wick stood on an imitation marble mantelpiece that was a relic of the days of the old mansion’s former glory.

We contrived to get one steamer trunk under the bed, and as soon as we could sort out articles of essential wear, the others drifted to that place of uncertainty called “storage.”

Some little time after we had entered the house we were able to get a room twice the size on the top floor, and we contrived to dispose ourselves with some degree of comfort. Aside from the size and the addition of a good bed, the room and furnishings of our second chamber agreed with the first.

During the time we lived there we dressed in such a manner as not to attract the attention of the people about us to the fact that we were not of them, only keeping with us apparel for use when we indulged ourselves in an evening’s relaxation from the hard life and stole away up-town for a bite of something good to eat and the cheer of the voices of friends speaking unadulterated English.

The first night we were in the house we were very weary with the operation of shifting bases and change of station in life, and, finding it almost impossible to read by the light of the lamp, we sought repose about ten o’clock; but just about that time from the floor below us, where we could hear the babel of the voices of men and women, as it were a family party or something of the sort, there began to come a series of vocal explosions. It seemed to be two or more men shouting single words at each other in concert. They enunciated with great energy, at first in a repressed sort of way, but after ten or fifteen words their voices rose to an alarming pitch. Then would come a pause filled in with laughter and chatter, and once more the word-slinging contest would begin. So fiercely were the words expelled that for a long time we could not tell what they were. At last we made out “sei” and “otto,” and as it was impossible to go to sleep with so lively a social function going on below, I got up, lit the lamp and took up our Italian books. A moment’s consultation of the books and a little listening showed us that they were counting, or at least hurling numbers at random at each other. It was inexplicable to us, but it was our first glance into the inside of Italian quarter life.

The Tenement in Houston Street in which the Author and his Wife lived (The chimney-shadow marks their room)

I was heartily glad, however, that the birthday party, christening or wedding anniversary, whichever it was, must surely be a matter of rare occasion.

Imagine our feelings when ten o’clock the next night came and the same rumpus broke forth once more, only with greater vigor. In vain we conjectured the cause. Perhaps they were in the midst of a week’s celebration of some church festival. Perhaps there was some sort of a tournament on.

At last I determined to investigate. Though it was a wet night and walls, ledges and railings about the rear of the house were dripping and slimy, I clambered down from the back window to a point where I could look in below.

There were two basement rooms opening into each other, and there must be a third that opened onto the street in front of the house. The first room was a much-cluttered kitchen with broken boxes of several sorts of macaroni exposed to view, a well-heated range, a cook in white clothes, innumerable bottles of wine on the shelves and dirty dishes on one side while the clean ones were in orderly piles on the other.

In the second and inner room there was a thick, blue atmosphere of pipe and cigar smoke through which the gas jets in the centre of the room flared sharply. Around the uncovered tables of varying sizes were Italians to the number of a score or more. More than half of them were in rough working clothes. Some had beer, some had wine before them and some were eating the stringing macaroni from large dishes heaped with it. Three of them were under the gaslight and were leaning forward in postures of straining excitement, and as each spoke a number he thrust out one hand or both with fingers held out,—three, four, seven, perhaps only one. All the numbers spoken were under ten, and the numbers spoken did not correspond with the numbers indicated by the fingers. After watching them a minute I saw that each man was trying to guess what number the other man would indicate on his fingers, and a correct guess ended each bout; then would come laughter at the expense of the defeated one, and the game would begin over again for points.

Later inquiry as to the name and popularity of the game brought forth the information that it is called mora and is very general through southern Italy, being a favorite diversion among the country people. In Italy country boys will get together in a corner and play mora till they are exhausted, and in the place under us I have known the last hoarsely shouted number to sound after the hour of three.

As I climbed back into my own room I took with me the satisfying knowledge that we should probably hear mora and sing-songing every night while we dwelt in the place. It was evidently a restaurant and used as a sort of club house by a company of the convivial and congenial. There was not the slightest indication on the street front that the place was anything but an ordinary tenement basement.

The commissary end of our campaign after information was very weak. Home cooking is well enough with facilities. It is a destroyer of peace and well-being, without them. Therefore we began a series of disastrous experiments in lunching and dining out in first one and then the other Italian restaurants thereabouts, and after a plucky and determined resistance to the enemy we succumbed. Our stomachs demanded time to accustom themselves to the change, and so we took to Italian fare only in moderation, securing at last an ability to eat and enjoy it.

After I had discovered that there was a restaurant in the basement of our own house, I made inquiry of the landlord as to its desirability, and on his recommendation we went in there one day for lunch. We found that, as I had surmised, there was a third room in the front, and in this a large table was set. At its head was an important-looking red-bearded gentleman whom I knew was an editorre of one of the many small Italian publications put forth in New York. Ranged down each side were men of several sorts. There was an animated conversation in progress as we entered, but a sudden silence fell as they saw us. Looks of suspicion passed, and though they greeted us in a constrained sort of way as we took places at the foot of the table, I could see that we represented a note of discord. The proprietor, who was cook as well, and his wife and sister-in-law were effusive in their welcome, and after we had tasted the character of the food I felt that we were nearer a solution of the eating question than at any time before. The men at the table were visibly relieved when they found that we could not understand Italian, and ventured remarks now and then to test our knowledge. Some of these were of a very personal nature concerning us; and, being able to understand some few of the words and phrases, I knew this but behaved as if there were no word of all they said that had any meaning to me.

That evening when we came in for dinner we found that a little table for the two of us had been put in a remote corner of the long room, and though the places in which we had been at noon were empty, plates and chairs had been removed, so that we well knew “outsiders,” especially ladies, were not desired at their board.

Once they were perfectly sure we did not understand anything of which they spoke, they became just as free of speech as they must have been before. This was very fine for us. An understanding of the good Italian they spoke, which was barely sufficient to trace and know the current of conversation, rapidly broadened into ability to get more of the full meaning. It was ill for speaking-practice, though, for we used only English in the place, and I found that if I used the Italian that I heard them speaking at the table, to any one outside in other parts of the Italian quarter there was an absolute failure to understand me. At first I thought this was because of my poor pronunciation and awkward attempts, but the more I listened the more I learned that we were absorbing better Italian than was spoken by the mass of Italians in New York, and when I first mentioned the subject to an Italian friend, newly made, he laughingly explained that there are about twenty varieties of Italian speech, and that in the restaurant in the Houston Street basement I was hearing Milanese while all about outside were Romans, Neapolitans, Genoese, Turinese, Calabrese, Sicilians, and so on. Greater knowledge of the language showed me that so wide are the differences that a man from certain portions of the north of Italy is almost unable to converse with a man from the south, even if willing to do so. There is the bitterest sectional feeling, and people of different provinces are constantly arrayed against each other. I found this feeling very strong between the Calabrese and the Sicilian.

The men who took lunch at the basement restaurant were of a more intelligent class than those who came there at night, and so, as we came to understand more each day, we began to learn more and more of the very facts of inside life among Italians for which we were seeking.

Mrs. Brandenburg in Her wretched Tenement-room

I do not know that we got so much well-rounded information from their chance conversation as tips on the things for which to be on the lookout. Some little things in particular that had no bearing on generalities are contained in the following incidents.

Gossip one day told me that a certain editor of an Italian newspaper of some standing had written a scathing article directed against Mr. Frank Munsey, at that time the new owner of the News, and William Randolph Hearst of the American and Journal. He had said things which he felt sure would make both of those gentlemen get down their rapiers and do battle either editorially or in person. He hoped it would be both, as he felt he had a righteous cause and needed the advertising. The day his editorial was published he stayed close to the telephone all day in his office expecting a telephone message from one or the other. When the papers of both attacked editors appeared next day without even a one-line hint of the deadly blow which had been dealt them, the Italian editor very nearly fell to the floor in a frothing rage. For an hour he raved like a wild man and was only calmed by the assurance from a cool-headed friend that both were preparing overwhelming answers for their print next day, so he settled himself to write what he thought would be an anticipation of their replies. Not a sign did the two smitten ones give, and it was not long before some one found out through friends in the offices of both papers that in neither had either the first or second assaults in the Italian journal even been so much as heard of.

One of the men at the table had his father in this country with him, and the father, having been here two years and saved $600 working in a piano factory for $1.40 per day, wished to return to Italy to spend his last days and, desiring to save his passage money, had followed the example of another old man and arranged to get himself deported. I listened closely and heard the son telling with great amusement how “feeble” the old man became when he went to make his application for deportation as an alien who was unable to support himself in America because of age and ill health.

At another time a newcomer at the table related to an interested audience what had been told him of the very wild condition of the country even so far east as Kentucky. He gave some instances of a feud, that had been generally printed a short time before, as if they were the actual doings of hordes of savages in the mountains. He may not have been as far wrong as it seems at first glance, of course, but the incident aptly illustrated how little conception the mass of otherwise well-informed aliens have of the great country which is giving them more of comfort, liberty and opportunity than they have ever had before.

Our landlord and his wife represented a class which is taken all too slightly into account by those Americans who are interested in the immigration question; for it has an influence which, while positive in few things and negative in many, is nevertheless very strong and powerfully affects the destinies of Italians in America.

The Chevalier Celestin Tonella is a man of striking presence. He is large and heavy and has the erect bearing of a soldier. He has the dominant nose and the composed air of one accustomed to command. The time was when he stood well up in the army. His exact rank I never learned.

His wife is a small, slender, gray-haired woman with the unmistakable stamp of the gentlewoman upon her, and she speaks a number of languages as well as having the deft-finger gift of making, painting, broidering and sewing, as is the way with Italian women of position.

Of their story I know nothing, except that once she was in the patronage of a duchess and was at court, and he was also in favor with the high and mighty; but now they are running Nos. 141, 145 and 147 Houston Street for a living and are here in America with no plans for going back to Italy. How or why they came, who knows? So far as the interests of this work are concerned I do not care, and have introduced them in so personal a fashion only because they are so typical a family of better-class Italians emigrated to America. Last year the number of alien immigrants landed in the United States who were able to come in the cabin instead of in the steerage was 64,269 and the year previous 82,055. Of this number more than one third were Italians.

In my personal acquaintance among Italians in New York there is a man who was formerly a priest in Rome and is now a saloon-keeper and banker on the East Side; another man who has four titles and an unenviable record in Genoa, Milan, Venice, Paris and Vienna, who owns three barber-shops up-town and two resorts in Elizabeth Street capitalized with the patrimony of a young gentlewoman of Udine who followed him to America when his family had cast him off and it was too hot for him to remain in Italy, France or Austria; a third man who is a banker not far from where we lived who is conducting a flourishing “padrone” business founded on funds which he abstracted while an official in Naples before that city was bankrupted by its rulers.

There are three. I could give a number more, but those will suffice. The point in the whole consideration is that the lower class Italians in this country continue to pay the respect and homage to those of their race who have been born to position, without regard to the changed and democratic conditions under which both gentleman and peasant are now living.

An Italian of humble birth who may have prospered in this country and have risen to a position of commercial and political eminence among New Yorkers will cringe unhesitatingly to some worthless scamp who chances to be well born. I have seen this instanced many times and in various ways. Twenty years of residence and fifteen of citizenship in the United States will change the average Italian into a very American sort of person, but I know to a certainty that he will suffer silently at the hands of a countryman of superior birth what he would not submit to for one minute from an American no matter what might be the latter’s station in life. It is certainly a curious fact.

In general it is safe to say that half of the Italians from the better classes who come to America are far more undesirable than any of the lower-class immigrants except that certain class of habitual criminals who are doing so much to get their race despised by honest, clean-handed Americans.

One of their worst influences is to retard the assimilation of their people by the great American body politic, by refusing to be themselves assimilated, even going so far as to send their children to private schools in order that they may not learn English, and in insisting on wearing clothes of imported make or pattern. They are by birth, tradition and intent the leaders of Italian communities in this country, and their prejudices and examples confuse if not entirely divert the natural social development of their humbler countrymen all about them.

Many of them are estimable, as are Chevalier Tonella and his clever, cheery wife, but their influence is negatively wrong.

One evening I was sitting with an Italian carpenter, a friend of the landlord’s, in a corner of a Thompson Street saloon, and we were discussing the effect of union-labor regulations on the labor of immigrants and the way in which skilled masons, carpenters, cabinet-makers, smiths, etc., are forced to become peddlers, common laborers, bootblacks, etc., instead of having opportunities to follow their trades, when we were interrupted by the sudden appearance of a very excited man. He was a young barber, flushed with wine and good fortune. He burst into the room with a shout and a rattle of oaths and slammed down a handful of mixed money on a table.

The people about were saying so much and delivering it in so short a time that it was a full five minutes before they began conversation piano enough for me to get the idea. The young barber had won three hundred dollars at lotto and had just received it.

I knew that in Italy nearly every block in the cities has its banco di lotto run by the government and supposed that the young chap had been playing the lottery from this side and had won but I soon learned that the national love of lotto gambling has been transplanted to America, and that since the laws here forbid lotteries the Italians of the country are forced to run them under cover, and do so very successfully. After that I often heard of plays made by my friends and of winnings now and then by people I did not know, but never at any time was I able to fathom the method by which the business was carried on. Instead of being officially conducted by any society, each lottery is entirely a private venture, and its patronage is confined to those who are compare as the dialect has it. It is a word difficult to render into English, but all those Italians who come from one town or province and have mutual interests and trust each other are compare. Not only does this freemasonry exist as to lotto, but it pervades all their other social relations. It is a potent force never reckoned with among those who persist in misunderstanding the “dirty dago.”

Very soon after we had taken up our residence in the quarter I found out the true reason for the prospect of an enormously increased immigration for 1903. The ponderous articles and profoundly wise comments on the question had attributed it to a number of things. Among these were: an increasing demand for labor that made a market for the immigrants’ muscles, advertising efforts on the part of competing steamship lines, oppression of the Jews, deflection of German emigration from South America to North America, increased taxes and failure of crops in southern Europe. Balderdash and folly! The truth was that every man who had any relatives to bring over to the United States had read of the new strictures in immigration laws that impended and was straining every nerve to bring them and get them passed before the new laws could be passed and put into effect. Thousands and thousands of people whom the laws would not have affected in the least came this last year when if there had been no change of legislation in prospect, they would have waited a year or two more. I know personally of a score of families whose plans were affected by this very thing and by no other consideration.

It should be remarked at this stage that one of the first things I learned among the Italians (and I knew later that it extended to all races) was that the alien considers the United States code of immigration laws a very complex, fearsome and inexplicable thing, to be thoroughly respected but if possible, evaded.

More than once I have been asked the following question which bears its own token:

“If a man and his family are good enough to live in Italy, why are they not good enough to live in the United States?”

The records of immigrants who have gone insane either on shipboard or in Ellis Island, or have broken down as soon as ever they were safely landed in the United States, are striking proof of how persons entirely within the bounds of the laws worry over the chance of exclusion.

One day after we had changed into our third-floor room we heard a frightful row among the neighbors below. A moment’s listening showed that some woman was berating a little girl, and some man was interposing in the child’s behalf. I suppose it was a man and his wife and the eldest of their three girls, who lived on that floor. I cannot give the entire conversation, but the following extract will tell the story:

Said the mother in very forcible Tuscan:

“You shall speak Italian and nothing else, if I must kill you; for what will your grandmother say when you go back to the old country, if you talk this pig’s English?”

“Aw, gwan! Youse tink I’m goin’ to talk dago ‘n’ be called a guinea! Not on your life. I’m 'n American, I am, ‘n’ you go way back ‘n’ sit down.”

The mother evidently understood the reply well enough, for she poured forth a torrent of Italian mixed with strange misplaced American oaths, and then the father ended matters by saying in mixed Italian and English:

“Shut up, both of you. I wish I spoke English like the children do.”

A very sensible German whom I know, a man of good education and holding an important position in the Ward line, has often told me that he was compelled to learn to speak good English in order to keep from being laughed at by his children, who contrived to escape correction whenever he used broken English in arraigning them.

One of our methods of investigation was to go from one place of business to another in the quarter and, if possible, buy some trifle, meanwhile asking questions. We found that it is usually the children who do the reading, writing, interpreting and accounting in English for their parents, and an extremely bright and quick lot of youngsters they seemed to be. In some places we saw startling contrasts between the two generations: one rooted in all that is Italian and absolutely unable to allow themselves to be absorbed and assimilated and the other intensely and thoroughly American in every idea and mannerism. It would be easy to understand how this could be so had these same children been well mixed with native-born children, but in all that community and in the schools they attended the percentage of Italians was so great that one would have thought it was the native-born children who would have been swallowed up in Italianism. It is a remarkable fact that the Italian children insist on learning and speaking English alone, though it is not the native tongue of more than one in ten persons about them.

One of the general conditions, to the true significance of which our attention was called by the conversation of the midday gathering around the table in the Houston Street basement, is the pernicious system of Italian “banks.” They are scattered everywhere through the Italian colonies of New York, Boston, Buffalo, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, etc., and, being ultra-parasitical in their nature, their harmful agencies may be imagined.

In Greater New York, and in its New Jersey purlieus which are so closely connected that they pulse with the life of the great city, there are 412 Italian banks with charters to do banking business and fully as many more that operate without charters. Many of these are combination businesses, money exchanges, steamship-ticket offices and banks, groceries and banks, saloons and banks, and often only the patrons are aware that there is a banking business at all.

Furthermore the banking business is conducted on a very different basis from that usual in American banks of the various grades. Every employer of Italian labor in New York city knows that if he wishes to get a gang of men quickly to go to a job of work he need only telephone to an Italian bank. It will be found to be a very effective employment bureau. I have known specific instances where two large corporations, one commercial and the other industrial, being suddenly in need of labor, sent to Italian banks and got gangs of men. In the one instance the commercial corporation agreed to pay the bank $7.20 per week per man, and the men received from the bank $5 per week each. In another the industrial corporation paid $1.50 per day, and the men got $1.10. Three banks were concerned in the two cases. I learned of the low wage from the men, and in answer to my questions they told me that they were under the control of the bank. So I made inquiry of the two corporations and ascertained the above facts.

It is unwise and unjust to say that all of the little Italian banks are conducted on these lines or indulge in the following practices. There are many which are conducted by honorable, trustworthy men; but the greater number are the arbiters of the welfare of the Italian laborer in this country. They “bureauize” him privately, as the Italian government is endeavoring and failing to do officially. The poverty-pinched Italian peasant who is minded to come to America, earn a few hundred dollars and return can go to a money-lender at home and deliver himself into his hands. His fare will be lent to him, with other necessary money, at a usurious rate, frequently with no security save that the peasant, often unable to read or write and densely ignorant of what awaits him, is consigned to the Italian bank in America of which the money lender is a correspondent. When he reaches Ellis Island he is met by his “cousin,” the bank’s representative, and is duly discharged to him in New York or shipped to him by rail. If he has any money of his own, he deposits it in the bank; the bank lends him more money if he needs it; the bank finds his place to sleep and eat; the bank sees that he has a doctor if he needs one; and in a day or two the ignorant peasant with others of his kind is despatched to work in the Subway, steve on the docks, excavate for new buildings, delve in the mines, or whatever the work may be, fulfilling the agreement which the bank has made to deliver labor. This is an evasion of the letter of the contract alien labor law and a flagrant violation of its spirit.

The bank, furthermore, is usually owned entirely or at least controlled by one man. It is the laborer’s address for his mail from home. It writes his letters for him if he is unable to write. It forwards his savings home, minus a percentage. It holds his passport and any other valuable papers and in every way makes itself so essential to him that it has him entirely in its control. Often he realizes that it does this for from five to thirty per cent of his wages; more often he never knows how much short of his full due he is getting. Worst of all are the naturalization frauds, the wholesale political mal-franchisements and increase of temporary immigration. In the last-named matter the banker rarely fails to urge the immigrant to return to Italy after he has saved two or three hundred dollars, because he will sell the immigrant his ticket home, clear the scores, realize his profits and be able to fill the place of the departing man with one who is “greener” and yet more ignorant. When the Italian has been here a year or two he begins to be difficult for the banker to handle, unless he be of that number who are born to be driven and sold like cattle.

As I have said there are many very worthy men engaged in banking and agency businesses among Italians, but there is a notable number who are born thieves and swindlers and have records at home which prevent their enjoyment of the balmy air of Italy for even one brief day. This matter is not overlooked at home. A joke in one of the Roman comic papers printed not long ago attests that.

A cashiered army officer is pictured as meeting a defaulting office-holder just emerging from a term in prison. This is the dialogue:

Army Officer.—“What is the game now? An honest life?”

Late Office-holder.—“No, I think I shall open an emigrant bank in New York.”

Army Officer.—“Indeed! I had thought of that myself.”

CHAPTER III
TO NAPLES IN THE STEERAGE OF THE LAHN

When midsummer came it was of course still too hot in southern Italy for us to go there with safety, let alone comfort, and it was becoming every day more onerous to live in the quarter. New Yorkers who dwell up-town and have entire houses, floors or apartments to themselves complain bitterly of the heat in summer, and, if possible, escape from the city. I have passed a whole summer in New York up-town, but, permit me to say that it is life at a seaside resort compared to what the people endure in the down-town tenement districts.

I think that we could have supported the heat, but the conglomerate of smells increased until it was overpowering, and each night the entire quarter was in tumult until well towards dawn. We learned then what we came to know so well thereafter, that when the Italian cannot sleep he fain would sing and play lotto, seven and a half, or mora. At last, in June, my wife became quite sick one day, and two days later we were off on a trip by steamer to Newfoundland, Labrador and Nova Scotia, returning early in August in time to sail on the Lahn of the North German Lloyd line.

The morning of our departure was a beautiful one, and as we crossed by the Hoboken ferry we could see the great German ships lying at the Hamburg-American and North German Lloyd docks. One of them had smoke pouring from her funnels, and a “blue peter” fluttered at her peak,—the signal that she was about to sail.

We were dressed in the plainest and cheapest of clothes, bought and worn previously in the quarter, and everything we owned we had stored except what could be got into a little $1.10 imitation-leather dressing-case, with a shoulder-strap clipped into screw-eyes in the end to make easy porterage. Over half of its contents were photographic and stationery supplies. Instead of a shirt I wore the usual dark jersey such as many Italians in this country wear. Around my waist was a plain leather belt cleverly made of two strips between which reposed several thousand lire, easily put in or taken out through a neatly concealed aperture. Once thereafter a man handled that belt and threw it down as not worth taking, when it had in it a sum that would have gladdened his heart. I bore the one piece of baggage, while my wife carried, slung over her shoulder, the five-by-seven cartridge kodak which was our most jealous ward, our one essential treasure.

We had bought tickets at the Greenwich Street office of the North German Lloyd Company, where the steerage traffic is handled, under the names of Berto and Luiga Brandi and when doing so were asked our ages, places of birth, occupation, etc. On inquiry I found that the Italian law requires this of the ship’s company, and that these sheets are used to keep track of returned emigrants and facilitate apprehension of any men who have avoided military duty.

As we pushed our way through the crowd on the dock, where freight and steerage baggage was being rushed out of the way of the “first-cabiners,” who had not yet begun to arrive, we were startled to find what an enormous number of fellow passengers we were to have compared to the steerage capacity of the ship and the agent’s forecast of the load. He had conjectured 350 four days before. We sailed with more than 750 and certainly had a full house.

As we came up the gangway we were checked off by a short, heavy-set official in a black-lustre coat and dirty piqué cap; and a white-aproned stewardess of massive frame gave us two little red cards which read “Good for One Ration,” while a steerage steward thrust into our hands a piece of horse-blanket goods of very poor material and very scant in dimensions, wrapped around a tin spoon, tin fork and tin cup, as well as a little pan about the pork-and-bean size. As we passed on into the crowd and into an unoccupied corner of the deck, and my wife unrolled her blanket and saw what was inside, a certain startled, stricken look came into her eyes. I knew that for the first time realization of a part of what was before her had come to her. I had often told her as nearly as I could, speaking from my own experiences as a sailor when studying seafaring life, of how steerage passengers lived on emigrant ships; but now any sort of “camping-out glamour” that had hung about it for her was dispelled, and she had a glimpse to the fore where misery, dirt and discomfort lay spread. If she was sorry she had come, she did not say so. I will confess that we had long since made a private bargain about the enterprise, and the consideration was well worth the while, so she showed no sign of wavering from her agreement.

The deck forward was the scene of the wildest commotion. Many people who were returning had been accompanied to the dock by their friends, and these, standing on shore, shouted vainly to their compatriots aboard. The noise was too great for speech except at close range. On every hand was piled baggage of all shapes and sizes; but I remembered it afterwards with envy when I saw the terrible mass of nondescript luggage which smothered the steerage on the return trip. The immigrant comes here with a huge pile of bundles, wooden boxes and flimsy bags; he goes home with good steel-framed valises and good trunks.

The chatter that prevailed about was mostly Italian, and I found that some of the dialects spoken I could not understand at all. I had not even encountered them in the quarter. Then, too, there were aboard, Greeks, Spaniards, Swiss, Germans, Macedonians, Montenegrians, Hungarians, Jews of several sorts, Syrians, etc. All spoke English in stages varying from a complete command down to the ability to swear. American “cuss words” are among the first things picked up and the last forgot. Strange, isn’t it?

We had been promised that we might secure places,—after we were on board, in a closed compartment with four other people, a sort of superior steerage accommodation to be had at the expense of $10 added to the $35 for passage, which we had paid, and, leaving my wife seated in a clean spot on a hatch, I scoured the ship within the limits of the steerage to find those compartments, but all I got was a series of round cursings from the petty officers for bothering them while they were busy. I nosed about every corner of the ship forward, and if there were those compartments for three married couples, which are popularly supposed to exist in the emigrant quarters and had been referred to in serious editorials in notable publications within the past three months as being “all that the ship’s people could be expected to give the third class in the way of comfort and privacy,” I was unable to find them, nor did I see them or hear of them at any time later on the Lahn or any other ship I have inspected.

Life on the Steerage-passengers’ Deck on the Lahn

When I came on deck a stocky Italian, well dressed in American clothes, was holding an umbrella over my wife, for the sun was beating down on the ship’s deck, and it was terrifically hot on board, moored as she was to the south side of the pier. They were chatting in English, and when I came up the stranger introduced himself as John Tury, of Lancaster, Pa., a peanut and fruit seller, who had been in this country five years and was now going home to Terra Nova, his native village in Sicily, for a brief visit. He had with him three cousins, younger men. His English was good though not perfect, and he refused to use Italian either with us or any one else on shipboard except when necessary. We sat talking for an hour or more, and became quite good friends, while waiting for the ship to sail and for a semblance of order to come about.

As yet we had no sleeping quarters. There seemed to be nothing to do but find places in the men’s and women’s compartments, and they were already so well filled when we went aboard that there was not a desirable bed left. I went below, where between decks the long, closely set double tiers of iron bunks were ranged, and looked in vain for a bunk that was not occupied by women and children or a piece of baggage left to signify that it had been pre-empted. There were some empty beds in the men’s compartments, but they were badly located for light and air. There seemed to be nothing to gain by being in a hurry, and it was a long time till evening and bedtime. I knew there was more room on the ship, and I meant to have some of it even if I had to leave the steerage quarters; for our only interest in voyaging to Italy in the steerage was to seek information by association, whereas when coming back to the States it would be to be constantly with the family with which we expected to return.

When I returned to the deck, the big liner had slid out of the slip and was just forging her way down stream. Back on the pier was a black group of people waving handkerchiefs, parasols and hats. One large group of Italians I observed, watching the serrated profile of Manhattan with great interest, and I heard them talking of it as if they had never seen it before. So I said to one of them:

“Have you been in America and have not seen New York?”

“No, we came to Boston and by railroad to Scranton.”

“Have you been at work in the mines?”

“Yes, they are just sending forty of us back home, and one hundred more will go next month.”

I knew at once that the group was one of contract laborers who were being returned to their country, and by questioning him further I learned that they had been employed in the Lackawanna mines and had got employment through an Italian “banker” in Scranton who had sent two men to Italy in October of the year before, and during the winter they had hired in the vicinity of Potenza nearly three hundred men and despatched them in small parties on successive steamers to Boston in the months of March, April and May. Those who were now returning were those who had been hurt, were sick, or were dissatisfied. Ten of them had had accidents and four had lung trouble; one poor fellow, he told me, being even then in the ship’s hospital for steerage passengers dying with consumption, the result of his two years’ work under ground.

The steerage passengers are supposed to form themselves into groups of six, and one man of the six is the one to receive the food as it is ladled out of huge tanks on deck by the steerage stewards; but not having had time to get properly assorted, dinner was now served to the steerage on a basis of “every man look out for his own.”

I took our two tin pans and the tin cups, and plunged into the crush waiting to pass in line down the alley which was made by the tanks and baskets of food, ranged on the deck forward, and emerged in half an hour with two messes of macaroni and meat, two tin cups of highly acid and alcoholic wine and a cap full of hot potatoes.

As my wife looked the fare over when I brought it to her as she squatted in a nook sheltered from the sun, her lips trembled and she looked away towards Staten Island, then dropping into dim distance, as if wishing that she could by some magic word transport herself back to home-land soil once more. But in an instant her courage forced a smile, and we closed our eyes and ate and drank. It did not taste so bad, after all, but it was the look of it! And the way the women and children about us spilled it around on the deck and on themselves!

After we had eaten what little we might, we ensconced ourselves in a bit of shade and watched the crowd about. Every moment that passed, every bit of conversation we caught, every small incident that occurred, showed us that for months we had been moving on a false plane, that just at that time when we thought ourselves in the genuine atmosphere of the life of the Italian immigrant in the New World, we were merely in that false temporizing atmosphere which he creates for himself and fellows, and from which he emerges only when he has become Americanized. In a few minutes we understood that the greater portion of the conditions, habits and operations which we had observed grew out of a feeling among them that they were merely temporizing here; that they had come to America to make a few hundred dollars to send or take back to Italy; and that it did not make much difference what they ate, wore or did, just so long as they got the money and got back. We could see plainly why it was that they had not risen above that state until they had been attracted and drawn into the real American life about them and had decided to remain. Here were hundreds of Italians just such as those who had been our household neighbors, but they were now a different people. They spoke freely, they bore themselves differently. There was a new certainty and boldness in their manner, for they were free and cut off from all things American, and, without imperilling a single interest, could return to everything that was Italian. Separated from its opportunities for betterment, their state in this country is inferior to that at home. This I can say conscientiously after long and careful observation.

We became acquainted with a woman who sat near us and who had a very pretty little girl. This woman said she came from Pittsburg, having been born of Italian parents in this country when the first Italians came from the north of Italy about twenty-five years ago. She had married an Italian who had emigrated more recently, and now they were going home for a visit. She expressed intense disgust at the manner in which about one third of the women conducted themselves and allowed their children to behave. These women were the ones who made the noise, who scattered the filth, who sprawled about on deck and whose children, though on board but a few hours as yet, were sights to behold from being allowed to play in the scuppers where the refuse from dinner had collected in heaps purpled with the wasted wine.

From her we learned that her husband had been commissioned by a contractor in Pittsburg to go into the Italian provinces of Austria,—by which is meant the Austrian possession immediately around the head of the Adriatic, where the stock is Italian,—and engage two hundred good stonemasons, two hundred good carpenters, and an indefinite number of unskilled laborers. These people were to be put in touch with sub-agents of lines sailing from Hamburg, Fiume and Bremen, and these agents were to be accountable for these contract laborers being got safely into the United States. This woman informed us that many of her neighbors in Pittsburg had come into the United States as contract laborers, and held the law in great contempt, as it was merely a matter of being sufficiently instructed and prepared, and no official at Boston or Ellis Island could tell the difference.

We had been seated there a little while when there came by a sailor whom I had known in Hamburg some years before, and when I stepped aside to talk with him he was greatly surprised but remembered me, and we talked of many things which do not pertain to this consideration, save that just before he left I told him that we were on the lookout for the best sleeping and eating accommodations we could get in the steerage, and he answered, laughingly, that it was easy enough to get a good place and good things to eat—if I had money. I signified that I had.

He said he would send me a man who would be the person with whom to dicker. When he was gone, I sat down to wait. In about an hour I saw a tall, well-built man in ship’s working rig, neither a sailor nor a steward, though moving about the steerage apparently looking for some one; so I moved his way, and when he saw me he sidled up cautiously, glancing up at the bridge, the forward end of the boat and the hurricane deck to see who might be observing. I spoke to him in German; but he replied in English and said we had better talk English, as it was the language that was safe from eavesdroppers.

He said he would sell us good beds for $10 each, and we could buy food as we wished it. The food would be furnished by the first-cabin cook and would be savings from the galley. I demanded to see the beds first, and he led the way below. He took us to the entrance to the steerage compartments nearest amidships, where they opened into a little alleyway, at one end of which was one of the public bars for the sale of beer to those Italians, Jews, etc., who have learned to drink beer instead of wine. Beside the companion-way which led down to the compartments for third-class passengers was a narrow one marked “Hospital.” It led down past the steerage dispensary and to the two rooms apportioned for female sick. A narrow alleyway passed transversely to the other side of the ship, where there were two rooms for the male sick. My conductor was the hospital steward, and his offer to us was a bunk each in the hospital wards, to which we could come at night as if we were patients. I could not see how it was safe to pay the money in advance, and then be ousted by the ship’s doctor the first time he made his rounds. So this hospital steward, who was called Otho, surprised me by summoning the ship’s doctor, a young German with a fringe of flaxen beard and bulging eyes, and allowing him to reassure me. It was all right. He got his share of the money from the rental of the bunks. All of them expressed a great fear and dread of the Italian doctor, the naval surgeon put on each emigrant ship by the Italian government.

In brief, as the beds were clean, the situation interesting and the hospital wards not very crowded, we accepted, and whenever the food on deck was not to our liking we could get an abundance from the hospital. It was rather wearisome, the last few days, though. Duck and chicken for every meal!

In my room there were two others who were paying rent for beds. One was a quaint old fellow from Tuckahoe, where he kept a saloon. He was on his way home for the fourth time. He wore a knit worsted green and yellow skull-cap day and night. It had a long yellow tassel on it, and some nights the tassel would get in his mouth and interfere with his slumbers—and mine. The second room had but one patient in it, one of the contract laborers from Scranton who was dying with consumption and prayed all day long for a sufficient lease of life to see the Bay of Naples, when he felt sure he would begin to get well at once. In three years he had saved and sent home $820, which made his wife and family comparatively independent. He told me one day that even if he died as the result of his voluntary slavery in the mines he felt sufficiently repaid. I am glad to say that at least he reached home alive.

Late that afternoon we ran rapidly into murky weather and before long encountered a stiff gale, for August. It lasted all night and all the next day. I have been on ships steadier than the Lahn, and this gale took her nearly on the beam. The seasickness in the steerage was nothing short of frightful. Fortunately the people had had very little to eat—few of them much breakfast on sailing-day and very few any supper—so the most undesirable feature of a seasick crowd was limited. Also many of the third-class passengers had profited by the experiences of former voyages, and were able to take care of themselves and make less bother for their neighbors. Nevertheless, the compartments, in which the people were compelled to stay by reason of the deck weather, were in a state in describing which no good purpose is served. The steerage stewards were constantly busy with hose, sand buckets, brooms, etc.

Not only were we seeking general information, but we were hoping to get trace of some southern Italian family about to emigrate, in order to make them, as planned, the central feature of our analytical study of particular experiences; so, as the days went by, I inquired of each new person with whom I fell into conversation if he knew of such a family. Nearly every other man was either going over to get a wife for himself or already had a family in Italy and expected to return in October, or, if not then, in the following May. In a short time we had twenty families under consideration, but none of them seemed to be exactly typical; they were all too small, too large, too rich or from provinces that sent few emigrants.

There was a group of eight Greeks aboard who had been denied admission to the United States and were part of twenty-two men, women and children of mixed races who had arrived in New York on the Lahn and other North German Lloyd ships and were being returned by the company. The leader of the group was a huge fellow with very curly hair and beard who rejoiced in the name of Garareikophalous, and the third day I had a long chat with him with the aid of an interpreter from among our fellow passengers.

He said that all Greece was stirred up over the matter of emigration, and that in five years’ time the number of Greeks coming to the United States would have increased a thousand per cent. The military duties in the kingdom were too onerous to be borne, and the Greeks already in the United States were prospering to such an extent that every remittance they made home fired the zeal of the people to follow after them. In nearly every village the candy-makers’ shops were educating twice the usual number of apprentices, because the first emigrants had been candy-makers and they had established a foothold in the confectionery business and then sent for their candy-making relatives, which had caused a shortage in confectioners in Greece and in turn had created the impression that to get on best in America a Greek should be a candy-maker. Therefore every father who desired that his sons should go to America and send him enough money home to make him a rich man among his neighbors, apprenticed them to candy-making and after two years shipped them to New York. Some of the venturesome ones had branched out in the dried-fruit and olive-oil business, and he had heard they were doing very well. The result would be that as the various natural industries of Greece were taken up in America, and opportunities for labor and business offered, the emigration would swell to comparatively huge proportions.

A feature which he mentioned and on which I questioned him exhaustively was the advertising done by the steamship companies. He had some of the advertisements in his pockets, and some others he got from the members of his party. These he translated to the interpreter, who gave me a rough idea of what they were. I found they were not issued by the steamship companies but by sub-agents in Vienna, Bremen, Hamburg, Berlin, Naples, etc., and were of a very alluring sort. Two of them were poems expatiating on the beauties and wealth of America, and one was a clipping from a Greek paper supposed to be printed in New York, which related how a poor boy from Thessaly had gone to Cincinnati and opened a little candy store. He had broadened his business to a factory, and now had headquarters of four factories in New York, and had property to the extent of a million and a half drachmæ, or about $200,000, to show for eight years’ work.

Garareikophalous was very proud of the fact that he and his party had not been deceived by the sub-agents into going to America by the northern route. He averred that every effort is made by the sub-agents all through his country to get the emigrants to go overland to the German or French ports and take ship there instead of shipping at Naples or other Mediterranean ports.

Preparing to Serve a Meal on the Lahn from the Food-tanks and Bread-baskets

I was unable to understand this action of the sub-agents until I had the light of later investigation upon it, when I found that it is a rule of the agents at the ports of embarkation never to allow an emigrant who has been denied admission to the United States to return to his native village if business is anything less than rushing from that section, for the reason that one emigrant who has failed to enter the United States can keep three hundred more from trying it. If the emigrant were returned to a southern port, the chances of his reaching home would be greatly increased. Emigrants returned to German and French ports are often reshipped to South Africa, South America and Mexico. Furthermore, when they are of the sort that needs coaching and schooling, in order that they shall not make the wrong answers at Ellis Island, the journey across the continent is used as an educational process in which they are carefully taught to dissemble. If there are members of the family who are physically unfit to be sent to Ellis Island, the sub-agents persuade the family to separate at the port of embarkation, and the diseased and deformed ones are sent across the channel into England and dumped in the charitable institutions. Sometimes they are sent from England, perhaps even from the port of embarkation, to Canada. The Hamburg-American line carries a notoriously bad lot of emigrants into Halifax. This feature I had investigated to my complete satisfaction in July.

More information that was decidedly to the point, I received from two Jews who were returning to assemble a large party of former neighbors and bring them to America, to sell off a quantity of property and in general readjust matters in a town not far from Odessa, in behalf of a coterie of relatives whom they had brought to America previously. Both had lived in Hungary and had traveled all through the districts from which comes the poor Jew of the South. They were going to Naples, by rail to Brindisi, then to Alexandria and Smyrna, and would go north from Constantinople. I will confess that it was not easy to elicit information from them, and very indirect processes were necessary; but here are some of the things learned.

Among Russians as well as Jews in Russia the limitations of the American immigration laws are very well known indeed by the priests, school-teachers, officials and others; and when a family desires to emigrate it begins by paying a weekly stipend to some person in this class, who puts them through a course of instruction as to how to carry money, answer questions, conceal diseases, etc. When the family starts it is met at all important stations by a Jewish committee and passed on. An ignorant Jew possessed of some wealth is almost certain to lose much of it at the hands of unscrupulous Jews who infest principal stations, border towns, etc. There have been cases where poor families even lost their little all to these harpies, ending by becoming charitable charges in England or Belgium. In many cases the family is part of a large group under the direct charge of a runner from some sub-agent’s office, but this is usually the case when the people are very poor and obviously diseased. Groups like this are not delivered to the steamship agents at German and French ports, but are sent to a place called the Shelter for Poor Jews which has been established in London, and they are kept there many weeks if necessary, and then sent either to New York, Boston, Halifax or Montreal. Cases of trachoma are treated in this shelter, in great numbers, until the emigrant is ready to pass inspection. Those cases which are regarded as hopeless are sent to Canadian towns in care of Jewish societies and are smuggled across the border gradually.

These men had a quantity of letters and credentials signed by various steamship representatives, and I was exceedingly sorry that I could not know whether they were bound on a mission that was much more extensive and nefarious than the plans which they avowed to me.

One fine morning we sighted the Azores and passed close by the shore of St. Michaels, and the second day thereafter we arrived at Gibraltar. Third-class passengers were not encouraged to go ashore, but I made a little arrangement with the man at the plank; and my wife, John Tury, the Lancaster peanut-seller, and I went ashore in the dusk of the evening. The steamer would not leave till after midnight. As we walked along the streets, Tury said to me:

“I suppose if we were going to be here for a day, we might take the train over to London?”

“To London! Why, what do you mean?” I exclaimed.

“Why, I have heard England is a very small place, and it cannot be far from here to London.”

Then I realized that he thought Gibraltar was the southern end of England, and I was surprised to learn later how many Italians who have voyaged by Gibraltar more than once are of the same impression. I have heard some argue for it stoutly.

Just the day before we reached Naples, when there was great happiness and rejoicing on every hand, I observed a well-built young Italian with heavy black hair and moustache, a handsome fellow of twenty-five, come up from below with his mandolin. With him was an older man with a guitar. In a few minutes there was a little band of four musicians gathered on the shady side of the ship at the foot of the companion-way to the hurricane deck. They were playing an American two-step, and had a well-pleased crowd about them. On the lapel of the mandolin-player I observed a button of the Foresters. They had begun on the second number of their impromptu concert, when the second officer piped from the bridge, a deck hand went up and came down in a minute with this mandate:

“You must stop playing; the captain wants to sleep.”

Jeers and shouts of scorn and anger rose on every hand, and I observed that the leaders in this expression were those men whom I knew to be American citizens or Italians, Jews or Greeks of some length of residence in the United States.

As the young mandolin-player walked away, I stopped him and spoke to him in English, asking him if he was a Forester. He told me he was and that he belonged to a lodge in Stonington, Conn., and, having been in America five years, was now going home “for the women folks.”

In brief, I found in him and his family the ideal group for which we had been looking. He was sufficiently Americanized to appreciate the object of our investigations, and we speedily became good friends.

His name is Antonio Squadrito, and he had with him his father, Giovanni. Five years before, he had left his native Sicilian village, Gualtieri-Sicamino, as one of the first to depart for America from all that country. He had done so because he had his choice between going into the Carabineers, or rural police, and taking up a trade. He had told his father that if he would help him borrow the money he would go to America. This was done, though the neighbors all prophesied disaster and misfortune “in that strange wild land.”

He landed at the Battery from the Kaiser Friedrich, being “recommended” to a distant relative from a northern province who was already in New York; and the first work he got was in the quarries of Westerly, R. I., where he worked for three months at $1.10 per day. He played the mandolin even then with fair skill, and made friends with an Italian who had a barber shop in Stonington. Antonio went there to work, and as he saved his money he sent back, little by little, enough to pay off his debt at home, and the remainder his boss “borrowed” from him. Some domestic relations of the boss caused him to desire to sell out, and one day he came to Antonio and told him he must buy his barber shop or he would not get back the borrowed money. Antonio protested that he could not speak enough English to run the business, but the boss insisted, and in the end Antonio found himself possessed of the shop and a new debt of $100 which he had got as a loan from a man who had taken an interest in him.

The shop prospered. Antonio sent over for his brother Giuseppe to come over and help him. Giuseppe is older and had married a year before, and his wife Camela had presented him with a pretty little girl baby whom they had named Caterina after her grandmother Squadrito. The next year the shop was doing so well that Carlino, the brother next younger than Antonio, was sent for; and the next year Tommasso, a still younger brother, and Giovanni the father were brought over. The father worked at carpentering and coopering in Stonington, making as much as $1.80 per day; but he could not learn the language, and when I met him his English was limited to “All right!” “Fine day!” “Yes, sir!” and “cuss words.”

In the last year before our meeting Antonio had married the widow of a whaling-captain of the town, who had been left property by her husband estimated roundly at $60,000. By this time Antonio had made in his barber shop and cigar store and by furnishing music for dances, etc., $8,000, and had sent home five or ten dollars each month. A nice little acre or two of garden land had been bought east of the village, and of this Antonio was very proud, as in his country none but the fairly well-to-do owns land.

Now he was going home to get a party of the family, of cousins and neighbors, and he expected to return in two or three months. That suited the limits of our time, and the location of the family in one of the hotbeds of emigration was most pleasing; so we were delighted when he cordially invited us to go home with him. We explained that we wished to make a sort of general study of the country as it related to the immigration question, before we took up the subject in particular, and he confided that his principal reason for wishing to have us visit him in Gualtieri was to show the people there that all the wonderful stories they had been hearing about him were true in the main. He carried no proof except banking papers, and he was anxious about “what the home folks might think.” I often think of how much of the strenuous endeavor in all lines in this world is to “impress the home folks.” How many men and women have been disappointed when they went out into the world and did something that was absolutely beyond the comprehension—even belief, perhaps—of the simple-minded “folks at home.”

The next day, late in the morning, signs began to show in the east that we were nearing the shores of Italy, and late that afternoon the Lahn forged into a berth close to the naval sea wall before the beautiful city of Naples.

As we were leaving the ship we saw Carabineers at the gangways arresting several men who had been in the steerage with us. I made inquiry, and was informed that the men arrested had left Italy to avoid military duty, and they had been kept track of. When they sailed home, the Italian authorities in New York had notified the questor, or chief of police, at Naples.

As the tender which took us ashore steamed away from the Lahn, we got a fine view of the ship and its surroundings. It was encompassed on every hand by bumboat-men selling the sweet fruits of Italy, for which her sons and daughters had hungered and thirsted so long. Just outside of the ring of bumboat-men were the twoscore or more boats of the runners for emigrant lodging-houses. These men would get the eye of a returned emigrant on board and would bargain with him for a room, then take him off with his baggage. A police official in plain clothes who was aboard the tender told me that among the curses of the city are the practices in these lodging-houses, where every sort of evil element congregates to prey on the simple-minded countryman who has been to America for two or three years, toiled hard for the few hundred dollars he is bringing back, and yet has not wit enough to keep the thieves of Naples from getting all or a portion of it. However, the returned emigrants are not to be condemned for their witlessness. I flatter myself that I know a thing or two, and yet I found myself on the constant qui vive to keep from being “done” in Naples, and even my great vigilance did not save me once or twice. Dishonesty is part of the air in Naples, just as is the smell that is famous.

CHAPTER IV
CONDITIONS IN THE NEAPOLITAN ZONE

It is a painful fact, but the average American’s conception of Italian immigration is that the majority of the Italians come from “down in the Boot,” and that they are all bad and undesirable. It is the usual thing to regard all southern Italians as unworthy of Americanism. One sees it constantly in public print or finds it in private discourse. And the phrase about the Boot is one which has been bruited around again and again from official report to alarmist editorial, and back to classical reference which was its origin. I have met many people who are not aware that the Sicilians, for instance, do not come from “down in the Boot.” These ideas all mate nicely with the one which attributes to every Italian the possession of a stiletto up his sleeve and an ever-ready hand to use it.

The poor southern Italians are the object of constant attack by the American public, of bitter contempt from the more fortunate people of the northern provinces, and of ceaseless worriment from the gentlemen legislators of the kingdom. Italia Meridionale is in a miserable condition compared with the north, and the people are ignorant, and the percentage of illiteracy is appalling; but, nevertheless, they are strong in body, steadfast in mind, willing of spirit and at all times thrifty; so that, speaking from an immigratory standpoint, I am convinced, after a survey of the entire experiment, that they are a very good sort of raw material and their immigration should be encouraged, if the rottenness that corrupts them after they are here—as a drop of poison can turn the blood of an entire body to virus—could be cut out before they start.

Poverty, ignorance and hot blood have fostered among them crime, treachery and immorality, and the larger towns have sufficed to gather these into festering clusters, leaving the countryside comparatively pure. The farmer-folk and the villagers are not criminal, dishonest or vicious; but when, in the process of emigration, nine of them are thrown with that one tenth man who is so, he leads them into ways that are not straight and paths that are turned, and in many, many instances organizes a band which holds a large coterie of families almost entirely in its power. This it can do by superior intelligence, boldness, etc., and the fact that the Italians in America are in a strange land, are “greenhorns,” as they say among themselves, lays them wide open to such invidious influences. If that one man or woman out of every ten who is vicious could be prevented from sailing, a few years would see Italian names almost entirely effaced from the criminal news and the court and prison records. If the system of social poisoning of the densely populated immigrant quarters is not destroyed, it will ultimately prove a menace to all law and order in the large cities or industrial districts populous with immigrants.

Before we went to Sicily to study the peculiar conditions surrounding the Squadrito family and their neighbors, we took up the general investigation through the country south of Rome, gathering what we could by going from town to town, asking questions, asking questions, always asking questions. Much was to be learned from watching even the tiniest things in the newspapers and from observing the people themselves as they passed about the most inconsequential pursuits of their daily existence.

To give the matter a topical consideration, it separates itself naturally into five divisions, which are semi-geographical merely for convenience, as it would be erroneous indeed to consider each province according to its political boundaries: The Zone of Naples, the Zone of Rome, the Provinces of the Heel, the Provinces of the Toe and Sicily. In those portions of the following consideration topicalized as zones, the distinctions are made, because the regions dealt with have all their general social conditions very largely shaped by the subtle cumulative influence of the life in the two great cities, Rome and Naples. It is possible that few Italians are aware of the differences, but they are palpable to an outsider immediately. Every village that is within touch of either the Italian capital or the most important port and city partakes of the markedly contradistinct life of the two. If Naples is correctly called a City of Thieves, then is Rome equally well named a City of Institutions, and there is the difference. Abruzzi, Molise and Puglie (Apulia), having greater extents of plain suited to agriculture than any of the other southern provinces and being farther from the emigration centres on the west side of the peninsula, form a group by themselves under the title Provinces of the Heel. Basilicata (Potenza) and Calabria, being nearly uniformly mountainous even out to the sea line and having the most potent influences at work to urge emigration, are considered under Provinces of the Toe; while, as for conditions in Sicily, they are best told in connection with our own experiences there with the people of Gualtieri-Sicamino and other towns.

As for general comparative conditions of education, amount of emigration and a very interesting sidelight on the Italian administrative attitude towards emigration, I give a translation of an article which appeared some months since in Il Progresso Italo-Americano, of New York, a newspaper of importance, and one which is usually able to reflect the Italian government’s position in anything that pertains to social and educational subjects. The article, which is editorial, reads:

“EMIGRATION AND EDUCATION

“The Bureau of Education in Rome has recently received the following telegram from Inspector Adolfo Rossi, who is at present in South Africa.

“‘According to the decree already published in the Official Gazette, the landing of illiterate immigrants at Cape Town shall be prohibited.’

“South Africa now follows Australia and British Columbia, and before long the United States will emulate their example.

“The law already approved by the House of Representatives is now before the Senate, being favorably reported by the Senate Committee, and from the last message of President Roosevelt (of which the readers of Il Progresso are not ignorant) it is evident it will have all the support of the Presidential power. What will then become of our emigration, and particularly that from the southern provinces? This has been a frequent question, and it is now becoming acute. A comparison between the grand total of permanent emigration from the Neapolitan provinces for the first six months of the year, and the percentage of illiteracy shown by the last compulsory enrollment of troops is necessary, in order to comprehend the terrible menace hanging over those regions, and the duties devolving upon the officials directing affairs.

Peasant Types

“The following tables give the statistics referred to:

“During the first ten months of 1902 there emigrated from Naples to the United States 145,629, of which number more than eighty-eight per cent were over ten years of age.

“Given the application of the law presented to Congress at Washington by the Hon. Mr. Shattuc, with amendments of the Hon. Mr. Underwood, about 70,000 persons from the Neapolitan provinces alone would have been returned from the American ports during the period mentioned. The following extract is taken from the report of the Senate Committee:

“‘While we are spending millions to eradicate from our country the evil of illiteracy, we are opening our doors to illiterate men of all nations. One may have the opinion that education is not a guaranty of character, any more than the want of education may be of dishonesty, but it is undoubted that education constitutes the fundamental basis of any moral and intellectual progress.’

“The last message of the President of the United States contains the following:

“‘The second object of an immigration law should be that of ascertaining, by means of an accurate examination and not one simply relative to illiteracy, whether the immigrant has the intellectual capacity of being able to act healthfully and judiciously as an American citizen.’

“In view of such danger, what action remains to be taken? It is illusory to hope that the action of our diplomacy (no matter what eminent statesmen we may have) can succeed in preventing the enactment of the law in America, any more than it could have prevented such action in Australia, British Columbia or Cape Colony.

“We can only endeavor to maintain for as long as possible the openings which we at present have for our emigration, and to endeavor to acquire new ones, as, for instance, the Transvaal mines. A strong economic crisis continues in the Argentine Republic, and at present immigration is necessarily suspended. In Brazil, where there is still much field for opportunities, it would be heartless to encourage our emigrants and afterwards see them in the ‘fazendas,’ treated with inhumanity and oppression, without being able to render them any effectual protection.

“On the other hand it is a duty of the Italian state energetically to provide for the education of the southern proletarian masses, which the local administrations cannot do, deprived as they are of resources and oppressed by debts and taxation. In the south it is the duty of the State to conduct, at least in the minor communities, the elementary education, causing the communities to contribute only in accordance with their means, thereby avoiding an unnecessary aggravation of their present condition. As stated by the Honorable Sonnino in his speech in Maddaloni Hall, Naples, modern Italy has so far deplorably failed in the first of its duties to civilization: that of giving primary education to the poor masses of its most unfortunate provinces.

“It is now time to resolve for energetic action, in order to eradicate from one-half the kingdom of Italy the stigma of being the leading nation of Christian Europe in illiteracy. Considerations of prudence as well as humanity advise us to take such a step.”

In a word, nearly half of the people are unable to read and write in Italia Meridionale, because the communes are too poor to pay the expenses of maintaining schools except in the larger towns and cities. The attitude of the Italian government is very nicely shown also. It looks on emigration as the only safety-valve for the districts which are over-populated, and recent years have proved that an immense improvement always follows in any village when the proportion of its emigration rises above ten per cent. The reason is that the Italians in America, South America, South Africa and Australia save enough money to send home enormous sums to their relatives, with the result that in Basilicata, for instance, which has been heavily drained by emigration, there are entire communities in a flourishing condition solely on the savings of their emigrants. By most careful estimates, made by comparison of consular reports with Italo-American banking statements, the Italian money post, and the statistics of the Italian Bureau of Emigration, I have concluded that in the year 1902 between $62,000,000 and $70,000,000 was sent home to Italy from the United States alone. In the year 1903 between $57,000,000 and $65,000,000 was the estimated amount.

The decrease is to be accounted for by the great increase in the number coming over to join those in the United States who had been sending them money. A great difficulty that blocks accuracy in these things is the concealment of funds by returning emigrants and by recipients of money in Italy. I found a family in Caivano, near Naples, for instance, who received through a cousin who returned to Italy on the Lahn, at the same time with us, $3,500, jointly sent by a father and three sons working in the mills in Birmingham, Ala. Only by chance did I learn of it, and then they besought me to keep their secret, fearing that “the King would get it.” When the Italian pays his two or three per cent to the government he says, “it has gone to the King.” H. J. W. Dam’s “The Tax on Moustaches” very nicely touches up this matter of national taxes in Italy. I know personally of a large number of instances of returning emigrants carrying large sums of money with them, and I have the statements of scores of money-changers to whom American dollars are sold; so that I feel justified in saying that a very large portion of the emigrant savings goes home clandestinely and is never caught in the government net, yet blessed is the lot of the tax-collector in a village which has twenty or more per cent of its native-born in America. His lot is an easy one compared with the corresponding official in a village of small emigration.

Particularly as to conditions in the zone of Neapolitan influence, emigration is the most important feature of life there to-day, for the reason that the emigration from Campania has been and is enormous, and that, should Naples suddenly cease to be the greatest of all ports of embarkation, a financial paralysis would strike the city and province.

Over large districts, the vital arteries of which are the river valleys of the Volturno and Garigliano and the country back from the Gulf of Naples and the Bay of Salerno, the influence of Naples obtains, and its dominant tone, as has been said, is dishonesty. Naturally, since Naples is the metropolis of the region, the Neapolitan point of view is the one emulated, and though I have seen many types of lying, lazy, morally oblique peoples, I have never dwelt among any where a constant exercise of one’s vigilance on the defensive was so absolutely necessary.

A rather good story which illustrates the propensities of the Neapolitans was told me by an Englishman whom I met in Caserta. According to his relation, a German Jew, a Scotchman and a Connecticut Yankee formed a company for the exportation of wine from Naples and went there to set up business. After being in the city several days, and having a few business transactions with the Neapolitans, the Yankee said to his partners:

“Well, boys, we had better settle down and live here for about ten years until we learn a few tricks and then start business, or we had better give these chaps all we have at once and save them the trouble of taking it away from us.”

From Frosinone south to the valley of the Sele and back as far as Ariano we found even the simple-minded peasants to have that touch of Neapolitanism, which is, to say the least, an undesirable characteristic. In the city itself it is so serious that not many years since the organized ruffians of the Cammora, recruited from all stations of society, were a power of terror, and since then men more polite, but just as criminal, bankrupted the city and brought general conditions to such a pass that the national government was forced to step in and take control till municipal and provincial affairs could be put on an honest and paying basis. The people are more noisy, more gross in their habits, and more irresponsible in their conduct than any class in any part of Italy. Constant change of government in the past, lack of things of an institutional nature and the focusing of all the bad in the south of Italy may have had the degenerating effect; but, whatever the cause, the effect exists, and the social virus seems to have poisoned many a man I know who, but for his brief stays in Naples, would be a very decent citizen, either in his native town, in other provinces, or in his new home in America. The bad Italians in the United States are in clusters, and the heads of the majority of these groups are men trained in theft, trickery and crime in the excellent schools of Naples and Palermo.

In the city there are few factories, though the government is bringing every influence to bear to promote industries in Naples, and under the new municipal plan a large tract of the side of the city that lies towards Vesuvius is arranged for factory sites; but there are three important things lacking: raw material, skilled labor and confident capital. Even the excellent street-car system is controlled by Belgians. The north of Italy continues to be the industrial section. The business that emigration engenders is first in importance. Vesuvius, Pompeii, the Bay and the climate form the next important asset, and the exportation of agricultural products and wholesale business of all sorts the third. Two hundred thousand people in the city live on so little a year that the statement of the amount would sound ridiculous.

Mangling Hemp

We traversed the country of the arbitrarily indicated zone in the time of the full harvest, when the bits of plain on which rows of trees, themselves loaded with fruit, were seen to be the supports of miles of running vines bearing great bunches of grapes, heavily covered with dust. In every village were to be seen the hemp workers, where the long stripped stalks were piled up in bound bundles waiting to be laid in the mangling machines, operated as a rule by women and hand-mangled. On carefully brushed stone squares men, women and children were threshing beans and peas. Before every door were flat shallow troughs in which figs or fruit of some sort were drying. On the house-tops the tomatoes were being converted into a dark red mash, which is called pomidoro and is used to make the delicious sauces with which macaroni is dressed. Long-horned oxen or patient donkeys, with now and then an undersized horse, drew along the dusty highways carts loaded with casks made ready for wine, bundles of hemp stalks or shocks of wheat. In every village were to be seen the several offices of the steamship companies’ sub-agents. The countryside simply teemed with life. There was never a spot where one might stand and, though there was no one in sight, not hear voices all about. In nearly every group of people was to be seen one or more who bore the signs of recent return from America or indications of near departure. Over everything lay the white dust from the dry plains and slopes, and the sun beat down with distracting fervor.

It did not seem to me that in the country districts of the Neapolitan zone the Church exercised quite the influence for good or evil in the material affairs of the people that it does elsewhere in Italia Meridionale, and it was noticeable that the people had stronger commercial instincts, being more inclined to buy and sell if given the opportunity. That finds an expression in America in this way. So many of the lace-workers, barrow-men, coal, wood and ice men are Neapolitans, or are from the villages in the Neapolitan zone. But, in the social organization of the countryside everything led to the impression that, as each child grew up, his or her elders forced a place in the already existing throng for him or her, a place wherein a bit to eat and a scrap to wear might be won, and above that place the child could scarcely hope to rise, inasmuch as it was difficult to maintain the foothold, let alone improve it. Those who were unfit for the struggle became beggars and wanderers, not paupers in the Italian sense, for the Italian pauper is a person not only penniless, homeless and friendless, but physically incapable of taking any care of himself whatever. The inmates of the Reclusario of Naples are the most shocking lot of human wrecks I have ever beheld aggregated.

If a family or group of families is suddenly deprived of the source from which it has been eking a slender livelihood, the desperation to which it is driven is well instanced by the terrible tragedy at Torre-Annunziata. Immediately on hearing of the first outbreak there, I took up the investigation, and in brief this is the story of the occurrence.

It was merely one of those risings of the common people which occur every now and then, and in which they uniformly get the worst of it. It seems that the estate owned by the Ferroni Corporation had for fifteen years been allowing the farmers about Sarno, Castellamare-Torre-Annunziata, to have cheaply certain waste materials for fertilizing their farms. These were suddenly cut off, and the tenants demanded the immediate delivery of the manure for their common use, but to their demand no attention was paid.

This led to a discontent, which it is claimed was fostered by the local Chamber of Labor, and they were exhorted by a Socialist by the name of Vincenzo Presenzano with the result that on the 31st of August over two hundred of them, armed with sticks, forks, spades and stones, gathered on the property of one Gennaro Salto and stopped the carts coming from the estate with the material, and, the high iron bridge over the River Sarno being close at hand, they dumped the entire outfit into the deeps.

Five municipal guards and two city officials intervened in an endeavor to maintain order; but by this time the crowd had grown to over five hundred, and, after securing information for making arrests, they retired.

In a little while there arrived a small force of Carabineers, city and municipal guards, and they were so outnumbered by the rioters that the latter attacked them vigorously. The commandant of the municipal guard and one Carabineer fell wounded.

Then the order to fire into the mob was given. It was the claim of the military that the first shots were fired into the air, but men who were in the mob averred that they opened fire even before the commandant was wounded.

Men, women and children withered away before the blazing rifles like so much grass, and, when the mob had dispersed, three lay dead on the grass, two more of the wounded died in a short time, and four were known to be in a very serious condition, while numbers of others were hurt. The exact number did not even come out at the investigation which was ordered by the government.

When I visited the commune it seemed as if a plague had fallen. More soldiers were being hurried to the district and posted in spots to command the situation, arrests were being made, even in houses where the dead lay; but a terrible silence hung over both military and populace. I talked with one of the Carabineers, and he told me he could never forgive himself for helping to shoot down his own people, and that he longed for the day when he could leave the service. It was the second disturbance in which he had been, and in both cases the sufferers were the simple-minded peasantry who, finding themselves deprived of what they regarded as their just rights, had been incited to violence by Socialists.

The disgrazia made a profound impression throughout the kingdom, and more than one resident foreigner in speaking of the subject remarked: “Some day there is going to be more than that. The people who really work and produce something in this country are getting about tired of paying enormous rents to support the aristocrats, and heavy tithes and taxes to maintain the Church, the army, and a government of splendor. We expect trouble, and that before long.”

The Socialists are growing, and a paper called Avanti, published in Rome, is the chief organ of the malcontents. During our stay in Italy it made a number of successful exposés of ministerial and official derelictions and won suits brought against it in retaliation, while numerous illustrated weeklies indulged in caricatures and cartoons of the Pope, cardinals and ministers, that seemed to meet with great popular favor; but my observation was that socialism as a principle was not generally understood by the masses, and the only reason that the socialistic groups have much following was because they are against things as they are rather than for socialism as a solution of the problem of what they should be. Socialism as a political belief is not being readily transplanted to this country by any class of the emigrants except the educated emigrants from the north and in and about Rome.

CHAPTER V
IN THE ROMAN ZONE

From the Sabine Mountains to the sea, south to Frosinone and north to Siena is that section of the peninsula which, it seems to me, is so greatly affected by life and conditions in Rome as to be set off properly as the Roman zone. It includes the greater portion of the provinces of Romagna Lazio, or Latium and Umbria, and the lower portion of Tuscany.

The greatest positive influence in Italy to-day is the Church; the greatest potentiality, the army and the military party; the greatest question, the condition of the peasantry of Italia Meridionale; the greatest danger to the nation as a nation, the bitterness between the people of the great and prosperous provinces of the north and the less favored ones of the south.

As the centre of the world-wide Catholic Church, of the political and military interests of the kingdom, of art, education and literature, modern Rome is a city of institutions, and her citizens are parasites in precisely the same way that a majority of the population of Washington is parasitical. I have not at hand the figures to show which city has the greater proportion of industries, but I think there is little difference.

All through the region are quarries from which are taken the material consumed in the thousands of studios that produce the enormous volume of copies of noted pieces of statuary and the slenderer stream of new creations which pours out of Rome and disperses to other parts of the Continent, Great Britain and the United States. The amount of art copies bought in Rome by American tourists each season is very large, much larger than is generally known, and forms the most important source of revenue to the people of the Roman zone, aside from the dispersion of government funds, church funds and the compensation for the maintenance of the hosts of tourists and art, musical and theological students. Next in industrial importance to the stone-workers come the operations that pertain to silk and to the making of imitation jewelry, of which latter pursuit Rome is certainly the incomparable centre. Hundreds of shops in Italy display Roman imitations that are nowhere excelled, and thousands of workmen in imitation flowers, jewels, etc., are coming into the United States, establishing themselves in the New World in their old vocations and finding things very prosperous indeed. In the vicinity of the tenement house in which we lived on Houston Street, down West Broadway and elsewhere in New York, are scores of establishments engaged in this very business, and all the workmen are Italians, from the zone of Rome for the most part. All over the United States the industry of designing, cutting and establishing marble and granite pieces of all sorts for cemeteries is rapidly passing into the hands of Italians, and in questioning many of them, in various parts of the country, as to their native provinces, they have replied uniformly, the Roman Campania or Tuscany.

The silk-weavers and hat-makers have centred in New Jersey, and in Newark vie with the Jews, while in Paterson they have the lists more nearly to themselves. In Italy the class of workmen so engaged forms a ready field for the operations of socialistic and anarchistic agitators; and though the fruit of their labors is rendered comparatively harmless in Italy owing to the vigilance of the police and secret service, in the United States, where there is freedom of speech, the fuller harvest is reaped and the greatest danger exists.

Back of these conditions lies the contempt which these people have come to hold, in the Roman zone, for both Church and State, and the reason is that to them both St. Peter’s and the Quirinal and all they represent are things far more ordinary and less impressive than to the populace of the remoter provinces. Political and religious skepticism is growing to be as dangerously common among the poor people in and about Rome as it was in France early last century. Many social conditions are accurately reproduced, and there are wise patriots who dread a repetition in Italy of what followed the 14th of July, 1789, in France.

These things really concern the people of the great northern provinces but little. They are busy and prosperous, educated and advanced, and, though within the boundaries of the same nation, they are very distinctly apart.

I can easily understand the attitude of the common people in the Roman zone toward the aristocracy. The representatives of this class were returning in full force to Rome only about the time we left it, but we had abundant opportunity in both Naples and Rome for getting something near the proper measure of these idling, pleasure-seeking, self-sufficient landholders. Having their position by right of birth, and given every advantage of the European civilization as a result of rent-rolls from huge inherited estates, we found them to be, nevertheless, insolent, shallow, degenerate physically, vicious and so thoroughly unfit as a class for the responsibilities of the rich and high-placed that, if I had the choice between admitting to the United States a wealthy educated Roman nobleman and a poor Calabrese contract laborer unable to read or write, I should choose the laborer every time.

Though the numbers of the middle class are lamentably small even in Rome, there is a greater and more deplorable paucity farther south. In the agricultural districts a man is either a laboring tenant or a landholder, except for those few who are village artisans, tradesmen, or are in the liberal professions. It requires well-divided ownership of land or diversified industries, as in the United States, to create that sturdy enlightened and independent middle class which is the strength of any nation. The army of returned emigrants are the nearest approach to a middle class to be found in many of the southern communes.

A man should certainly be able, under nearly all circumstances, to find a better use for his pen than in uttering derogatory statements concerning any other man or class of men engaged in the service of God, no matter what their beliefs or his own convictions may be; but the relation of the Italian priests to the millions of emigrants that have come or will come to the United States is of such importance that it would be cowardly not to give an honest expression concerning them. In a general sort of way the poor provinces are referred to, just as is Spain, as “priest-ridden”; but to the average American that is a term of indefiniteness.

Morning in the Village and Vineyards

The thought of a Catholic cleric always brings to my mind the memory of the Rt. Rev. M. F. Howley, F. R. S. C., the noble and self-sacrificing Bishop of Newfoundland; of Father Tommaso laboring among the poor Italian miners of the Pennsylvania anthracite regions; of priests in frontier missions of the great Canadian Northwest; of priests in the slums of New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, and other cities; of men whom I know, admire, and revere. So, judging the Italian clergy by them and by them alone, I do not believe prejudice of any sort could be charged against what is hereafter said.

Nor is it the Italian clergy as a whole or a major portion that is open to criticism, except as it contributes to the continuance of the oppressive, vitiating system whose acute wrongs are wrought by the minority in the cloth.

Rome, as the centre of the tremendous fabric of the Church, witnesses not only the focussing of the beneficent operations of the Church at large, but of the condemnable workings of the provincial clerics as well. There the true root of the trouble is most nearly laid bare, and it seems strange indeed that something so unworthy should exist under the very walls of the Vatican.

This basic condition is the propensity of indolent young men, sons of impoverished families of quality, sickly youths unfit for more strenuous pursuits, and designing and ambitious students, to turn to the priesthood as affording them the prospect of a lifelong “soft snap.” They do this, and are supported in it by their families, without the slightest regard, as a rule, to any truly religious considerations whatever. Italy is greatly overcrowded. Opportunities to rise in life are very few indeed. The man is fortunate who can hold what his father attained. England has suffered and is suffering from the incompetence of those younger sons of good families who have turned to the church, army, and similar professions. In Italy the diversity of pursuits is still smaller than in England, and the candidates far greater in number, while the examples of Italian priests who have risen to bishoprics, archbishoprics, the cardinal’s hat, and even the pontifical chair are so constantly before them, that men who are really fitted by nature and fibre for the priesthood are crowded out to make way for those who are unfit and never become fit. Rome, more than all other cities, sees them in the early stages of their evil progress, and they take on cant, hypocrisy, and prejudice there which, mingled with unscrupulousness, and often with vicious propensities, make them a cloaked harass indeed to the poor people of the parishes in which they are later established.

In the villages of the provinces where the people are poorly educated, the priests have nearly an absolute control of local affairs. I do not mean in any way that pertains to the business of the commune or as to its officials, or the proceedings of law, but the deeper current of life. A newly established school will thrive or fail just as the village priests favor it or inveigh against it. The holidays are the feast days of the patron saints, and it depends upon the priests whether these days are mere occasions for bearing a painted and carved figure of a saint through the streets to be loaded with gifts of money and valuables by the populace, or whether they shall be made occasions of relaxation and communal development to the people. A very great deal of letter-writing is done by the priests for illiterate parishioners, so that much of the correspondence between emigrants in America and relatives at home passes through the priests’ hands. Not infrequently priests are money-lenders and take their usury just as might the veriest Shylock, only that their loan is a “charitable advance to an unfortunate parishioner.” An interesting incident of this sort of thing happened at Velletri. An old priest of one of the churches of the town had two brothers for parishioners who desired to emigrate to America. One was named Giuseppe and the other Giacomo. They had barely money enough for one passage, though Giuseppe had a tiny bit of property. Both had borrowed money of the old priest before and paid it back with a high rate of interest. They plotted to get even with him. Giuseppe turned the care of his bit of property over to Giacomo and sailed for America. In a few months Giacomo went to the priest and offered as security for a loan of 300 lire the property which did not belong to him. The old priest took a note of temporary conveyance, installed one of his dependents in the property, gave Giacomo the 300 lire at twenty per cent per annum, and Giacomo went to Naples and sailed for New York. At the end of two years the old priest was beginning to consider the property already his, when Giuseppe came home on a visit, proved that his brother had no right to offer the property as security, and forced the priest to pay rent for it for two years. Giacomo was of course safe from harm in America. Giuseppe sold the property and returned, and is now in partnership with his brother in a little business on Vine Street, Cincinnati.

In an effort to maintain in the eyes of their parishioners their own outward show of virtue, priests whose lives have vicious tendencies often commit crimes that are worse than murder. The attitude of the Church toward an adulteress is a matter of common knowledge. When it is said that the judging of the women of their parish is left in the hands of the priests, and that in small communities a woman disgraced by such judgment has no opportunity of hiding it from her neighbors, the terrible power of the padre can be seen. There is scarcely a community which has not its pathetic story; some have many, and I have heard more than one told in brief whispers as the poor woman who was the object of it passed by. Yet, though convinced of her innocence, her neighbors do not dare take up her cause, for fear of bringing on their own heads what has fallen on her.

A son of a well-to-do oil and wine merchant in a certain village was a patron of the priest in charge at the principal church of the town. He was in love with the daughter of the man who sold the salt and tobacco for the government. She refused his attentions, and, though there had never been a whisper of blame against her, one Sunday she found that the priest had directed against her the power of the Church. She bravely faced the conditions, stepped quietly into her new status in village life, and since then has been living such a life of self-sacrifice and nobility that her very deeds have daily given the lie to the charge against her. Since then the son of the oil merchant has ruined his father and fled to Australia, and the priest died a miserable death in a torrente into which he stumbled while drunk; but to her is for ever denied everything most dear to a woman.

Not so with many other women who come under the ban: though equally innocent, though victims of spite, of distorted circumstances, they fail to support the blow and do become abandoned. The natural current is toward the cities, where they may hide from all who ever knew them in the village.

It must not be forgotten that this system has been going on in a greater or less degree for centuries, and it has forced the natural attitude of the fathers, husbands, and brothers of the women into one of the utmost watchfulness and jealousy. I have often heard philanthropically inclined Americans who went into the Italian quarters seeking to do good, complain that the men were exceedingly averse to allowing their wives or daughters to meet strangers, or to have any of the usual liberties of American women. This jealousy is traditional, and is the result of the system outlined above.

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:

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.

Many, many families on the Apulian plain, who had been doing very well so far, were preparing to depart for the United States just as soon as the harvest season was over. They had been intending to go to the United States for some years, but had put it off, fearing to disturb a condition that was well enough, but nevertheless being fully decided, sooner or later, to go to the United States. The prospect of a law excluding illiterates precipitated them. Many of these same families are already in this country, having left their homes since we visited them.

Threshing Beans

There is something that is insistently Greek about the people of the Heel, and they more nearly approach the Oriental than any others of the Italian provincials. I do not think they have quite the passionate natures of the Sicilians or the ruggedness of the mountain Calabrese, nor are they as energetic as their fleas, which are certainly the liveliest I have ever encountered.

To the casual observer they seem to be lazy, and their habitations present a certain neglected appearance that is strongly contrasted with those houses in each town which have been rehabilitated with money sent home from America. But the people are not lazy. They are merely bound by traditional methods of doing things, and by an unconquerable sub-malarial condition. In many spots one will see large plantations of Eucalyptus globulus planted to counteract malaria.

There is an odd theory, of interest only because of its oddity, that the famous Apulian fevers are the results of the dissolution of the numbers of men fallen in battles which have taken place on Apulian soil. A little computation and historical reference shows millions of men to have fallen in the Heel, and when the armies of the Crusaders camped about Brindisi they were nearly wiped out by death from sickness. Ever since that time fevers have prevailed, and there are some spots that are certain death to any foreigner should he sleep there over night.

Large quantities of cotton are grown in this region, and when one is travelling south it will be noticed that shortly after the groves of hazelnuts, beeches, and chestnuts cease, the first plantations of cotton will begin to appear. The plain of Cannæ roughly marks the limit of the cotton country. Around the Gulf of Taranto there will be seen large fields of cotton and saffron, and though the country is very fertile and densely populated, the agricultural system is very bad, and the ground inefficiently cultivated merely because it is a centuries-old custom to let the ground lie fallow for two years after each crop.

Olive orchards flourish, and nearly every considerable town is a centre of salad-oil manufacture. Oranges are grown in abundance, but cannot compete with the Sicilian for export. The Apulian wine is very fine, being much softer than the Sicilian, yet not as popular as the wines of Capri and the Vesuvius region.

About Cotrone the finest licorice in the world is produced, and in many spots there will be seen clusters of date palms, though the fruit does not mature as fully as it should.

Much of the wood required for artificial purposes in southern Italy comes from western Apulia, Potenza and Calabria. Fine oaks, beeches, chestnuts, etc., grown on the mountains, and the Sila chain, whose highest peak is snow-covered, are well clad with pines which afford what the Italian carpenter calls legno bianco (white wood).

Aside from agriculture, some of the few industries are wood-cutting, taxed unbearably by the government, sulphur-mining at Eboli, salt-mining about Lungro, honey-producing about Taranto, fish-catching and exporting from the same town, velvet and silk producing in and about Catanzaro, and sheep and goat herding in the Sila chain. The agricultural products are the mainstay of the people, who are so densely packed in some communities that if it were not for the Cactus opuntia, which is grown in hedges in place of fences, there would be scarcely enough to eat.

The town of Taranto, which is built on a rock cut off from the land by a 239–feet-wide canal, which will allow the passage of any battle-ship in the Italian navy, is possibly the most densely inhabited spot on the earth. Sixty thousand people live there in a space so small that New York’s most thickly populated tenement districts do not compare with it. An odd thing is noticeable in this town, especially among the fishermen of the Mare Piccolo. The Italian is generously tinctured with Greek, and among the totally illiterate the jargon is absolutely unintelligible to an outsider.

Around the Heel nearly all the settlements are well back from the coast, and strange to say the reason is, not that it is healthier or more convenient, but that in the Middle Ages they were established there because it was not safe to live alongshore. Since then no one has thought of changing; in fact the entire region, except as it has been stirred by the letters of emigrants and the doctrines of Socialists and Anarchists, seems to live by the precept, “What is, is best.”

Something of the deep establishment of customs and of the religious state of the country can be gathered from the following. In Bari there is the Church of San Nicola, than whom there is no more revered saint in all Italia Meridionale, wherefore note the number of Nicolas. In the crypt his remains are supposed to be encased in a tomb from which exudes on and about the 8th of May an oily substance that is miraculous. Pilgrims come for the feast of the 8th of May by thousands and thousands, and nearly all of them are in the costume of the remoter villages. On the promontory at Cotrone stands a pillar which marks the site of the temple of Hera, once the goddess of all the peoples about the Gulf of Taranto, but now it has for a neighbor the Church of the Madonna del Capo, and each Saturday young girls from the region about go in procession to the church in their bare feet, all clad in white.

The people in many of the towns are primitive, especially in the Basilicatan Mountains, where strangers are often as unwelcome as they are to-day among the mountaineers of East Tennessee. Some few families control nearly all the tillable land, and exact from the poor peasants one-half of all they produce on it for rent. To the American farmer who has been long accustomed to raising a crop on shares, that does not sound very bad, but the latifondo, as this system is called, is one of the curses of Italia Meridionale to-day, and in that portion of this narrative which deals with our studies in Sicily, where the same condition prevails as in Apulia, Basilicata, and Calabria, I shall give more definite expression on the system. One of the very powerful families in this region is the Baracco family, and they literally hold in their hands the fate of a vast region.

Not only is the country very primitive in spots, but in some it is exceedingly wild. About Mount Vulture, and especially in the great half-destroyed lateral crater, the forests are so dense as to be almost impenetrable, and wolves and wild boars are numerous.

Leaving entirely the consideration of the regions of the Heel, and speaking only of Basilicata and Calabria, which have been pouring emigrants into the United States, there should be mentioned the great enemy of the peasant, which has driven more men to America than any other thing, the terrible torrente.

It is merely a mountain stream, totally dry in the summer time, as what little water might course down it is carried along in clay-lined irrigating ditches, and distributed along the face of the hills sometimes hundreds of feet above the level of the river bed, so cleverly are some of the canals constructed. But, in the rainy season, when enormous quantities of water are precipitated every day on the mountain sides, the torrente becomes a devilish agent of destruction, and its waters devastate whole communes in a few hours.

These districts have struggled to wall in with masonry and concrete the whole course of the stream, and to clear the bed of all obstructions which would prevent the current having a straight, easy plunge to the sea, but the water is perverse, and it is not unusual for the best-curbed torrentes to rip out their walls and ruin in a night the labor of twenty years. Taxes and volunteer labor to repair communal works, and expenditures and labors to patch up private estates, have so impoverished the people that in many places they have been forced to abandon, not only any attempt to curb the torrente, but to maintain any department of the communal government that costs as much as a penny. The general taxes went unpaid, and when the government forced sales of houses and gardens, the people simply abandoned their places and became wanderers or emigrated to America. At the present time nearly all of the villages are in a condition that is much improved. Money sent home from America is doing it. But the torrentes are just as bad as ever, and so long as they keep the people impoverished there will be no money to pay for the maintenance of schools.

Sicily has a slight advantage in the formation of the country, but there the torrente is still the object of constant vigilance and does much damage. People of intelligence are fully aroused to conditions in Italia Meridionale, and a very excellent expression of the provincial attitude was given in an article by Signor Enzo Saffiotti, which appeared in the Gazetta di Messina della Calabrie on the 15th of September, 1903. It is given below:

The Southern Question Confronts the Country.

Congressional resolutions and government promises. The burden on the Southern press. Great discontent among the people. Résumé of the past thirty years of conditions. Riots in 1893. Agrarian and mining crises. The Church’s tenths, the great landed estates renting system and the confiscated demesnial properties. Heavy usuries and peasants’ land contracts. Economic-social revival. Appeal to Southern deputies. Restoration’s era.

We must not grow weary of repeating it!

One of the most urgent and yet most difficult problems which the government and parliament have been called upon and are obliged and bound promptly to solve in the present course of our national life is the question of the condition of southern Italy. In order that such a mighty and intricate matter may be properly adjusted, verily must it be known to its every limit and studied through its every cause.

It is the task of the press, and particularly of the Southern press, to associate its endeavors with noble and unselfish intention, to direct with exactitude the current of public sentiment in the country, so that it shall force the government to efficacious measures and precautions. These may be obtained through some financial sacrifice and reduction of useless expenditures in the state budgets.

The state cannot entrench itself behind financial difficulties when a question that is not regional arises, for there are those to devise ways out of the difficulty.

The deficit of many millions could in no manner continue to enfeeble the state budget if a preference were given to the productive works, and the national economic conditions would certainly be revived.

In parliamentary sessions, debates on the Southern question have at all times been closed with vague votes and presidential assurances, the latter filled with so many pretty promises for the improvement of these our generous and forgotten regions.

They are promises which will doubtless continue to remain unfulfilled, just as the preceding mass of assurances delivered by administrations, leaders, and ministers. Meantime the South is waiting and will continue to wait for those prompt reforms and vigorous measures which would assist greatly in raising the economic status, and for the future disclose a horizon bright and clear. It is anxious to be lifted from that condition of humbled inferiority into which the guilty carelessness of its rulers have thrust it.

Just a little has been done, comparatively nothing, directly to the advantage of our population, harassed as it has been by the different forms of commercial and industrial crises and vexed with all kinds of local and fiscal taxes, yet they ever know how to keep high and unchanging the Unitarian sentiment of the nation.

The cause of recurrent convulsions of agitation among the working class and the slender middle class is not entirely to be attributed to the propagation of socialistic doctrines, as the government is so ready to explain it. It is all a leaven of discontent working within the population, a realization of the isolation in which they are left, of the deprivation of the rightful help and support from the government which with provident laws and measures should defend their interests, and further encourage and protect their industrial undertakings.

The various ministers, during the last thirty years of Italian political life, have done nothing that was remarkable for these Southern regions, whose economic conditions, though troublesome in the beginning, have gradually grown worse.

As a matter of fact, the recurrence of those social phenomena have given people at a distance who were inclined to turn their observation and consideration on our affairs, a different impression from that which would be gathered if the inward causes were otherwise studied, and this attests in a very considerable way the moral sentiment of our people, who, though of great sensitiveness and resentful of wrong, quietly sustain the additional adversity of being misunderstood, even when instinctively rebellious to all forms of oppressive authority.

On the day after the conflict in 1893, when the administration of that day set on foot measures to favor the Southern provinces, which should eventually alleviate the severe hardships of our condition, the universal discontent began to disappear rapidly.

The resumption of quiet was not the result of the presence of bayonets and the pronouncing of exemplary sentences from temporary tribunals, for our people fear neither, but came about through the administration’s pledging itself to help the population and hurriedly presenting to parliament new and old schemes for relief. Owing to political changes, these remained merely in their former status, that of schemes. Our people, mindful of the past, realize in the new promises of the government nothing but a quantity of pious lies, destined to deceive or satisfy, if for no other reason, with their beautiful sound and appearance. So pretences and claims on behalf of these promises are merely like bad drafts of short date, and even had the government fulfilled them it would not have been generosity, but apportioned justice.

The hardships of southern Italy—those of Sicily are common with those of the other regions—are of an economical nature, and arise from complex causes, in which are competing factors, but antique and recent, permanent and transitory, and thus inducing excessive taxes divided unjustly, agrarian and mining crises, lack of needed public works, not of merely electoral nature, but of a most necessary sort, the insufficience of roads to connect districts, and the disproportionate rates of the railroads for freight and transportation.

The first step toward a gradual reduction of these oppressive tariffs, after so many years in which there has been so much complaint, has at least been achieved in a very cautious way by the first ordinance of Minister Palenzo, which went into effect with good results at the beginning of the present month. It is to be hoped that our legislators will uphold it with additional and greater reductions.

There still remain unsolved some other notable questions, among which are the annual tithes of one-tenth taken by the Church, the system of renting piecemeal large properties on oppressive leases to the peasants, and others, all waiting these many years to be adjusted and regulated by a wise legislation. Also from the distribution and opening up for cultivation of the great demesnial estates (Church property confiscated by the governments a quarter of a century ago), Sicily and the other southern provinces could extract great benefit and profit.

The provincial evils will increase gradually, but powerfully, if radical reforms are not introduced and carried out in the matter of the existing agrarian régime, in which pauper peasants, on account of their miserable condition, are making themselves greater burden-bearers under onerous and usurious contracts, thus prostituting their industry to usury and impeding all agricultural progress.

Meanwhile the population is increasing so rapidly that the products of the soil are become insufficient for their very necessities. Prompt aid to agriculture, which is the important resource of southern Italy, is needed if the Meridionale population hope to derive any increase in benefit or profit. Only with a readjustment of the agricultural régime and the leasing of country properties may we hope for a true and healthy social revival. With the renewal of parliamentary procedures it is to be hoped that the government will seriously undertake the Southern Italian question.

Our deputations—they who should be examples of harmony and tenacity—instead of being objects of daily criticism, should join compactly together, without making disrupting questions of party, race, or political gradation, and demand and obtain those reforms waited for so long.

They should have a sole intention, a single aim: to redeem the provinces of southern Italy from the straits in which they lie so cruelly oppressed. Returning to Montecitorio’s halls they should not evade their principal duty. Discussions about this matter there have been in plenty, until now we demand action; on behalf of the dignity and prestige of the entire nation, the solution of the Southern Italian problem is clearly imposed upon them. The legislative body has already announced its position of being willing, and facing its promises it cannot honorably fail.

After so many depreciations too often inspired by misconceptions, after so many accusations, discredits, and imputations treacherously cast on our patriotic population, there might come suddenly an era of reparation—it might come at once!

The South is waiting!

Enzo Safiotti.

This, though comprehensive and with more than one carefully veiled threat in the lines, is only one of the many strong articles appearing in the southern papers, and it is among the mildest. When the situation is reviewed, I believe it not ill considered to say that Italy owes her immunity from a great rebellion in the south to the relief afforded by emigration and emigrant savings.

Scilla—Draught-oxen of Italy

CHAPTER VII
GUALTIERI-SICAMINO AND THE SQUADRITO FAMILY

It was a rare morning when we got out of our ill-smelling second-class compartment at Reggio di Calabrie, and strolled down in the bright sunlight to the steamer lying at the makeshift dock ready to ferry passengers over to Messina.