This brief period of the harvest time is almost the only opportunity that the majority of these country women have to get acquainted with the outside world. For the remainder of the year, it seems, they are rarely allowed to venture beyond the limits of the street or village in which they live.
In the course of my journey across the island I had seen, high up in the mountains, some of these inaccessible little nests from which, perhaps, these girls had come. In one or two cases, and especially at the time I visited the sulphur mines, I had an opportunity to see something of the life of these mountain villages. Now that I have come to speak especially of the women of the labouring and agricultural classes, I may as well tell here what I saw and learned of the way they live in their homes.
Such a village as I have referred to consists, for the most part, of rows of low, one-story stone buildings, ranged along a street that is dirty beyond description. The wells are frequently built without mortar or plaster, and roofed sometimes with wood, but more frequently with tiles. In a corner there is a stone hearth upon which the cooking is done, when there is anything to cook. As there is no chimney, the smoke filters out through the roofing.
I remember well a picture I saw in passing one such house. In front of the house a woman was standing holding in her arms a perfectly naked child. Another child, with nothing on but a shirt, was standing beside her holding her skirt. Through the open door I could see the whole of the single room in which this family lived. Back of the living-room and connected with it was a stall for the cattle. This was typical of many other homes that I saw.
During the day the women, the children, the pigs, and the chickens spend most of their time in the dirty, crowded street. As a rule the men, unless they are engaged in some sort of handicraft, are away in the fields at work. In many cases they do not come home once a month.
In my journeys through these villages and the poor streets of the larger cities one question constantly arose in my mind for which I was never able to find an answer. It was this: What becomes of these people, together with their pigs, goats, chickens, and other animals, at night? How does the interior of these homes look after sundown?
I have gone through some of the poorer streets of Catania at night, but invariably found them in almost total darkness. I could hear the people talking as they sat in their doorways, but I could not see them. In fact, I could not see anything but the dim outlines of the buildings, because nowhere, apparently, were there any lights.
A German author, Mr. S. Wermert, who has studied conditions closely in Sicily, and has written a great book on the social and economic conditions of the people, says, in regard to the way the people live in the little villages:
"In the south, as is well known, people live for the most part out of doors. Every one sits in the street before the house door; there the craftsman works at his trade; there the mother of the family carries on her domestic labours. At evening, however, all crowd into the cave, parents and children, the mule or the donkey. The fattening pig, which, decorated with a collar, has been tied during the day in front of the house, where, with all the affection of a dog, it has glided about among the children, must also find a place in the house. The cock and hens betake themselves at sunset into this same space, in which the air is thick with smoke, because there is no chimney to the house. All breathe this air. One can imagine what a fearful atmosphere pervades the place. Every necessity of physical cleanliness and moral decency is lacking. In the corner there is frequently only one bunk, upon which the entire family sleeps, and for the most part it consists of nothing more than a heap of straw. In the fierce heat of the summer one naturally sleeps without a cover; in winter every one seeks to protect himself under the covers. Even when there are separate sleeping places all the most intimate secrets of family life become known to the children at an early age. Brothers and sisters almost always sleep in the same bed. Frequently a girl sleeps at the feet of her parents. The stupidity and coarseness of such a family existence is beyond description. There is naturally no such thing as a serious conception of morality among a people that for generations has grown up without education. For that reason, it frequently happens that the most unspeakable crimes are committed. It is, therefore, frequently difficult to determine with exactness the parentage of the children born into the family. The saying of the Romans, that 'paternity is always uncertain,' holds good here. In fact, it is quite possible that this legal conception owes its origin to observations in regard to the condition of the rural population of that period. It is, however, probable that in the country districts of Sicily conditions have changed very little since Roman times."
From all that I can learn, the filthy promiscuity of these crowded houses and dirty streets have made the Sicilian rural villages breeding places of vices and crimes of a kind of which the rural Negro population in the United States, for example, probably never heard. There are some things, in connection with this ancient civilization, concerning which it is better the Negro should not know, because the knowledge of them means moral and physical degeneration, and at the present time, whatever else may be said about the condition of the Negro, he is not, in the rural districts at least, a degenerate. Even in those parts of the Southern States where he has been least touched by civilization, the Negro seems to me to be incomparably better off in his family life than is true of the agricultural classes in Sicily.
The Negro is better off in his family, in the first place, because, even when his home is little more than a primitive one-room cabin, he is at least living in the open country in contact with the pure air and freedom of the woods, and not in the crowded village where the air and the soil have for centuries been polluted with the accumulated refuse and offscourings of a crowded and slatternly population.
In the matter of his religious life, in spite of all that has been said in the past about the ignorance and even immorality of certain of the rural Negro preachers, I am convinced, from what I learned while I was in Sicily, that the Negro has a purer type of religion and a better and more earnest class of ministers than is true of the masses of these Sicilian people, particularly in the country districts.
In this connection, it should not be forgotten also that the Negro is what he is because he has never had a chance to learn anything better. He is going forward. The people of Sicily, who have been Christians almost since the time that the Apostle Paul landed in Syracuse, have, on the other hand, gone backward. All kinds of barbarous superstitions have grown up in connection with their religious life and have crowded out, to a large extent, the better elements.
While the condition of Negro education in the Southern States is by no means perfect, the Negro, and particularly the Negro woman, has some advantages which are so far beyond the reach of the peasant girl in Sicily that she has never dreamed of possessing them. For example, every Negro girl in America has the same opportunities for education that are given to Negro boys. She may enter the industrial school, or she may, if she choose, as she frequently does, go to college. All the trades and the professions are open to her. One of the first Negro doctors in Alabama was a woman. Every year there are hundreds and, perhaps, thousands of Negro girls who go up from the farming districts of the Southern States to attend these higher schools, where they have an opportunity to come under the influence of some of the best and most cultivated white people in the United States. In the country villages, I venture to say, not one girl in a hundred ever learns so much as to read and write.
I was much impressed, as I went about in Sicily, with the substantial character of the buildings and improvements, such as they were. Everything is of stone. Even the most miserable house is built as if it were expected to last for centuries, and an incredible amount of labour has been spent everywhere throughout the country in erecting stone walls.
One reason for this is that there is almost no wood to be had for building. Everything is necessarily built of stone and tiles. Another reason, I suspect, why Sicilian people build permanently is because they never expect any change in their condition. If one asks them why they have built their villages on the most inconvenient and inaccessible places, they do not know. They know only that these towns have always been there and they haven't the least idea but what they will remain always where they are. As a matter of fact, in order to find an explanation for the location of these towns, students, I learned, have had to go back several centuries before Christ to the time when the Greeks and the Phœnicians were contending for the possession of the island. At that time the original population took refuge in these mountain fastnesses, and through all the changes since, these towns, with, perhaps, some remnants of the race that originally inhabited the island, have remained.
Everywhere in Sicily one is confronted with the fact that he is among a people that is living among the ruins and remains of an ancient civilization. For example, in seeking to understand the difference in the position of women in Sicily from that of other parts of Europe I learned that one had to go back to the Greeks and the Saracens, among whom women held a much lower position and were much less free than among the peoples of Europe. Not only that, but I met persons who professed to be able to distinguish among the women Greek and Saracen types. I remember having my attention called at one time to a group of women, wearing very black shawls over their heads, who seemed more shrinking and less free in their actions than other women I had seen in Sicily. I was informed that these women were of the Saracen type and that the habit of wearing these dark shawls over their heads and holding them tight under their chins was a custom that had come from the Arabs. The shawls, I suppose, took the place in a sort of way of the veils worn by Oriental women.
Now all these ancient customs and habits, and all the quaint superstitions with which life among the ignorant classes is overgrown, have, I suppose, the same kind of interest and fascination as some of the ancient buildings. But very few people realize, I am convinced, to what degree these ancient customs weigh upon the people, especially the women, and hinder their progress.
In the midst of these conditions the Sicilian women, who are looked upon by the men as inferior creatures and guarded by them as a species of property, live like prisoners in their own villages. Bound fast, on the one hand, by age-long customs, and on the other surrounded by a wall of ignorance which shuts out from them all knowledge of the outer world, they live in a sort of mental and moral slavery under the control of their husbands and of the ignorant, and possibly vicious, village priests.
For this reason, the journey to America is for the woman of Sicily a real emancipation. In fact, I do not know of any more important work that is going on for the emancipation of women anywhere than that which is being done, directly and indirectly, through the emigration from Sicily and Italy to the United States, in bringing liberty of thought to the women of Southern Italy.
CHAPTER X THE CHURCH, THE PEOPLE, AND THE MAFIA
One of the interesting sights of Catania, Sicily, as of nearly every other city I visited in Europe, is the market-place. I confess that I have a fondness for visiting markets. I like to wander through the stalls, with their quantities of fruit, vegetables, meat and bread, all the common, wholesome and necessary things of life, piled and ranged in bountiful profusion.
I like to watch the crowds of people coming and going, buying and selling, dickering and chaffering. A market, particularly an old-fashioned market, such as one may see almost anywhere in Europe, in which the people from the town and the people from the country, producer and consumer, meet and bargain with each other, seems a much more wholesome and human place than, for example, a factory. Besides that, any one who goes abroad to see people rather than to see things will, I believe, find the markets of Europe more interesting and more instructive than the museums.
During my journey across Europe I visited the markets in nearly every large city in which I stopped. I saw something of the curious Sunday markets of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, London, with their long lines of shouting hucksters and their crowds of hungry shoppers, and the Jewish market in the Ghetto of Cracow, Poland, where pale-faced rabbis were slaughtering, according to the strict ritual of the Jewish law, droves of squawking geese. Among others, I visited the Monday market in Catania, which differs from the markets I had seen elsewhere in the multitudes of articles of household manufacture offered for sale, and in the general holiday character of the proceedings.
It was like a country fair in one of our Southern cities, only cruder and quainter. For example, instead of the familiar shooting gallery, with painted targets, one enterprising man had set up a dozen painted sticks on a rough box, and offered to the public, for something less than a cent, the opportunity to shoot at them with an ancient cross-bow, such as I did not imagine existed outside of museums. Then there were all sorts of curious and primitive games of chance. Among other devices for entertaining and mystifying the people I noticed a young woman seated in a chair, blindfolded. A crowd surrounded her while she named various objects belonging to the crowd, which her companion, a man, held in his hands. At the same time she told the colour of the hair and eyes, and reeled off a prophecy in regard to the future of the different persons to whom the article belonged.
More interesting still were the public story-tellers, who seemed to take the place, to a certain extent, of the daily newspaper among the masses of the people, so many of whom can neither read nor write.
The story-tellers stood upon little platforms, which they carried about with them like portable pulpits, in order that they might be plainly visible to the crowd. Each carried a large banner on which were painted a series of pictures representing the scenes in the stories which they told.
These stories, together with the pictures which illustrated them, had apparently been composed by the men who told them, for they all touched upon contemporary events. In fact, most of them referred in some way to America. Like those songbirds that have only one constantly repeated note, each story-teller had but one story, which he told over and over again, in the same tones, with the same attitudes, and same little dramatic surprises.
Although I was not able to understand what was said, it was not difficult to follow the narrative from the pictures. One story told the fortunes of a young girl who had been lured away to America. Perhaps she was one of those "white slaves" to which I noticed a good many references in Italy, and in other of the emigrant countries. At any rate, she was imprisoned in a very dark and dismal place in some part of New York which I was not able to locate from the picture. Then her brother, or perhaps it was her lover, whom she had left behind in Sicily, saw a vision. It was a vision of St. George and the dragon, and after seeing this vision he rose up and went to America and rescued her. The touching thing about it all, the thing that showed how realistic this whole tale was to the crowd that stood and listened to it in rapt attention, was that when the story reached the point where the picture of St. George and the dragon is referred to, the men simultaneously raised their hats. At the same time the speaker assumed a more solemn tone, and the crowd listened with a reverential awe while he went on to relate the miracle by which the young woman had been saved.
The sight of this crowd of people, standing bareheaded in an open square, listening reverentially to the story of a street fakir, struck me, like so much else that I saw of the life of the common people in Catania and elsewhere in Sicily, as strangely touching and pathetic. It reminded me of all that I had read and heard of the superstitions of the common people of the country and gave me as insight, such as I had not had before, into the way in which the masses of the people feel toward the Catholic Church, with all its religious ceremonies and symbols. It led me to suspect, also, that much in the religious life of the Sicilian people which looks, perhaps, to those who have had a different training, like superstition, is in fact merely the natural expression of the reverence and piety of a simple-minded and, perhaps, an ignorant people.
I was told, while I was in that city, that Catania has two hundred and fifty churches, and though I do not know that this statement is correct, I could easily believe it from the interminable clanging church bells that smote upon my ears the first Sunday morning I was in the city. At any rate, no one can go through the city and look at the public buildings, or study the people in their homes, without meeting abundant evidence of the all-pervading influence of the Church. Everywhere, built into the buildings, on the street corners, and in every possible public place, one sees little images of the Virgin, with perhaps a burning lamp before them. Once I ran across one such image, with a lamp before it, planted in a field. I was told it was there to protect the crops from the influence of evil spirits.
It did not seem to have occurred to any one that the image of the Virgin and the blessing of the Church, which were intended to protect the fields from evil spirits, might protect them also from thieves, or banish from the community the evil spirits that inspired men to rob and steal. If this opinion had been very widely held among the masses of the people it would hardly have been necessary to guard the fields night and day during the harvest season, by men armed with shotguns.
This brings me to another point in which I should like to compare the masses of the Sicilian people with the masses of the Negroes in the Southern States—namely, in respect to their religious life.
Naturally, the first thing that strikes one, in attempting to make such a comparison, is the wide difference in the situation of the average black man in the Southern States and the corresponding class in Sicily. In all the externals of religious life, at least, the Sicilian is far ahead of the Negro.
Sicily was one of the first countries in the world in which Christianity was planted. St. Paul stopped three days in Syracuse on his way to Rome, and there is still standing a building in Catania in which St. Peter is said to have preached.
Sicily has inherited the traditions, the organization and the splendid churches and buildings which have grown up and accumulated through a thousand years and more. The black man, on the contrary, gained his first knowledge of Christianity in slavery and in a very imperfect and unsatisfactory form. It is only since freedom came that the Negro church has had an opportunity to extend and establish its influence among the masses of the people, while out of their poverty Negroes, who are even yet struggling to build and own their own homes, and so establish family life, have had to build churches and training schools for their ministers, to establish a religious press, to support missionary societies and all the other aids and accessories of organized religion.
In view of the wide difference between the people of Sicily and the Negroes in America, so far as concerns the external side of their religious life, it struck me as curious that I should hear almost exactly the same criticism of the people in Sicily, in respect to their religion, that I have frequently heard of the Negroes in America. A very large number of the popular superstitions of Sicily, what we sometimes call the folklore of a country, are very much like many of the notions that the Negroes are supposed to have imported to America from Africa. Any one who has listened to any of the older generation of coloured people tell of the various ways of "working the roots," as they call it, will learn a great many things that can be almost exactly duplicated in the popular notions about drugs and philters among the people of Sicily.
It is said of the Sicilians, among other things, that their Christianity is saturated with pagan superstitions and that, for the average Sicilian, religion has no connection with moral life.
In many cases it seems as if the image of the Virgin has become, among the lower class of people, little more than a fetish, a thing to conjure with. For example, the peasant who, in order to revenge himself upon his landlord, and perhaps to compensate himself for what he believes has been taken from him by fraud or extortion, determines to rob his landlord's field or flock, will pray before one of these images, before starting out, for success. If he is really "pious" he may offer to the saints, in case he is successful, a portion of what he has stolen. If, however, he fails and is merely superstitious, he will sometimes curse and revile, or even spit upon, the image to which he previously prayed.
I have heard that the savages in Africa will sometimes behave in the same way toward the object of which they have made a fetish, but I have never heard of anything like that among my own people in the South. The Negro is frequently superstitious, as most other ignorant people are, but he is not cynical, and never scoffs at anything which has a religious significance.
One thing that indicates the large part that religion plays in the lives of the Sicilian people is the fact that out of the 365 days in the year 104 are sacred to the Church. The large amounts of money expended annually by the different cities of Sicily upon processions and celebrations in honour of the local saints is one of the sources of complaint made by those who are urging reforms in the local administrations. They say that the money expended in this way might better be used in improving the sanitary condition of the cities.
As indicating how little all this religious activity connects itself with practical and moral life it is stated that, while Sicily supports ten times as many churches and clergy in proportion to its population as is true of Germany, for instance, statistics show that it suffers from eleven times as many murders and crimes of violence. In quoting these statements I do not intend to suggest a comparison between the form of religion that prevails in Germany with that in Sicily. Religion, like everything else in Sicily, is deeply rooted in the past. It has shared all the changing history of that island, and naturally reflects the conditions, sentiments, and prejudices of the people.
If the Catholic Church is in any way to blame for the existing conditions in Sicily it seems to me it is in the fact that during the long period of years in which the education of the people has been almost wholly in its hands, the Church has held fast to the old medieval notion that education was only for the few, and for that reason has done little or nothing to raise the standard of intelligence among the masses.
It has been a great mistake on the part of the Church, it seems to me, to permit it to be said that the Socialists, many of whom are not merely indifferent but openly opposed to the Church, represent the only party that has sincerely desired and striven for the enlightenment and general welfare of the people at the bottom. Such a statement could not, of course, be so easily made of the Church in its relations to the masses of the people elsewhere in Italy.
The fact about the Sicilian seems to be, however, not that he is, as is sometimes said of the Negro, unmoral, but that the moral code by which he governs himself sometimes makes him a menace to public order.
One of the first things that impressed me, while I was in Sicily, was the enormous and expensive precautions that were necessary to guard the fields from thieves. Hundreds of miles of high stone walls have been erected in different parts of the island to protect property from vandalism and thieves. In the harvest time it is necessary to practically garrison the island with armed guards to preserve the crops. The cost of putting a private policeman in every field and garden is very heavy, and this expense, which is imposed upon the land, falls in the long run upon the labourer.
The reason for this condition rests in the conviction, which every farm labourer shares, that for his long and crushing labour on the land he does not receive a sufficient wage. In many cases it is likely enough that he is driven by hunger to steal. Under such circumstances it is not difficult to understand that stealing soon ceases to be looked upon as a crime, and seems to be regarded as a kind of enterprise which is only wrong when it is unsuccessful. But there is something further, I learned, in the back of the head of almost every Sicilian which explains many things in the Sicilian character and customs that strike strangers as peculiar. I refer to what goes in Sicily under the name of the omerta, and is, like some of the customs that exist in the Southern States, part of the unwritten law of the country. The principle of this unwritten law is silence. If any one is robbed, wounded, or injured in any way he remains silent. If the police seek to find out who is his enemy he will answer, "I do not know."
In some provinces in Sicily it is said to be almost impossible to arrest and convict criminals, because no one will hesitate to go into court and perjure himself for a friend. It is considered a point of honour to do so. On the other hand, to assist the police in any way in the prosecution of crime is looked upon as a disgrace. The ordinary man may be a thief, a robber, or a murderer and be forgiven, but there is no comfort in heaven or earth for the man who betrays a neighbour or a friend.
Complaint is sometimes made that the coloured people in the Southern States will protect and conceal those among their number who are accused of crime. In most cases where that happens I believe it will be found that the real reason is not the desire to save any one of their number from a just and deserved punishment, but rather the feeling of uncertainty, because of what they have heard and seen of lynchings in different parts of the country, as to whether the accused will have the benefit of a full and fair investigation in a court of law.
There is among the Negro population of the United States, even though the administration of the law is almost entirely in the hands of another race, no settled distrust of the Government and the courts and no disposition, as is true of the Sicilian, to resort to private justice and revenge. In spite of the fact that he frequently gets into trouble with the police and the courts the Negro is, by disposition at least, the most law-abiding man in the community. I mean by this, the Negro is never an anarchist, he is not opposed to law as such, but submits to it when he has committed a crime.
This brings me to another feature of Sicilian life—namely, the Mafia.
I had heard a great deal about the Mafia in Italy, and about the criminal political organizations in other parts of Italy, before I came to Europe, and was anxious, if possible, to learn something that would give me an insight into the local causes and conditions which had produced them.
One of the professional story-tellers whom I encountered while I was wandering about in the market in Catania recalled the subject to my mind. He was retailing to a crowd in the market square a story that was even more exciting and interesting to me, at least, than the one which I have already mentioned. It was, in fact, nothing less than an account of the murders and outrages of the Black Hand in New York City.
At first it struck me as very curious that I should meet in Italy, the home of the Mafia and the Camorra, a crowd of people in the public square listening with apparent wonder and awe to an account of the fabulous crimes and misdeeds of their fellow countrymen in another part of the world. I had a sort of notion that the Black Hand operations would be so familiar to Sicilians that they would have no curiosity about them. It was not so, however, and after I learned that New York had an Italian population larger than Rome, larger, in fact, than any Italian city, with the exception of Naples, this did not seem so strange. There are, as a matter of fact, more than 500,000 Italians in New York City, and 85 per cent. of them are from southern Italy. Among this 85 per cent. are very many who belong to the criminal classes. The result is that the Mafia, under the name of the Black Hand, is probably as active and, perhaps, as powerful among the Italian population in New York to-day as it ever was in Italy.
While I was in Palermo I had the place pointed out to me where Petrosino, the Italian detective from New York, who went to Sicily to secure the records of some of the noted Italian criminals then living in America, was shot and killed. Petrosino was killed March 12, 1909. The killing of this American officer in the streets of Palermo served to call attention to the number of Black Hand crimes committed by Italians in this country. During the next nine months after Petrosino's death it was reported that no less than fifty "Italian killings," as they were called, took place either in New York City itself or in the surrounding territory, and from 1906 to 1909, according to statistics prepared by the New York World, of the 112 unexplained murders committed in and around New York, 54 were those of Italians. This suggests, at least, the manner in which our own country is affected by the conditions of the masses in southern Italy and Sicily.
The Mafia, the Black Hand, as it is called in America, is a kind of institution which is so peculiar and to such an extent the product of purely local conditions that it seems difficult even for those who know most about it to explain its existence. One statement which I heard in regard to the matter was especially interesting to me. It was said that the condition of mind which made the Mafia possible, the fear and distrust which divide the masses of the people from the ruling classes and the Government, was the result of the mingling of the races in the island; that the Mafia was, in short, Sicily's race problem.
It is certainly true that in no other part of Europe, with the possible exception of Spain, have the different peoples of Europe and Africa become so intermingled as they have in this island, which is one of the natural bridges between Europe and Africa. In addition to the Arabs and Saracens from Africa, nearly all the races of Europe, Germans, Latins, Greeks, have all at different times lived and ruled on the island. Near Palermo, for example, there are still the remnants of a colony of Albanians, a Slavic people who speak modern Greek, and worship after the fashion of the Eastern Church, and there are fragments and remnants of many other races still preserved in different parts of the island.
My own experience has taught me, however, to distrust what I may call "racial explanations." They are convenient and easy to make, but too sweeping, and, practically, the effect of them is to discourage any effort to improve. For example, if some one discovers that the condition in which a people happens to be found at any given time is due to race, that it is constitutional, and in the blood, so to speak, then, of course, there is nothing to do. If, however, it is due to environment, education may help. The discussion and emphasis on the fact of race have been made the excuse, in the Southern States, for a good deal of apathy and indifference in regard to the hopes and progress of the Negro. In fact, whenever I hear a politician in the South ask the rhetorical question, "Can the leopard change his spots?" I usually find that he is opposing the establishment of a Negro school or is discouraging some other effort to improve the condition of the Negro people.
The real trouble with explanations of this kind is that as soon as a man has made up his mind, for example, that a people, or class of people, belongs to a so-called "inferior race," he is not inclined to support any kind of experiment, like the building of a school, that may prove that his explanation was mistaken.
The real reason for the backward condition of Sicily is, in my opinion, not so much the intermixture of races as the neglect and oppression of the masses of the people. In 1861, when Sicily became a part of the Italian Confederation, 90 per cent. of the population were wholly unable to read or write. This means that at this time the people of Sicily were not much better off, as far as education is concerned, than the Negro slaves at the time of emancipation. It has been estimated that between 5 and 10 per cent. of the slaves could read and write.
One of the first things the Italian Government attempted to do, after annexation, was to reorganize the school system of Sicily. But even under the new Government, and with a compulsory education law on the statute books, progress has been slow. In 1881, twenty years later, more than 84 per cent. of the population could neither read nor write, and as late as 1901, for every hundred inhabitants of school age, more than seventy were illiterate.
In practically the same period—that is, from 1866 to 1900—the Negro population in the United States reduced its illiteracy to 44.5 per cent. of the population of school age, and for every one hundred Negroes in the Southern States, fifty-two could read and write.
Sicily has three universities, one in each of its three largest cities, Palermo, Catania, and Messina, but they are for the few, and have in no way connected themselves with the practical interests and the daily life of the people. One result of the ignorance of the people is that in Sicily, where the educational qualifications exclude more persons than elsewhere from the suffrage, not more than 3.62 persons in every hundred of the population vote. This is according to statistics, which go back, however, to 1895.
As near as I can make out, the Mafia seems to have grown up, in the first place, like the White Caps, the Night Riders, and the lynchers in our own country, as a means of private vengeance. The people, perhaps because they despised and hated the Government, preferred to settle their scores in the old barbaric fashion of private warfare. The consequence was that the small towns were divided by tribal and family feuds. Under such circumstances professional outlaws became of service either for the purposes of attack or defence. From conditions something like this what is known as the Mafia sprang.
It is said that it was the rich fruit gardens of the "Shell of Gold" outside of Palermo which gave the Mafia its first secure foothold and eventually made that city the centre of its activity. In that region field guards were necessary, in addition to the high walls, to keep thieves out of the plantations where the golden fruit ripened almost all the year round. In the course of time these field guards became associated in a sort of clan or guild. In these guilds the most enterprising of the guards eventually became the leaders, and ruled those under them like the tribal chiefs.
Once established, these bands soon dominated the situation. No property owner dared install a guard without the consent of the chief. If he did, he was likely to have his trees destroyed or his whole crop stolen. A guard who was not a member of the band was likely to be brought down some night with a shot from a hedge. On the other hand, the mere knowledge that a certain plantation was under the protection of the Mafia was in itself almost sufficient to insure it from attack, and this because the Mafia, through all its devious connections with the lower and criminal classes, was much better able to ferret out and punish the criminals than the police.
By making himself at the same time useful and feared in the community, the chief of the Mafia soon began to get his hand in almost everything that was going on. He found himself called on to settle disputes. He mixed in politics and was secretly in the employ of rich and powerful men. In this way the Mafia, which was at bottom largely a criminal organization, gained in time standing and recognition in the community, in some respects, not unlike, I imagine, that of Tammany Hall in New York. When the Mafia, under the name of the Black Hand, reached New York, however, it seems to have become a criminal organization, pure and simple.
Those who have studied the history of this peculiar organization much farther than I have been able to do say that in their opinion the Mafia, or Black Hand, will not long survive in America because there is in this country no such oppression of the poor by the rich and no such hatred and suspicion of the high by the low as is the case in Sicily, to give it general support. In other words, the Mafia is dependent on class hatred and class oppression for its existence.
Perhaps I can give some idea of what it is that embitters the poor man in Sicily, who is without property, education, or opportunity, against the large property owners, the rich, educated, and ruling class.
It is estimated by the Socialists that in Italy the labouring man pays 54 per cent. of the taxes; business men and the professional classes pay 34 per cent., while the class which lives upon rents and the income from investments of various kinds furnishes but 12 per cent. of the revenues of the state.
Italy has, I think, every kind and method of taxation which has ever been invented. There is an income tax, which varies between 7½ and 20 per cent., though small incomes of less than one hundred dollars a year are exempt. The tax on landed property amounts to 30, 40, or even 50 per cent. In addition to these there is the lottery, the state monopolies, the stamp tax and dog tax. Finally the municipal taxes on all kinds of foodstuffs which are brought into the town. This tax absorbs from 20 to 30 per cent. of the labouring man's income.
All these taxes, direct and indirect, are so arranged that the heaviest burden falls upon that portion of the community which is least able to bear it. For example, salt is a Government monopoly in Italy, and in 1901 the people of Italy paid $15,000 for salt which cost the Government $1,200 to manufacture. The Italian Government ships salt to America for the use of the Gloucester fishermen for 50 cents a barrel of 280 pounds, or five and three-fifth pounds for a cent. This same salt costs the Italian, because of the monopoly of the Government, 4 cents a pound—that is to say, twelve times what it costs in America. In order to protect this monopoly the Government even goes so far as to station guards along the whole seacoast to prevent people from "stealing" sea water in buckets, to obtain salt.
Fortunately the state monopoly of salt does not extend to Sicily, but the principle of taxing the people according to their necessities, rather than according to their ability to pay, is the same there as elsewhere in Italy. As an illustration of the unfair way in which the taxes are levied in some parts of the country it is said that the donkey of the poor farmer is compelled to pay a tax, while the saddle-horse of the rich landlord goes free.
In comparison with this, the Negro in the South hardly knows what taxes are. The Negro farmer, for example, has an inexhaustible market for his cotton, corn, pork, and vegetables, and all the other farm vegetables that he can raise. Land is so cheap that a thrifty farmer can buy and pay for a farm within five or six years. Taxes on farm land are so low that the farmer hardly considers them in his yearly budget.
Poor as some of the Negro schools are in some parts of the South, they are vastly better and more numerous than those of the country people in Sicily. More than that, the Government puts no tax either on rain or sunshine, and the Negro in the Southern States has plenty of both, which is not true of the Sicilian farmer, who has too much sunshine and not enough rain. So much is the farmer in Sicily in need of water that at certain times in the year it is said that wine is cheaper than water. Finally, the Negro farmer, if he desires to take a load of produce to the town, does not, as is the case of the Sicilian, meet a policeman on the outskirts of the city who takes one fifth of his cotton, corn, eggs, or whatever he happens to have, away from him, before he will allow him to enter the town.
One day, while I was walking along the edge of the harbour in Catania, I noticed a man who was at work mending a high wire netting, about twenty or thirty feet high, which extended along the edge of the water. I saw that it extended as far as I could see. Upon inquiry I learned that it was placed there to prevent the fishermen, whom I noticed constantly coming and going with their little sailing boats, from bringing their fish into the city without paying the tax.
At the custom house, where the fishermen land, I observed one of these fishermen, who had landed with a small quantity of fish, which he was carrying to the market nearby, stop and fumble in his clothes, trying to find money enough to pay the tariff. When he could not find sufficient money to pay the sum demanded, he left two small fishes behind with the collector to cover the amount of the tax.
Fish is the cheapest and most abundant food the poor in the city can get to eat. The sea, just beyond their doors, is swarming with this kind of food. Nevertheless the city maintains an expensive army of officials to collect this miserable little tax upon the necessities of the poor.
The yearly income of a labourer's family in Catania is about 750 lire, or $170 a year. Of this amount it has been reckoned that in the way of taxes upon foodstuffs brought into the city the labourer pays 150 lire, or one fifth of his whole income.
In spite of all that has been proposed and attempted to improve conditions in Sicily since that island became a part of the Italian Confederation, the Government has failed, so far as I can learn, to gain the confidence, respect, and coöperation of the masses of the people. Naturally, conditions which have grown up in the course of hundreds of years and have become fixed in the minds and habits of all classes of the people cannot be changed suddenly. The farther I have looked into the situation in Sicily the more I am convinced that, different as it is in details, the problem of Sicily is fundamentally the same as that which we have here to face in the Southern States since the war. It is, in short, a problem of education, and by that I mean education which seeks to touch, to lift and inspire the man at the bottom, and fit him for practical daily life.
In this opinion I find that I am in agreement with the members of the commission which was appointed by the Italian Government in 1896 to investigate the condition of the peasants in southern Italy, particularly in their relation to the landed proprietors. The report of the commission, which has been recently made, fills several large volumes, but the substance of it seems to be, as far as I can learn, that the root of the evil is in the ignorance of the rural population. One of the effects of Italian immigration to America will probably be the establishment of a popular school system for the people on the land.
CHAPTER XI CHILD LABOUR AND THE SULPHUR MINES
There is one street in Catania, Sicily, which seems to be given over to the trade and industry of the poorer people of the city. It is not mentioned in the guide-books, and there is perhaps no reason why it should be. Nevertheless, there are a great many interesting things to be seen in that street—strange, quaint, homely things—that give a stranger intimate glimpses into the life of the people.
For example, on a street corner, tucked away in one of those snug spaces in which one sometimes finds a crowded fruit-stand, I discovered, one day, a macaroni factory. Within a space perhaps three feet wide and ten or twelve feet in length one man and a boy conducted the whole business of the sale as well as the manufacture of macaroni, from the raw grain to the completed article of trade. The process, as it was carried on in this narrow space, was necessarily a simple one. There was a bag of flour, a box in which to mix the paste, and a press by which this paste was forced through holes that converted it into hollow tubes. Afterward these hollow tubes were laid out on a cloth frame which, because there was no room inside, had been set up in the street. After leaving this cloth frame the macaroni was hung up on little wooden forms for inspection and for sale.
One of the most curious and interesting places on the street was an apothecary's shop in which the apothecary manufactured all his own drugs, and acted at the same time as the poor man's physician or medical adviser. This man had never studied pharmacy in a college. His knowledge of drugs consisted entirely of the traditions and trade secrets which had come down to him from his predecessor in the business. His shop was filled with sweet-smelling herbs, gathered for him by the peasants, and from these he brewed his medicines. The skeleton of a fish hung over the counter from which medicines were dispensed, and the shelves behind were filled with many curious and musty bottles.
The apothecary himself was a very serious person, with a high, pale forehead and the absorbed air of a man who feels the weight of the knowledge he carries around with him. All these things, especially the smell of the herbs, were quite awe-inspiring, and undoubtedly contributed something to the efficacy of the medicines.
It is a very busy street in which the apothecary, the macaroni manufacturer, and the others are located. In fact, it seems as if work never stopped there, for it is full of little shops where men sit in their doorways or at the open windows until late at night, working steadily at their various trades, making the things they sell, and stopping only now and then to sell the things they make. The whole region is a hive of industry, for it is the neighbourhood where the artisans live, those skilled workmen who make everything by hand that, in our part of the world, we have long since learned to make by machine. In fact, in this street it is possible to get a very good picture, I suspect, of the way in which trade and industry were carried on in other parts of Europe before the age of steam.
About nine o'clock Saturday night—the night upon which I arrived in Catania—I was walking down one of the side streets in this part of the city, when my attention was attracted to a man, sitting in his doorway, working by the light of a little smoky lamp. He was engaged in some delicate sort of iron work, and, as near as I could make out, he seemed to be a tool-maker.
What particularly attracted my attention was a little girl, certainly not more than seven years of age, who was busily engaged in polishing and sharpening the stamps he used. I stopped for a moment and watched this man and child, working steadily, silently, at this late hour of the night. I could but marvel at the patience and the skill the child showed at her work. It was the first time in my life that I had seen such a very little child at work, although I saw many others in the days that followed.
I have often heard it said that people who are born under the soft southern skies are habitually indolent, and never learn to work there, as they do in more northern latitudes. This is certainly not true of Sicily, for, so far as my experience goes, there is no other country in Europe where incessant labour is so largely the lot of the masses of the people. Certainly there is no other country where so much of the labour of all kinds, the skilled labour of the artisan as well as the rough labour of digging and carrying on the streets and in the mines, is performed by children, especially boys.
There is a law against Sunday labour in Catania, but the next morning, as I passed through this same quarter of the city, I found the majority of the people still busily at work. I stopped to watch a man who was making mandolins. This man lived in one room, which was at the same time a workshop, kitchen, and bedroom. There was a great heap of mattresses piled high upon the bed in one corner. A little charcoal brazier, on which the cooking for the family was performed, stood upon the workbench. The ceiling was hung with finished instruments, and the pavement in front of the house was piled with others in various stages of completion. This room was occupied by a family of five, all of whom, with the exception of the wife and mother, were engaged, each in their different ways, in the work of manufacturing mandolins. All the skilled work (the setting of the decorations and the polishing of the frames) was performed by the boys, but a little girl who was standing near seemed to be making herself handy as a helper in the work of the others.
In this treeless country, where there is almost no wood of any kind to be had, the most useful building material, after stone and plaster, seems to be tile. Not only the roofs but the floors of most of the buildings are made of this material, and its manufacture is consequently one of the principal minor industries of the country. One day, while I was wandering about in the outskirts of Catania, I ran across a plant where two men and three little boys were at work mixing the clay, forming it into octagonal shapes, and piling it out in the sun to dry. The two men were at work in the shade of a large open shed, but I could not make out what they were doing. As nearly as I could see, almost all of the actual work was performed by the children, who ranged, I should say, from eight to twelve years of age. The work of carrying the heavy clay, and piling it up in the sun after it had been formed into tiles, was done by the younger children.
I am certain that if I had not seen them with my own eyes I would never have believed that such very little children could carry such heavy loads, or that they could work so systematically and steadily as they were compelled to do in order to keep pace with the rapid movements of the older boy, who was molding the tiles from the soft clay. The older boy could not have been, as I have said, more than twelve years of age, but he worked with all the skill and the rapidity of an experienced piece-worker driven at the top of his speed. I was so filled with pity and at the same time with admiration for this boy that, as I was unable to speak to him, I ventured to offer him a small coin in token of my appreciation of the skill with which he worked. So intent was he on his task, however, that he would not stop his work even to pick up the money I proffered him, but simply thanked me and nodded his head for me to place it on the bench beside him.
These instances of skilled labour among children are by no means exceptional. At another time I remember stopping to look at a little boy who, it seemed to me, could not be more than eight or nine years of age, working side by side with a man, evidently his father, together with several other men, all of them engaged in building a boat. The boy I speak of was engaged in finishing off with a plane the hardwood rail of the sides of the boat, and as I watched him at his task I was again compelled to wonder at the ease and skill with which these little fellows use their tools.
All these things, as I have said, gave me an idea of the manner in which the trades were carried on before the extensive use of machinery had brought the factory system into existence. It showed me also the easy way in which, in those days, the industrial education of children was carried on. When the work in the handicrafts was performed in the house, or in a shop adjoining the house, it was an easy thing for the father to hand down to the son the trade he himself had practised. Under the conditions in which trades are carried on in Sicily to-day children are literally born to the trade which their fathers practise. In these homes, where the shop and the home are crowded together in one or two rooms, children see their fathers and mothers at work from the time they are born. As soon as they are able to handle a tool of any kind the boys, at any rate, and frequently the girls also, are set to work helping their parents. As the father, in his turn, has probably inherited the accumulated traditions and skill of generations that preceded him in the same trade, his children are able to get from him, in the easiest and most natural way, an industrial education such as no other kind of school can give.
Whatever may be the disadvantages of the people of Sicily in other respects, they have an advantage over the Negro in learning the skilled trades, the value of which it is difficult to estimate. Everywhere one sees the evidences of this skill with the hand, not only in the public buildings, but in some of the common objects of daily use. I have already referred to the way in which the ordinary little two-wheeled carts, which take the place of the ordinary farmer's wagon in this country, are decorated. I have seen in Catania men at work practically hewing these carts out of the log. I do not know to what extent the frame of the wagon is hewn out in this way, but, at any rate, the spokes are. Every detail is worked out with the greatest possible skill, even to the point of carving little figures or faces at the ends of the beams that make the frames. Likewise the harness of the donkeys that draw these carts is an elaborate and picturesque affair which must require a vast amount of patience and skill to make. The point I wish particularly to emphasize here is that all this skill in the handicrafts, which has become traditional in a people, is the best kind of preparation for every kind of higher education. In this respect the Italian, like the Japanese and Chinese, as well as every other race which has had centuries of training in the handicrafts, has an advantage over the Negro that can only be overcome when the masses of the Negro people have secured a training of the hand and a skill in the crafts that correspond to those of other races.
Not only are children, especially boys, employed at a very early age in all the trades I have mentioned, but young boys from fourteen to sixteen perform, as I have said, in the mines and elsewhere an incredible amount of the crude, rough work of the community.
I remember, one day in Palermo, seeing, for the first time in my life, boys, who were certainly not more than fourteen years of age, engaged in carrying on their backs earth from a cellar that was being excavated for a building. Men did the work of digging, but the mere drudgery of carrying the earth from the bottom of the excavation to the surface was performed by these boys. It was not simply the fact that mere children were engaged in this heavy work which impressed me. It was the slow, dragging steps, the fixed and unalterable expression of weariness that showed in every line of their bodies. Later I learned to recognize this as the habitual manner and expression of the carusi, which is the name that the Italians give to those boys who are employed in the sulphur mines to carry the crude ore up from the mines where it is dug and to load it into the cars by which it is conveyed to the surface.
The work in a sulphur mine is organized in many respects, I learned, like that of a coal mine. The actual work of digging the sulphur is performed by the miner, who is paid by the amount of crude ore he succeeds in getting out. He, in his turn, has a man or a boy, sometimes two or three of them, to assist him in getting the ore out of the mine to the smelter, where it is melted and refined. As I myself had had some experience as a boy in work similar to this in the mines of West Virginia, I was interested in learning all I could in regard to these boys and the conditions under which they worked.
In the case of boys employed for this work, the Sicilians have a custom of binding out their children to the miner, or picconiero, as he is called. Such a boy is then called, in the language of the country, a caruso. As a matter of fact, a picconiero who buys a boy from his parents to employ him as a caruso actually purchases a slave. The manner in which the purchase is made is as follows: In Sicily, where the masses of the people are so wretchedly poor in everything else, they are nevertheless unusually rich in children, and, as often happens, the family that has the largest number of mouths to fill has the least to put in them. It is from these families that the carusi are recruited. The father who turns his child over to a miner receives in return a sum of money in the form of a loan. The sum usually amounts to from eight to thirty dollars, according to the age of the boy, his strength and general usefulness. With the payment of this sum the child is turned over absolutely to his master. From this slavery there is no hope of freedom, because neither the parents nor the child will ever have sufficient money to repay the original loan.
Strange and terrible stories are told about the way in which these boy slaves have been treated by their masters. Before coming to Sicily I had met and talked with persons who described to me the processions of half-naked boys, their bodies bowed under the heavy weight of the loads they carried, groaning and cursing as they made their way up out of the hot and sulphurous holes in the earth, carrying the ore from the mine to the smelter. All that I had heard elsewhere was confirmed later by the details furnished by official reports and special studies of conditions in the mining regions, made at different times and by different persons. In these reports I learned that the mines had been in the past the refuge of a debased and criminal population, whose vices made the bleak, sulphur-smitten region where the mines are located as much like hell as it looks.
The cruelties to which the child slaves have been subjected, as related by those who have studied them, are as bad as anything that was ever reported of the cruelties of Negro slavery. These boy slaves were frequently beaten and pinched, in order to wring from their overburdened bodies the last drop of strength they had in them. When beatings did not suffice, it was the custom to singe the calves of their legs with lanterns to put them again on their feet. If they sought to escape from this slavery in flight, they were captured and beaten, sometimes even killed.
As they climbed out of the hot and poisonous atmosphere of the mines their bodies, naked to the waist and dripping with sweat, were chilled by the cold draughts in the corridors leading out of the mines, and this sudden transition was the frequent cause of pneumonia and tuberculosis.
In former years children of six and seven years of age were employed at these crushing and terrible tasks. Under the heavy burdens (averaging about forty pounds) they were compelled to carry, they often became deformed, and the number of cases of curvature of the spine and deformations of the bones of the chest reported was very large. More than that, these children were frequently made the victims of the lust and unnatural vices of their masters. It is not surprising, therefore, that they early gained the appearance of gray old men, and that it has become a common saying that a caruso rarely reaches the age of twenty-five.
It was with something of all this in my mind that I set out from Palermo a little before daylight one morning in September to visit the mines at Campofranco, on the southern side of the island, in the neighbourhood of Girgenti. My misgivings were considerably increased when, upon reaching the railway station to take the train, I found that the guide and interpreter who had been employed the night before to accompany us on the trip had not made his appearance. We waited until all the porters at the station and the guards on the train were fairly in a fever of excitement in their well-meant efforts to get us and our baggage on the train. Then, at the last moment, with the feeling that we were taking a desperate chance, we scrambled aboard and started off into a wild region, which no guide-book had charted and, so far as I knew, no tourist had ever visited.
The train carried us for some distance along the fertile plain between the sea and the hills. It was just possible to make out in the twilight of the early morning the dim outlines of the little towns we passed. At length, just as we were able to catch the first gleams of the morning sun along the crests of the mountains, the railway turned abruptly southward and the train plunged into a wide valley between the brown and barren hills.
At Roccapalumba we left the main line of the railway, which turns eastward from there in the direction of Catania, and continued our journey with the somewhat ruder comforts of an accommodation train. From this point on the way grew rougher, the country wilder, and the only companions of our journey were the rude country folk, with an occasional sprinkling of miners. At the little town of Lercara we entered the zone of the sulphur mines. From now on, at nearly every station we passed, I saw great masses of the bright yellow substance, piled in cars, waiting to be carried down to the port of Girgenti for shipment to all parts of the world, and particularly to the United States, which is still the largest market for this Sicilian gold.
The nearer the train approached our destination, the more uncomfortable I grew about the prospect that was before us. I felt very sure that I should be able to reach Campofranco and perhaps see something of the mines, but whether I should ever be able to get out again and what would become of me if I were compelled to seek shelter in some of the unpromising places I saw along the way was very uncertain.
Fortunately, Dr. Robert E. Park, of Boston, who was travelling with me, and who accompanied me on nearly all of my excursions of this kind, was with me on this trip. Doctor Park had a pretty thorough mastery of the German language, and could speak a little French, but no Italian. He had, however, an Italian grammar in his satchel, and when we finally found ourselves at sea, in a region where neither English, German, nor French was of any help to us, he took that grammar from his satchel and set to work to learn enough Italian between Palermo and Campofranco to be able to make at least our most urgent wants known. For four hours he devoted himself industriously to the study of that beautiful and necessary language. It was a desperate case, and I think I am safe in saying that Doctor Park studied grammar more industriously during those four hours than he ever did before in his life. At any rate, by the time the train had crossed the rocky crest of the mountains which divide the north and south sides of Sicily, and before we disembarked at the lonesome little station of Campofranco, he could speak enough Italian, mixed with German, French, and English, to make himself understood. Perhaps another reason for Doctor Park's success was the fact that the Italians understand the sign language pretty well.
The mines at Campofranco are on the slope of the mountain, just above the railway station. A mile or more across the great empty valley, high up on the slope of the opposite mountain, is the village from which the mines get their name, a little cluster of low stone and cement buildings, clinging to the mountainside as if they were in imminent danger of slipping into the valley below.
A few hundred yards above the station great banks of refuse had been dumped into the valley, and a place levelled off on the side of the mountain, where the furnaces and smelters were located. There were great rows of kilns, like great pots, half buried in the earth, in which the ore is melted and then run off into forms, where it is cooled and allowed to harden.
I confess that I had been very dubious as to the way that we were likely to be received at the mines, seeing that we did not know the customs nor the people, and had very scant supply of Italian in which to make known our wants. The manager, however, who proved to be a very polite and dignified man, could speak a little French and some English. He seemed to take a real pleasure in showing us about the works. He explained the methods by which the sulphur was extracted, insisted upon our drinking a glass of wine, and was even kind enough to loan me a horse and guide when I expressed a desire to rent one of the passing donkeys to convey me to some of the more inaccessible places, farther up the mountain, where I could see the miners had burrowed into the earth in search of sulphur. On the vast slope of the mountain and at a distance they looked like ants running in and out of little holes in the earth.
It was at the mouth of one of these entrances to the mines that I got my first definite notion of what sulphur miners look like—those unfortunate creatures who wear out their lives amid the poisonous fumes and the furnace heat of these underground hells. There was a rumble of a car, and presently a man, almost stark naked, stepped out of the dark passageway. He was worn, haggard, and gray, and his skin had a peculiar grayish-white tinge. He spoke in a husky whisper, but I do not know whether that is one of the characteristic effects of the work in the mines or not. I was told that, in addition to other dangers, the sulphur has a bad effect upon the lungs. It was explained to me that the sulphur dust gets into the lungs and clogs them up, and that is what accounts for the groans of the carusi, so frequently spoken of, when they are tugging up the steep and winding passageways with the heavy burdens of crude ore on their backs.
It had been many years since I had been in a mine, but as I entered the dark, damp gallery and felt the sudden underground chill, the memories of my early experiences all came back to me. As we got farther into the mine, however, the air seemed to grow warmer. Suddenly a door at the side of the gallery opened; a blast of hot air, like that from a furnace, burst out into the corridor, and another of those half-naked men, dripping with perspiration, stepped out.
We passed at intervals along the main corridor a number of these doors which, as I discovered, led down into parts of the mine where the men were at work. It seemed incredible to me that any one could live and work in such heat, but I had come there to see what a sulphur mine was like, so I determined to try the experiment.
The side passage which I entered was, in fact, little more than a burrow, twisting and winding its way, but going constantly deeper and deeper into the dark depths of the earth. I had known what it was to work deep down under the earth, but I never before so thoroughly realized what it meant to be in the bowels of the earth as I did while I was groping my way through the dark and winding passages of this sulphur mine.
It is down at the bottom of these holes, and in this steaming atmosphere, that the miners work. They loosen the ore from the walls of the seams in which it is found, and then it is carried up out of these holes in sacks by the carusi.
In the mine which I visited the work of getting the ore to the surface was performed in a modern and comparatively humane way. It was simply necessary to carry the ore from the different points where it is mined to the car, by which it is then transported to the smelter. In those mines, however, where the work is still carried on in the old, traditional fashion, which has been in vogue as far back as any one can remember, all the ore is carried on the backs of boys. In cases where the mine descended to the depth of two, three, or four hundred feet, the task of carrying these loads of ore to the surface is simply heartbreaking. I can well understand that persons who have seen conditions at the worst should speak of the children who have been condemned to this slavery as the most unhappy creatures on earth.
From all that I can learn, however, the conditions have changed for the better in recent years. In 1902 a law was passed which forbade the employment of children under thirteen years in underground work, and to this was added, a little later, a provision which forbade, after 1905, the employment of children under fifteen in the mines.
So far as I am able to say, this provision was carried out in the mine I visited, for I did not see children at work anywhere inside the mine. I saw a number of the poor little creatures at work in the dumps outside the mine, however. They were carrying refuse ore in bags on their backs, throwing it on screens, and then loading the finer particles back into the cars. Once having seen these gangs of boys at work, I could never mistake their slow, dragging movements and the expression of dull despair upon their faces.