The great general strike of September, 1904, which resulted in practically putting an end, for five days, to all kinds of business industries in the city of Milan, was provoked by the state police firing upon some peasants who were holding a meeting to pay their shares and take their lots in an agricultural coöperative society.
I have attempted to describe at some length the character of the Socialistic movement as I found it in Hungary and Italy, because it represents on the whole the movement of the masses at the bottom of life in Europe. Through this party, for the first time, millions of human beings who have had no voice in and no definite ideas in respect to the Government under which they lived are learning to think and to give expression to their wants.
Few people, I venture to say, have any definite notion to what extent the most remote parts of Europe, from which the majority of our immigrants now come, have been penetrated by the ideas and the sentiments of the Socialistic party. There are, for example, some five or six different branches of the party in Bohemia. Socialism, I learn, has made its way even into such countries as Roumania, Servia, Bulgaria, and Dalmatia, where perhaps three fourths of the population are engaged in agriculture.
There are, however, as I discovered, various kinds and types of Socialism. I think I saw during my journey across Europe as many different kinds of Socialists as I did kinds of Jews, which is saying a good deal. In Denmark and Italy, for example, I met men of the very highest type who were members of the Socialist party. In Copenhagen I was entertained by the editors of the Socialistic paper, The Politiken, which is perhaps the most ably edited and influential paper in Denmark. In Italy many of the most patriotic as well as the most brilliant men in the country, writers, students, and teachers, are members of the Socialist party.
In Poland, on the other hand, I met other Socialists who had taken an active part in the revolution in Russia and who, for aught I know, were members of that group of desperate men who are said even now to be plotting from Cracow, Austria, a new revolutionary movement among the agricultural classes in Russia.
In short, I found that where the masses of the people are oppressed, where the people at the bottom are being crushed by those who are above them, there Socialism means revolution. On the other hand, where governments have shown a liberal spirit, and especially where the Socialists have had an opportunity to participate in the Government, or have been able, by means of the coöperative societies I have described, to do constructive work for the benefit of the masses, they have ceased to be revolutionists, have no longer sought to overturn the Government, but have patriotically striven to strengthen the existing order by freeing it from those defects that were dangerous to its existence.
In saying this, I do not mean to imply that I in any way favour the Socialistic programme of reform. I live in the Southern States, a part of the country which, more than any other part of the civilized world, still believes that the best government is the government that governs least; the government that you can wear like an old coat, without feeling it. More than that, I believe that the best and only fundamental way of bringing about reform is not by revolution, not through political machinery that tries to control and direct the individual from the outside, but by education, which gets at the individual from within; in short, fits him for life but leaves him free.
There is much in the history of the agricultural labourers of Hungary and Italy that is interesting to any one who has studied the condition of the Negro farm labourer in the South. In many respects their history has been the same. There is, however, this difference: When the serfs were freed in Hungary, as in most other parts of Europe, provision was made to give them land, though to a very large extent they were denied the political privileges enjoyed by the upper classes.
In Italy also it was intended, in giving the serfs freedom, to give them likewise land. Again, when the vast estates of the Church were taken over by the State, an attempt was made to increase the class of small owners and to give the land to the people who tilled it. In both cases, however, it was but a few years before the greater portion of the peasant owners were wiped out and their lands absorbed into the large estates. At the present time the small landowners, under the influence of education and agricultural organization, are gaining ground, and both countries, in the interest of agriculture, are seeking to encourage this movement.
The case of the Negro was just the opposite. When the masses of the Negro people were turned loose from slavery they carried in their hands the ballot that they did not know how to use, but they took no property with them. At the present time, I believe, by a conservative estimate, that the Negroes in the South own not less than twenty million acres of land, an area equal to the five New England States of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
On the other hand, the Negroes have largely lost, at least temporarily, many of the political privileges which were given them at emancipation. The experience of the peasants of Europe, just as the experience of the Negro in America, has served to confirm an opinion I have long held—namely, that it is very hard for a man to keep anything that he has not earned or does not know how to use. And in most cases, the best way and, in fact, the only way to insure any people in the possession either of property or political privileges is to fit them by education to use these gifts for their own good and for the highest good of the community in which they live.
The peasants were given land without effort on their part and soon lost it. The masses of the Negroes were given the ballot without effort on their part and they soon lost it. The peasants are now gradually gaining the land through their own effort and are keeping it. The masses of Negroes are gradually gaining the ballot through their own effort, and are likely to keep it when so gained.
I had crossed Europe from north to south before I got my first glimpse of an emigrant bound for America. On the way from Vienna to Naples I stopped at midnight at Rome, and in the interval between trains I spent an hour in wandering about in the soft southern air—such air as I had not found anywhere since I left my home in Alabama.
In returning to the station my curiosity was aroused, as I was passing in the shadow of the building, by what seemed to me a large vacant room near the main entrance to the station. As I attempted to enter this room I stumbled over the figure of a man lying on the stone floor. Looking farther, I saw something like forty or fifty persons, men as well as women, lying on the floor, their faces turned toward the wall, asleep.
The room itself was apparently bare and empty of all furniture. There was neither a bench nor a table, so far as I could see, in any part of the room. It seems that, without any expectation of doing so, I had wandered into the room reserved for emigrants, and came accidentally upon one of the sights I most wanted to see in Italy—namely, a party of emigrants bound for America.
As near as I could learn, these people were, for the most part, peasants, who had come in from the surrounding country, carrying what little property they possessed on their backs or tied up in little bundles in their arms, and were awaiting the arrival of the train that was to take them to the port from which they could take ship for America.
I confess it struck me as rather pathetic that, in this splendid new and modern railway station, in which the foreign traveller and the native Italian of the upper classes were provided with every convenience and luxury, so little thought had been given to the comfort of these humble travellers, who represent the people in Italy who pay proportionately most of the taxes, and who, by their patient industry and thrift, have contributed more than any other class to such progress as Italy has made in recent years.
Later on I had an opportunity to pass through the country from which perhaps the majority of these emigrants had come. I travelled through a long stretch of country where one sees only now and then a lonesome shepherd or a wretched hut with one low room and a cow-stall. I also visited some of the little villages which one sees clinging to the barren hilltops, to escape the poisonous mists of the plains below. There I saw the peasants in their homes and learned something of the way in which the lowly people in the rural districts have been neglected and oppressed. After that I was able to understand that it was no special hardship that these emigrants suffered at Rome. Perhaps many of them had never before slept in a place so clean and sanitary as the room the railway provided them.
Early the next morning, as my train was approaching Naples, my attention was attracted by the large number of women I saw at work in the fields. It was not merely the number of women but the heavy wrought-iron hoes, of a crude and primitive manufacture, with which these women worked that aroused my interest. These hoes were much like the heavy tools I had seen the slaves use on the plantations before the Civil War. With these heavy instruments some of the women seemed to be hacking the soil, apparently preparing it for cultivation; others were merely leaning wearily upon their tools, as if they were over-tired with the exertion. This seemed quite possible to me, because the Italian women are slighter and not as robust as the women I had seen at work in the fields in Austria.
I inquired why it was that I saw so many women in the fields in this part of the country, for I had understood that Italian women, as a rule, did not go so frequently into field work as the women do in Austria and Hungary. I learned that it was because so many of the men who formerly did this work had emigrated to America. As a matter of fact, three fourths of the emigration from Italy to America comes from Sicily and the other southern provinces. There are villages in lower Italy which have been practically deserted. There are others in which no one but women and old men are left behind, and the whole population is more than half supported by the earnings of Italian labourers in America. There are cities within twenty miles of Naples which have lost within ten years two thirds of their inhabitants. In fact, there is one little village not far from the city of which it is said that the entire male population is in America.
Ten days later, coming north from Sicily, I passed through the farming country south of Naples, from which large numbers of emigrants go every year to the United States. It is a sad and desolate region. Earthquakes, malaria, antiquated methods of farming, and the general neglect of the agricultural population have all contributed to the miseries of the people. The land itself—at least such portion of it as I saw—looks old, wornout, and decrepit; and the general air of desolation is emphasized when, as happened in my case, one comes suddenly, in the midst of the desolate landscape, upon some magnificent and lonely ruin representing the ancient civilization that flourished here two thousand years ago.
Statistics which have been recently collected, after an elaborate investigation by the Italian Government, show that, in a general way, the extent of emigration from southern Italy is in direct ratio to the neglect of the agricultural classes. Where the wages are smallest and the conditions hardest, there emigration has reached the highest mark. In other words, it is precisely from those parts of Italy where there are the greatest poverty, crime, and ignorance that the largest number of emigrants from Italy go out to America, and, I might add, the smallest number return. Of the 511,935 emigrants who came to North and South America from Italy in 1906, 380,615 came from Sicily and the southern provinces.
One of the most interesting experiences I had while in Europe was in observing the number of different classes and races there are in Europe who look down upon, and take a hopeless view of, certain of their neighbours because they regard them as inferior. For example, one of the first things I learned in Italy was that the people in northern Italy look down upon the people of southern Italy as an inferior race. I heard and read many times while I was in Italy stories and anecdotes illustrating the childishness, the superstition, and the ignorance of the peasant people, and the lower classes generally in southern Italy. In fact, nothing that I have known or heard about the superstition of the Negro people in America compares with what I heard about the superstition of the Italian peasants. What surprised me more was to learn that statistics gathered by the Italian Government indicate that in southern Italy, contrary to the experience of every other country, the agricultural labourers are physically inferior to every other class of the population. The people in the rural districts are shorter of stature and in a poorer condition generally than they are in the cities.
For all these reasons I was the more anxious to learn for myself what these people were like. I wanted to find out precisely in what this inferiority of the southern Italian consisted, because I knew that these people were very largely descended from the ancient Greeks, who, by reputation at least, were the most gifted people the world has ever known.
The city of Naples offers some advantages for studying the southern population, since it is the port at which the stream of emigration from the small towns and farming districts of the interior reaches the sea. The exportation of labourers to America is one of the chief businesses of that city. It was at Naples, then, that I gained my earliest first-hand acquaintance with the Italians of the south.
I think the thing that impressed me most about Naples was the contrast between the splendour of its natural surroundings, the elegance and solidity of its buildings, and the dirt, disorder, and squalor in which the masses of the people live. It was early morning when I arrived in the city for the first time. The sun, which was just rising over the black mass of Vesuvius, flooded the whole city and the surrounding country with the most enchanting light. In this soft light the gray and white masses of the city buildings, piled against the projecting hillside to the right and stretching away along the curving shores to the left, made a picture which I shall never forget.
Some of this sunshine seemed to have got into the veins of the people, too, for I never saw anywhere so much sparkle and colour, so much life and movement, as I did among the people who throng the narrow streets of Naples. I never heard before so many curious human noises or saw such vivid and expressive gestures. On the other hand, I never saw anywhere before so many beggars, so many barefooted men, so many people waiting at the station and around the streets to pick up a casual job. It seemed to me that there were at least six porters to every passenger who got off the train, and these porters were evidently well organized, for I had the experience of seeing myself and my effects calmly parcelled out among half a dozen of them, every one of whom demanded, of course, a separate fee for his services.
My experience in Europe leads me to conclude that the number of casual labourers, hucksters, vagabonds, and hunters of odd jobs one meets in a city is a pretty good index of the condition of the masses of the people. By this measure I think that I should have been able to say at the outset that there was in Naples a larger class living in the dirt, degradation, and ignorance at the bottom of society than in any other city I visited in Europe. I make this statement even though cities like Catania and Palermo, in Sicily, which are surrounded by an agricultural population just as wretched, are little, if any, better than Naples in this respect.
Very few persons who go to Naples merely as sightseers ever get acquainted, I suspect, with the actual conditions of the people. Most travellers who see Naples are carried away by the glamour of the sunshine, the colour, and the vivacity of the Italian temperament. For that reason they do not see the hard struggle for existence which goes on in the narrow streets of the city, or, if they do, they look upon the shifts and devices to which this light-hearted people are driven in order to live as merely part of the picturesqueness of the southern life and people.
I have been more than once through the slums and poorer quarters of the coloured people of New Orleans, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and New York, and my personal observation convinces me that the coloured population of these cities is in every way many per cent. better off than the corresponding classes in Naples and the other Italian cities I have named. As far as the actual hardships they have to endure or the opportunities open to them, the condition of the Negroes in these cities does not compare, in my opinion, with that of the masses of the Italians in these southern Italian cities.
There is this difference also: the majority of the Negroes in the large cities of the South and North in the United States are from the country. They have been accustomed to range and wander in a country where life was loose and simple, and existence hardly a problem. They have not been accustomed to either the comforts or the hardships of complex city life. In the case of the Italians, life in the crowded, narrow streets, and the unsanitary intimacy and confusion in which men, goats, and cattle here mingle, have become the fixed habit of centuries.
It is not an unusual thing, for instance, to find a cow or a mule living in close proximity, if not in the same room, with the rest of the family, and, in spite of the skill and artistic taste which show themselves everywhere in the construction and decoration of the buildings, the dirt and disorder in which the people live in these buildings are beyond description. Frequently, in passing through the streets of these southern cities, one meets a herd of goats wandering placidly along over the stone pavements, nibbling here and there in the gutters or holding up in front of a house to be milked.
Even where the city government has made the effort to widen and improve the streets, let in air and sunlight, and maintain sanitary conditions, the masses of the people have not yet learned to make use of these conveniences. I recall, in passing along one of these streets, in the centre of the city, which had been recently laid out with broad stone sidewalks and built up with handsome three and four story stone buildings, seeing a man and a cow standing on the sidewalk at the corner of the street. It seemed to me that the natural thing would have been to let the cow stand in the street and not obstruct the sidewalk. But these people evidently look upon the cow as having the same rights as other members of the population. While the man who owned the cow was engaged in milking, a group of women from the neighbouring tenements stood about with their pitchers and gossiped, awaiting their turn at the cow.
This method of distributing milk—namely, by driving the animal to the front door and milking while you wait—has some advantages. It makes it unnecessary to sterilize the milk, and adulteration becomes impracticable. The disadvantage is that, in order to make this method of milk delivery possible, the cow and the goat must become city dwellers and live in the same narrow streets with the rest of the population. Whatever may be true of the goat, however, I am sure that the cow is not naturally adapted to city life, and where, as is true in many instances, whole families are forced to crowd into one or two rooms, the cow-stall is likely to be still more crowded. Under these conditions I am sure that the average cow is going to be neither healthy nor happy.
For my purposes it is convenient to divide the life of Naples into three classes. There is the life of the main avenues or boulevards, where one sees all that is charming in Neapolitan life. The buildings are handsome, streets are filled with carriages, sidewalks are crowded with handsomely dressed people. Occasionally one sees a barefooted beggar asleep on the marble steps of some public building. Sometimes one sees, as I did, a woman toiling up the long street side by side with a donkey pulling a cart. There are a good many beggars, but even they are cheerful, and they hold out their hands to you with a roguish twinkle in their eyes that somehow charms the pennies out of your pocket.
Then there is the life of the narrower streets, which stretch out in an intricate network all over the older part of the city. Many of these streets contain the homes as well as the workshops of the artisan class. Others are filled with the petty traffic of hucksters and small tradesmen. In one street you may find a long row of pushcarts, with fish and vegetables, or strings of cheap meat dangling from cords, surrounded by a crowd, chaffering and gesticulating—Neapolitan bargain-hunters. In another street you will find, intermingled with the little shops, skilled artisans with their benches pushed half into the street, at work at their various tasks. Here you will see a wood-carver at his open doorway, busily engaged in carving out an elegant bit of furniture, while in the back of the shop his wife is likely to be engaged in getting the midday meal. A little farther along you may meet a goldsmith, a worker in iron or in copper. One is making a piece of jewellery, the other is mending a kettle. In these streets one sees, in fact, all the old handicrafts carried on in much the same manner and apparently with the same skill that they were carried on three hundred years ago.
Finally, there are the narrower, darker, dirtier streets which are not picturesque and into which no ordinary traveller ventures. This seldom-visited region was, however, the one in which I was particularly interested, for I had come to Naples to see the people and to see the worst.
In the neighbourhood of the hotel where I stayed there was a narrow, winding street which led by a stone staircase from the main thoroughfare up the projecting hillside to one of those dark and obscure alleyways for which Naples, in spite of the improvements which have been made in recent years, is still noted. Near the foot of the stairs there was a bakery, and not far away was the office of the State Lottery. The little street to which I refer is chiefly inhabited by fishermen and casual labourers, who belong to the poorest class of the city. They are the patrons also of the lottery and the bakery, for there is no part of Naples that is so poor that it does not support the luxury of a lottery; and, I might add, there are few places of business that are carried on in a filthier manner than these bakeries of the poorer classes.
I was passing this place late in the afternoon, when I was surprised to see a huckster—I think he was a fish vender—draw up his wagon at the foot of this stone staircase and begin unhitching his mule. I looked on with some curiosity, because I could not, for the life of me, make out where he was going to put that animal after he had unhitched him. Presently the mule, having been freed from the wagon, turned of his own motion and began clambering up the staircase. I was so interested that I followed.
A little way up the hill the staircase turned into a dark and dirty alleyway, which, however, was crowded with people. Most of them were sitting in their doorways or in the street; some were knitting, some were cooking over little charcoal braziers which were placed out in the street. One family had the table spread in the middle of the road and had just sat down very contentedly to their evening meal. The street was strewn with old bottles, dirty papers, and all manner of trash; at the same time it was filled with sprawling babies and with chickens, not to mention goats and other household appurtenances. The mule, however, was evidently familiar with the situation, and made his way along the street, without creating any surprise or disturbance, to his own home.
I visited several other streets during my stay in Naples which were, if possible, in a worse condition than the one I have described. In a city where every one lives in the streets more than half the time, and where all the intimate business of life is carried on with a frankness and candour of which we in America have no conception, there is little difficulty in seeing how people live. I noted, for example, instances in which the whole family, to the number of six or seven, lived in a single room, on a dirt floor, without a single window. More than that, this one room, which was in the basement of a large tenement house, was not as large as the average one-room Negro cabin in the South. In one of these one-room homes I visited there was a blacksmith shop in one part of the room, while the family ate and slept in the other part. The room was so small that I took the trouble to measure it, and found it 8 × 13 feet in size.
Many of these homes of the poorer classes are nothing better than dark and damp cellars. More than once I found in these dark holes sick children and invalid men and women living in a room in which no ray of light entered except through the open door. Sometimes there would be a little candle burning in front of a crucifix beside the bed of the invalid, but this flickering taper, lighting up some pale, wan face, only emphasized the dreary surroundings. It was a constant source of surprise to me that under such conditions these people could be so cheerful, friendly, and apparently contented.
I made some inquiry as to what sort of amusements they had. I found that one of the principal forms of amusement of this class of people is gambling. What seems stranger still, this vice is in Italy a Government monopoly. The state, through its control of the lottery, adds to the other revenue which it extracts from the people not less than five million dollars a year, and this sum comes, for the most part, from the very poorest part of the population.
There are, it seems, something like 1,700 or 1,800 offices scattered through the several large cities of Italy where the people may buy lottery tickets. It seemed to me that the majority of these offices must be in Naples, for in going about the city I saw them almost everywhere, particularly in the poorer quarters.
These lottery offices were so interesting that I determined to visit one myself and learn how the game was played. It seems that there is a drawing every Saturday. Any one may bet, whatever amount he chooses, that a number somewhere between one and ninety will turn up in the drawing. Five numbers are drawn. If you win, the lottery pays ten to one. You may also bet that any two of the five numbers drawn will turn up in succession. In that case, the bank pays the winner something like fifty to one. You may also bet that three out of five will turn up, and in case you win the bank pays 250 times the amount you bet. Of course the odds are very much against the player, and it is estimated that the state gets about 50 per cent. of all the money that is paid in. The art of the game consists, according to popular superstition, in picking a lucky number. In order to pick a lucky number, however, one must go to a fortune-teller and have one's dreams interpreted, or one must pick a number according to some striking event, for it is supposed that every event of any importance suggests some lucky number. Of course all this makes the game more interesting and complicated, but it is, after all, a very expensive form of amusement for poor people.
From all that I can learn, public sentiment in Italy is rapidly being aroused to the evils which cling to the present system of dealing with the agricultural labourer and the poorer classes. But Italy has not done well by her lower classes in the past. She has oppressed them with heavy taxes; has maintained a land system that has worn out the soil at the same time that it has impoverished the labourer; has left the agricultural labourers in ignorance; has failed to protect them from the rapacity of the large landowners; and has finally driven them to seek their fortunes in a foreign land.
In return, these emigrants have repaid their native country by vastly increasing her foreign commerce, by pouring back into Italy the earnings they have made abroad, by themselves returning with new ideas and new ambitions and entering into the work of building up the country.
These returned emigrants have brought back to the mother country improved farming machinery, new methods of labour, and new capital. Italian emigrants abroad not only contribute to their mother country a sum estimated at between five and six million dollars annually, but Italian emigration has awakened Italy to the value of her labouring classes, and in doing this has laid the foundation for the prosperity of the whole country. In fact, Italy is another illustration that the condition of the man at the bottom affects the life of every class above him. It is to the class lowest down that Italy largely owes what prosperity she has as yet attained.
Among the things that make Sicily interesting are its ruins. There are dead cities which even in their decay are larger and more magnificent than the living cities that have grown up beside them—larger and more magnificent even than any living city in Sicily to-day. There are relics of this proud and ancient past everywhere in this country.
In the modern city of Catania, for example, I came suddenly one day upon the ruins of the forum of a Roman city which was buried under the modern Italian one. At Palermo I learned that when the members of the Mafia, which is the Sicilian name for the "Black Hand," want to conceal a murder they have committed, they put the body in one of the many ancient tombs outside the city, and leave it there for some archæologist to discover and learn from it the interesting fact that the ancient inhabitants of Sicily were in all respects like the modern inhabitants.
Among the other antiquities that one may see in Sicily, however, is a system of agriculture and method of tilling the soil that is two thousand years old. In fact, some of the tools still in use in the interior of the island are older than the ruins of those ancient heathen temples, some of which were built five centuries before Christ. These living survivals, I confess, were more interesting to me than the dead relics of the past.
These things are not easy to find. The guide-books mention them, but do not tell you where to look for them. Nevertheless, if one looks long enough and in the right place it is still possible to see in Sicily men scratching the field with an antique wooden plow, which, it is said, although I cannot vouch for that, is mentioned in Homer. One may see a Sicilian farmer laboriously pumping water to irrigate his cabbage garden with a water-wheel that was imported by the Saracens; or one may see, as I did, a wine press that is as old as Solomon, and men cutting the grapes and making the wine by the same methods that are described in the Bible.
It was my purpose in going to Sicily to see, if possible, some of the life of the man who works on the soil. I wanted to get to the people who lived in the little villages remote from the larger cities. I was anxious to talk with some of these herdsmen I had seen at a distance, wandering about the lonesome hillsides, tending their goats and their cows and perhaps counting the stars as the shepherds did in the time of Abraham. As there are some 800,000 persons engaged in agriculture in one way or another, it did not seem to me that this would be difficult. In spite of this fact, if I may judge by my own experience, one of the most difficult persons to meet and get acquainted with in this country, where many things are strange and hard to understand, is the man who works out in the open country on the land.
Even after one does succeed in finding this man, it is necessary to go back into history two or three hundred years and know a great deal about local conditions before one can understand the methods by which he works and thinks. In fact, I constantly had the feeling while I was in Sicily that I was among people who were so saturated with antiquity, so out of touch, except on the surface, with modern life, so imbedded in ancient habits and customs, that it would take a very long time, perhaps years, to get any real understanding of their ways of thinking and living.
In saying this I do not, of course, refer to the better classes who live in the cities, and especially I do not refer to the great landowners, who in Sicily do not live on the land, but make their homes in the cities and support themselves from the rents which are paid them by overseers or middlemen, to whom they usually turn over the entire management of their properties.
Nevertheless, in spite of the difficulties I have mentioned, I did get some insight into the condition of the rural agricultural classes in Sicily—namely, the small landowner and the agricultural labourer—and I can perhaps best tell what I learned by starting at the beginning.
The first thing I remember seeing of Sicily was a long black headland which stretches out into the sea like a great black arm toward the ships that approach Palermo from Naples. After that the dark mass of the mainland, bare and brown and shining in the morning light, seemed to rise suddenly out of the smooth and glittering sea. A little later, the whole splendid panorama of the beautiful bay of Palermo lay stretched out before me.
I recall this picture now because it suggests and partly explains the charm which so many travellers find in this island, and because it stands out in contrast with so much that I saw later when I visited the interior.
Sicily is, in this, like a great many other places I saw in Europe: it looks better on the outside than it looks on the in. All the large cities in Sicily are situated on a narrow rim of fertile land which encircles the island between the mountains and the sea. Palermo, for example, is situated on a strip of this rim which is so rich that it is called the "Shell of Gold." In this region, where the soil is constantly enriched from the weathering of the neighbouring mountains, and where agriculture has been carried to the highest perfection that science and the skill of man can bring it, are situated those wonderful orange and lemon groves for which Sicily is famous. As an illustration of what irrigation and intensive culture can do in this soil, it is stated that the value of the crop in this particular region has been increased by irrigation from $8 to $160 an acre.
When one goes to Sicily to look at the agriculture it is this region that one sees first. During my first day in Palermo I drove through miles of these magnificent fruit farms, all laid out in the most splendid style, surrounded by high stone walls, the entrance guarded by heavy iron gates, and provided with extensive works for supplying constant streams of water to the growing fruit. The whole country, which is dotted with beautiful villas and winter palaces, is less like a series of fruit farms than it is like one vast park. Here the fruit ripens practically the whole year round. The trees are heavy all winter with growing fruit, and one can wander for hours through a forest of lemon and orange trees so closely crowded together that the keen rays of the southern sun can scarcely penetrate their foliage.
Palermo, however, like many other European cities in which the masses of the people are just now emerging out of the older civilization into the newer modern life, is divided into an old and a new city. There is the northern end, with broad streets and handsome villas, which the people call the "English Garden." This is the new city and the quarter of the wealthy classes. Then at the southern end there is the old city, with crowded, narrow and often miserably dirty streets, which is the home of the poorer class.
After visiting one or two of the estates in the suburbs at the northern end of the city, I determined to see some of the truck farms of the smaller farmers which I had heard were located at the south end of the city. I made up my mind, also, if possible, to get out into the country, into the wilder and less settled regions, where I could plainly see from my hotel window the olive groves creeping up the steep mountainside and almost visibly searching out the crevices and sheltered places on the steep slopes in search of water, which is the one missing ingredient in the soil and climate of this southern country.
Now one of the singular things about Palermo and some other cities in Sicily is that, as soon as you get to the edge of the town, you find yourself driving or walking between high stone walls which entirely shut out the view in every direction. We drove for an hour through these blind alleys, winding and twisting about without seeing anything of the country except occasionally the tops of the trees above the high stone walls that guarded the farms on either side. Occasionally we passed heavy iron gates which looked like the gates of a prison. Now and then we came upon a little group of houses built into the walls. These barren little cells, lighted only by an open door, looked as if they might be part of a prison, except for the number of sprawling children, the goats, and the chickens, and the gossiping housewives who sat outside their houses in the shadow of the wall sewing, or engaged in some other ordinary household task. There was scarcely a sprig of grass anywhere to be seen. The roads frequently became almost impassable for wagons, and eventually degenerated into mere mule paths, through which it seemed almost impossible, with our carriage, to reach the open country.
What added to the prison-like appearance of the place was the fact that, as soon as we approached the edge of the town, we met, every hundred yards or more, a soldier or a police officer sitting near his sentry box, guarding the approaches to the city. When I inquired what the presence of these soldiers meant, I was told that they were customs officers and were stationed there to prevent the smuggling of food and vegetables into the city, without the payment of the municipal tax which, it seems, is levied on every particle of produce that is brought into the city. I am sure that in the course of half an hour we met as many as twenty of these officers watching the highway for smugglers.
As we proceeded, our driver, who had made several fruitless attempts to turn us aside into an old church or cemetery, to see the "antee-chee," as he called it, grew desperate. When I inquired what was the trouble I learned that we had succeeded in getting him into a part of the city that he had never before visited in his whole life, and he was afraid that if he went too far into some of the roads in which we urged him to go he would never be able to get back. Finally we came to a road that appeared to lead to a spot where it seemed one could at least overlook the surrounding country. We urged him to go on, but he hesitated, stopped to inquire the way of a passing peasant and then, as if he had made a mighty resolve, he whipped up his horse and said he would go on even if that road took him to "paradise." All this time we were not a quarter of a mile beyond the limits of the customs zone of the city.
Finally we came, by good fortune, to a hole in one of the walls that guarded the highway. We stopped the carriage, got out, clambered up the steep bank and made our way through this hole into the neighbouring field. Then we straightened up and took a long breath because it seemed like getting out of prison to be able to look about and see something green and growing again.
We had hardly put our heads through the hole in this wall, however, when we saw two or three men lying in the shade of a little straw-thatched hut, in which the guards sleep during the harvest season, to keep the thieves from carrying away the crops. As soon as these men saw us, one of them, who seemed to be the proprietor, arose and came toward us. We explained that we were from America and that we were interested in agriculture. As soon as this man learned that we were from America he did everything possible he could to make us welcome. It seems that these men had just sat down to their evening meal, which consisted of black bread and tomatoes. Tomatoes seemed to be the principal part of the crop that this farmer was raising at that time. He invited us, in the politest manner possible, to share his meal with him and seemed greatly disappointed that we did not accept. Very soon he began telling the same story, which I heard so frequently afterward during my stay in Sicily. He had a son in America, who was in a place called Chicago, he said, and he wanted to know if I had ever heard of such a place and if so perhaps I might have met his son.
The old man explained to me all about his farm; how he raised his crop and how he harvested it. He had about two acres of land, as well as I could make out, for which he paid in rent about $15 per acre a year. This included, as I understood, the water for irrigation purposes. He admitted that it took a lot of work to make a living for himself, and the others who were helping him, from this small piece of land. It was very hard to live anywhere in Sicily, he said, but the people in Palermo were much better off than they were in other places.
I asked him what he would do if his son should come back from America with a bag of money. The old man's face lighted up and he said promptly, "Get some land and have a little home of my own."
Many times since then I have asked the same or similar questions of some man I met working on the soil. Everywhere I received the same answer. Everywhere among the masses of the people is this desire to get close to the soil and own a piece of land of their own.
From where we stood we could look out over the country and see in several places the elaborate and expensive works that had been erected for pumping water by steam for the purposes of irrigation. One of the small farmers I visited had a small engine in the back of his house which he used to irrigate a garden of cauliflower about four acres in extent. This man lived in a little low stone and stucco house, but he was, I learned, one of the well-to-do class. He had an engine for pumping water which cost him, he said, about $500. I saw as I entered his place a little stream of water, not much larger than my thumb, drizzling out of the side of the house and trickling out into the garden. He said it cost him between $4 and $5 a day to run that engine. The coal he used came from England.
I had seen, as I entered the Palermo harbour, the manner in which this coal was unloaded, and it gave me the first tangible evidence I had found of the cheapness of human labour in this over-populated country. Instead of the great machines which are used for that purpose in America and England, I learned, this work was all done by hand.
In order to take this coal from the ship it was first loaded into baskets, which were swung over the side of the vessel and there piled upon a lighter. This lighter was then moved from the ships to the shore. The baskets were then lifted out by hand and the coal dumped on the wharf. From these it was reloaded into carts and carried away. It was this coal, handled in this expensive way, that this farmer was using to pump the water needed to irrigate his land.
After leaving Palermo I went to Catania, at the other side of the island. The railway which climbs the mountains in crossing the island took me through a very different country and among very different people than those I had seen at Palermo. It was a wild, bare, mountainous region through which we passed; more bare, perhaps, at the time I saw it than at other times, because the grain had been harvested and plowing had not begun. There were few regular roads anywhere. Now and then the train passed a lonely water-wheel; now and then I saw, winding up a rocky footpath, a donkey or pack-mule carrying water to the sulphur mines or provisions to some little inland mountain village.
Outside of these little villages, in which the farm labourers live, the country was perfectly bare. One can ride for miles through this thickly populated country without seeing a house or a building of any kind, outside of the villages.
In Sicily less than 10 per cent. of the farming class live in the open country. This results in an enormous waste of time and energy. The farm labourer has to walk many miles to and from his labour. A large part of the year he spends far away from his home. During this time he camps out in the field in some of the flimsy little straw-thatched shelters that one sees scattered over the country, or perhaps he finds himself a nest in the rocks or a hole in the ground. During this time he lives, so to speak, on the country. If he is a herdsman, he has his cows' or goats' milk to drink. Otherwise his food consists of a piece of black bread and perhaps a bit of soup of green herbs of some kind or other.
During my journey through this mountain district, and in the course of a number of visits to the country which I made later, I had opportunity to learn something of the way these farming people live. I have frequently seen men who had done a hard day's work sit down to a meal which consisted of black bread and a bit of tomato or other raw vegetable. In the more remote regions these peasant people frequently live for days or months, I learned, on almost any sort of green thing they find in the fields, frequently eating it raw, just like the cattle.
When they were asked how it was possible to eat such stuff, they replied that it was good; "it tasted sweet," they said.
I heard, while I was in Sicily, of the case of a woman who, after her husband had been sent to prison, supported herself from the milk she obtained from a herd of goats, which she pastured on the steep slopes of the mountains. Her earnings amounted to not more than 12 to 14 cents a day, and, as this was not sufficient for bread for herself and her four children, she picked up during the day all sorts of green stuff that she found growing upon the rocks, and carried it home in her apron at night to fill the hungry mouths that were awaiting her return. Persons who have had an opportunity to carefully study the condition of this country say it is incredible what sort of things these poor people in the interior of Sicily will put into their stomachs.
One of the principal articles of diet, in certain seasons of the year, is the fruit of a cactus called the Indian fig, which grows wild in all parts of the island. One sees it everywhere, either by the roadside, where it is used for hedges, or clinging to the steep cliffs on the mountainside. The fruit, which is about the size and shape of a very large plum, is contained in a thick, leathern skin, which is stripped off and fed to the cattle. The fruit within is soft and mushy and has a rather sickening, sweetish taste, which, however, is greatly relished by the country people.
One day, in passing through one of the suburbs of Catania, I stopped in front of a little stone and stucco building which I thought at first was a wayside shrine or chapel. But it turned out to be a one-room house. This house had a piece of carpet hung as a curtain in front of the broad doorway. In front of this curtain there was a rude table made of rough boards; on this table was piled a quantity of the Indian figs I have described and some bottles of something or other that looked like what we in America call "pop."
Two very good-looking young women were tending this little shop. I stopped and talked with them and bought some of the cactus fruit. I found it sold five pieces for a cent. They told me that from the sale of this fruit they made about 17 cents a day, and upon this sum they and their father, who was an invalid, were compelled to support themselves. There were a few goats and chickens and two pigs wandering about the place, and I learned that one of the economies of the household consisted in feeding the pigs and goats upon the shells or husks of the Indian figs that were eaten and thrown upon the ground.
As near as I could learn, from all that I heard and read, the condition of the agricultural population in Sicily has been growing steadily worse for half a century, at least.
Persons who have made a special study of the physical condition of these people declare that this part of the population shows marked signs of physical and mental deterioration, due, they say, to the lack of sufficient food. For example, in respect to stature and weight, the Sicilians are nearly 2 per cent. behind the population in northern Italy. This difference is mainly due to the poor physical condition of the agricultural classes, who, like the agricultural population of the southern mainland of Italy, are smaller than the population in the cities.
In this connection, it is stated that considerably less than one third as much meat is consumed per capita in Sicily as in northern Italy. Even so, most of the meat that is eaten there is consumed in the hotels by the foreigners who visit the country.
In looking over the budgets of a number of the small landowners, whose position is much better than that of the average farm labourer, I found that as much as $5 was spent for wine, while the item for meat was only $2 per year. There are thousands of people in Sicily, I learned, who almost never taste meat. The studies which have been made of the subject indicate that the whole population is underfed.
Upon inquiry I found it to be generally admitted that the condition of the population was due to the fact that the larger part of the land was in the hands of large landowners, who have allowed the ignorant and helpless peasants to be crushed by a system of overseers and middlemen as vicious and oppressive as that which existed in many parts of the Southern States during the days of slavery.
This middleman is called by Italians a gobellotto, and he seems to be the only man in Sicily who is getting rich out of the land. If a gobellotto has a capital of $12,000 he will be able to rent an estate of 2,500 acres for a term of six to nine years. He will, perhaps, work only a small portion of this land himself and sublet the remainder.
Part of it will go to a class of farmers that correspond to what are known in the South as "cash renters." These men will have some stock, and, perhaps, a little house and garden. In a good season they will be able to make enough to live upon and, perhaps, save a little money. If the small farmer is so unfortunate, however, as to have a bad season; if he loses some of his cattle or is compelled to borrow money or seed, the middleman who advances him is pretty certain to "clean him up," as our farmers say, at the end of the season. In that case, he falls into the larger and more unfortunate class beneath him, which corresponds to what we call in the Southern States the "share cropper." This man, corresponding to the share cropper, is supposed to work his portion of land on half-shares, but if, as frequently happens, he has been compelled to apply to the landlord during the season for a loan, it goes hard with him on the day of settlement. For example, this is the way, according to a description that I received, the crop is divided between the landlord and his tenants: After the wheat has been cut and thrashed—thrashed not with a machine, nor yet perhaps with flails, but with oxen treading the sheaves on a dirt floor—the gobellotto subtracts from the returns of the harvest double, perhaps triple, measure of the seed he had advanced. After that, according to the local custom, he takes a certain portion for the cost of guarding the field while the grain is ripening, since no man's field is safe from thieves in Sicily.
Then he takes another portion for the saints, something more for the use of the threshing floor and the storehouse and for anything else that occurs to him. Naturally he takes a certain portion for his other loans, if there have been any, and for interest. Then, finally, if there is nothing further to be subtracted, he divides the rest and gives the farmer his half.
As a result the poor man who, as some one has said, "has watered the soil with his sweat," who has perhaps not slept more than two hours a night during the harvest time, and that, too, in the open field, is happy if he receives as much as a third or a quarter of the grain he has harvested.
In the end the share cropper sinks, perhaps, still lower into the ranks of day labourer and becomes a wanderer over the earth, unless, before he reaches this point, he has not sold what little property he had and gone to America.
I remember meeting one of these outcasts and wornout labourers, who had become a common beggar, tramping along the road toward Catania. He carried, swung across his back in a dirty cloth of some indescribable colour, a heavy pack. It contained, perhaps, some remnants of his earthly goods, and as he stopped to ask for a penny to help him on his way, I had a chance to look in his face and found that he was not the usual sort. He did not have the whine of the sturdy beggars I had been accustomed to meet, particularly in England. He was haggard and worn; hardship and hunger had humbled him, and there was a beaten look in his eyes, but suffering seemed to have lent a sort of nobility to the old man's face.
I stopped and talked with him and managed to get from him some account of his life. He had been all his life a farm labourer; he could neither read nor write, but looked intelligent. He had never married and was without kith or kin. Three years before he had gotten into such a condition of health, he said, that they wouldn't let him work on the farm any more, and since that time he had been wandering about the country, begging, and living for the most part upon the charity of people who were almost as poor as he.
I asked him where he was going. He said he had heard that in Catania an old man could get a chance to sweep the streets, and he was trying to reach there before nightfall.
Several hours later, in returning from the country, I turned from the highway to visit the poorer districts of the city. As I turned into one of the streets which are lined with grimy little hovels made of blocks hewn from the great black stream of lava which Mt. Ætna had poured over that part of the city three hundred and fifty years before, I saw the same old man lying in the gutter, with his head resting on his bundle, where he had sunken down or fallen.
I have described at some length the condition of the farm labourers in Italy because it seems to me that it is important that those who are inclined to be discouraged about the Negro in the South should know that his case is by no means as hopeless as that of some others. The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.
The Negro farmer sometimes thinks he is badly treated in the South. Not infrequently he has to pay high rates of interest upon his "advances" and sometimes, on account of his ignorance, he is not fairly treated in his yearly settlements. But there is this great difference between the Negro farmer in the South and the Italian farmer in Sicily: In Sicily a few capitalists and descendants of the old feudal lords own practically all the soil and, under the crude and expensive system of agriculture which they employ, there is not enough land to employ the surplus population. The result is the farm labourers are competing for the privilege of working on the land. As agriculture goes down and the land produces less, the population increases and the rents go up. Thus between the upper and the nether millstone the farmer is crushed.
In the South we have just the contrary situation. We have land crying for the hand to till it; we have the landowners seeking labour and fairly begging for tenants to work their lands.
If a Negro tenant does not like the way he is treated he can go to the neighbouring farm; he can go to the mines or to the public works, where his labour is in demand. But the only way the poor Italian can get free is by going to America, and that is why thousands sail from Palermo every year for this country. In certain places in Sicily, in the three years including 1905 and 1907, more than four persons in every hundred of the population left Sicily for America.
One thing that keeps the Sicilian down is the pride with which he remembers his past and the obstinacy with which he clings to his ancient customs and ways of doing things. It is said by certain persons, as an excuse for backward conditions of the country, that even if the landlords did attempt to introduce new machinery and modern methods of cultivation the people would rebel against any innovation. They are stuck so fast in their old traditional ways of doing things that they refuse to change.
I have sometimes said that there was a certain advantage in belonging to a new race that was not burdened with traditions and a past—to a race, in other words, that is looking forward instead of backward, and is more interested in the future than in the past. The Negro farmer certainly has this advantage over the Italian peasant.
If you ask a Sicilian workman why he does something in a certain way, he invariably replies: "We have always done that way," and that is enough for him. The Sicilian never forgets the past until he leaves Sicily, and frequently not even then.
The result is that while the Negro in Africa is learning, as I saw from a recent report of the German Government, to plow by steam, the Sicilian farmer, clinging proudly to his ancient customs and methods, is still using the same plow that was used by the Greeks in the days of Homer, and he is threshing his grain as people did in the time of Abraham.
It was late in September when I reached Catania, on the eastern side of Sicily. The city lies at the foot of Mt. Ætna on the edge of the sea. Above it looms the vast bulk of the volcano, its slopes girdled with gardens and vineyards that mount, one terrace above the other, until they lose themselves in the clouds. A wide and fertile valley below the city to the south, through which the railway descends from the mountain to the sea, seemed, as did Mt. Ætna itself, like one vast vineyard.
This was the more noticeable and interesting because, at the time I reached there, the harvest was in progress; the vineyards were dotted with women carrying baskets; the wine presses were busy, and the air was filled with the fumes of the fermenting grape juice.
Although it was Sunday morning and the bells in a hundred churches were calling the people to prayers, there was very little of the Sunday quiet I had somehow expected to meet. Most of the shops were open; in every part of the city men were sitting in their doorways or on the pavement in front of their little cell-like houses, busily at work at their accustomed crafts. Outside the southern gate of the city a thrifty merchant had set up a hasty wine shop, in order to satisfy the thirst of the crowds of people who were passing in and out of the city and also, perhaps, to escape the tax which the city imposes upon all sorts of provisions that enter the city from the surrounding country. Country wine was selling here at a few pennies a litre—I have forgotten the exact sum—and crowds of people from the city celebrated, something after the ancient custom of the country, I suppose, the annual harvest of the grapes.
Out of the southern gate of the city, which leads into the fertile vine-clad plain, a dusty and perspiring procession—little two-wheeled carts, beautifully carved and decorated, carrying great casks of grape juice, little donkeys with a pigskin filled with wine on either flank and a driver trotting along beside them—pushed and crowded its way into the city. At the same time a steady stream of peasants on foot, or city people in carriages, mingling with the carts and pack-animals, poured out of the gate along the dusty highway, dividing and dwindling, until the stream lost itself among the cactus hedges that mark the winding country roads.
It was to me a strange and interesting sight and, not only on this particular Sunday but afterward, almost every day I was in the city, in fact, I spent some time studying this procession, noting the different figures and the different types of which it was made up. It was at this gate that I observed one day a peasant woman haggling with the customs officer over the tax she was to pay for the privilege of bringing her produce to town. She was barefoot and travel-stained and had evidently come some distance, carrying her little stock of fruit and vegetables in a sack slung across her back. It seemed, however, that she had hidden, in the bottom of the sack, a few pounds of nuts, covering them over with fruit and vegetables. Something in her manner, I suppose, betrayed her, for the customs officer insisted on thrusting his hand down to the very bottom of the little sack and brought up triumphantly, at last, a little handful of the smuggled nuts. I could not understand what the woman said, but I could not mistake the pleading expression with which she begged the officer to let her and her little produce through because, as she indicated, showing him her empty palms, she did not have money enough to pay all that he demanded.
I had heard and read a great deal about the hardships and cruelties of the tariff in America, but I confess that the best argument for free trade that I ever met was that offered by the spectacle of this poor woman, with her little store of fruit and nuts, trying to get to market with her goods.
Not far outside the city the highway runs close beside a cemetery. From the road one can see the elegant and imposing monuments that have been erected to mark the final resting places of the wealthy and distinguished families of the city. The road to this cemetery passes through a marble archway which is closed, as I remember, by massive iron gates. Standing by this gate, I noticed one day a young peasant woman silently weeping. She stood there for a long time, looking out across the fields as if she were waiting for some one who did not come, while the tears streamed down her face. She seemed so helpless and hopeless that I asked the guide who was with me to go across the street and find out what her trouble was. I thought there might perhaps be something that we could do for her.
The guide, with the natural tact and politeness of his race, approached the woman and inquired the cause of her grief. She did not move or change expression, but, while the tears still streamed down her face, pointed to a pair of high-heeled slippers which she had taken off and placed beside her on the ground.
"They hurt my feet," she said, and then smiled a little, for she, too, saw that there was a certain element of humour in the situation. I looked at her feet and then at her shoes and made up my mind that I could not help her.
Farther on we passed some of the large estates which are owned generally by some of the wealthy landed proprietors in the city. The corresponding region outside of Palermo is occupied by orange and lemon groves, but around Catania all the large estates, apparently, are given up to the culture of the vine.
A large vineyard in the autumn or the time of the grape harvest presents one of the most interesting sights I have ever seen. The grapes, in thick, tempting clusters, hang so heavy on the low vines that it seems they must fall to the ground of their own weight. Meanwhile, troops of barefooted girls, with deep baskets, rapidly strip the vines of their fruit, piling the clusters in baskets. When all the baskets are full, they lift them to their heads or shoulders and, forming in line, march slowly in a sort of festal procession in the direction of the wine press.
At the plantation which I visited the wine house was a large, rough building, set deep in the ground, so that one was compelled to descend a few steps to reach the ground floor. The building was divided so that one room contained the huge casks in which the wine was stored in order to get with age that delicate flavour that gives it its quality, while in the other the work of pressing the grapes was carried on.
There was at one side of the room a press with a great twisted arm of a tree for a lever, but this was only used, I learned, for squeezing dry the refuse, from which a poorer and cheaper sort of wine was made. Directly in front as one entered the building, and high up under the roof, there was a huge, round, shallow tub-like vat. In this vat four or five men, with their trousers rolled up above their knees and their shoes and stockings on, were trotting about in a circle, and, singing as they went, tramping the grapes under their feet.
Through an open space or door at the back I caught a glimpse now and then of the procession of girls and men as they mounted the little stairs at the back of the wine house to pour fresh grapes into the press. In the light that came in through this opening the figures of the men trampling the grapes, their bare legs stained with wine, stood out clear and distinct. At the same time the fumes which arose from the grapes filled the wine house so that the air, it almost seemed, was red with their odour. It is said that men who work all day in the wine press not infrequently become intoxicated from merely breathing the air saturated with this fermenting grape juice.
I imagine that the harvest season has always been, in every land and in every time, a period of rejoicing and gladness. I remember it was so among the slaves on the plantation when I was a boy. As I watched these men and listened to the quaint and melancholy little songs they sang, while the red wine gushed out from under their trampling feet, I was reminded of the corn-huskings among the slaves, and of the songs the slaves sang at those times.
I was reminded of it the more as I noticed the way in which the leader in the singing bowed his head and pressed his temples, just as I have seen it done before by the one who led the singing at the corn-husking. I recall that, as a boy, the way this leader or chorister bowed his head and pressed his hands against his temples made a deep impression. Perhaps he was merely trying in this way to remember the words, but it seemed as if he was listening to music that welled up inside of him, seeking in this way, not merely to recall the words, but catch the inspiration of the song. Sometimes, after he had seemed to listen this way for a few minutes, he would suddenly fling back his head and burst into a wilder and more thrilling strain.
All this was strangely interesting and even thrilling to me, the more so, perhaps, because it seemed somehow as if I had seen or known all this somewhere before. Nevertheless, after watching these men, stained with wine and sweat, crushing the grapes under shoed and stockinged feet, I had even less desire to drink wine than ever before. It perhaps would not have been so bad if the men had not worn their socks.
One thing that impressed me in all that I saw was the secondary and almost menial part the women took in the work. They worked directly under an overseer who directed all their movements—directed them, apparently, with a sharp switch which he carried in his hand. There was no laughter or singing and apparently little freedom among the women, who moved slowly, silently, with the weary and monotonous precision in their work I have frequently noted in gang labour. They had little if any share in the kind of pleasurable excitement which helped to lighten the work of the men.
Once or twice every year, at the time of the grape and olive harvests, the girls and women come down from their mountain villages to share with the men in the work of the fields. For these two brief periods, as I understand it, the women of each one of these little country villages will be organized into a gang, just as is true of the gangs of wandering harvesters in Austria and Hungary. I had seen, on the Sunday I arrived in Catania, crowds of these women trooping, arm in arm, through the streets of the city. A party of them had, in fact, encamped on the pavement in the little open square at the southern gate of the city. They were there nearly all day and, I suppose, all night, also. I was interested to observe the patience with which they sat for hours on the curb or steps, with their heads on their bundles, waiting until the negotiations for hiring them were finished.