It is a very nearly safe prophecy to say that the heel of the Italian Boot, or rather southern Molise and Apulia, shall yet pour forth the greatest flood of southern Italian emigrants bound for America which has yet been witnessed in the varying exodus from southern Europe. There have been times when it seemed as if these provinces were about to rise and distance Campania and Sicily, whose flow has generally been the largest; but the great mass of the peasantry of the Apulian plain has not yet started toward America, and will not until the status of the Italian emigrant in America becomes similar to that of the Irish in 1878–79, a quantity respected and duly reckoned with, or until the steamship companies make Bari, Brindisi, or Taranto ports of direct departure for the United States.

As remarked previously, the fluctuations of the volume of emigration, as viewed in retrospect and from this side of the water, are hardly understood, though a social crisis in Russia always produces an outpouring of the Jews, good crops in the Northwest an increase in Scandinavians, and a period of strikes in the United States an augmented Polish immigration. The figures for the past twelve years, taken from June till June, compared with the relative wage rate, are interesting:
72
Year     Immigrants Arrived     Average Daily Wage in U. S.
 
1891     489,407     $1.00.??
1892     579,663     1.00.30
1893     439,730     .99.32
1894     285,631     .98.06
1895     258,536     .97.88
1896     343,267     .97.93
1897     230,832     .98.96
1898     229,299     .98.79
1899     311,715     1.01.54
1900     448,572     1.03.43
1901     487,918     1.05.62
1902     648,743     1.04.93
1903     857,046     1.03.89

It will appear that there are other and less understood influences at work, to cause the swelling or diminishing of the flood of immigrants, than the wage rate in the country. In a previous chapter I have noted the bearing of the prospect of more stringent immigrant legislation on the flood of 1903, and in the section of the country now under discussion we found abundant evidences of the effects of the news spread far and wide that people who did not get into the United States soon would find it more difficult than ever to get in.

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

Threshing Beans

73There is something that is insistently Greek about the people of the Heel, and they more nearly approach the Oriental than any others of the Italian provincials. I do not think they have quite the passionate natures of the Sicilians or the ruggedness of the mountain Calabrese, nor are they as energetic as their fleas, which are certainly the liveliest I have ever encountered.

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

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

Large quantities of cotton are grown in this region, and when one is travelling south it will be noticed that shortly after the groves of hazelnuts, beeches, and chestnuts cease, the first plantations of cotton will begin 74to appear. The plain of Cann? roughly marks the limit of the cotton country. Around the Gulf of Taranto there will be seen large fields of cotton and saffron, and though the country is very fertile and densely populated, the agricultural system is very bad, and the ground inefficiently cultivated merely because it is a centuries-old custom to let the ground lie fallow for two years after each crop.

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

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

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

Aside from agriculture, some of the few industries are wood-cutting, taxed unbearably by the government, sulphur-mining at Eboli, salt-mining about Lungro, honey-producing about Taranto, fish-catching and exporting from the same town, velvet and silk producing in and about Catanzaro, and sheep and goat herding in the Sila chain. The agricultural products are the mainstay of the people, who are so densely packed in some communities that if it were not for the Cactus 75opuntia, which is grown in hedges in place of fences, there would be scarcely enough to eat.

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

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

Something of the deep establishment of customs and of the religious state of the country can be gathered from the following. In Bari there is the Church of San Nicola, than whom there is no more revered saint in all Italia Meridionale, wherefore note the number of Nicolas. In the crypt his remains are supposed to be encased in a tomb from which exudes on and about the 8th of May an oily substance that is miraculous. Pilgrims come for the feast of the 8th of May by thousands and thousands, and nearly all of them are in the costume of the remoter villages. On the promontory at Cotrone stands a pillar which marks the site of the temple of 76Hera, once the goddess of all the peoples about the Gulf of Taranto, but now it has for a neighbor the Church of the Madonna del Capo, and each Saturday young girls from the region about go in procession to the church in their bare feet, all clad in white.

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

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

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

It is merely a mountain stream, totally dry in the 77summer time, as what little water might course down it is carried along in clay-lined irrigating ditches, and distributed along the face of the hills sometimes hundreds of feet above the level of the river bed, so cleverly are some of the canals constructed. But, in the rainy season, when enormous quantities of water are precipitated every day on the mountain sides, the torrente becomes a devilish agent of destruction, and its waters devastate whole communes in a few hours.

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

Sicily has a slight advantage in the formation of the country, but there the torrente is still the object of constant vigilance and does much damage. People 78of intelligence are fully aroused to conditions in Italia Meridionale, and a very excellent expression of the provincial attitude was given in an article by Signor Enzo Saffiotti, which appeared in the Gazetta di Messina della Calabrie on the 15th of September, 1903. It is given below:
The Southern Question Confronts the Country.

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

We must not grow weary of repeating it!

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

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

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

The deficit of many millions could in no manner continue to enfeeble the state budget if a preference 79were given to the productive works, and the national economic conditions would certainly be revived.

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

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

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

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

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

As a matter of fact, the recurrence of those social phenomena have given people at a distance who were 80inclined to turn their observation and consideration on our affairs, a different impression from that which would be gathered if the inward causes were otherwise studied, and this attests in a very considerable way the moral sentiment of our people, who, though of great sensitiveness and resentful of wrong, quietly sustain the additional adversity of being misunderstood, even when instinctively rebellious to all forms of oppressive authority.

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

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

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

81The first step toward a gradual reduction of these oppressive tariffs, after so many years in which there has been so much complaint, has at least been achieved in a very cautious way by the first ordinance of Minister Palenzo, which went into effect with good results at the beginning of the present month. It is to be hoped that our legislators will uphold it with additional and greater reductions.

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

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

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

Our deputations—they who should be examples of harmony and tenacity—instead of being objects of daily criticism, should join compactly together, without 82making disrupting questions of party, race, or political gradation, and demand and obtain those reforms waited for so long.

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

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

The South is waiting!
Enzo Safiotti.

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

Scilla—Draught-oxen of Italy