THE LABOURER AND THE LAND IN SICILY
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.
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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
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 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
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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
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 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
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 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
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 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
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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
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 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
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 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.
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 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,
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 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 diffe............