THE CHURCH, THE PEOPLE, AND THE MAFIA
One of the interesting sights of Catania, Sicily, as of nearly every other city I visited in Europe, is the market-place. I confess that I have a fondness for visiting markets. I like to wander through the stalls, with their quantities of fruit, vegetables, meat and bread, all the common, wholesome and necessary things of life, piled and ranged in bountiful profusion.
I like to watch the crowds of people coming and going, buying and selling, dickering and chaffering. A market, particularly an old-fashioned market, such as one may see almost anywhere in Europe, in which the people from the town and the people from the country, producer and consumer, meet and bargain with each other, seems a much more wholesome and human place than, for example, a factory. Besides that, any one who goes abroad to see people rather than to see things will, I believe, find the markets of Europe more interesting and more instructive than the museums.
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During my journey across Europe I visited the markets in nearly every large city in which I stopped. I saw something of the curious Sunday markets of Bethnal Green and Whitechapel, London, with their long lines of shouting hucksters and their crowds of hungry shoppers, and the Jewish market in the Ghetto of Cracow, Poland, where pale-faced rabbis were slaughtering, according to the strict ritual of the Jewish law, droves of squawking geese. Among others, I visited the Monday market in Catania, which differs from the markets I had seen elsewhere in the multitudes of articles of household manufacture offered for sale, and in the general holiday character of the proceedings.
It was like a country fair in one of our Southern cities, only cruder and quainter. For example, instead of the familiar shooting gallery, with painted targets, one enterprising man had set up a dozen painted sticks on a rough box, and offered to the public, for something less than a cent, the opportunity to shoot at them with an ancient cross-bow, such as I did not imagine existed outside of museums. Then there were all sorts of curious and primitive games of chance. Among other devices for entertaining and mystifying the people I noticed a young woman seated in a chair, blindfolded. A crowd surrounded her while she named various objects
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 belonging to the crowd, which her companion, a man, held in his hands. At the same time she told the colour of the hair and eyes, and reeled off a prophecy in regard to the future of the different persons to whom the article belonged.
More interesting still were the public story-tellers, who seemed to take the place, to a certain extent, of the daily newspaper among the masses of the people, so many of whom can neither read nor write.
The story-tellers stood upon little platforms, which they carried about with them like portable pulpits, in order that they might be plainly visible to the crowd. Each carried a large banner on which were painted a series of pictures representing the scenes in the stories which they told.
These stories, together with the pictures which illustrated them, had apparently been composed by the men who told them, for they all touched upon contemporary events. In fact, most of them referred in some way to America. Like those songbirds that have only one constantly repeated note, each story-teller had but one story, which he told over and over again, in the same tones, with the same attitudes, and same little dramatic surprises.
Although I was not able to understand what was said, it was not difficult to follow the narrative from the pictures. One story told
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 the fortunes of a young girl who had been lured away to America. Perhaps she was one of those "white slaves" to which I noticed a good many references in Italy, and in other of the emigrant countries. At any rate, she was imprisoned in a very dark and dismal place in some part of New York which I was not able to locate from the picture. Then her brother, or perhaps it was her lover, whom she had left behind in Sicily, saw a vision. It was a vision of St. George and the dragon, and after seeing this vision he rose up and went to America and rescued her. The touching thing about it all, the thing that showed how realistic this whole tale was to the crowd that stood and listened to it in rapt attention, was that when the story reached the point where the picture of St. George and the dragon is referred to, the men simultaneously raised their hats. At the same time the speaker assumed a more solemn tone, and the crowd listened with a reverential awe while he went on to relate the miracle by which the young woman had been saved.
The sight of this crowd of people, standing bareheaded in an open square, listening reverentially to the story of a street fakir, struck me, like so much else that I saw of the life of the common people in Catania and elsewhere in Sicily, as strangely touching and pathetic. It
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 reminded me of all that I had read and heard of the superstitions of the common people of the country and gave me as insight, such as I had not had before, into the way in which the masses of the people feel toward the Catholic Church, with all its religious ceremonies and symbols. It led me to suspect, also, that much in the religious life of the Sicilian people which looks, perhaps, to those who have had a different training, like superstition, is in fact merely the natural expression of the reverence and piety of a simple-minded and, perhaps, an ignorant people.
I was told, while I was in that city, that Catania has two hundred and fifty churches, and though I do not know that this statement is correct, I could easily believe it from the interminable clanging church bells that smote upon my ears the first Sunday morning I was in the city. At any rate, no one can go through the city and look at the public buildings, or study the people in their homes, without meeting abundant evidence of the all-pervading influence of the Church. Everywhere, built into the buildings, on the street corners, and in every possible public place, one sees little images of the Virgin, with perhaps a burning lamp before them. Once I ran across one such image, with a lamp before it, planted in a field. I was told
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 it was there to protect the crops from the influence of evil spirits.
It did not seem to have occurred to any one that the image of the Virgin and the blessing of the Church, which were intended to protect the fields from evil spirits, might protect them also from thieves, or banish from the community the evil spirits that inspired men to rob and steal. If this opinion had been very widely held among the masses of the people it would hardly have been necessary to guard the fields night and day during the harvest season, by men armed with shotguns.
This brings me to another point in which I should like to compare the masses of the Sicilian people with the masses of the Negroes in the Southern States—namely, in respect to their religious life.
Naturally, the first thing that strikes one, in attempting to make such a comparison, is the wide difference in the situation of the average black man in the Southern States and the corresponding class in Sicily. In all the externals of religious life, at least, the Sicilian is far ahead of the Negro.
Sicily was one of the first countries in the world in which Christianity was planted. St. Paul stopped three days in Syracuse on his way to Rome, and there is still standing a building
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 in Catania in which St. Peter is said to have preached.
Sicily has inherited the traditions, the organization and the splendid churches and buildings which have grown up and accumulated through a thousand years and more. The black man, on the contrary, gained his first knowledge of Christianity in slavery and in a very imperfect and unsatisfactory form. It is only since freedom came that the Negro church has had an opportunity to extend and establish its influence among the masses of the people, while out of their poverty Negroes, who are even yet struggling to build and own their own homes, and so establish family life, have had to build churches and training schools for their ministers, to establish a religious press, to support missionary societies and all the other aids and accessories of organized religion.
In view of the wide difference between the people of Sicily and the Negroes in America, so far as concerns the external side of their religious life, it struck me as curious that I should hear almost exactly the same criticism of the people in Sicily, in respect to their religion, that I have frequently heard of the Negroes in America. A very large number of the popular superstitions of Sicily, what we sometimes call the folklore of a country, are
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 very much like many of the notions that the Negroes are supposed to have imported to America from Africa. Any one who has listened to any of the older generation of coloured people tell of the various ways of "working the roots," as they call it, will learn a great many things that can be almost exactly duplicated in the popular notions about drugs and philters among the people of Sicily.
It is said of the Sicilians, among other things, that their Christianity is saturated with pagan superstitions and that, for the average Sicilian, religion has no connection with moral life.
In many cases it seems as if the image of the Virgin has become, among the lower class of people, little more than a fetish, a thing to conjure with. For example, the peasant who, in order to revenge himself upon his landlord, and perhaps to compensate himself for what he believes has been taken from him by fraud or extortion, determines to rob his landlord's field or flock, will pray before one of these images, before starting out, for success. If he is really "pious" he may offer to the saints, in case he is successful, a portion of what he has stolen. If, however, he fails and is merely superstitious, he will sometimes curse and revile, or even spit upon, the image to which he previously prayed.
I have heard that the savages in Africa will
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 sometimes behave in the same way toward the object of which they have made a fetish, but I have never heard of anything like that among my own people in the South. The Negro is frequently superstitious, as most other ignorant people are, but he is not cynical, and never scoffs at anything which has a religious significance.
One thing that indicates the large part that religion plays in the lives of the Sicilian people is the fact that out of the 365 days in the year 104 are sacred to the Church. The large amounts of money expended annually by the different cities of Sicily upon processions and celebrations in honour of the local saints is one of the sources of complaint made by those who are urging reforms in the local administrations. They say that the money expended in this way might better be used in improving the sanitary condition of the cities.
As indicating how little all this religious activity connects itself with practical and moral life it is stated that, while Sicily supports ten times as many churches and clergy in proportion to its population as is true of Germany, for instance, statistics show that it suffers from eleven times as many murders and crimes of violence. In quoting these statements I do not intend to suggest a comparison between the
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 form of religion that prevails in Germany with that in Sicily. Religion, like everything else in Sicily, is deeply rooted in the past. It has shared all the changing history of that island, and naturally reflects the conditions, sentiments, and prejudices of the people.
If the Catholic Church is in any way to blame for the existing conditions in Sicily it seems to me it is in the fact that during the long period of years in which the education of the people has been almost wholly in its hands, the Church has held fast to the old medieval notion that education was only for the few, and for that reason has done little or nothing to raise the standard of intelligence among the masses.
It has been a great mistake on the part of the Church, it seems to me, to permit it to be said that the Socialists, many of whom are not merely indifferent but openly opposed to the Church, represent the only party that has sincerely desired and striven for the enlightenment and general welfare of the people at the bottom. Such a statement could not, of course, be so easily made of the Church in its relations to the masses of the people elsewhere in Italy.
The fact about the Sicilian seems to be, however, not that he is, as is sometimes said of the Negro, unmoral, but that the moral code by
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 which he governs himself sometimes makes him a menace to public order.
One of the first things that impressed me, while I was in Sicily, was the enormous and expensive precautions that were necessary to guard the fields from thieves. Hundreds of miles of high stone walls have been erected in different parts of the island to protect property from vandalism and thieves. In the harvest time it is necessary to practically garrison the island with armed guards to preserve the crops. The cost of putting a private policeman in every field and garden is very heavy, and this expense, which is imposed upon the land, falls in the long run upon the labourer.
The reason for this condition rests in the conviction, which every farm labourer shares, that for his long and crushing labour on the land he does not receive a sufficient wage. In many cases it is likely enough that he is driven by hunger to steal. Under such circumstances it is not difficult to understand that stealing soon ceases to be looked upon as a crime, and seems to be regarded as a kind of enterprise which is only wrong when it is unsuccessful. But there is something further, I learned, in the back of the head of almost every Sicilian which explains many things in the Sicilian character and customs that strike strangers as
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 peculiar. I refer to what goes in Sicily under the name of the omerta, and is, like some of the customs that exist in the Southern States, part of the unwritten law of the country. The principle of this unwritten law is silence. If any one is robbed, wounded, or injured in any way he remains silent. If the police seek to find out who is his enemy he will answer, "I do not know."
In some provinces in Sicily it is said to be almost impossible to arrest and convict criminals, because no one will hesitate to go into court and perjure himself for a friend. It is considered a point of honour to do so. On the other hand, to assist the police in any way in the prosecution of crime is looked upon as a disgrace. The ordinary man may be a thief, a robber, or a murderer and be forgiven, but there is no comfort in heaven or earth for the man who betrays a neighbour or a friend.
Complaint is sometimes made that the coloured people in the Southern States will protect and conceal those among their number who are accused of crime. In most cases where that happens I believe it will be found that the real reason is not the desire to save any one of their number from a just and deserved punishment, but rather the feeling of uncertainty, because of what they have heard and seen of lynchings
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 in different parts of the country, as to whether the accused will have the benefit of a full and fair investigation in a court of law.
There is among the Negro population of the United States, even though the administration of the law is almost entirely in the hands of another race, no settled distrust of the Government and the courts and no disposition, as is true of the Sicilian, to resort to private justice and revenge. In spite of the fact that he frequently gets into trouble with the police and the courts the Negro is, by disposition at least, the most law-abiding man in the community. I mean by this, the Negro is never an anarchist, he is not opposed to law as such, but submits to it when he has committed a crime.
This brings me to another feature of Sicilian life—namely, the Mafia.
I had heard a great deal about the Mafia in Italy, and about the criminal political organizations in other parts of Italy, before I came to Europe, and was anxious, if possible, to learn something that would give me an insight int............