It seemed wise, during our stay in Gualtieri-Sicamino, to make a study of more than lay in the province of Messina, and so we pursued the same methods of research employed in the provinces of the mainland, but found the conditions of life among the Sicilians so equable with that of Gualtieri-Sicamino, that to tell what we saw elsewhere would be but to repeat what is said of the village home of the Squadritos, with the exception of a few notable incidents.

The northern side of the island is much more fertile and is therefore more densely populated than the southern slopes, which are unprotected from the hot winds from Africa; and in the mountains back from Girgenti and Sciacca where travel is quite difficult except on mule-back, the state of the people is of the most primitive sort, and a man who can read and write is a man of distinction in the community in which he lives. Some of the families are of a complexion that is nearly Malayan, and their long black hair is beautiful to see. Wherever a branch office of a steamship ticket broker has been established and emigration started, or wherever the tourist goes scattering gold, there is a marked difference from the communities where a stranger is nearly a catastrophe.

The western end of the island is the famous Marsala wine district, and one firm controls all of the best vineyards but a few, which are gradually being forced into the monopoly. One man who was regularly employed by this company told me that he received thirty-five lire per month for ten hours’ labor per day (about twenty-one cents per day).

Catania is the exporting centre of the eastern end of a rather prosperous sulphur-mining district on the eastern coast of the island, and in this harbor are vessels constantly loading with sulphur for the American and German markets. It is estimated that about fifty thousand people derive their livelihood from this industry, and it is the one notable industry other than agriculture in the entire island. The largest though not the most fertile plain of Sicily is about Catania, and some very fine estates are to be found there, owned for the most part by wealthy people in Messina or Naples, perhaps resident in the beautiful cities of northern Italy.

The political disturbances which have made Sicily an uncertain quantity in years past, the comparative isolation of Palermo from the central government, and the effect of the traditions of the Sicilian Vespers (1282 A. D.) which are well known to every man, woman and child, topped by the natural supremacy of the educated unscrupulous over the ignorant well-meaning, have caused Palermo to become to a certain extent what Naples is,—the scene of aggregated rogueries. The past twenty years have seen malfeasances by high officials, impositions by aristocrats, commercial and political plots, and outrages by declared criminals, which brand the beautiful capital of the Sicilian state as a nesting-place of the boldest and most nefarious malefactors in all Italy. The common people are not dishonest in the degree that the Neapolitans are, but the educated classes can boast some bright and shining lights in the public and private hold-up game that should make even St. Louis or Philadelphia envious. An English officer of a Liverpool tramp steamer, who has spent a very great deal of time in Palermo when shore superintendent of a line in the lemon trade, told me that “a Palermo politician can give any Tammany district leader cards and spades, and beat him with his hands tied.”

Col. John A. Weber, of Buffalo, formerly Immigrant Commissioner at the Port of New York, thinks immigration should be encouraged to an even greater volume than at present, but that dishonest and illegal naturalization is a rotten spot in the matter. In this he is correct, and I would add that my observations have been that more men from Palermo, who have found even that city too hot for them, are engaged in the brokerage of naturalization papers in the United States and Italy than any other city’s representatives. A bill newly introduced by Congressman Gulden, of New York, is intended as a corrective, but I doubt its efficiency.

One of the first things that strikes the American visitor to the rural districts of Calabria, Sicily or Apulia, and even farther north, is the antiquated processes employed by the farmers. A man who knows what a sulky plow and a harvester are rebels at the sight of an entire peasant family spading up a field or reaping a crop with sickles, and there is a vast difference between a big green and red Studebaker wagon drawn by two good horses and loaded to the top boards with apples or potatoes, and a string of donkeys, women, and children laden with paniers and head-baskets; but the introduction of modern farming methods into Italy would have an effect equivalent to a visit of plague. The three million three hundred thousand people who live from the soil in Sicily, for instance, win for each his portion of food stuffs by hand labor on the farms or in the village workshops, where work is traded for food very often directly; and the introduction of machinery which would dispense with the labor of more than half the people would upset the system of division of products of the soil and prove a terrible calamity.

Outside of the number of a few noted vineyards where there are power plants for wine-making, the great volume of Sicilian wine, which is strong, of good nutritious quality and flavor, is produced by hand processes. The grapes are gathered in season by men, women and children, and borne in paniers or baskets to the trampling-vats, which are often two miles from the vineyard, and in some instances more. I have seen a half-dozen little girls, the youngest too small to speak plainly, the oldest not over eight, going plodding along in the dust between vineyard and press, with loads of grapes on their heads.

The grapes are dumped into the stone-built, plastered trampling-vat, which drains into a butt, and when enough, say a layer of six inches of thickness, has been put in, the peasants get in with pants and skirts rolled up, and tramp the grapes into a pulp. This trampling is usually given up to old men or women whose sight is defective, or whose hands are distorted by accident or rheumatism from years of wine-drinking, and who are thus not so valuable at picking and carrying grapes. I remember, at a press near Collesamo, seeing two old women trampling grapes with their skirts rolled up and pinned about their hips, and far up on their thighs were the purple stains of the fruit. As they tramped they sang the high, nasal, droning canto of their village.

The pulp is taken out in forms and put into a press which operates by screw power, the screw being a huge beam of wood which has had a screw thread carved on it by hand, and the power is the leverage of a pole mortised into the top of the upright screw, and sloping down to where two men can seize it, or a horse, ox or donkey be hitched to it.

One of the wine-presses in Gualtieri is owned by a fine old country gentleman by the name of Betto, a freeholder who has prospered in the heating and forging of the several irons he has in the community fire; and after a visit to his press he took us up to his house, one of the very best in the region, and set before us wine that was so old it had changed color twice and was, at the time of uncorking, a pale amber with light-flecks in it here and there.

If there were spots in the southern provinces on the peninsula where the irrigation systems were worthy of note, then indeed did the artificial watering of the soil in Sicily appear wonderful. In that extremely fertile spot called the Conca d’Oro “Shell of Gold,” which surrounds Palermo, not only is every natural spring and stream sought out and redirected, but deep artesian wells tap the subterranean waters. Where the sides of the mountains in the interior are terraced far up, in an effort to increase the area of tillable land, water conduits have been hewn out of solid rock in spots, and streams carried for miles over barren places to moisten a patch or two of productive soil. Looking on such works of patience, one can fully realize the hard necessity of the Sicilian; and one cannot help thinking how much better it would be for all concerned if the Sicilian peasant, when he emigrates to the United States, instead of becoming a barber, a fruit-peddler, a trencher, or following some other of the favorite temporary pursuits which allow the immigrants to congregate in large cities or their environs, he should be given an opportunity to try his irrigating skill on some of the fine undeveloped land in the West, where a little carefully applied water and seed will bring any man a wealth of results at harvest-time.

I do not think there was a soul of reasoning years within a radius of several miles of the mountain village of Gualtieri-Sicamino who did not know that on the last Tuesday of September, Antonio Squadrito, with a part of his family, a number of neighbors, and his two American friends, would be leaving for Naples, to embark thence on the Prinzessin Irene for New York. When, in the sixth year preceding, Antonio had been one of a handful of the first emigrants from that section, every one, even his own family, had been dubious and pessimistic about the venture. Since then more than one tenth of the population has followed him, and any remaining pessimism was restrained, and those who were too poor to go, too old or too well situated to take new chances, vented openly expressions of envy.

From San Filipo, a near-by village, where almost half of the people have the dreaded eye-disease, trachoma, an old man hobbled over to Gualtieri to ask if there was not some way that he could go to America. He had a nephew earning $1.20 a day in the mines in Belmont County, Ohio, and he felt sure that if he got there his nephew would find him work enough to do. He said he could sell his few belongings for five hundred lire, enough to take himself and his wife to Ohio. I looked at his gaping, granulated lids and told him that he could never go. He sat with his head bent on the top of his staff for a longtime in silence, then, with working features and trembling hands, rose and said good-bye. A day or so later a very brown, shy little girl brought over three fine squashes, a present to us from the old pair.

I was somewhat concerned when I learned that Concetta Fomica, a beautiful young girl of sixteen, a relative of the Squadrito family, who was to go with us, was the daughter of a San Filipian and had lived in the afflicted village. She had some slight inflammation of the eyes, but it did not seem to be trachoma, and Dr. Giunta, the village medico, assured me that, though her father had it, she did not. Since the disease is highly contagious by contact of hand, towel, handkerchief or anything that the head touches, and there are few oculists who claim to be able to effect permanent cures and none who are able to remove the cicatrices from the inside of the lids, the causes for concern can be easily understood. There were only two cases in Gualtieri, so Dr. Giunta said, and one was her father. He is blind almost half the time. Those who are known to have the disease are required to have separate toilet articles for their own use.

Antonio, as the actual head of the Squadrito family, was in hot water constantly over the matter of who should go to America and who should not. All of the remaining members of the family, with the possible exception of the eldest daughter, Giovanina, and the mother, were wild to come to America and join the three brothers at their little barber shop in Stonington, Conn. Giovanina alone was looking forward to the day of her marriage with her soldier lover. The small boys were simply insane on the subject of America. One of them approached my wife with an air of great mystery one day and confided to her a plan whereby he would himself borrow the money to buy his ticket, and she could hide him under her shawl and bring him through. But a great reversal in the family plans came when Giovanni, the father, who, remembering his two hard years in America, announced that he had come home to stay. He said he liked home and village life too well to go back. I told him that I believed the restless germ of the American spirit lurked somewhere in his system and that he would change his mind. This has proved entirely true. As I write, a letter lies before me in which he says that he wants to come back. Home comforts and familiar pleasures and labors are all right, but he “can’t stand it.”

When the father had so decided, there was no question as to whether the mother should come, and the small boys’ chances were effaced. Nicola decided to stay by his prosperous smithy, Maria clung to her mother, and Vincenzo, who had a cartilaginous growth over his left eye, was told to wait till his eye had been operated upon and then he might come. Of course, there was a small storm, especially from the younger members of the household; but Antonio poured oil on the troubled waters by promising to return next year and take every one who would go. It was a treacherous compromise, and since the father has changed his mind I believe this year will see nearly the entire family in America.

We were to be joined at Messina by Giuseppe Cardillo and several other people, and by the Papalia family from Monforte-Spadafora; but our party as finally constituted had the following people from Gualtieri, and throughout the trip they continued to be our party proper and were directly under our care:

Antonio Squadrito, Camela Squadrito and her child, Caterina; Mrs. Squadrito’s brother, Giovanni Pulejo, a barber; Felicia Pulejo, a nephew; Concetta Fomica, the pretty young cousin; Antonio Nastasia, a sixteen-year-old boy neighbor; Gaetano Mullura, in the same category; Nicola Curro, aged twenty-seven, an intimate friend of the family, a finished cabinet-maker; Nunzio Giunta, son of a prominent family of the village, a big, powerful fellow of twenty-three, just out of five years’ service in the police or Carabineers; Antonio Genino, twenty-one years of age, a cheese-maker going to a cousin in Philadelphia; and Salvatore Niceta, Benedetto Runzio, Luciano Sofia and Salvatore Damico, four farmer-boys from Gualtieri-Socosa, a detached village of the community, all going to the Banca Gelantado in Philadelphia, destined for the mines.

These boys afforded a very fine example of the latest methods of evading the contract-labor law. They had no contract in writing, merely the letter of an uncle of one of them promising work if they would come. He was not to employ them, but he would turn them over to men who would. This is the method by which scores of big corporations in America, which dare not import Italian laborers by reason of the law on this matter, do it by making the contract here with a relative or friend of some group of men in an Italian community, and the relative or friend brings them over. The men are instructed to answer the question as to whether they have been promised work or not by saying they have not. Out of 1903’s approximate million emigrants, only 1,086 were refused admittance as alien contract laborers. One large industrial corporation at Buffalo, N. Y., alone received nearly half that many, and those who passed successfully through to other parts of the country can be easily imagined. I do not hesitate to say that it is impossible to defeat this fraud by any operations on this side of the sea.

In a later chapter there will be shown the outlines of a plan which will offset the weaknesses of the enforcement of the alien contract-labor law, and I shall throw light in numbers of places on the true meaning of “assisted emigration.”

The first official procedure of the many and intricate ones necessary for the departure of emigrants and their admission to the United States was the obtaining of the passports for the male members of the party. The women and children are entered on the passport of some man of their family or party. The first step is getting the birth certificate from the secretary of the municipality in which one is born, so Antonio, the elder Pulejo, Concetta’s father, young Giunta, Curro, and the father of the Socosa boys went before Giacomo Marini, and when he had consulted the register and found that all had been duly born in Gualtieri, birth-certificates were issued, signed by himself and the president of the municipality, or mayor. As for myself, wishing to return as an Italian to America and not as an American, a birth-certificate was issued to me as having been born nel commune di Londra, son of Paolo Brandi and Migone Caterina. I regret to say it was necessary to take undue advantage of the old secretary to carry my point. Precious little good it did me, though.

These birth-certificates were then forwarded by Carmelo Merlino, the shoemaker steamship agent, who was on a high wave of prosperity through sending so many people at once, to one Mazzulo, in Messina, whose nominal duties are to take the birth-certificates before the questura or police headquarters of Messina district, where the personal record of each man in the district is kept for both military conscription and reserve, as well as criminal vigilance purposes. If there was anything in that record which would cause the questor to think that one of our party should be refused permission to depart, he would not issue the passport, and the emigrant could not leave the country, as each person must have a passport in which is an identifying description of the bearer so complete as to make an exchange of passports impossible with the careful scrutiny which is given them by the Italian police officials in Naples.

As things fell out, none of our party were refused the very necessary passport except myself. The accuracy of the Italian system is shown by this. I was refused because they had no record of me; and my birth-certificate was returned as irregular, and the local police would have arrested me if I had persisted in trying that method.

Now, all of this goes to prove one of the most important facts in connection with Italian emigration: that the questura of each district is slowly and effectually clearing the district of its criminal class by dumping the lot into North and South America, the most dangerous coming to the United States as the best field for their further operations.

Here is the syllogism:

Since American police records and prison statistics, especially those of the United States secret service, show large and increasing numbers of Italian criminals in this country;

And since the mass of these can enter only by immigration;

And since the immigrant must have a passport from the chief of his local police district;

And since every criminal’s record is kept in the district in which he was born, and he must go there to get the birth-certificate on which he gets his passport,—

Then these thousands of passports issued annually to criminals are given by chiefs of police who know the records of the men who are receiving them, and are thus deliberately ridding their districts of them to save themselves trouble and increase their reputation for efficiency.

That those secret instructions which are issued from Rome to the chief of each district advise any such procedure I do not believe. They do advise, so I have been reliably informed, that passports be not issued to prostitutes easy of detection, or to persons over forty-five not accompanied by sons, inasmuch as both classes are very nearly sure to be turned back and to become a matter of expense to the government. That is the bugaboo of Italian statesmen,—expense.

In my own case I knew I would have no difficulty concerning my passport until I came to the gate in the police-office in Naples; then I must have a passport either American or Italian. Any chance of getting an Italian one had been quickly shattered; and yet, if I went on the ship’s manifest as an American I would not be entering the United States in the desired rÔle. The solution of the difficulty was not reached till we were in Naples.

When Antonio and the others had their passports, then the tickets were issued to them by the agents, and not before, the lot being returned to Gualtieri by post. Now there was no turning back. Camela began to waver, and hourly there was some new dread to suffuse her eyes with tears.

One day Antonio Nastasia’s father went to Messina, taking some of the money which he had labored hard as a tinsmith and sheet-iron worker to accumulate, and spent nearly all of it in buying clothes for little Antonio to wear. Curro spent a month’s wages on a new suit. Giunta’s relatives prepared him a considerable wardrobe, and altogether nearly half as much as was needed to pay the passage of the entire party was spent in buying Italian clothes to wear to America. The senselessness of this proceeding is plain when it is said that few of these new clothes were worn after the first day or two in the States.

Something else equally ill-advised was the making of huge trunks by Nicola Squadrito and others, in which the families of the departing ones packed quantities of every conceivable sort of supply, just as if the voyagers were going to a new, wild land to begin life as best they could. Despite the protestations of Antonio, my wife and myself, Camela, crammed into huge boxes two sets of heavy mattresses with all the accompanying bedding; large cans of pomidoro; olive oil; sticks on which dried figs were impaled; flasks of wine; forms of cheese; old clothes; and cooking-utensils, many of which were new; and Concetta Fomica’s mother repeated the performance. Enough excess baggage, freight and customs duty were paid, before we were through, on these big encumbrances to replace the whole lot twice over in America.

The last days were at hand. We were to leave on Tuesday before dawn. On Saturday afternoon a request came from an old woman up the valley that we see her—she being unable to come to us—before we departed. As we followed the stony torrente path to her home, her story was told to us. Twenty-three years ago, when she was a bride of little more than a year and a mother but a month, her husband had gone to America, the first man to emigrate from all that region, nearly eighteen years before Antonio Squadrito and the others had started the flood. She had received one letter in which he said he had changed his name to Frank Smith, as nobody had any patience with his Italian name. She never heard from him after that, and after her one boy died she continued to live alone in the little house Francesco had built for her and waited for Francesco’s return. For a living she worked in the fields in summer, and in the early autumn in the vineyards and the lemon, olive, and orange orchards.

We found her spinning with the old distaff in the sunshine before her door. She set before us such humble hospitality as her hut afforded, and then told us she wanted us to begin a search in America for a Frank Smith, and she desired to turn over her savings, thirty-two lire ($6), to defray the expenses. She could not understand why we would not take it. It may be that these lines will fall beneath the eye of a man who long since left all his Italianism behind him and is now a thoroughgoing American and no longer Francesco. If so, I bid him remember that there is a faithful woman waiting for him in the Sicilian hills.