A COUNTRY WHERE GOING TO AMERICA 



IS AN INDUSTRY 



By Arthur II. Warner 



WHILE on a visit to Piana dei 

 Greci, an Albanian settlement 

 on the mountains 12 miles out 

 of Palermo, I asked what the leading in- 

 dustries of the place were. 



"Agriculture and emigration to Amer- 

 ica," was the reply. 



The answer would be equally true of 

 all that part of Italy which lies south and 

 east of the city of Naples, including 

 Sicily. It is this region — whose people 

 are the most untutored and whose land 

 is the least developed in the kingdom — 

 that for almost a score of years has been 

 pouring its lifeblood into the United 

 States, until it has given us a population 

 of some 2,000,000 Italians, and brought it 

 about that at least every eighth man, 

 woman, or child in the city of New York 

 is of that race. 



In my effort to see the Italian emi- 

 grant as he is at home, I went first to 

 Sicily, partly because of the magnitude 

 of the exodus from that island within 

 recent years — 110,477 annually from 

 1905 to 1908 — and partly because, of all 

 his race, the Sicilian has as yet the fewest 

 friends in America. There was a time 

 in the United States when it was custom- 

 ary to condemn Italian immigrants en 

 masse. Later it became the fashion to 

 assert that, while the northern Italians 

 might be desirable, those from the south 

 were otherwise. Still more recently it 

 has come to be said that some southern 

 Italians might be all right, but the Sicil- 

 ians are a dangerous and lawless set, re- 

 sponsible for the "Black Hand" outrages 

 and other crimes among their people. 



One of the first localities I visited 

 while making my headquarters at Pa- 

 lermo was Termini, a seaport 25 miles to 

 the eastward, with a reputation for mak- 

 ing the finest macaroni in Italy. I had 

 heard it spoken of as an "American 

 town" and, inquiring the reason, it was 



explained that the leaven of emigration 

 had worked so powerfully there that half 

 the population was in America and the 

 rest was likely to go before long. 



"You will see many women there," I 

 was told. "You will find them keeping 

 the shops and doing the work which 

 there are no longer any men to do." 



And so it proved. 



The population of Termini, I was in- 

 formed by residents, was about 25,000, 

 by comparison with a number nearly 

 twice as great when the emigration move- 

 ment set in 15 years ago. 



"But it has helped 'the town," they 

 continued. "There are fewer people 

 here now than once, but more money. 

 Capital that has been earned in America 

 has been invested here and the city was 

 never more prosperous. Some 200,000 

 francs a month come back from towns- 

 men in the United States and the prin- 

 cipal bank here holds 8,000,000 francs 

 against the names of emigrants who are 

 at work in America." 



Come with me through this island of 

 Sicily somewhat and see if its people are 

 the degenerate and undesirable sort that 

 they are frequently pictured. From Pa- 

 lermo, on the north coast, situated in a 

 wonderful valley of lemons and oranges 

 known as the Conca d'Oro (shell of 

 gold), we will go south through the inte- 

 rior to the blue rim of the African Sea 

 where stand the golden brown temples, 

 which the Greeks reared at Girgenti 

 2,500 years ago, and then back into the 

 sulphur country and eastward to Mount 



The lemons and oranges which are 

 so great a part of Sicily's wealth we lose 

 soon after leaving the coast, for they 

 must have water, and it is not to be found 

 in this treeless interior. In their stead 

 are groves of olives and almonds and 

 fields of barley and beans, which last 



