The northern Italian is the result of a superior environment. His section is more prosperous, intelligent, orderly, and modern. The industrially progressive, democratic north presents a striking contrast to the industrially stagnant, feudal south. The northern division is full of the spirit of the new Italy, and its people are less prone to leave home. Central Italy, too, is making steady advances in agriculture and education, and the peasant farmer is a stay-at-home. In southern Italy agriculture is practically the sole reliance of the people, the lot of the day laborers is wretched, and the failure of a wheat crop is as disastrous as the potato famine in Ireland was to the Irish in 1847. United Italy is undoubtedly making progress in education and industry, the standards of living are rising, and the money sent or carried back to Italy from America has helped to some degree in this advancement. Religiously, of course, the domination of the Roman Catholic Church continues over all Italy, and in illiteracy as in other respects Italy is an example of what this ecclesiastical rule means where it has power over the people sufficient to enable it to work its will.
[Sidenote: Common Poverty of the Peasants]
In view of these facts regarding the home environment and difference in peoples, it will not do, evidently, to use sweeping generalizations, or to regard the organ-grinder and fruit-peddler as the representatives of Italy in America. We receive all grades, from cultured professionals to illiterate peasants, though mainly, of course, the peasant class. The one common feature of the Italian provinces is the poverty produced by the crushing taxes and agricultural depression. Absentee landlordism has blighted southern Italy as it has Ireland. Yet with great tracts of fertile soil thus held away from the people, and with no new territory to cultivate, the population of Italy has increased within twenty years from twenty-eight and a half to thirty-two and a half millions, an average density of 301 per square mile, and the excess of births over deaths amounts to nearly 350,000 a year. Hence the question with the people in overcrowded districts is simply emigration or starvation. The southern Italian is driven from home by necessity to work, and work is to be found in America, so he comes. His labor is mostly unskilled, and this is in demand here. The result is that almost eighty per cent. of the Italian immigrants are males; over eighty per cent. are between fourteen and forty-five, the working age; over eighty per cent. are from the southern provinces, and nearly the same percentage are unskilled laborers, and a large majority of these are illiterates. The eighty per cent. of "human capital of fresh, strong young men" is Italy's contribution to America, and is a force winning its way to recognition.