These two cases are extreme examples of the mediaevalism that to a considerable degree prevails in New York City, probably in Chicago and Boston, and wherever there is an excessive south Italian population.

The conditions under which a large number of Italians live in this country are favorable not only to the continuance of ignorance, but to the development of disease and crime.  Naples is bad enough, no doubt.  The people there are poverty-stricken and homeless.  But in New York City they are worse than homeless.  It is better far to sleep under the stars than in a stuffy room with ten or twelve other persons.  Let the reader climb the stairs of some of the tenements in Elizabeth Street, or go through those in Union Street, Brooklyn, and he will get firsthand evidence.  This is generally true of the lower class of Italians throughout the United States, whether in the city or country.  They live under worse conditions than at home.  You may go through the railroad camps and see twenty men sleeping together in a one-room built of lath, tar-paper, and clay.  The writer knows of one Italian laborer in Massachusetts who slept in a floorless mud hovel about six feet square, with one hole to go in and out by and another in the roof for ventilation—­in order to save $1.75 per month.  All honor to him!  Garibaldi was of just such stuff, only he suffered in a better cause.  In Naples the young folks are out all day in the sun.  Here they are indoors all the year round.  For the consequences of this change see Dr. Peccorini’s article in the ‘Forum’ for January, 1911, on the tuberculosis that soon develops among Italians who abroad were accustomed to live in the country but here are forced to exist in tenements.

Now, for historic reasons, these south Italians hate and distrust all governmental control and despise any appeal to the ordinary tribunals of justice to assert a right or to remedy a wrong.  It has been justly said by a celebrated Italian writer that, in effect, there is some instinct for civil war in the heart of every Italian.  The insufferable tyranny of the Bourbon dynasty made every outlaw dear to the hearts of the oppressed people of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.  Even if he robbed them, they felt that he was the lesser of two evils, and sheltered him from the authorities.  Out of this feeling grew the “Omerta,” which paralyzes the arm of justice both in Naples and Sicily.  The late Marion Crawford thus summed up the Sicilian code of honor: 

According to this code, a man who appeals to the law against his fellow man is not only a fool but a coward, and he who cannot take care of himself without the protection of the police is both ....  It is reckoned as cowardly to betray an offender to justice, even though the offence be against one’s self, as it would be not to avenge an injury by violence.  It is regarded as dastardly and contemptible in a wounded man to betray the name of his assailant, because if he recovers he must naturally expect to take vengeance himself.  A rhymed Sicilian proverb sums up this principle, the supposed speaker being one who has been stabbed.  “If I live, I will kill thee,” it says; “if I die, I forgive thee!”