Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/219

 ITALIAN IMMIGRATION INTO THE UNITED STATES 203

prevent his using that knowledge. Furthermore, the same lack of money forbids him to choose work in the fields, for, although better paid, it depends upon circumstances, which he has neither time nor money to command, and the fact that the land can be bought at a low price must be neglected, while he is glad to secure any kind of work which will provide for his present needs.

In addition to the economic causes, there is another, far more complex, because derived from habits of life which have obtained for centuries. The population of southern Italy is composed in great part of peasant farm laborers massed in large boroughs, which might be called cities, not for the perfection and complexity of their municipal and social life, but for their number of inhabit- ants. In order to live in these crowded haunts and mix with their fellows, the peasants walk morning and night several miles to and from the fields. They leave their homes long before dawn and return after sunset. This custom arose in feudal days, when the organization for public safety was deficient, and existed in those communities until the foundation of Italian unity, thus forming tendencies and psychological conditions in the peasant peculiar to him.

A study of the character of the southern Italians shows that they cannot live isolated; the conditions indicated above have formed in them the necessity of living in homogeneous groups, to reunite with their own kind. At the same time, they have acquired great diffidence toward the outside world of all who do not belong to the nucleus in which they were born and bred. Such tendencies, however, with the conditions which created them, are slowly passing away, but are yet strong enough to influence the deliberations of the individual, and especially in his choice of a mode of life.

This fear of isolation and this distrust of strangers become stronger and deeper in a new, strange country, and the peasant, although provided with money enough to buy and stock a small farm, finds in his own social needs a powerful obstacle to the realization of such a plan; but, joined with a sufficient number of his own countrymen in similar financial conditions, he does not hesitate to choose the farm.