As we came through the street with our trailing, staring, interested party, scores of persons with relatives in America came out of the houses or called down from the balconies, desiring that we look up their friends in the States and take them messages. Lest some who read these lines may find in them fresh cause to raise the Mafia bugaboo, I will repeat an earlier assertion: while it is no use denying that once the Mafia was a large, well-organized and most murderous society, and that for a long period it built up a record of atrocious crimes, extortions coupled with murders, the stringent measures adopted in Italy have suppressed it so effectually that actual Mafia members are only a few middle-aged or old men, who keep their allegiance only for fear of their old comrades. No man dares raise his voice to-day and call himself “_Mafite_” except in America, and here the man who does it is a common criminal, trading on the terrors of the old bloody band. This country was greatly roused over the operations of a secret society in New Orleans, and much was written and said about the Mafia at the time. It is true some of the men were old _Mafiti_, but I have the word of an Italian secret-service official of high rank that the band was a purely independent organization. About a year ago a terrible murder was committed by Italians in New York, and there was not one of the great leading dailies and the reviewing periodicals but pronounced it an outbreak of a Mafia band. A number of men were arrested, with strong proof against them, and they were labeled “The Band,” and connections with other Mafia bands sought for in Buffalo, Chicago, New Orleans, and elsewhere. Very serious editors discussed “the growth of the Mafia in America” and “the frightful influx of criminal Italians.” The whole had considerable influence on the Shattuc bill. The truth of the matter is that “The Band” was merely a small gang of counterfeiters, most of them men of such undesirable qualities that they would never have been able to gain admission to the Mafia; and they were no more _Mafiti_, strictly speaking, than are the members of the American Board of Foreign Missions. I repeat, “the Mafia in America” is nothing but a bugaboo. Men who belong to small criminal gangs used the word as a means of extortion, and the mysterious murders which happen frequently—always with Italians as the victims—are private vendettas. When we consider that the Sicilian considers it just as much his inherent right to stab a man who has done him a great wrong as the American Southerner to lynch a negro who has turned beast, and that criminal Italians in America work astounding injustices on their gullible countrymen, it is a wonder that there are not more mysterious murders than there are. The deportation from America of about six shiploads of Italian parasites who live on the labor of their fellows would put an end to all such things in this country.