The decrease is to be accounted for by the great increase in the number coming over to join those in the United States who had been sending them money. A great difficulty that blocks accuracy in these things is the concealment of funds by returning emigrants and by recipients of money in Italy. I found a family in Caivano, near Naples, for instance, who received through a cousin who returned to Italy on the _Lahn_, at the same time with us, $3,500, jointly sent by a father and three sons working in the mills in Birmingham, Ala. Only by chance did I learn of it, and then they besought me to keep their secret, fearing that “the King would get it.” When the Italian pays his two or three per cent to the government he says, “it has gone to the King.” H. J. W. Dam’s “The Tax on Moustaches” very nicely touches up this matter of national taxes in Italy. I know personally of a large number of instances of returning emigrants carrying large sums of money with them, and I have the statements of scores of money-changers to whom American dollars are sold; so that I feel justified in saying that a very large portion of the emigrant savings goes home clandestinely and is never caught in the government net, yet blessed is the lot of the tax-collector in a village which has twenty or more per cent of its native-born in America. His lot is an easy one compared with the corresponding official in a village of small emigration. Particularly as to conditions in the zone of Neapolitan influence, emigration is the most important feature of life there to-day, for the reason that the emigration from Campania has been and is enormous, and that, should Naples suddenly cease to be the greatest of all ports of embarkation, a financial paralysis would strike the city and province. Over large districts, the vital arteries of which are the river valleys of the Volturno and Garigliano and the country back from the Gulf of Naples and the Bay of Salerno, the influence of Naples obtains, and its dominant tone, as has been said, is dishonesty. Naturally, since Naples is the metropolis of the region, the Neapolitan point of view is the one emulated, and though I have seen many types of lying, lazy, morally oblique peoples, I have never dwelt among any where a constant exercise of one’s vigilance on the defensive was so absolutely necessary. A rather good story which illustrates the propensities of the Neapolitans was told me by an Englishman whom I met in Caserta. According to his relation, a German Jew, a Scotchman and a Connecticut Yankee formed a company for the exportation of wine from Naples and went there to set up business. After being in the city several days, and having a few business transactions with the Neapolitans, the Yankee said to his partners: