In many districts where there are clay banks, sand banks, and other spots where earth materials have been extracted for building or plastic art work, the extraction has been done as if cutting out arched caves, and in these and in the arches of ruins, with boarded-up or plastered-up fronts, thousands of poor families live, making their living by digging in the pits, acting as guides about the ruins, begging, or working on the land as hired laborers. CHAPTER VI IN THE HEEL AND TOE OF THE BOOT It is a very nearly safe prophecy to say that the heel of the Italian Boot, or rather southern Molise and Apulia, shall yet pour forth the greatest flood of southern Italian emigrants bound for America which has yet been witnessed in the varying exodus from southern Europe. There have been times when it seemed as if these provinces were about to rise and distance Campania and Sicily, whose flow has generally been the largest; but the great mass of the peasantry of the Apulian plain has not yet started toward America, and will not until the status of the Italian emigrant in America becomes similar to that of the Irish in 1878–79, a quantity respected and duly reckoned with, or until the steamship companies make Bari, Brindisi, or Taranto ports of direct departure for the United States. As remarked previously, the fluctuations of the volume of emigration, as viewed in retrospect and from this side of the water, are hardly understood, though a social crisis in Russia always produces an outpouring of the Jews, good crops in the Northwest an increase in Scandinavians, and a period of strikes in the United States an augmented Polish immigration. The figures for the past twelve years, taken from June till June, compared with the relative wage rate, are interesting: _Year_ _Immigrants Arrived_ _Average Daily Wage in U. S._ 1891 489,407 $1.00. 1892 579,663 1.00.30 1893 439,730 .99.32 1894 285,631 .98.06 1895 258,536 .97.88 1896 343,267 .97.93 1897 230,832 .98.96 1898 229,299 .98.79 1899 311,715 1.01.54 1900 448,572 1.03.43 1901 487,918 1.05.62 1902 648,743 1.04.93 1903 857,046 1.03.89