These holdings were almost invariably owned by some one else, a few by well-to-do people in the village, most of them by the Duke of Avarna, who lives in Naples and never comes near Sicily, though he owns nearly all the ground around Gualtieri. The actual farmers tilled the soil, bought or preserved the seed, supplied the implements, looked after the construction and maintenance of the irrigation, harvested the crop and often marketed it, then gave the landowner’s agent, the middleman at Faro near by, half of all they produced. Of what they had left, three per cent went for direct or indirect taxes, and they gave “voluntarily” to the church one tenth. A little calculation will show one that even if a farmer have a prosperous season and be not in debt or have any misfortunes, he retains, when he has finished his contributions to the support of the non-producing classes, aristocrats, tradesmen, army, church, and middlemen, but thirty-eight per cent of what he produces by toil from before dawn till after dark. When I say that ninety-four per cent of the production in southern Italy is agricultural, and that the one important source of wealth is the cultivation of the soil, and the control of wealth the ownership of the land, it can be understood how and why the poor farmer, having heard what betterment there is in the United States will borrow money at twenty per cent for six months to get himself or a son over here to establish a foothold from which he can broaden a space of relief and liberty. Many of these boys in Gualtieri, anxious to go, desired to escape the forcible conscription every two years, which takes every other able-bodied young man, and keeps one fifteenth of the able-bodied men of the country under arms at all times. The Italian government never relinquishes its claim on its men for military duty, and no matter whether they become American citizens or not, if they have not served their term and return to Italy, they are arrested and conscripted. A notable test case of this was that of the young man from Baltimore,—Schipriano, son of an Italian general,—in which the government won. Even though the Squadritos have raised themselves to an independent footing in Gualtieri and own a little land, the power of the landlord was demonstrated fully to me when, on the second day of our stay, Giovanni Squadrito got out from among the things he had brought back from America a nice piece of oilcloth, a treasure in Italy, and tramped off to Faro and presented it to the middleman, the agent of the Duke of Avarna, as a sort of propitiatory offering. At the agent’s office there was a considerable staff of clerks and bailiffs, which showed me what a business is this collecting of the crops and rents.