The Negro farmer sometimes thinks he is badly treated in the South. Not infrequently he has to pay high rates of interest upon his "advances" and sometimes, on account of his ignorance, he is not fairly treated in his yearly settlements. But there is this great difference between the Negro farmer in the South and the Italian farmer in Sicily: In Sicily a few capitalists and descendants of the old feudal lords own practically all the soil and, under the crude and expensive system of agriculture which they employ, there is not enough land to employ the surplus population. The result is the farm labourers are competing for the privilege of working on the land. As agriculture goes down and the land produces less, the population increases and the rents go up. Thus between the upper and the nether millstone the farmer is crushed. In the South we have just the contrary situation. We have land crying for the hand to till it; we have the landowners seeking labour and fairly begging for tenants to work their lands. If a Negro tenant does not like the way he is treated he can go to the neighbouring farm; he can go to the mines or to the public works, where his labour is in demand. But the only way the poor Italian can get free is by going to America, and that is why thousands sail from Palermo every year for this country. In certain places in Sicily, in the three years including 1905 and 1907, more than four persons in every hundred of the population left Sicily for America. One thing that keeps the Sicilian down is the pride with which he remembers his past and the obstinacy with which he clings to his ancient customs and ways of doing things. It is said by certain persons, as an excuse for backward conditions of the country, that even if the landlords did attempt to introduce new machinery and modern methods of cultivation the people would rebel against any innovation. They are stuck so fast in their old traditional ways of doing things that they refuse to change. I have sometimes said that there was a certain advantage in belonging to a new race that was not burdened with traditions and a past--to a race, in other words, that is looking forward instead of backward, and is more interested in the future than in the past. The Negro farmer certainly has this advantage over the Italian peasant. If you ask a Sicilian workman why he does something in a certain way, he invariably replies: "We have always done that way," and that is enough for him. The Sicilian never forgets the past until he leaves Sicily, and frequently not even then. The result is that while the Negro in Africa is learning, as I saw from a recent report of the German Government, to plow by steam, the Sicilian farmer, clinging proudly to his ancient customs and methods, is still using the same plow that was used by the Greeks in the days of Homer, and he is threshing his grain as people did in the time of Abraham. CHAPTER IX WOMEN AND THE WINE HARVEST IN SICILY