In nothing are the two peoples so unlike as in their crimes. While northern Italy leads in fraud and chicane, southern Italy reveals a rank growth of the ferocious crimes that go with a primitive stage of civilization. The contrast is between force and fraud, violence and cunning. The South produces five times as much homicide as the North, four times as much brigandage, three times as many assaults, and five times as many seizures or destructions of property. On the whole, it has from three to four times the violence of the North, while its obscene crimes, which constitute an index of sensuality, are thrice as numerous. As for Sicilians, they are scourged by seven times the homicide, four times the brigandage, and four times the obscene crime suffered by an equal number of North Italians. [Illustration: Photograph by Hine Italian Gypsy Mother and Child] [Illustration: Photograph by Hine Italian Woman of Greek or Albanian Ancestry] Although less advanced, the Italians from the valley of the Po are racially akin to the Swiss and the South Germans. As immigrants, their superiority to other Italians is generally recognized. I have yet to meet an observer who does not rate the North Italian among us as more intelligent, reliable, and progressive than the South Italian. We know from statistics that he is less turbulent, less criminal, less transient; he earns more, rises higher, and acquires citizenship sooner. Yet only a fifth of our Italians are from the North. It is the backward and benighted provinces from Naples to Sicily that send us the flood of "gross little aliens" who gave Henry James, on revisiting Boston, the melancholy vision "of a huge applied sponge--a sponge saturated with the foreign mixture and passed over almost everything I remembered and might still have recovered." VARIETY OF OCCUPATIONS Being new-comers, the Italians are doing the heavy, unskilled work which was once the prerogative of the Irish. The shovel is now as firmly associated in our minds with 'Tonio as formerly with Barney. The North Italians go much into mine and quarry and silk-mill, but the others stick close to railroad, street, and construction work. Of our railroads it has been said that "Italians build them, Irish run them, and Jews own them." Nearer to the truth, perhaps, is the New York _mot_, "Houses nowadays are built by Italians, owned by Jews, and paid for by Irish tenants." Being small and vegetarian, the Italians are not preferred in earthwork for their physical strength, but because of their endurance of heat, cold, wet, and muck. As one contractor puts it, "they can stand the gaff."