The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-11-17
THE ITALIAN PEASANT.


, some respects worse, and in many respects
better, than that of his English brother. He
has better soil and better china to- to
begin with; fewer wants, and greater capa-
city for enjoying life. He is often q poor
man, but seldom a pauper, in the legal sense
of the word. His appearance in Englsndand
elsewhere as an organ-grinder is not a result
of poverty, but of desire to escape from the
CONSUMPTION, or to elude the laws of his native
country, which are very severein certain cases,
though much milder than they were few
years ago. Most of these vagabonds have
run away from home, leaving behind them
parents or families who are respectable; or.
if young, have been sold or EARNED out to
master organ grinders, with or without their
parents consent, at so much g head, or in
! gangs of six or eight like convicts. 1t is
quite q mistake to suppose that these wan
derers are the outpourings of the Italian
streets They are generally vagrants and
beggars-perhaps criminals als-because they
have come to England. In their own coun-
try they have the means of subsistence.
Many of thh organ grinders of London
are peasants from the mountain districts
of Italy. They speak q language of their
own-a patois made up of the waits and
strays of various dialects-a kind of Babel
! of sounds which would be unintelligible in
the cities and large towns of their native
land. Most of the image men are Tuscans,
or inhabitants of Lucca and Modena. The
hurdy- -gurdy boys are Ssvoyards and Pied
montese The Pifferari, or Italian pipers,
some of whom have bagpipes like the Scotch
Highlanders, are Sicilians and Calabresi; but
in some rare instances q Roman or Tuscan
minstrel is to be found in the streets of Lon
don dancing jig or singing plaintive song
in pure Italian. Most of these adventurers
live and vegetate in the dark courts and alleys
of Clerkenwell and Soho squsre-haunts of
vice and misery, where Italy may look for her
exiled children any day in the year, and claim
them, too, if she have o mind (Which she has
mott, together with all the organ grinders or
others who infest the metropolis. One and
all are peasants, or relatives and friends of
peasants; people who began life as farmers or
farm servants-landlords of wretched novels
landed propristors of fields and cabbage
gardens.
The peasantry of Italy may be divided
into two great classes: the contadini and
the paesani, or the upper and lower classes
of peasants. The cultivators of the soil are
an independent race. They are the fellow
laborers of the OK, but they are not plough
men or peasants in the English sense of
the word. They associate with dogs, horses,
and sheep; but they are their own masters.
They are the children of nature They call
themselves the citizens of the woods. They
are proud and ignorant at the same time.
They have a flowers right to grow on their
native heath, a larks privilege to sing in the
fields. They are as much part of the land
scape as the tees themselves Their defect is
that they take root. You may cut them down,
or they will die in their places, as their fathers
did before them; but you cannot induce them
to leave the country, unless it be for criminal
or political reasons.
Let us take glance at the English pea
SAINT, and compare his qualities good, bad,
or indifferent-with those of the Italian con-
tadino.
f. l.
swain; now rude he is, how unwieldy, how
unable to compete with mechanics in the
race for wealth. In nine cases out of ten he
is drudge, thing, and not a man, part of
the machinery of farmhouse; in some cases
pauper, and in others slave-if people can
be called slaves who have the right to die of
starvation and the liberty to
defects, aud the defects of
his position, he is more substantial being
than his Italian prototype. He has greater
powers of endurance, and he endures with a
better grace. He is thankful for small mer-
cies; he works and plays with will; and he
starves in good-humored sort of way, as if
he thought his time were come. But send
him abroad, put him on his own land in a
new country, give him in Australia or Ameri-
ca the chances which an Italian peasant has
at home, and ten to one he will prosper, and
bring about, or help to bring about, the
prosperity of others. For the English work
ingman is never more at home than when he
is abroad. He knows that he is man as well
as an EDglishman; an inhabitant of the earth,
not of part of it; native of the land on
whose epossessionsthe sun never set. Notso the
italian peasant. For him Italy IS everything,
the world nothing. If he transplants him
self, he languishes. He knows no history
but the history of Rome, no sun but that
which shines on his fathers fields. He likes
money we'll enough, but he would rather live
on a crust of bread or chestnut -four in his
own land Chestnut porridge is the great
staple of food in Central Italy, than live on
milk and honey in foreign cline. He owns,
or partly owns the field he cultivates. He
is never very rich, and never utterly desti-
tute. He may send his wife aud children
out to beg or become beggar himself when
work is slack and the winter haryest-that OF
the chestnut tree--has been gathered in, but
he has always a roof to cover him, q house
hold fire from which no landlord can expe
him, hut which he has inherited with hil
name, and which is as much part of hii
identity as the snails shell is part Of itl
body.
The contadini of the North of Italy make
as a rule, very good farmers. They are more
industrious than the peasants of Naples anC
better educated than the men who work il
the fields and vineyards of Tuscany but they
are not so refined as the latter, and the,
speak Italian as people speak a language the,
have acquired by study. TO them the Ian
guage Tuscaua-the national speech of Ital,
lis foreign tongue. They learn it-they
do not inherit it; they are Italy's foster
chilren. Thus it comes to pass that the