New Orleans Republican. [volume] (New Orleans, La) 1867-1878, 1875-09-26

He presents the contrast of carriages,
silks and velvets:
And the half naked mob stretched their
limbs and lolled about the pavement in
| every sunny, well sheltered nook and sang,
and jested. and used such foul language in
their horrid play that l shrunk from their
vicinity. And then the scene changed. and
| rain and snow fell and the gay carriages
disappeared, and all the "civili'' went to
their more or less luxurious or comfortable
| homes and left the streets to foreigners and
| to the beggars. And of these last manv
heaped themselves in doorways one on an
other to maintain such latent heat as they
might, and the foul slush, black with hui
| man slime, ran slowly down from the steep
alleys into which those among this miser-
able crew who had any lairs or shelter there
hurried and disappea AIRED before the storm.
Then follow extracts from official reports
of the restitution in Naples and other
Italian cities. We will not occnpy space
with the horrible details, but must give a
few descriptive paragraphs to point the
moral which We propose to inculeate
They may be compared with the lowest
slums of London, or with the tenement
shame of New York, but they prove
degree of degradation to which few civil
lied and Christianized communities have
ever descended.
Pasquele Vilari, lately II -o.ber of the
Superior Council of Public IL -uction, and
now distinguished liberal conservative
deputy, reports:
The city of Naples is of all towns, he as
| serted, that where the lowest orders live,
not only in the greatest misery, but in the
! uttermost abandonment, in the lowest deg
1ut LII
| condition.
These FOndaci have generally long pas.
| sage entrance without any door, leading t.
a small open yard. both of the tilthiest,
which admit t. large number of horrible
| lodgings. many below the level of the drains
and all OF which are without fresh air, while
the lower ones are without light and reek-
ing with damp. In these live, crowded to.
| gether several thousands of nersons an
degraded by misery that they are more like
brutes than human beings. In these dens,
rendered impenetrable by the stencil from
muck heaps, which lie and rot from all time,
there is often nothing but bundle of straw,
on which whole family, males
and females, sleep together. OF cesspools
| there is truly not thought for the neigh.
boring streets and the court-yards answer
all purposes. In two or three only of the
places among the many l explored do the
women exercise the miserable trade of mat
no one working in any of the others, l saw
nothing but half naked spectres. Ia some
there were women hanging about the court
yard with nothing on but a chemise, which
Tell in tatters about them. In word, the
EXTREMIST restitution finds shelter in these
buildings, not one of which is without a
brothel OF the lowest and lurdest descrip.
ton. In our city there are ninety four of
these courts. Calculating therefore, that
each harbors one hundred persons, and this
number l give to keep below the mark,
there must be in Naples 9400 of these most
wretched beings.
There are subterranean dens described
thus:
Yesterday l found one of the so.called
grottoes still inhabited. The majority of
them are however, closed. This one ia at
the foot of the Rampo di Brancaccio. The
entrance did not prepare me for the horrors
within. 1t resembles the Catacombs of St.
Gennaro, but is more awful and more cor
fined. Provided with a light l went in, for
there are only barred openings or windows
here and there, two OF which looked into
the Francatelli gardens, the Others into
damp coul t wards All this grotto is crowded
with beds as close to each otEer as those in
the Hospital for lncurables. With few ex-
cepticns they are large beds, made to con
tain several people To describe the filth
aud poverty would be impossible. That
hocrid den, its dismal passages, and its
brutalized inhabitants are all OF a piece-an
evil harmony-a world apart, that could
not exist under other circum. inces and
with no inherent power of change. But
even here there is kind of social scale
BY the side of the few openings or windows.
where some ray of daylight pierces the
misery, it is less intense; where no outer
light ever falls, where, without my lamp,
should have been in complete darkness, the
| WrArphplDp9a ia reached IN pa N
not be told.
One family, widow and five young
children. had no other shelter, and their
only bed was a heap of dry leaves they had
collected, and they had no kind of cover
ing to it, Her earnings were half franc
day, except when the cold, by numbing
her poor fingers prevented her finishing
the necessary task. The little children
earned halt-penny day by turning the
wheels for the other women. Their only
: food during tbs day was raw chestnuts, but
at night the mother was paid her fvepence
and brought something else The rags
they wore were gnawed in many places by
} the rats and mice which ran over them in
the night. The woman keeps stone by
her to beat the wall and scare away the
vermin that the shrieking children feel
running about them in the darkness.
The dens in which the poor live, the
wheels with which cord is made the hemp
|
for everything, tool and material, they L2ust
payday men who grind and Cypress them
and live On their grOveliug misery. APP
proach their haunts and you are surrounded
by famished crowd, all begging, each
anxious to tell his own tale of suffering In
such fearful struggle for life 1t is human
nature to use its brute force in any possible
direction, and here the camorra takes its
rise, not as an abnormal growth, but as
'the FORMAL and only possible result of such
things. In this misery, too, the can,O'Ta
lind that immense swarm of young thieves
who steal tor the profit of their chiefs, and
who, when they fill the prisons by hundreds,
constitute there, too, the band of che
camorra, not less powerful, not less auda-
cious than outside.
| Nillari considers the probable effect of
of education upon such state of society,
but he despairs of relief from this source.
he says;
Then talk to me of education. Can ele-
| mentary schools cure these evils-schools to
which such classes as we have described do
not and can not go2 Their condition has
not been bettered, but rather aggravated.
OF that l am fully persuaded by the evil
dence OF my own eyes. l know that there
are men who, when shown vast multitude
| rotting in misery aud corruption, have ever
the same answer: You must have faith in
liberty, progress and modern light. With
such / neither can nor wish to reason.
From all this we have right to infer
such state of ignorance, restitution and
crime as does not exist in America, with all
| the varieties of faith and heresy which are