New Ulm weekly review. [volume] (New Ulm, Minn.) 1878-1892, 1880-11-17

Working Glasses in Southern Italy.
An English newspaper correspond
ent, who has been visiting the manu-
featuring districts of Southern Italy,
writes chat he had never before seen
or dreamed of such misery and oppres-
sion as the working classes there en-.
dure. He says: From Salerno I drove
through a fertile valley where the oats
and barley are nearly ripe; the wheat
droops with its own weight; the grapes
are full budded. Olive-clad hills, oak
and chestnut studded groves, stretch to
the horizon on either side. But the
striking feature of the landscape is the
manufactory-gaunt, immense, glaring,
sending up it's clouds of smoke to the
blue and cloudless sky. Ipresented my
card and obtained permission to enter.
The first thing that strikes one is the
enormous number of women, girls and
little children, carrying and unloading
baskets of coal far too heavy for any
of them. If you ask how much they
earn, you are told. "A farthing an hour,
the children; somewhat less than
halfpenny, the women and girls" ''How
many hours do they work?' From
dawn to DUSK" is the invariable re-
ply. In the entire establishment about
$500 people are employed, chiefly wom-
en- and children, because their work
costs less. The men earn 10d. day in
summer, I'd. and Sd. in winter; tho
women, sd. to 3d.; the children, I'd. to
sd. As they live at distances from two
to six miles from the mandatory,
none go home during the dinner hour.
Once there was soup kitchen, but
soup making occupied time and labor,
80 q pagaaotto of brown bread is substi-
tuted and distributed at midday to the
working population, the price q the
brown loaf being subtl acted from the
daily earnings. The eating of this
brown bread is the only break in the
twelve or fourteen hours working day.
I have visited many English factories
where the atmosphere Sufficiently viii
ated, but five minutes in these cotton
mills beat me altogether. In one upper
room were four hundred looms, one
VOu1ttA ACCplAS UWO III "OA NJ d pltSSSI0C
between the sets barely allowing two
persons to pass abreast; every window
Theoretically closed. The haggard, pail
lid faces of the women; the wan, wiz
ened, wistful faces of the children, need
another pen than mine to describe.
"Why, in Gods name, don't you open
the windows?" I asked, as one of my
italian companions turned sick and
faint, and the walls seemed to reel
around me. "Oh," said the overseer,
"the hotter it is and the more the
breaths are condensed the quicker 90
the machines, and the less break in the
cotton threads" One scarcely dares
imagine what those rooms would be
when the gas is alight, or during the
heat of an italian summer; yet day and
night-for the workmen and women
come in two relays-these poor Great
ures work literally for their daily bread.
And for what bread? Your paupers
would fling it at the heads of the guar
dams, and with such loaves your prison
inmates would stone their jailers. As
you wind upward from the lower val
leys, past newly-planted parks and re-
Gently built villas, where the extraor-
binary fertility of the soil contrasts
strangely with the enaciated forms and
general wretchedness of the laborers,
you come upon hamlets and villages,
or, as they say here, communes; every
where you find a lottery bank installed.
everywhere receiving officers of the
llGzi0 consuna0-that is to say, of the
tax on the common necessities of life;
everywhere a municipal palace, a
church and prison. Having expressed
awish to a friend who accompanied me
to see one of the Italian.kept
wooden manufactures, l was given
my choice of four, and alighted at the
nearest. Here the condition of the
working classes is at its lowest; they
work as long as daylight lasts, there
being no night relays; the men receive
nine pence, the women four pence, five
pence and six pence-that is to say,
they ought to receive this sum, but they
are compelled, one and all, to take the
bread furnished by the contractor;
otherwise twenty per cent. is deducted
when the wages are paid fortnightly.
In comparison with this bread, that
furnished at the large mandatory is
as gold to copper-this is made of the
refuse of macaroni, such as is else
where given to swine and poultry
There arc, besides, fines for every
imaginable sin of omission or commits
sion--ines for being late, fines for
smoking, talking, or laughing; fines
for supposed or real imperfections in
the ''pieces." Perhaps fines may be
necessary for discipline and for keep
ing order, and we know that they ex-
list in Tuscany, especially at the Ginori
porcelain factory at the Doccia; but
there, at least, they revert to the work.
ingmen themselves, are handed over to
the fund for the sick, infirm and Or
phans. But here the head of the fac
tory divides the spoil with his agent, so
it may be imagined how keen is the
latter on the least shortcoming. Of in
FAINT schools there are none in the dis
trict, no hospital, no almshouse. The
other day an old man who, am told,
was faint with hunger and blind with
fatigue, had his arm torn off by one of
the leathern straps. ''He must have
been drunk" quoth the owner, and the
man was left to die of gangrene.
Advice.
Tn +l,oA o.os4o II