immigration is the comparatively small number who engage in farming, despite the fact that 85 per cent, of this immigration is made up of the peasant class. This phenomenon can be explained by the fact that the immigrant is both poor and ignorant. His poverty forces him to accept whatever work is offered. His ignorance and inability to speak our language prevent him from learning the possibilities of American agriculture. He looks with distrust on an agricultural occupation, as likely to be unremunerative and enslaving, as he found it at home. Then the rural life at home was very different from rural life here. In Italy the peasants for the most part live in big villages or towns, and go to their work early in the morning, returning to their home in the evening, so that when the day's work is done they can rejoin their family among thousands of their own kind.
The crowding of Italians into our large cities can be understood if one studies the padrone system and padrone banks. The poor, ignorant laborer is at the mercy of the padrone and banker, and if he could leave, does not know where to go. He has no friends to show him the way, to inform him of the homestead law or of the wages paid farm laborers. But he finds friends (?) speaking his own language in the great city who will get him a 'job,' and so he stays in the city. He is sent out on contract labor and probably in the fall, when the work is done, arrives in the city again with very little money to face the winter. Often he finds it cheaper to pay the steerage rate and go back to sunny Italy than to stay in cold New York, where fuel is a necessity and provisions dear.
The Italian as an agricultural immigrant is a success, and the regrettable feature of Italian immigration is the small percentage who go to rural communities. Italian agricultural colonies in and around Vineland, N. J., are prosperous and growing. The Italians in Texas have been uniformly successful in rice and cotton culture, truck farming and vine growing. They have been very valuable in Louisiana, Mississippi and other southern states, as a substitute for the unreliable, shiftless negro. Their success in California, where they found the climate particularly suited to them and their favorite occupation, vine and fruit growing, has been one of the features of the development of California. The report of the Italian Chamber of Commerce, San Francisco, 1897, gave 47,625 Italians living in the 56 counties of California, almost all engaged in agriculture, owning 2,726 farms. Eight hundred and thirty-seven business concerns had a capital of $17,908,300, the total capital for Italian business men, ranchers and farmers aggregating, according to this report, $114,325,000.
Italians have been established near many of our largest cities upon truck farms, and in almost every instance are successful. The Italian colonies in Alabama are thriving and prosperous communities, with schools and churches.
