ITALIAN INDUSTRY.
IT is hard for the Englishman who traverses the Italy of to-day, and observes her people with unprejudiced eyes, to doubt that she must at no distant period regain much of her ancient riches. The elements of wealth are there in such abundance. We do not speak of her soil, although that of France is beside it but an ungenerous one, for some of the richest soils in the world belong to poverty-stricken races, and the owners of Australasia never accumulated a month's supply of food. Nor do we speak of what are called " natural resources," the mines and quarries and fruits and cereals in which Italy is so rich, for countries like India and Peru, which contain all the world contains, have often been filled with populations poor to hunger, and the lavishness of nature too often seems to paralyze the energy of man. We speak of a source of wealth which we have often heard mentioned by shrewd Italians, and have recently watched closely for ourselves, the rare industrial faculty of the Italian people, a faculty which, once put forth as it is now being put forth, must result in great accumula- tions. The prejudice of Englishmen as to the laziness of Italians is a prejudice merely, though it is one not very hard to understand. The aristocracy was till lately indolent in the extreme, and the well-to-do middle-class is so still. Cut off by their foreign oppressors from all careers, except those connected with the Church or the public service, driven from commerce by ridiculous tariffs, habituated to economy, and full of that sense of enjoyment in existence which is felt to content only by the men of the South, and by them only when nature is visibly gracious— Arabs, Bengalees, and Peruvians, for example, are at heart melan- choly people—the Italians with a little took to sauntering, to intrigue, and to half-humorous, half-satirical gossip, led lives with- out purpose or interest, and found in the absence of cares compensa- tion for their neglect of duties. For the most part, the well-to-do lead those lives still, though a new crave for wealth, and indeed a new necessity for it, is gradually driving them out of their easy groove. Then the shop life of which the foreigner sees so much was, and in a less degree is, an apparently indolent one, Italians, like Turks, and, indeed, all Asiatics except the Chinese, " keeping shop " mainly with their heads, leaving work, as we regard it, to subordinates, and doing most even of their book-work after hours or iu the early morning. Finally, the restrictions placed upon enterprise were so severe that it languished or died—in Naples, for example, during two generations there was but one investment for capital, State bonds, which rose, conse- quently, to 120—and work was almost unprocurable, or when pro- cured was paid for at rates which made industry seem a waste of time. It was pleasanter to lounge, or beg, or work sharply an
hour a day, and very nearly as profitable ; and the Italian, who has no instinctive impatience of doing nothing, and whose eyes, where- ever he turns, are satisfied with beauty, accepted the fate which seemed to him at once unavoidable and endurable. He was aided by a temperance which is a wonder and almost a ridicule to men of the more exacting North, and which, if we read Roman stories right, must at some time have been forced on him by necessity. With food cheaper than it is anywhere in Europe—a Florentine, for example, can be well fed on fourpence a day—uo Tuscan ever eats quite enough for health, and with wine almost for the asking, no Italian out of one or two occupations ever drinks. There was no necessity for labour, and no reward for it, and the Italian is not an English- man or a Chinese, to work for work's sake. Even then, however, agricultural labour went on, and the cultivator contrived, by marvellous industry, to extract a crop so good that he could pay half to the owner yet leave himself a sufficient subsistence, ter- raced the hills, and—first cause of his beautiful climate—in- cessantly replanted the plains. In Italy alone the small culture has not swept away the trees, for the trees produce the rent.
Work came at last with the revival of enterprise, remunerative work, work with wages, and the Italian, after his siesta of centuries, took to it with his old activity, and his old power of making the brain aid the hand. Everywhere the loungers without money disappeared. Milan, Florence, Ancona, Leghorn, Genoa are asi
busy as Northern capitals ; and Naples, the city of the Lazzaroni, is a hive of workmen, who, though they still sleep in the heat, work on tirelessly from five till noon and from two till five at their occupations, and then again at home far into the night, work with a will and an energy equal to that of any ordinary artizans, though inferior, no doubt, to that of English navvies. Strange to say, too, the great curse of all Southern people—want of fidelity to their work—is little felt in Italy. The men take a pride, as of artists, in their labour, need little superiuteudeuce, and, as a rule, always do the very best, if not the very utmost, they can, and their best is very good. As builders they are unapproachable, by the testimony even of English engineers, while they display, wherever they get the chance, the faculties wanting to English workmen of all trades, innate taste and capacity for invention. M. Haussmann has had to import Italian workmen for his opera-house, and where- ever anything beyond industry is needed, wherever the workmea, are required to be originators, they are at once forthcoming. Given a trade like the silversmith's, or the pearl-castor's, or any one demanding either an artist's eye or a special sleight-of-hand, and six weeks' instruction suffices to secure men whose touch is in its way as perfect as that of a great sculptor. The result we hope to attain by technical education and art schools and cultivation generally has been attained in Italy without effort. Duties can there be entrusted to labourers which in England could be assigned only to the cultivated. In Venice, Salviati's foremen are men of genius. In Florence, men who cannot read are moulding the stone ornamentation for palaces. In Leghorn and Ancona, the shipyards are full of men in blouses who could plan a ship as well as the engineers who employ them. Common carpenters turn out wood carvings which make English connoisseurs stare, at prices which might make philanthropists wince. The workmen in this trade display a positive genius for furniture which will yet make it an important trade, were only foreign carriage more speedy and less expensive. In every branch of manufacture in which so.ne- thing is required beyond organization and machine-like industry, English capitalists may find in Italy an endless supply of labour such as they can discover nowhere else. A factory for shirting& would not pay, but a factory for the costliest velvets, the finest china, the most elaborate decorations, the most delicate instru- ments, would. The slightest cultivation would make Italian work- men the first in the world, as they were in the middle ages, and the cultivation is at hand. In the cities a passion for instruction has broken out, and in North and Central Italy the communes are meeting the demand most nobly, the single want being an adequate supply of teachers. In some towns the adults are thronging to night-schools, as in Venice, where even the gondoliers are learning to read ; and Florence, where unskilled labourers, cabmen, masons' assistants, and the like give two hours of their rest to learn to read and write, and record the cal- culations which even in the unlettered days they could always make. It needs but time and quiet to make educatioa as uni- versal in Italian cities as in Prussia ; to make it a shame to be ignorant, a shame under which the children already wince, and there will be quiet. There is a new life among the people, and with it a new habit of order. Some observers who have watched them closely say that a spirit of democracy of the restless rather than of the old proud kind is spreading, that the lower class begins to manifest something of French envy of the rich; but the order of the cities is something marvellous, and violent crime, with one excep- tion, unknown. Milan, Venice, and Florence are safer than London. Stabbing, unfortunately, is still frequent, partly because an Italian always expresses jealousy in that way, partly because in his long-taught distrust of the civil law he has learned to con- sider the knife the only redresser of a pecuniary wrong. It is doubtful if he strikes as often as the Englishman, but then his blow is fatal. To smash in an adversary's face and head, as an infuriated Englishman does, and yet spare life, would strike an Italian as an exquisite brutality worthy of lynching ; but there is not the same horror of a blow with the fatal but not brutal steel. The practice is dying away, however, in the North— Brescia excepted—and if the Courts were a little cheaper and quicker, if there were some means of redress against au official, and if the law against murder were executed like a law of nature, assassination would gradually become an offence of the past, as bravoism—assassination for hire—already is. North,. of the Roman States stealing, except by an exercise of his intellect, is not an Italian vice ; and even in Naples, the police, three times as numerous and as active as in any other city, is gaining ground upon the badly disposed, whose greatest protection now is the dis- trust of authority, the tacit combination to protect all whom it attacks, which in Naples, as in Ireland, has been fostered by generations of legal injustice. Naples is still unsafe by night, but it is much to have triumphed by day. The real spirit of the people, their genuine instinct, is better shown by an incident for which we may, we believe, absolutely vouch. The King is convinced that soldiers are best made in great camps, and this year some forty thousand men were collected in a plain some miles from Florence. It was before the vintage, the plain was full of pea- - sants, and to conciliate them they were promised full compensa- tion for all damage done by the soldiers. They were even urged to send in claims, and they showed no hesitation, but the total amount, as estimated by themselves, was less than 400 francs. The soldiers had wandered at will among the fields, then most tempting ; had been encamped under the walls of the little farms, had been six weeks with the villages, as it were, at their mercy, and had done less harm than guests would.
The defect of the Italian as an industrial is a certain sluttish- ness as to his work wherever his artistic taste is not aroused. That which need not be beautiful is done badly. In the whole peninsula South of Turin there is not a morsel of butter fit to eat. There are the great sleek grey cows that would delight equally Landseer or McCombie ; there is the milk, and there is the apparatus ; but there is not the last little touch of cleanliness which would turn out the butter in an appetizing shape. It is the same with wine. Italy could this year be flooded with her own grape-juice ; there never was such a crop, and one-third at least of the wine obtained would, in French hands, fetch its price, indeed great quantities do reach Bordeaux, there to be "improved" into claret ; but the Italian cannot as yet be per- suaded that nature even in Italy will not do the whole of man's work for him. The Minister of Agriculture, Minghetti, is devoting his whole energy to this subject, asserting what is, we believe, literally true, that if Italian wine could only be brought up to the French level, the difference in value would exceed the whole public expenditure of Italy, but as yet he has only converted some great landlords. Half the cities are spoiled for want of penn'orths of plaster, and the workman who will spend hours in perfecting the curve of a moulding will not spend five minutes in keeping his tools up to the maker's mark, will hardly take his saws out of the rain. It is curious that precisely the same charge was once Alleged, and truly, against a race whose industry has never been -questioned, the Scotch, who have contrived more or less to free themselves from the reproach. The evil will be slow of cure in Italy, where content rises into a vice ; but it will be cured with the desire for more money, which, with rising prices, a higher standard of comfort, more education, and incessant intercourse with the North, is penetrating every grade of Italian society. Competence by the village standard is poverty by the standard of the capital, -and north of the Roman States all Italy is in motion. Twenty sears hence there will not be a grown man who has not seen the -sea. Ten years ago not one in a hundred had ever passed the boundary of his commune.
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