with one hole to go in and out by and another in the roof
for ventilation--in order to save $1.75 per month. All honor to him!
Garibaldi was of just such stuff, only he suffered in a better cause. In
Naples the young folks are out all day in the sun. Here they are
indoors all the year round. For the consequences of this change see
Dr. Peccorini's article in the 'Forum' for January, 1911, on the
tuberculosis that soon develops among Italians who abroad were
accustomed to live in the country but here are forced to exist in
tenements.

Now, for historic reasons, these south Italians hate and distrust all
governmental control and despise any appeal to the ordinary tribunals of
justice to assert a right or to remedy a wrong. It has been justly said
by a celebrated Italian writer that, in effect, there is some instinct
for civil war in the heart of every Italian. The insufferable tyranny
of the Bourbon dynasty made every outlaw dear to the hearts of the
oppressed people of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Even if he robbed
them, they felt that he was the lesser of two evils, and sheltered
him from the authorities. Out of this feeling grew the "Omerta," which
paralyzes the arm of justice both in Naples and Sicily. The late Marion
Crawford thus summed up the Sicilian code of honor:

According to this code, a man who appeals to the law against his fellow
man is not only a fool but a coward, and he who cannot take care of
himself without the protection of the police is both.... It is reckoned
as cowardly to betray an offender to justice, even though the offence be
against one's self, as it would be not to avenge an injury by violence.
It is regarded as dastardly and contemptible in a wounded man to betray
the name of his assailant, because if he recovers he must naturally
expect to take vengeance himself. A rhymed Sicilian proverb sums up this
principle, the supposed speaker being one who has been stabbed. "If I
live, I will kill thee," it says; "if I die, I forgive thee!"

Any one who has had anything to do with the administration of criminal
justice in a city with a large Italian population must have found
himself constantly hampered by precisely this same "Omerta." The south
Italian feels obliged to conceal the name of the assassin and very
likely his person, though he himself be but an accidental witness of the
crime; and, while the writer knows of no instance in New York City
where an innocent man has gone to prison himse