s to
occur, Malta would eventually become the Mecca of Catholicism. We may
not expect to see such a change brought about in our day; if it should
ever happen, it would add but one more to the strange vicissitudes in
the history of Malta.

The wages paid to ordinary laborers in these islands are insignificant
in amount, though there has been an improvement in this respect during
the last decade. Boatmen in the harbor demand but nine-pence, English
money, for rowing a person to or from a ship lying a quarter of a mile
from the landing. Equally moderate terms prevail for pleasure
excursions, according to the service and the time occupied. Women
employed in field labor receive twenty-five cents per day, and men one
third more. The P. & O. Steamship Company pay to colliers half a dollar
a day; the same men get forty cents per day at the wharves. Blacksmiths,
carpenters, stonemasons, boat-builders, and sail-makers rarely earn more
than seventy-five cents per day. The drivers of the street vehicles in
Valletta are quite reasonable in their demands, and a shilling will pay
one's fare to any part of the city. The little one-horse vehicles called
_carrozzellas_ are well adapted to their purpose.

The same economic conditions are found here as prevail in India and
China. The multiplicity of seekers for employment keeps the prices which
are paid for services at a minimum rate. So, in over-populated
Barbadoes, a plantation hand can earn but twenty-five cents for a day's
work continued through ten hours. To be sure, that sum will more than
feed him; and as to clothes and shelter, these are of secondary
consideration in the tropics, where only conventional ideas require the
native race to wear clothes of any sort. Idlers swarm about the landings
and in the open squares of Valletta, who, it would seem, might be better
employed upon the soil inland. An organized effort of capital and
official influence to this end would accomplish the object, and render
many a square mile of the now sterile ground not only beautiful to the
eye, but also exuberantly productive. All over the civilized world the
most useless and idle portion of the people leave comparatively
comfortable homes in the country, where at least good food and shelter
can nearly always be earned, to crowd into cities, attracted thither by
the glamour of vice and fast life which always prevails more or less in
populous centres.

The arrival of a P. & O. steamship in the harbor