II

Gentlemen, the dangers connected with this type of emigration are numberless, and so are the evils connected with it.

Ten years ago, when I heeded the sorrowful cry of our unfortunate emigrants and wrote a pamphlet which had a profound echo in the hearts of all people of good will and which inspired such unanimity of feelings

and actions, I had no idea of the mountain of evils and dangers which our poor emigrants are confronted with. Everything, gentlemen, everything works against the emigrant! His troubles often begin before he leaves his poor home, in the person of an emigration agent who convinces him to emigrate, by painting in glowing colors the prospect of the easy acquisition of prosperity, an emigration agent who sends the emigrant wherever it serves the agent – not where it is best for the emigrant. Along the journey, which often turns into tragedy, the emigrant is shadowed by these very same evils and, upon his arrival in disease – infested areas, he finds these evils in the jobs for which he often is not fit, under bosses who have become inhuman either because of an insatiable greed for money or because of the habit of regarding workers like inferior beings. And these evils multiply a thousand times when evil people try to ambush the emigrant in a foreign country, whose language and customs he is not familiar with, while he finds himself in a state of isolation that is often the death of body and soul.

How wet with tears and bitter to the taste was the bread of the emigrant, of those unfortunate souls, who attracted either by vain hopes or false promises, found an Iliad of woes, abandonment, hunger, and not rarely death, where they had believed they would find a paradise. They saw an El Dorado, brightened by the mirage of need, without remembering that the violent wind of reality scatters in an instant the enchanted cities of dreams! Unhappy ones! Exhausted by work, the climate, the insects, they fall disconsolate to the soil made fertile by their labors, on the edge of the green forests they have cleared, not for themselves nor for their children, shaken by the gentle and fatal sickness of nostalgia, dreaming perhaps of the home country, which could not even feed them, calling in vain for the minister of the holy religion of their ancestors, who calms the terrors of the agony of death with the immortal hopes of faith.

Gentlemen, it is not a happy picture, but it is the true story of thousands and thousands of our fellow countrymen who have emigrated, and I have put it together from the reports of my missionaries and from what has been told or written to me by those who have witnessed and shared these most distressing exoduses.

I do not want to be misunderstood, however, or be considered pessimistic. The sad happenings I have mentioned are not true of all emigrants. Very many of them have found in hospitable countries an adequate

living, many a comfortable one, and some have even found wealth. They form colonies of which the motherland can be proud. But there are also very many who are miserable, and in great measure this is due to their ignorance and to our neglect.

Now the duties and concerns deriving from such a state of affairs are many, are important and, even though to a different degree, are all related, because in the field of emigration, religious, social and national, public and private concerns cannot be separated without harm.

In this blend of interests and obligations, some aspects apply to emigration in general, like the laws that deal with the phenomenon of emigration itself and mutual benefit societies, while other aspects deal with particular groups of emigrants, like the economic and political conditions of the host countries, the methods of colonization, salaries and ensuing commercial exchanges. I shall limit my talk to the duties and concerns that have to do with emigration in general, not only because dealing with the various aspects in detail would take too long, but also because I dealt with those detailed aspects in other writings of mine, particularly in the conference which I gave in this very city some ten years ago. I shall devote the time your kind patience will allow me to those general aspects, which I summarize in two words: to assist and to guide emigration; assistance and guidance that translates into legislative, religious and charitable action and involves government, clergy and all people of good will, of whatever persuasion.

Gentlemen, during the course of my analysis, I must repeat observations and cite facts I have already mentioned here and elsewhere, but it is not my fault if the observations I made and the measures I called for have not yet been enacted into law. Besides, everybody knows that ideas move ahead at such a discouragingly slow pace, especially when they run counter to certain interests and passions, but the pace is relentless when the ideas put forward are right and truly beneficial. We must press on, therefore, because every progress, however minimal, brings us closer to our goal, as long as fatigue does not defeat the supporters of those ideas.

For this reason, gentlemen, even at the risk of taking advantage of your patience, I will discuss with you a little longer some proposals of mine having to do with emigration law, the draft, emigration agents, and banks in our colonies; and I request not only your kind attention, but also your help in word and action, so that each of you, within the range of his influence, will in turn promote such proposals.

Let me start with the emigration law. When in 1888 a bill was submitted in the Parliament, which later became the present law governing our emigration, I pointed out in a publication addressed to a distinguished parliamentarian, that the good provisions of such a law and the best intentions would be nullified by articles having to do with sub-agents of emigration. At that time I wrote:

I believe this provision, justifiable perhaps in theory, will in practice cause serious harm, such as to nullify many other good provisions of the same law.

If, as the Hon. De Zerbi seems to believe in his report, the emigration agents were only a liaison, trusted intermediaries between the maritime carriers and the emigrants, and if their role were restricted to providing information on how and when to embark, and if the agencies were only branches of the central offices of the carriers, there would be no reason to worry. (Their action, albeit superfluous in most cases, (since this information is readily available to anyone who inquires at any street corner or public agency), would still not be harmful. Sometimes it could even be useful to the emigrants. And even if the agents were to act like tempters and convince the undecided and painted in glowing colors to the poor and thirsty people the fresh and golden rivers of America, like those which, in Dante’s “Inferno”, would make good old Adam go into ecstasy, well, it would not be the end of the world and we could even close an eye and say with Manzoni: ‘Poor wretch, you won’t be the one to destroy Milan’.

However, the recruiting provision is something quite different. Can you imagine that the agents who were once recruiting when it was forbidden by Ministerial rules will not do so with even greater alacrity when they will be protected by the law! Consequently, the calamities deplored in the past will increase in proportion to the freedom granted, since, on the one hand, experience does not stand a chance against the unquenchable thirst for gain and, on the other hand, ignorance either does not know the fate of those who came before or hopes to be luckier.

Emigration recruitment is something intrinsically evil, something that alters the functions of this social phenomenon and makes it deviate from its purpose and its natural goal. Like in all selection, emigration must be free for it to be useful. If emigration is not free, instead of being a relief for the social body and a beneficial centrifugal and centripetal process that stimulates and balances different forces, it will become an effort that exhausts, a fever that slowly consumes.

Why do we need to license emigration recruiters and to lend authority, through government approval, to an activity which, to be profitable, cannot be carried out with too many scruples? What is the task of the recruiter of emigrants, if not to stimulate and awaken the expectations and needs of the lower classes? Aren’t enough misfortunes already forcing our peasants and workers to emigrate, without having someone constantly remind them of their plight, by directing their attention, usually through deceitful arguments, to places where there is easily accessible prosperity?

Among the causes for the spread of the emigration phenomenon in Italy, the Hon. De Zerbi, in his scholarly and elegant report, places, and rightly so, the false impressions imposed on people by the artifices of the merchants of human labor. But why, I ask, why, to the many deplored causes of emigration, do we want to add another one, making it even more effective by legally approving such deceitful practices of the merchants of human labor?

Unfortunately, my predictions came true, and to a more serious degree than I had foreseen. The new law made the conditions of the emigrants worse, and that fact speaks for itself. As a result, agencies and sub-agencies prospered and proliferated. They continued in their business like before, even more aggressively than before, something the law had meant to put a stop to.

After that law, the number of agencies in Italy increased to 34, a record figure. In 1892, there were 5,172 agents. In 1896, according to inquiries made by the Minister of the Interior, there were 7,169 agents, and they must surely have increased in the last two years. We are looking at a veritable army of licensed recruiters: an army of parasites of human misery, I was about to call them.

Now, gentlemen, it is a duty to promote freedom of emigration, but it is also a duty to oppose forced migration. It is the duty of the ruling classes to offer the working class a useful outlet for their manpower, to help them get out of poverty, to channel them toward a gainful occupation. But it is equally their duty to prevent that their good faith be exploited by money-hungry people. As a matter of fact, the flaws in the present emigration legislation were recognized and condemned at area meetings of the “Congressi” in Genoa, Rome and Florence. They were pointed out by consuls and diplomatic agents and authoritatively confirmed by the Hon. Visconti Venosta in his capacity as Minister of Foreign

Affairs in his report introducing an excellent legislative bill. In fact, this is what the respected parliamentarian writes:

Since the emigration law of December 30, 1880, went into effect, and while the various provisions were implemented, it became clear, with the data acquired by experience, that there were several gaps and serious flaws in the law, leaving the door open to deplorable abuses.

Hence, Parliament and the country felt strongly that new proposals and provisions were necessary to meet the needs of our emigration – temporary and permanent – so as to prevent or, at least, minimize the evils that keep cropping up day after day, while our authorities lack entirely, or almost, the legal tools to fight them.

Gentlemen, we must use all our influence so that the new emigration bill introduced by the Hon. Visconti Venosta and accepted by the Hon. Canevaro, the present Minister of Foreign Affairs, will soon receive the approval of Parliament. In this way, many serious abuses against the emigrants will be eliminated, and a serious and insidious lacuna in our legislation will be taken care of.

Another providential bill, which should soon receive parliamentary approval, is the one introduced by the Hon. Luzzati, the former Treasury Minister, along with his colleagues Rudini, Visconti Venosta, Sineo and Branca, On the Protection of Remittances and Savings of Italian Emigrants in the Two Americas.

The lengthy report that preceded the bill lists the facts and the ways by which the hard-won and valued earnings of our countrymen abroad are always reduced by the exchange rate and in transmission, through the work of greedy and often dishonest pseudo-bankers. Unfortunately, those meager savings quite often are entirely lost through acts of bank banditry, not infrequent overseas (where everyone may claim to be a banker, even without accumulated capital), a banditry that consists in taking all the deposits and absconding them to other countries. In just one year and in just one city of North America, four such disappearances took place, and the savings lost by our emigrants amounted to 200,000 lire!

Some of these facts alone, and there are hundreds of them, are enough to justify and give urgency to the legislative provision formulated by the distinguished statesman from Padua that aims at cutting at the root all the parasitism that thrives and gets fat on the people’s savings through the shameful exploitation of the workers’ ignorance and good faith.

Equally defective and harmful, to say the least, is the draft law for the Armed Services as applied to our emigrants, to their children, and to the missionaries.

With the emigration law we have swung open the doors to anyone who wants to emigrate, but we have also given free rein to those who recruit, lure and push people into emigrating with every possible enticement. With this law on the draft, we slam the door shut on the emigrants who would like to come back.

I wish to make my own the following observations of one who writes authoritatively on colonial matters.

It is hard to measure the evil effects the draft law has caused and is still causing when applied to our overseas emigration. Many people, inside and outside of Parliament, have raised their voice against it. Until now, they were a voice in the desert, because the stubborn and conservative bureaucracy in all the branches of government is even more present in the military forces.

Gentlemen, I believe that the law is not a dogma nor a statement of absolute principles and that it is not a good law either in itself or in the way it is applied, if it does not fulfill a real need, if it does not serve any purpose, if, in a word, it is not a law made for its own time.

The present draft law does not have any of these qualities, is motivated by an old-fashioned militarism and by the times when, in order not to serve one’s country and government, many ruined their health, others mutilated themselves, and still others, the majority, emigrated. Not only is such a law anachronistic, but it is also unfair, harmful, and aggravates the illness it means to cure.

Draft resistance, a scar on our social life and a sad heritage of our past, has, by now, almost completely disappeared everywhere. Nobody now mutilates or kills himself rather than join the army, nor does one emigrate. So why enact such a law?

After a period of years, more or less long, thieves, bankrupts, embezzlers, even murderers, are allowed to come back, and the law accepts exile as a sufficient punishment for a crime committed. Instead, for draft resisters there is no statute of limitations. Even when the usual amnesty reopens the doors to one’s country to those over 40 years of age or to those who have excelled in works of creativity or charity, even then the law requires the draft resister to undergo a sham trial, a real waste of time, to say the least, both for the plaintiff and for the judges.

Yet, very many of these men are not at fault at all, while many have such extenuating circumstances that, in themselves, they would be enough to erase even worse faults.

Most of the draft resisters are sons of Italians, people who were born in America or went there as children. Now, for them to come back would be hard, if not impossible. Often, it would mean the loss of a position acquired through many years of long, hard work.

For this reason, the draft law, which is based on the principle of equality for all – everyone should serve his country – becomes unfair when rigorously applied to our emigrants or to their children born in the far-off countries of the Americas or to those who in their youth were carried away by the storms of life.

Not only is it an unfair law, but, as I mentioned earlier, it does more harm than might at first appear.

Many of our emigrants would like to come back, to end their life in comfort in the very place where they had begun their life in the midst of difficulties, thus bringing back to our country capital and rich experiences and reestablishing the bonds between the motherland and the distant family. However, before them rises the specter of jail or simply of a trial; so they resign themselves to dying in a foreign land. Many in the prime of their life and at the peak of their career would happily visit our country to become acquainted with its products, unfamiliar to most people, and to stimulate commercial exchange. But since the door is slammed in their face, they turn their steps and their commercial attention elsewhere.

Many children of Americanized Italians would gladly visit the land of their ancestors. But they dare not for fear of military punishment. The fear many be exaggerated, but the fear is there. And if anyone takes a chance, he does so with many precautions, traveling far away from his own birthplace where he might be recognized as the son of so and so, because a reward of sorts is out for him for draft evasion.

In some people this kind of mortgage on their person produces in them a resentment against their motherland, a resentment that makes them hostile to everything Italian, something that does not help good political relations and commercial exchanges: the first, real benefits – perhaps the only ones – we might reasonably expect from our colonies in America. For our commercial interests it would be better to have in these countries aliens who are friends rather than hostile fellow citizens.

Besides, this state of affairs speeds up that assimilation of our countrymen

by other nations that we would like to and we should impede at all costs.

Even more harmful is the provision in the law that deprives the Missions of so many priestly recruits. As a result, flourishing Franciscan, Dominican and Carmelite missions, not to mention others, have seen the ranks of their missionaries thinned. In many regions, especially in the Ottoman Empire and the Far East, these missionaries have had to be replaced by French, German and Austrian confreres. It is with a lump in my throat that we ponder the loss of influence and prestige Italy has suffered in those regions, because you know very well, gentlemen, that civilization and political influence are not created by trade nor imposed by arms. They are the fruit of a peaceful, holy, patient, wise, tireless, persevering moral education, imparted at the cost of their life by people who do not seek or desire anything for themselves but everything for their brothers and sisters and for Jesus Christ.

Since I am speaking in Turin, I would be remiss if I were not to recall the beautiful words of one of the outstanding writers of this city, Gioberti:

Oh, if we understood where true glory lies and if we were to consider things for what they really are, what a field for victory would be open to us! But we are so blind that, while we have high praise for those Napoleonic slaughters called battles and victories, we do not give importance to those peaceful undertakings that benefit all people and redound to the honor of all Catholics, especially of us Italians, because the hand that moves and guides them is in Italy. And, while the occupation of one more foot of land, perhaps paid for with much bloodshed, makes governments and nations exult with joy, we sons and daughters and heirs of ancient Rome could not care less about being apostles of Christian civilization and lawgivers to the world!

Gentlemen, those of us who have visited the magnificent Exposition of Sacred Art and have seen the Chinese in their characteristic costumes, the Bedouins, the Blacks from Eritrea, the Arabs from the Holy Land, the girls from Africa and the East Indies, the charming orphan boys and girls who answer our questions so fluently in our own beautiful language, which they learned to read and write as well as we do, will easily understand how right the scholar from Turin is. We cannot but think with admiration and gratitude of the generous people who, far from their own country, their relatives and friends, in the midst of difficulties and dangers, in a continuous offering of self, are evangelizing pagan lands, endeavoring to fashion one people out of many peoples, one family out of many families.

Everyone, friend or foe, agrees in paying tribute to the civilizing and patriotic work done by our missionaries. France, Austria, Germany, Spain and England are aiming at this goal and have made it the heart of their colonial policies. Voltairean and atheistic France, above all, appreciates the value of the missions, subsidizes them with money, exempts its missionaries from the draft and exercises diplomatic pressure to have the exclusive right to be the protector of all the missions in the Far East, even of those not French.

Everything is rapidly changing in the government of that great country, and the political parties seeking power are engaged in fierce battles. Each party, upon arriving at power, destroys, almost with secret satisfaction, what the previous one had built up. However, no cabinet, no matter how radical, how opposed to religious orders, has ever undermined the vast organization of the Catholic Missions. In fact, the fiercer the opposition within France, the more the Government subsidizes the missions outside of France.

Gentlemen, the fact of the matter is that France, for over half a century, has experienced the overwhelming power of the Catholic missionary who, among uncivilized people, is an unparalleled point man, and among conquered people, a very powerful controlling force. More than once, the French have realized that a handful of missionaries armed with the cross can do at least as much as an army of heavily armed soldiers.

Among the many testimonies on behalf of the Italian missions I would like to quote the following one. It is a beautiful tribute and is included in a report for a parliamentary bill introduced in the Senate during its session of May 28, 1885, and is signed by Ministers Mancini, Pessina, Ricotti and Brin:

And now (thus, the official document) we should speak more particularly about our missionaries abroad and about the work they are carrying out not only on behalf of universal civilization but also on behalf of our country and our national culture.

In the Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are filed numberless reports by representatives of His Majesty, recognizing and praising these courageous and tireless apostles of both causes, both sacred. The more inhospitable the land, the stronger and more independent the population, the more numerous the dangers, the more futile it is to expect help except from Divine Providence, there the missionary lives, works and often dies, an unknown and ignored martyr, accustomed from the very beginning of his very hard training to give up everything, including his very self.

Since the missions stem from Rome, one can easily understand how the Italian element is predominant among the missionaries and how, by the use of our language in the pulpit and in the classroom, the Italian language has become popular even in the most remote regions, especially in the Ottoman Empire, where the glorious traditions of our medieval republics are still alive. Just a few years ago, almost the Italian language alone was heard alongside the native languages in the ports of the East Mediterranean Sea and North Africa, along the coasts from the Adriatic to the Bosphorus, across the Balkan peninsula.

Unfortunately, this, too, is more a memory than a boast of present Italian grandeur.

Thus far the aforementioned document.

Even the present Head of Government, the Hon. Pelloux, when Minister of War, introduced a bill on the draft, based on modern ideas and practical considerations. Among its many wise provisions, it envisioned the case of the Italian emigrants and the missionaries. Not long ago, newspapers carried the news that, soon, the Minister of War plans to reintroduce this bill in the House. Wonderful! I am sure Parliament will not fail to give its approval, since the many benefits of the bill are all too obvious.

On the other hand, we are not asking for exemptions or privileges for our seminarians. We are only asking that their training not be interrupted (as the training of the liberal arts students is not interrupted) and that, once ordained priests, they may substitute the few months in the barracks with a long period of apostolate abroad, perhaps for their whole lifetime, on behalf of religion and country. What loss would it be for the Army, if those young clerics planning to become missionaries are excused from the draft? How unfair would it be to the equality of all citizens vis-à-vis the draft, if, instead of three years in the barracks, young Italians training for the priesthood were to devote their whole life to the missions, especially those taking care of our countrymen, looking after their religious and moral welfare, soldiers of Church and country at one and the same time? With the unspoiled enthusiasm of their youthful years, with a zeal that knows no fatigue, with the boldness of their age, how many heroic apostles we would have! What tireless teachers! How thankful they would be! How grateful the emigrants would be! The emigrants are homesick beyond words for the land of their birth, but they miss even more the faith that accompanied their first baby steps, strengthened their youth and blessed their dearest affections. Yes, the need to practice their religion is so deeply felt by the

great majority of our emigrants that very often they undertake long journeys in those inhospitable regions to attend Mass and hear the word of God from an Italian priest.