in Hungary, a country that entered upon
the modern field of development only recently. Hungary, a land in point
of the fertility of her soil, as rich as few in Europe, is overloaded
with debt, and her population, pauperized and in the hands of usurers,
emigrates in large numbers. Hungary's soil is now concentrated in the
hands of modern capitalist magnates, who carry on a ruinous system of
cultivation in forest and field so that Hungary is not far from the
time when it will have ceased to be a grain exporting country. It is
quite similarly with Italy. In Italy, just as in Germany, the political
unity of the nation has taken capitalist development powerfully under
the arm; but the thrifty peasants of Piedmont and Lombardy, of Tuscany,
Romagna and Sicily are ever more impoverished and go to ruin. Swamps and
moors are reappearing on the sites occupied but recently by the well
cultivated gardens and fields of small peasants. Before the very gates
of Rome, in the so-called Campagna, a hundred thousand hectares of land
lie fallow in a region that once was the "garden of Rome." Swamps cover
the ground, and exhale their poisonous miasmas. If, with the application
of the proper means the Campagna were thoroughly drained and properly
irrigated, the population of Rome would have a fertile source of food.
But Italy suffers of the ambition to become a "leading power:" she is
ruining herself with military and naval armaments and with African
colonization plans, and, consequently, has no funds left for such tasks
as the reclaiming of the Campagna for cultivation. And as the Campagna,
so are South Italy and particularly Sicily. The latter, once the granary
of Rome, sinks ever more into deepening poverty. There is no more
sucked-out, poverty-stricken and maltreated people in all Europe than
the Sicilian. The easily-contented sons of the most beautiful region of
all Europe overrun half Europe and the United States as lowerers of
wages because they care not to starve to death upon the native soil that
has ceased to be their property. Malaria, that frightful fever, is
spreading over Italy to an extent that, frightened at the prospect, the
government instituted in 1882 an investigation, which brought to light
the deplorable fact that, of the 69 provinces of the country, 32 were
severely afflicted by the disease, 32 were infected, and only 5 had so
far remained free. The disease, once known only in the rural districts,
penetrated the cities, w