of labour they feel the necessity of expansion; they
receive their wages and go to Caltanissetta; those who are married sleep
with their wives, while those who are unmarried sleep quite alone as the
soldiers did after the death and burial of l'Invincible Monsieur
d'Malbrough. They become free human beings for two days. I have seen
the piazza full of them on Sunday morning--so full that I thought it
would have been easier to walk across it, treading on their heads, than
to push through the crowd. Unfortunately their notion of the life of a
free human being does not stop at loafing about in the piazza. They also
go to the wine shops, where they offer one another the means of
forgetting that their oases of rest lie in a desert of drudgery, and
sometimes this becomes the means of their forgetting everything else as
well.

Gigino has written a paper upon the connection between alcoholism and
crime. He told me that the consumption of alcohol in Sicily is less than
in northern countries, but that there is more crime. I naturally
inquired whether it would not tend to lessen the crime if the Sicilians
would drink rather more. He replied that, as so often happens at the
beginning of any inquiry, there are other considerations and I must not
be in a hurry. As for the sulphur-miners, they need not drink more, but
if they would spread fairly over the week the amount they consume during
Saturday and Sunday, then, although they would risk incurring the
consequences of chronic alcoholism, they would avoid those of acute
alcoholism. For the need of expansion causes them to drink more than
they can stand all at once, then they quarrel and commit murders. So
that many of those who begin life as boys in the mine, and week after
week escape the falling rocks, live to be killed in a drunken brawl, and
one does not know which prospect is the more ugly.

I asked whether their condition could not be improved by raising their
wages. They asked whether I wished to dislocate the commerce of the
world by raising the price of sulphur. I had no such desire and, indeed,
did not know, till they told me, that sulphur enters into so many
manufactures as it does. Here again in seeking to ameliorate conditions
with which one is imperfectly familiar one must not be in a hurry. It is
not altogether a question of raising their wages, they receive from four
and a half to five francs a day, which, for five days, amounts to between
twenty-two fra