AGRARIAN UNREST IN ITALY AND ITS RELATION TO LAND TENURE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR.") Stn,--The recent seizure of Italian factories by the workers is well known to your readers, but another form of forcible occupation, which was one of the earliest repercussions of the war in Italy, has probably been less widely observed, although it is perhaps of even deeper sociological interest and import- ance, I refer to the seizure of waste or ill-cultivated lands by the contadini in various parts of Italy. The extent to which this has taken place is little known, even to Italians: their Press has exercised an astonishing degree of "discretion," so that the truth of what has happened in districts beyond one's immediate purview is not easy to come by. Most of your readers will have noticed some account of the fighting between contadini and troops round about Bari, in Puglie—better known as Apulia, the Heel of Italy—but few, probably, have heard anything of the destruction of rice-fields on the Lombard Plain or of the "Red Guards" that sprang into being in various parts of rural Italy, for even Italian papers have published the most meagre references to these events. To what immediate cause is attributable this 'surprising outburst amongst a class so innately peace-loving and conservative as the peasantry of Italy? To say that "the war has awakened the consciousness of the expropriated classes" is a platitude: but so to ticket a fact does not entitle a thoughtful person to relegate the fact itself to the pigeon-holes of forgetfulness; and it appears to the writer that this awakening is this fundamental cause which, re-acting upon the special conditions of Italian land tenure, has produced results so startling as the frequently successful occupation, by the peasantry, of lands which are technically the property of private owners or the State; more startling than ever, once it is realized that these unconstitu- tional methods are bringing almost undiluted goad to the country at large. The tenure systems of Italy may be roughly classified as follows: The small-holding, owned by the actual cultivator; the mezzadro (metaycr), where, in lieu of a fixed rent, the cultivator pays to his landlord a specified percentage of the actual crop, and which, granted the equity of any non
cultivator to receive profits from farm lands, works wills reasonable fairness to both parties; the latifondia—that evil heritage from Roman days—a system whereby a normally absentee landlord practically farms his rents to an agent, and where the actual cultivator has not even fixity of tenure to put against the rent he must pay and the improvements that good husbandry would demand of him; finally, there is a class of large landowners who do not sub-let and who seem willing to do little with their lands save raise such cattle as unassisted nature will support.
I omit mention of the extensive areas where medium-sized farms are worked by their owners with hired labour, as also of the disturbances caused by the efforts of these labourers to obtain an increase of wages commensurate with the rise in the cost of living. Where then, and under what conditions of the maximum disturbance has arisen in the Province of Pug,lie, the Roman Campagnn, and parts of Southern Tuscany. The greater proportion of the land in these three areas comes under the two latter systems of tenure, which one may term briefly the Extortionate and the Supine. Here the peasantry, exas- perated alike by the enormous rise in the cost of living and the crass heedlessness of the landlords, have entered forcibly upon large tracts of land, taken it for their own, fought for it, often lost it, but when they have held it successfully, done all within their power to make it productive. While this was going on the mezzadro districts remained, on the whole, tran- quil—apart from the wage-strikes a the labourers—but not even a ripple disturbed the prosperous calm of the Small- holding areas. Thus in Liguria, when to motor through the factory towns of Savona or Sampierdarena was to invite a shower of stones from a populace fermenting with discontent, the rural portions of that great province of small-holdings was wrapped in halcyon calm. Again, when Catania was for days in the hands of the "Casa di Lavoro," when cattle-dniving was at its height in the latilondia district of Caltanissetta in Sicily, the whole coast strip from Syracusa to Palermo—that paradise of scent and colour—was probably the most tranquil spot in all Europe, and that again is a district of small-holders. Admitted that the contadiname is crude—what chance has he ever had to be otherwise? Rapacious—how few, in these days, are not? Short-sighted, as where tempted by the soaring price of fuel he has felled acres upon acres of magnificent olive trees —who shall expect far sight from one whose educational oppor- tunities are even now so meagre? That he is consciously a " profiteer " I do not believe: it is not within his competence to fix the market values of his produce; he takes, with thank- fulness, the prices of his good fortune—brought him, essen- tially, by Germany—nor at all realizes who is the giver. Against this, his industry compares with that of the China- man alone, his land-love and land-hunger stand unequalled, and, whenever his tread is upon his own land, for one blade that grew before his feet a dozen spring behind his heel. I have no wish to labour the moral, or even to extend it to countries where the conditions may be considered fundament- ally dissimilar, but it is a truth that the natural genius i)f the Italian contadino finds its highest fulfilment in the "intensive" system of small-holdings, just as does the natural genius of his language in the "intensive" poetry of the sonnet.—I am, Sir, &c., GILBERT THORNE. Garden House, Ightham, Kent.
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