MORAL CONDITIONS. The Italian landowners are honest, paying their store debts promptly and often meeting their bank paper before the payments become due. As tenants they keep their agreements and seldom ask for credit, except as a last resort. As a race they like beer and wine, but seem to care little for whisky and other spirituous drinks. Though they are spoken of as being great drinkers, none of them are ever seen on the street in an intoxicated condition. Petty stealing and an occasional cutting affray take place, but these offenses are generally traced to the transient berry pickers, who seem to be of a lower social class, although practically all are Sicilians. The resident Italians seem to realize the importance of law and order, but those from the city have less respect for peace and property. From all who come most closely in contact with the Italians one hears nothing but praise of them. In spite of the number of single men and women and the informal manner in which the people live, the morals of the community are high. They marry among themselves, the girls marrying young, as do the men, though as a rule the men are older than the women at the time of marriage. The families average over five persons each. The husband is clearly the head of the family, and the wife and children look to him as their authority. In general, the children remain with their parents until they are 21 years of age, contributing their earnings to the household fund. EFFECT OF SETTLEMENT ON NEIGHBORHOOD. The Italians came into this locality when much of the land was uncultivated, when drainage was needed to make profitable crops, and when the berry industry was in its infancy. By the hardest work they have cleared the undesirable land, built drains, and are now farming more energetically than are the natives. Many Americans decided that the Italian with his large family was too difficult to compete with, so sold their farms and moved to a locality where they could work in a more leisurely fashion. The Italians purchase all the farms so abandoned, spend nothing on the houses, but work the land to the utmost. STATISTICAL DATA FOR SELECTED FAMILIES. The accompanying table represents the economic history of 12 families from the time of their arrival until the gathering of the crops in 1909. Some of the families represented have been in the locality twelve years and others only three years. The number of persons 10 years and over in each family is comparatively small, though undoubtedly the number of children under 10 who work in the fields fully makes up the normal number of working hands per family. In some cases the Italians had enough money to purchase land immediately on their arrival; others were obliged to work picking berries before they had money enough to make a first payment on their small tracts of 10, 12, or 16 acres. Four of the farms still have a small indebtedness; in the other 8 cases the farms are free from debt. over $100 per acres trg 2006. mum is the length of the beam seast, sod at the 28 & De season the vines are covered will tema SC & at home. No estimate can be made of the short sumed at home, but they family in the course of the Test This table also shows what 10 families have done. is typical of what the rezacz der d the ha Independence. གཞི ན ས མ སྟེ |