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Title: Sicilian Miners Author: Freedom Press Date: October, 1890 Language: en Topics: Freedom Press, Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism Source: Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Socialism, Vol. 4, No. 47, online source http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=3124, retrieved on May 2, 2020. Notes: Freedom Press (ed.)
The miners who work the sulfur mines in the beautiful island of Sicily
are some of the most unhappy victims of oppression on the face of the
earth: the oppression of property, we mean. A comrade who has lately
been among them sends us a description of the state of things.
You cannot conceive, he writes, a more primitive kind of work; there is
no machinery to take the miners down into the pits or to bring the
mineral up. All is done by hand, and the "hands" are moody little
children. Children, some of whom are only six years old, have to carry
on their shoulders loads weighing from one hundred to two hundred
pounds, up steep, rough, broken flights of steps for two or three
hundred yards. The poor little creatures arrive at the top utterly
broken down with fatigue, often crying, and scarcely able to move. But
all the same the "pioneer" drives them down again for more with his
whip. The sight is simply heartrending. These boys are almost all
hump-backed, and, of course, their miserable lives are but short. They
have been bought of their parents, much as English children used too be
bought of the parish authorities in the early days of the great industry
here. The pioneer gives the family a "help" of from 1 pound to 5 pounds,
and in return has a right to the children's work until the money is paid
back.
This slave-driver is himself a slave, and often a hard-driven one. The
system is for the mine owner to let the mine to a contractor,
stipulating for say 20 per cent on the profits; the contractor underlets
the mine to a sub-contractor, with the same sort of agreement, and so
on, through a longer or shorter series of harpies, until we reach the
last of the contractors. This man engages a pioneer, and pays him 25/8 a
week. The pioneer himself engages the boys, and gets 12/10 on their
labor, so that, after all, he has not so very much to live on. But the
wretchedness of the miners themselves is indescribable. Their situation
has gone from bad to worse, year after year, until their life has become
quite savage. At Catanisetta, the miners having simply nothing to pay
any rent, and being scarcely able to keep body and soul together,
bethought them of the plan of our uncivilized ancestors, who made
burrows in the earth to live in. The poor fellows scooped out some caves
in the hillsides to shelter themselves and their families: in the night
time one can see quite a long row of light, glimmering from these human
dens. But the Government has now discovered that this return to
primitive customs is not to be tolerated in the nineteenth century, and
when our comrade wrote the wretched miners had received orders to turn
out on a certain day.
We are glad to learn that they had the spirit left in them to be
extremely indignant, and even disposed to fight for their miserable
homes. The mining population is very revolutionary, the women even more
so than the men. The sight of what their children suffer has forced the
mothers to recognize the necessity of a change; and, besides, the truck
system exists there in full force. The miners are obliged to buy their
flour at the mine owner's mills, at something like double the market
price. If they do not do this, they are fined. Lately they struck for
better wages, and got an increase of 1/8 a week. Little enough, but it
has given them the pluck to think about asking for something more, and
we hope soon to hear better news of them.