Then another man said:
"I hate those Sicilians; I have good personal reasons for hating them.
But no Sicilian fears death. If they are not brilliant soldiers, they
certainly make first-class assassins, which is only another branch of
the same business. This boy deserts not because he is afraid of death,
but because he still owes a debt. He feels he ought to do something to
repay his parents who nursed him when he was a child, and not be
sacrificed to that kidnapping camorra of blackguards out yonder"--and he
pointed with his thumb, spitting contemptuously the while, in the
direction of Rome.
Nobody had any comment to make on this speech. Not a word of protest was
raised. The man was entitled to an opinion like everybody else, and
might even have obtained his share of approval had the victim been a
native. He was only a Sicilian--an outsider. What is one to say of this
patriarchal, or parochial, attitude? The enlargement of Italy's
boundaries--Albania, Cyrenaica, Asia Minor and so forth--is an ideal
that few Italians bother their heads about. They are not sufficiently
dense--not yet. [17] To found a world-empire like the British or Roman
calls for a certain bullet-headed crassness. One has only to look at the
Germans, who have been trying to do so for some time past. That
collecting mania.... One single boy who collects postage stamps can
infect his whole school with the complaint, and make them all jealous of
his fine specimens. England has been collecting, for many centuries,
islands and suchlike; she is paying the penalty of her acquisitive
mania.
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