A Stone-Mason Was Killed By Falling
From A Scaffolding, And His Funeral Was Attended By So Many Hundreds,
Amounting
To thousands, of workmen that the police conceived, not quite
unjustifiably, that it was to be made the occasion of
A demonstration,
especially as the proposed route of the procession lay through the
Piazza di Venezia, under the windows of the Austrian Embassy, Austria
being always a red rag to the Italian bull and peculiarly irritating
through the reservation of the Palazzo Venezia to the ancient enemy at
the cession of Venice to Italy. The mourners were therefore forbidden to
pass that way, and the police forces were drawn up in the Piazza Gesu,
before the Jesuit church, with a strong detachment of troops to support
them. Their wisdom in all this was very questionable after what
followed, for the mourners insisted on their rights and would go no way
but through the Piazza di Venezia. When the dispute was at its height
two wagons laden with bricks appeared on the scene. The mourners swarmed
upon them, broke the bricks into bats, and hurled them at the police.
They had apparently the simple-hearted expectation that the police would
stand this indefinitely, but the brickbats hurt, and in their paroxysms
of pain the sufferers began firing their revolvers at the mourners. Four
persons were killed, with the usual proportion of innocent spectators.
At night the labor unions met, and the _sciopero_ was proclaimed as an
expression of the popular indignation; but the police had been left with
the victory. Whether it was not in some sort a defeat I do not know, but
a retired English officer, whom I had no reason to think a radical, said
to me that he thought it a great mistake to have let the police oppose
the people with firearms. Soldiers should alone be used for such work;
they alone knew when to fire and when to stop, and they never acted
without orders. In fact, the troops supporting the police took no part
in the fray, as the workmen's press recognized with patriotic rejoicing.
The next morning a signal silence prevailed throughout the city, where
not a wheel stirred or the sound of a hoof broke the hush of the
streets. We had noted already that there were seven Sundays every week
in Rome, as was fit in the capital of the Christian religion, but this
Thursday was of an intenser Sabbath stillness than any first day of the
week that we had yet known. There was the clack of passing feet in the
street under our windows, but we looked out upon a yawning void where
the busy cabs had clustered, and the cabmen had socially chaffed and
quarrelled, and entreated the stranger in the cabman's superstition that
a stranger never knows when he wants a cab. Now he could have walked all
over Rome without being once invited to drive. Except for here and there
a private carriage, or the coupe evidently of a doctor, the streets were
empty, and the tourists had to join the citizens in their pedestrian
exercise.
The shopkeepers had been notified to close their places of business on
the tacit condition of having their windows broken for non-compliance,
but in the early forenoon they were still slowly and partially putting
up their shutters. You could get in through the darkened doors up till
noon; after that it was more and more difficult. But it would be hard to
say how far and how deep the _sciopero_ went. In our hotel we knew of it
only the second day through the failure of the morning rolls, for there
had been no baking overnight. Most of the in-door service was of Swiss
or other foreign extraction, and the mechanism of our comfort, our
luxury, was operated as usual. Our floor _facchino,_ or porter, went to
the meeting of the unions in the evening, being an Italian. Otherwise
the strike fell especially on the helpless and guiltless foreigner, who
might be, and very often was, in sympathy with the strikers. He had to
walk to the ruins, the galleries, the gardens, the churches, if he
wanted anything of them; he could not get a carriage even from a stable.
Between the hotels and the station the omnibus traffic was suspended.
The railroads being national, push-carts manned by the government
employes carried the baggage to and fro, but if one wanted to arrive or
depart one had to do it on foot. Tragical scenes presented themselves in
relation to this fact. In the afternoon, as I walked up the street
toward the great railroad station, I saw coming down the middle of it a
strange procession of ladies and gentlemen of every age, gray-haired
elders and children of tender years, mixed with porters and push-carts,
footing it into the region of the fashionable hotels. They were all
laden according to their strength, and people who had never done a
stroke of work in their lives were actually carrying their own
hand-bags, rugs, and umbrella-cases. It was terrible.
It was terrible for what it was, and terrible for what it suggested, if
ever that poor dull beast of labor took the bit permanently into its
teeth, or, worse yet, hung back in the breeching and inexorably balked.
What would then become of us others, us ladies and gentlemen who had
never done a stroke of work and never wished to do one? Should we be
forced to the hard necessity of beginning? Could we remain in the
comfortable belief that we gave work, or must we be made to own
distastefully that it had always been given to us? Should we be able to
flatter ourselves with the notion that we had once had dependents
because we had money, or should we realize that we had always been
dependents because of our having money?
These were the hateful doubts which the Roman strike suggested to the
witness, or, at least, one of the witnesses, who has here the pleasure
of unburdening himself upon the reader.
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