The Italian government is beginning to oc cupy itself with the control of emigration ac cording to the law of 1888, which we owe to Francesco Crispi, and which was intended- to prevent the frauds and abuses of emigration agencies. It was more of a primitive character than anything else and it was soon found that the intervention of the government could not be restricted to these terms, but that it must exercise an efficient control, both in the country and during the voyage, and when possible in the countries whither the emigrants were bound and where they landed. Through the special efforts of the Honorable Luzzatti Pantano and Visconti Venosta, Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Parliament sanctioned a new law 31 Jan. 1901, by which the phenomenon of emigration is truly controlled by an administrative organ ization and with provisions which will, if amended, give better and more complete re sults.
This law in its essential provisions has ref erence to trans-oceanic emigration only, and although Art. 29 points out that the legislature has been forced to recognize the need of protecting the other emigrants from any pos sible deplorable occurrence, to their injury, it is nevertheless certain that the emigrants to the countries of Europe and the Mediterranean have not had the legal and social guardianship they had expected. In order to study the prob lems in relation to these matters two congresses have already been held; one at Udine in 1903, and one at Milan, January 1907.
Many and serious were the problems that previously confronted Italy in the first years of the present century, in regard to the phe nomenon of emigration. All her material, moral and political life was at stake; and no doubt all the conditions of Italian life must im prove before emigration may be restored to proportions that are not abnormal; different from those that it has assumed in the last five years of the 30 which we considered with the aid of official statistics. It may be done, on the one hand, by not permitting the country in certain regions, especially in the south, to be depopulated of its laborers; and on the other, it may be arranged that emigration shall acquire all those qualities which serve to pro cure for it economic power in foreign lands, a moral authority and a just appreciation of the benefits that it confers on the countries of its destination. It is interesting to notice that in 1914 emigrants from Italy to the United States numbered 167,451; and in the same year 157,006 Italians returned from the United States to their native land. During the first year of • the great war in Europe — the year ending in the summer of 1915—the number of Italians reaching the United States as immigrants was, as mentioned above (Italian Emigration to the United States, etc.) only about one-third as great as in the previous year, or one-fifth of the number in a record year.