The truth is that the internecine war among the gentry is
the same in every village of Lucania. The upper classes have
not the means to live with decorum and self-respect. The
young men of promise, and even those barely able to make
their way, leave the village. The most adventurous go off
to America, as the peasants do, and the others to Naples or
Rome; none return. Those who are left in the villages are
the discarded, who have no talents, the physically deformed,
the inept and the lazy; greed and boredom combine to dispose
them to evil. Small parcels of farm land do not assure them
a living and, in order to survive, these misfits must dominate
the peasants and secure for themselves the well-paid posts of
druggist, priest, marshal of the carabinieri, and so on. It is,
therefore, a matter of life and death to have the rule in their
own hands, to hoist themselves or their relatives and friends
into top jobs. This is the root of the endless struggle to ob-
tain power and to keep it from others, a struggle which the
narrowness of their surroundings, enforced idleness, arid a
mixture of personal and political motives render continuous
and savage.