Greetings and a long life to your newspaper, organ of the 
Sicilian workers, good health to your party in its reorganisation! * 

Nature has made Sicily an earthly paradise; this was a sufficient 
reason for human society, divided into opposing classes, to turn it 
into a hell. 

Greco-Roman antiquity endowed Sicily with slavery in order to 
produce the great estates and the mines. 

The middle ages replaced slavery with serfdom and the feudal 
order. 

The modern age, although it claimed to have broken these 
chains, has merely changed their form. Not only has it retained 
these ancient forms of servitude; it has also added a new form of 
exploitation, the cruellest, the most merciless of all: capitalist 
exploitation. 

The ancient Sicilian’ poets, Theocritus and Moschus, sang the 
idyllic life of their slave-shepherd contemporaries. These were, 
without doubt, poetic dreams. But is there a modern poet so bold 
as to sing the idyllic life of the ‘free’ workers of present-day 
Sicily? Would not the peasants of this island be happy if they 
could work their fields even under the harsh conditions of Roman 
sharecropping? This is where the capitalist system has led us: free 
men pining for the slavery of the past!... 

But let them take heart. The dawn of a new and better society 
sheds its light for the oppressed classes of all countries. And 

a4 In the manuscript this paragraph reads: “Greetings and a long life to the 
organ of the Sicilian workers which has just come into being.”— Ed. 
b In the manuscript: “Greek” .— Ed. 

Greetings to the Socialists of Sicily 475 

everywhere the oppressed are closing ranks; everywhere they 
understand one another across frontiers, across different lan- 
guages: the army of the international proletariat is forming, and 
the new century which is about to begin will guide it to victory!... 

(London) 

F, Engels 
: ; ; Sociale, checked with the French 
1895 and in the Critica Sociale, No. 16, 
August 16, 1895 Translated from the Italian