burned to the ground—were women and children
massacred in our day? Which of us decreed that
no peasant should go to his daily labour further
than a certain distance from his dwelling, or that
no peasant's wife, sister, or child, should carry to
him the food for his humble meal?" With such
rebutting charges as these did the exiled party
meet all the accusations of their opponents.

To assert, however, that brigandage had its
whole source or origin here, was totally untrue.
Indeed, were it the fact, what would have
been easier than repression? If the brigands
issued from Rome, and Rome alone, an army of
eighty thousand men could have drawn a cordon
against them across the entire peninsula, where
each sentinel would have been within hail of
his neighbour. Eighty thousand soldiers might
certainly have prevented the issue of four hundred
ill-armed and undisciplined mountaineers.
If Rome had been the centre of this insurrectionary
movement, how was it that the whole
Capitanata swarmed with brigands, and that
Pillone carried his ravages to within a few miles
of Naples? If, in a word, the movement were as
despicable in numbers, organisation, and courage,
as it was asserted to be, why could a larger army
than Wellington led at Waterloo not suffice to
crush it? These are questions which each
Italian asked of his neighbour, and it was the
difficulty thus indicated that called for this special
commission.

Brigandage is a very ancient institution in the
south of Italy. Every age and every government
have known it. To a people estranged
from intercourse with the civilised world, with
few roads, and those of the very worst— indisposed
to labour, reckless of lives that had little
to cheer them, and credulously relying on the
powers of the Church to absolve them from all
consequences in the next world—such a mode of
livelihood did not present many repugnant features.
There was about it, too, a false air of
heroism, which, to a highly imaginative and
vainglorious race, has a great attraction. These
same brigands exacted a deference from their
honester equals, that recals the habits of the
mediæval barons. They were the terror of the
country round them, and their black mail was
paid with a punctuality unknown in the payment
of government imposts. Their fondness for
titles, and their assumption of military rank,
show how these men prized social eminence,
and what store they set upon those claims
which exalted them above their fellows. Antonelli
stipulated with the French general sent
to confer with him, for the grade, and, stranger
still, the uniform of a colonel! Chiavone, it is
said, holds the commission of a major-general.

Brigandage, in a word, was a pursuit which
offered very attractive and dazzling rewards,
and no wonder is it that it should appeal successfully
to those whose daily lives were lives
of misery and want. Last of all, it brought
no stigma of shame on those who followed it.
They suffered nothing in fame or reputation.
They lived heroes, and, if they died on the
scaffold, they died martyrs. Brigandage enlisted
the bold, the daring, and the energetic;
the men, in fact, who, under a happier system,
would have constituted the distinguished persons
of the neighbourhood. They were such as
preferred peril to daily drudgery, and were
willing to risk life, rather than lower it to the
condition of a servitude. Such was the mode
of reasoning, such the explanations, which every
traveller in the Abruzzi will have heard over
and over again from the lips of peasants. In
the one single fact that it entailed no dishonour
on him who followed it, no shame nor
disgrace on his family or relations, lay its
chief mischief. As in Ireland, where what are
called agrarian crimes attach no infamy to him
who commits them, the brigandage of Italy
carries with it no legacy of discredit and dishonour.
It is this which makes its suppression,
not the act of an age nor an army, but
the great political problem of regenerating a
whole people. It is not that four hundred
brigands have found occupation for an army of
eighty thousand; but that a people who sympathise
with brigandage, who submit with patience
to its exactions, and who feel a sort of
triumph in its successes—who regard its exercise
as the struggle of poverty with riches—the
duel between destitution and affluence—would
rather aid it, succour it, and screen it, than help
a government to suppress it. This is the reason
why all attempts to exterminate it have proved
failures. The State has not been able to bring
that discredit on the crime which is the chief
agent in repression. The Calabrese peasant
screens the brigand, as the Tipperary man conceals
the Whiteboy.

Probably no Italian government before the
present day ever seriously contemplated dealing
with brigandage. It is no part of our task to
inquire whether, even now, the attempt would
have been made if brigandage had not presented
itself as the agent of a political party. As it is, the
system has rendered Southern Italy ungovernable.
Life and property are no longer secure, and Africa
itself is a safer land for the traveller than certain
districts of the Terra di Lavoro. The exactions
of brigandage, not satisfied with contravening
the law, have gone so far as to outrage
and insult the law. But a few weeks ago, a
person of high station and wealth was arrested
within a few miles of Naples; and his ransom—
fixed at the sum of nigh three thousand pounds
sterling—was demanded formally at the bank,
and paid over to one of the emissaries of the
band, just as if the matter had been an ordinary
commercial transaction.

It is absurd to speak of government where such
atrocities exist unpunished. Proprietors in the
south would no more presume to visit their
estates than they would undertake an excursion
among the Scioux or the Mandans. Only to the
extent of a few leagues outside the capital, can
safety be said to exist; and yet in the face of
all this, we are gravely told that the brigands in
the Neapolitan provinces are not over four hundred
in number, and that even these are "as deficient
in arms as in courage, and too