Terrorism, in one shape or other, is the bane of Italy. By a system of
organised terrorism the princes of Italy have governed their states, and
by means of terror the peoples have replied to their rulers. From the
wide diffusion of this sentiment throughout the nation, secret societies
took their root in the land, and men became banded together for attack,
protection, resistance, or revenge. There was none so high in character
or so elevated by station that he might not be denounced; there was not
one so degraded that he might not be associated with the secret acts of
the Government. The only idea of rule was through the instrumentality of
a secret police. All were suspected—all were watched. The report of the
secretary was entertained as to the character and the acts of the
minister, and the secretary was himself under the close inspection of
some underling in his office. The work of the State went on under the
assumption that no man was honest; and it was really curious to see how
all the complicated questions of a Government could be dealt with by a
system whose first principle was that there was no truth anywhere. It
impaired nothing of a man’s position or influence that he was known to
take bribes. Corruption was the rule, from the star-covered courtier
beside the throne, down to the half-naked lazzarone on the Mole. “Take
care of your pockets, gentlemen, there’s a minister coming,” was the
decorous pleasantry of King Ferdinand at one of his last receptions, and
the speech had a significance which all could appreciate. It was
especially in Southern Italy that this corruption prevailed the most.
Amongst a race long enervated and demoralised, the work of Government
went easily on by means of such agency. The great efforts of the rulers
were directed, not to repress crimes against property and offences
against society, but to meet political disaffection and discontent. The
noted thief would be leniently dealt with, while the Liberal journalist
would be sentenced to the ergastolo. Assassination and robbery went on
increasing, and none seemed to feel terrified; while the imprisonment of
one man for some expression of Liberal opinions, or some half-implied
censure of the Government, was sure to strike terror into many a heart.
The “Government” was, in fact, very little else than an organised
conspiracy against the spread of all civilisation. Its efforts were
directed to keeping the people in a degraded ignorance—the slaves of
priestly superstition, thinking little of the present and utterly
regardless about the future. The Neapolitan temperament was well suited
for such a system. Caring wonderfully little how life was sustained, so
that no labour was exacted for its maintenance,—light-hearted, even to
recklessness—indifferent to almost all privations,—such a people were
neither subject to the same fears nor stirred by the same hopes as the
Northern Italian. They asked, in fact, for little beyond the permission
to exist. Discontent, in its political significance, had no place among
them; they had never heard of any better liberty than idleness, and if
they had, they could not have prized it. With natural acuteness,
however, they saw the corruption that surrounded them—how the minister
took bribes from the contractor, and how the contractor cheated the
State—how the customs officer was bribed by the smuggler, and how the
first merchants of the capital filled their warehouses with contraband
goods. They saw that no man’s integrity ever interfered to his
disadvantage, but that self-interest was the mainspring of every action;
and could a people so acute to learn be slow to profit by the lesson
they acquired? Out of this system of terror, for it was and is a system,
grew two institutions in Southern Italy—Brigandage and the Camorra. The
former of these asserted its influence over the country at large; the
latter, which was an “organised blackmail,” limited its operations to
towns and cities. Brigandage is no new pestilence in Italy; it has
existed for centuries. From the character of the country, so difficult
to travel and so interlaced with cross paths only known to the
inhabitants, all pursuit of these robbers has been rendered difficult;
but besides this, another and far greater obstacle has presented itself
in the sympathy of the peasantry, who, partly from affection and partly
from fear, have always taken part with the brigands to protect or to
conceal them. The same disposition of the country people to side with
those who break the law that we see every day in Ireland, is
recognisable here. Like the Irish, the lower Italians have never
regarded the law but as a harsh and cruel tyranny. They only know it in
its severity and in its penalties—they have never had recourse to it for
protection or defence; it has never been to them a barrier against the
exactions of the great man, or the unjust pressure of the powerful man;
they have felt it in its moods of vengeance, and never in its moments of
commiseration. Elevated above their fellows by a certain wild and savage
chivalry, the brigands have long exercised a terror over the people of
the South. Their lives were full of marvellous adventures, of terrible
incidents and hairbreadth escapes, sure to excite interest in the minds
of an uneducated and imaginative race, who grew to regard the relators
in the light of heroes. Nor did the Church itself scruple to accept the
ill-gotten gains of the highwayman: and the costly robe of the Virgin,
and the rich gems that decked her shrine, have often and often displayed
the spoils that have been torn from the luckless traveller.
In this mixture of religious superstition with a defiance of all human
law, we see again a resemblance between the Italian and the Irishman,
whose traits have indeed an almost unerring similarity in everything.
That “wild justice” of which the great Irish rhetorician once spoke, is
the rule of each. Assuming that society has formed a pact against them,
they have taken up arms in their own defence; and whether it be the
landlord or the traveller, it matters little who shall pay the penalty.
It is next to impossible to deal with crime where the general sentiment
favours the criminal. The boasted immunity of the policeman in England
is but another name for the ascendancy of the law. How comes it
otherwise that one man armed with a mere truncheon dares to arrest a
thief in the midst of his accomplices and associates, while we see in
Italy ninety thousand soldiers unable to repress Brigandage in two
provinces of the South, where the number of the brigands is set down as
four hundred? Such in substance is the report lately furnished to the
Chamber of Deputies at Turin by the order of General Lamarmora. The
forces for the repression of Brigandage amount to ninety thousand
well-armed and well-disciplined soldiers, and the enemy are stated as
four hundred half-naked and scarcely armed wretches, as destitute of
courage as of food. Such is the picture given of them; and we are left
in utter astonishment to guess why, with such a disparity of numbers,
the curse of Brigandage should yet be known in the land.
Why cannot ninety thousand deal with four hundred, even were the cause
at issue less one of equity and justice? If, as has often been asserted,
the Brigandage has been fed from Rome—if the gold of Francis II. and the
blessing of the Pope go with those who cross the frontier to maintain
the disturbance in Southern Italy—what should be easier, with such a
superiority of numbers, than to cut off the communication? With sixty
thousand men a cordon could be drawn from the Mediterranean to the
Adriatic in which each sentinel could hail his neighbour. Were the
difficulty to lie here, could it not be met at once? It was declared a
few weeks back by Mr Odo Russell, that a whole regiment, armed and
clothed in some resemblance to French soldiers, passed over to the
south; and we are lost in amazement why such resources should be
available in the face of an army greater than Wellington ever led in
Spain or conquered with at Waterloo. To understand a problem so
difficult, it is first of all necessary to bear in mind that this same
Brigandage is neither what the friends of the Bourbons nor what the
advocates of united Italy have pronounced it. If the Basilicata and the
Capitanata are very far from being La Vendée, they are also unlike what
the friends of Piedmontism would declare—countries well affected to the
House of Savoy under the temporary dominion of a lawless and bloody
tyranny from which they are utterly powerless to free themselves. If
Brigandage is not in its essence a movement of the reactionists, it has
nevertheless been seized upon by them to prosecute their plans and
favour their designs. To render the Neapolitan States ungovernable—to
exhibit to the eyes of Europe a vast country in a state of
disorganisation, where the most frightful cruelties are daily
practised—where horrors that even war is free from are hourly
perpetrated—was a stroke of policy of which the friends of the late
dynasty were not slow to avail themselves. By this they could contrast
the rule of the present Government with that of the former ones; and
while the press of Europe still rang with the cruelties of the Bourbons,
they could ask, Where is the happy change that you speak of? Is it in
the proclamations of General Pinelli—the burning of villages, and the
indiscriminate slaughter of their inhabitants? Do the edicts which
forbid a peasant to carry more than one meal to his daily labour, tell
of a more enlightened rule? Do the proclamations against being found a
mile distant from home, savour of liberty? Are the paragraphs we daily
read in the Government papers, where the band of this or that brigand
chief has been captured or shot, the only evidences to be shown of a
spirit which moves Italians to desire a united nation? You tell us of
your superior enlightenment and cultivation, say the Bourbonists, and
the world at large listens favourably to your claims. But why, if it be
true, have the last two years counted more massacres than the forty
which have preceded them? Why are thousands wandering homeless and
shelterless through the mountains, while the ruins of their dwellings
are yet smoking from the ruthless depredations of your soldiery? If
Brigandage numbers but four hundred followers, why are such wholesale
cruelties resorted to? The simple fact is this: the Brigandage of
Southern Italy is not a question of four hundred, or four thousand, or
four hundred thousand followers, but of a whole people utterly
brutalised and demoralised, who, whatever peril they attach to crime,
attach no shame or disgrace to it. The labourers on one of the Southern
Italian lines almost to a man disappeared from work, and on their return
to it, some days after, frankly confessed they had spent the interval
with the brigands. They were not robbers by profession nor from habit;
but they saw no ignominy in lending themselves to an incidental massacre
and bloodshed. The National Guards of the different villages, and the
Syndics themselves, are frequently charged with a want of energy and
determination; but the truth is, these very people are the very support
and mainspring of Brigandage. The brigands are the brothers, the sons,
or the cousins of those who affect to move against them. So far from
feeling the Piedmontese horror of the brigand, these men are rather
irritated by the discipline that bands them against him. They have none
of that military ardour which makes the Northern Italian proud of being
a soldier. Their blood has not been stirred by seeing the foreigner the
master of their capital cities; their pride has not been outraged by the
presence of the hated Croat or the rude Bohemian at their gates. To
_them_ the call to arms has been anything but a matter of vain glory.
Besides this, there seems in the unrelenting pursuit of the Brigandage a
something that savours of the hate of the North for the South. Under the
Bourbons the brigand met a very different measure, as he did under the
French rule, and in the time of Murat. Men of the most atrocious lives,
stained with many and cruel murders, were admitted to treat with the
Government, and the negotiations were carried on as formally as between
equals. When a Capo Briganti desired to abandon his lawless and perilous
life, he had but to intimate his wish to some one in authority. His full
conditions might not at first or all be acceded to, but he was sure to
be met with every facility for his wish; and in more than one case was
such a man employed in a situation of trust by the State; and there yet
lives one, Geosaphat Talarico, who has for years enjoyed a Government
pension as the reward of his submission and reformation.
Under the old Bourbon rule, all might be pardoned, except an offence
against the throne. To the political criminal alone no grace could be
extended. The people saw this, and were not slow to apply the lesson.
Let it also be borne in mind, that the brigand himself often met a very
different appreciation from those who knew him personally to that he
received at the hands of the State. The assassin denounced in wordy
proclamations, and for whose head a price was offered, was in his native
village a “gran’ Galantuomo,” who had done scores of fine and generous
actions.
To revolutionise feeling in such a matter is not an easy task. Let any
one, for instance, fashion to his mind how he would proceed to turn the
sympathies of the Irish peasant against the Rockite and in favour of the
landlord, to hunt down the criminal and to favour his victim. It would
be a similar task to endeavour to dispose the peasant of the Abruzzi to
look unfavourably on Brigandage. Brigandage was, in fact, but another
exercise of that terrorism which they saw universally around them. Was
the Capo Briganti more cruel than the tax-gatherer? was he not often
more merciful? and did he ever press upon the poor? Were not his
exactions solely from the rich? Was he not generous, too, when he was
full-handed? How many a benevolent action could be recorded to his
credit! If this great Government, which talked so largely of its
enlightenment, really wished to benefit the people, why did it not
lighten the imposts, cheapen bread, and diminish the conscription?
instead of which we had the taxes quadrupled, food at famine prices, and
the levies for the services more oppressive than ever. They denounced
Brigandage; but there were evils far worse than Brigandage, which, after
all, only pressed a little heavily on the rich, and took from them what
they could spare well and easily.
It is thus the Neapolitan reasons and speaks of that pestilence which is
now eating like a cancer into the very heart of his country, and taxing
the last energy of her wisest and best to meet with success. At this
moment Southern Italy is no more under the control of the Italian
Government than are the States of the Confederacy under the sway of
President Lincoln, and all the powerful energies of the North are
ineffectual to eradicate a disease which is not on the surface, but in
the very heart of the people.
The Italian Brigand, like the Irish Rockite, is by no means of necessity
the most depraved or most wicked of his native village. Perhaps his
fearlessness is his strongest characteristic. He is in other respects
pretty much like those around him. He has no great respect for laws,
which he has often seen very corruptly administered. He has been
familiar with perjury all his life. He has never seen the rites of the
Church denied to the blackest criminals, and he has come to believe
that, except in the accidents of station, men are almost alike, and the
great difference is, that the filchings of the minister are less
personally hazardous than the spoils of the highwayman.
That these men take pay and accept service from the Bourbonist is easy
enough to conceive. To cry Viva Francesco Secondo, when they stop the
diligence or pillage a farmhouse, is no difficult task; but that they
are in any sense followers, or care for the King or his cause, is
utterly and ridiculously untrue. The reactionists affect to believe so,
for it gives them the pretext of a party. The French like to believe so,
for it proclaims, what the press continues unceasingly to assert, that
the North has no footing in the South, and that no sympathy ever has
existed, or ever will exist, between peoples so totally and essentially
dissimilar.
The Piedmontese, too, unwilling to own that the event they have so
ineffectually struggled against has not all the force of a great
political scheme, declare that the Brigandage is fed from Rome, and
would not have a day’s existence, if the ex-King were compelled to leave
that capital, and the favour of the Papal Court withdrawn from its
support.
That the present rulers of Italy pursue the brigands with an energy, and
punish them with a severity never practised before, is cause even to
prefer the reign of the Bourbons to that of the Piedmontese. There is no
need for them to enter upon the difficult questions of freedom and
individual liberty, to contrast the rights enjoyed under one government
with those available under another. It is quite sufficient that they see
what was once tolerated will no longer be endured, and that the robber
chief who once gave the law to the district he lived in is now hunted
down with the remorseless severity that will only be satisfied with his
extermination.
It may be asked, How could the people feel any sympathy for a system
from which they were such heavy sufferers, or look unfavourably on those
who came to rid them of the infliction? The answer is, that long use and
habit, a sense of terror ingrained in their natures, and, not less than
these, a reliance in the protective power of the brigand, disposed the
peasant to prefer his rule to that of the more unswerving discipline of
the State. The brigand was at least one of his class, if not of his own
kindred. He knew and could feel for the peculiar hardships which pressed
upon the poor man. If he took from the proud man, he spared the humble
one; and, lastly, he possessed the charm which personal daring and
indifference to danger never fail to exercise over the minds of the
masses.
Let us again look to Ireland, to see how warmly the sympathies of the
peasant follow those who assume to arraign the laws of the State, and
establish a wild justice of their own—how naturally they favour them,
with what devotion they will screen them, and at what personal peril
they will protect them; and if we have to confess that centuries have
seen us vainly struggling with the secret machinery which sustains crime
amongst ourselves, let us be honest enough to spare our reproaches to
those who have not yet suppressed brigandage in Southern Italy. It is
not, in fact, with the armed and mounted robber that the State is at
issue, but with a civilisation which has created him. He is not the
disease, he is only one of its symptoms; and to effect a cure of the
malady the remedies must go deeper.
Nor is the question an easy one to resolve; for though Garibaldi with a
few followers sufficed to overthrow a dynasty, the whole force of a
mighty army, backed by a powerful public opinion, has not succeeded in
firmly establishing a successor.
Piedmont is not loved in the South. There is not a trait in the
Piedmontese character which has not its antitype in the Neapolitan; and
they whose object it was to exhibit the sub-Alpine Italian in the most
unfavourable colours, could not lack opportunity to do so. The
severities practised towards the brigands—which were not always, nor
could they be, exercised with discrimination—furnished ample occasion
for these attacks. Many of these assumed a Garibaldian, or even
Mazzinian tone, and affected indignation at cruelties of which the
people—the _caro popolo_—were always the victims. One of the chief
brigands, Chiavone, pretended to imitate Joseph Garibaldi; and in dress,
costume, and a certain bold, frank manner, assumed to represent the
great popular leader. Amongst his followers he counted Frenchmen,
Spaniards, Germans, Belgians, and, it is said, Irish. One of these
foreigners was a man of high rank and ancient lineage, Count Alfred de
Trazégnies—a near relative of M. de Merode’s: he was taken prisoner and
shot. Another was the famous Borjès, from whom was taken the
instructions given him by General Clary, and, more interesting still, a
journal written in his own hand.
Though his “instructions” are full of grandiloquent descriptions of
battalions and squadrons and batteries—horse, foot, and dragoons—with
exact directions given as to the promotions, the staff appointments, the
commissariat,—let us hear how he himself describes the first steps of
his enterprise.
Having with great difficulty succeeded in obtaining about twenty muskets
at Malta, he saw himself in some embarrassment as to getting away from
the island, where intimations as to his project were already about. He
succeeded, however, in getting on board of a small coasting vessel with
his officers, and landed after a two days’ voyage at Brancaleone. “The
shore,” he says, “was totally deserted, no trace of habitation to be
seen; and, directed at last by the glimmer of a solitary light, we came
upon the hut of a shepherd, who received us kindly and hospitably. The
next day he guided us to the little town of Precacore, where we were met
by the curate, and amidst cries of Viva Francesco Secondo conducted into
the Piazza. I was cheered by this,” says he, “and deemed it a lucky
augury. About twenty peasants enrolled themselves here under my command,
and we moved on to Caraffa, where I was told a friendly welcome awaited
me. On passing, however, near St Agata, a company of the mobilised
National Guard, about sixty in number, opened a sharp fire on us, and my
new recruits took to their heels, leaving me alone with my officers.
Sustained, however, by a strong position, we held our own for an hour
and a half, after which a deputation from Caraffa came to offer me the
hospitality of that city—an offer I was fortunate enough to refuse, for
another and far more serious ambuscade was prepared for me there.”
At Cirella he came up with a Bourbon partisan named Mittica, with one
hundred and twenty men under him, but who refused to accept him as a
leader, and in fact treated him and his officers as spies and prisoners.
After many dangers and much suffering, deserted by Mittica and his band,
Borjès found himself in Tovre, “where an old soldier of the 3d
Cacciatori offered to accompany me—the only follower I have met with up
to this day.”
His narrative, simply and unaffectedly written, is one of the most
extraordinary records of suffering, privation, and peril, and at the
same time of devotion to his enterprise and zeal in the cause of the
ex-King. He firmly believes that the mass of the people are “royalist,”
that he only needs five hundred men, well armed and disposed to obey
him, to “overthrow the revolution” and restore the sovereign.
He met his death like a brave man. He was surprised with some of his
followers at a farmhouse in the very last village before crossing the
Roman frontier, to which he was hastening. A young Piedmontese Major,
Franchini, with a detachment of Bersaglieri and some mounted gendarmes,
surrounded the house and at last set fire to it, on which Borjès
surrendered and was immediately shot. “I was on my way to tell the
King,” said he with his last words, “that he has nothing but cowards and
scoundrels to defend him—that Crocco is a villain and Langlais a fool.”
Then turning to the Major he added, “Thank fortune for it that I did not
start one hour earlier this morning, for I should have gained the Roman
frontier, and you would have heard more of me.”
The Piedmontese have been severely blamed for the execution of Borjès.
Indeed he has found no less an advocate than Victor Hugo, who would not
consent to have him ranked with Crocco, Ninco Nancho, and the rest, mere
brigands and robbers on the highway. That the popular sentiment of Italy
was not disposed in his favour may be assumed from the indignation felt
by all the villages of the frontier when General Lamarmora consented
that the body of Borjès should be exhumed and conveyed to Rome. There is
little doubt, however, that his being a Spaniard influenced this
feeling. In no country of Europe is the foreigner regarded with the same
jealousy and distrust.
While the report of General Lamarmora shows that no disparity of force,
not even ninety thousand to four hundred, is sufficient to deal with the
Neapolitan Brigandage, it affects to explain why. In fact, the report is
one insinuated accusation of the French, who by their occupation of Rome
supply arms and money to the reactionists, and feed a movement which, if
left to its own resources, must perish of inanition. The report shrinks
from the avowal that the whole inhabitants of two great provinces are
friends and sympathisers with the brigands; that however little
political reasons enter into the issue, the priests have contrived to
give a political colouring to the struggle, and by contrasting the
immunities of the past with the severities of the present, have made the
peasant believe that the rule of the Bourbon was more favourable to him
than that of the House of Savoy. It is not merely in the conscription
for the regular army that the pressure is felt, but in the very
enrolment for the National Guard, which, liable as it is to being
“mobilised,” exacts all the services and all the privations of
soldiering. So much as 3000 francs have been paid for a substitute,
rather than serve in a force which compels the shopkeeper to desert his
business or the farmer his fields for eight or ten months of the year!
If we have heard much of the personal unpopularity of the Piedmontese in
Southern Italy, it is a theme which cannot be exaggerated. There is not,
perhaps, throughout Europe a people who have less in common than the
sub-Alpine and the South Italian. If Garibaldi and his followers came as
liberators, the Piedmontese entered Naples as conquerors. The
Garibaldians won all the suffrages of a people who loved their
free-and-easy manners, their indiscipline, that “disinvoltura” so dear
to the Italian heart;—their very rags had a charm for them. The rigid,
stiff, unbending Piedmontese, almost unintelligible in speech and
repulsive in look, were the very reverse of all this. Naples was gay,
animated, and happy under the sway of the same lawless band of
red-shirted adventurers, but she felt crushed and trampled down by the
regular legions of the King.
In the great offices of the State, and in the Prefectures, it was easy
enough for the Piedmontese to appoint their own partisans; but how do
this throughout the rural districts, the small towns, and the villages?
In these the choice lay between a Royalist—that is, a Bourbonist—and a
Mazzinian. If you would not accept a follower of the late King, you must
take one who disowned sympathies with all royalty. The Syndics and
“Maires” of the smaller cities have been almost to a man the enemies of
the Northern Italian. It is through these all the difficulties of
propagating “union” sentiments have been experienced. It is by their
lukewarmness, if not something worse, that Brigandage is able still to
hold its ground, not so much because they are well affected to the
Bourbons, or that they cherish sentiments of Mazzinianism, but simply
that they disliked Northern Italy, nor could any rule be so distasteful
to them as that which came from that quarter. That the French occupation
of Rome has tended to maintain and support Brigandage cannot for a
moment be disputed. The policy of France, from the very hour of the
treaty of Villafranca, has been to perpetuate the difficulties of
Italian rule—to exhibit the country in a state of permanent disorder,
and the people unquiet, dissatisfied, and unruly—to reduce the peninsula
to that condition, in fact, in which not only would the occupation of
Rome be treated as a measure of security to Europe at large, but the
graver question urged whether a more extended occupation of territory
might not be practicable and possible.
If Garibaldi’s expedition had not terminated so abruptly at Aspromonte,
it is well known the French would have occupied Naples. When they would
have left it again, it is not so easy to say. It is clear enough then to
see, how little soever the French may like that Brigandage that now
devastates the South, they are not averse to the distress and trouble it
occasions to the Italian Government, all whose ambitions have been
assumed as so many menaces against France. Had you been content with the
territory we won for you—had you remained satisfied with a kingdom of
six millions, who spoke your own language, inherited your own
traditions, and enjoyed your own sympathies, you might have had peace
and prosperity, say the oracles of the Tuileries; but you would be a
great nation, and you are paying the penalty. “This comes of listening
to England, who never aided you, instead of trusting to us who shed our
blood in your cause.”
France never has consented to a united Italy; whether she may yet do so
is, however improbable, still possible; one thing is, however,
clear—until she does give this consent, not in mere diplomatic
correspondence, but in heart and wish, the southern provinces of the
peninsula will remain unconquered territories, requiring the presence of
a large force, and even with that defying the power of the Government to
reduce them to obedience.
Brigandage is but the open expression of a discontent which exists in
every class and every condition in the districts it pervades. It is the
assertion of the Catholic for the Pope, of the Royalist for the Bourbon,
of the Revolutionist against a discipline, and last of all, of the
Southern Italian against being ruled by that Northern race whose
intelligence he despises, and for whose real qualities of manliness he
has neither a measure nor a respect.
One word as to the Camorra before we conclude: and first of all what is
this Camorra of which men talk darkly and in whispers, and whose very
syllables are suppressed while the servants are in the room? The Camorra
is an organised blackmail, which, extending its exactions to every trade
and industry, carries the penalties of resistance to its edicts even to
death.
The Camorra has its agents everywhere. On the Mole, where the boatman
hands over the tenth of the fare the passenger has just paid him—at the
door of the hotel, where the porter counts out his gains and gives over
his tithe—at the great restaurant, at the theatre, at the
gaming-table—some one is sure to present himself as the emissary of this
dreaded society, and in the simple words, “for the Camorra,” indicate a
demand that none have courage to resist.
The jails are, however, the great scenes for the exercise of this
system. There the Camorra reigns supreme. In the old Bourbon days the
whole discipline of the prisons was maintained by the Camorristi, who
demanded from each prisoner as he entered the usual fees of the place.
The oil for the lamp in honour of the Madonna had to be paid for, then
came a sort of fee for initiation, after which came others in the shape
of taxes on the income of the prisoner and his supposed means, with
imposts upon leave to smoke, to drink, or to gamble. His incomings too
were taxed, and a strict account demanded of all his gains, from which
the tenth was rigidly subtracted. To resist the imposts was to provoke a
quarrel, not unfrequently ending fatally; for the Camorristi ruled by
terror, and well knew all the importance of maintaining their
“prestige.”
The revenues of the Camorra, amounting to sums almost incredibly large,
are each week handed over to the treasurer of the district, and
distributed afterwards to the followers of the order by the Capo di
Camorra, according to the rank and services of each, any concealment or
malversation of funds being punished with death. The society itself not
only professes to protect those who belong to it, but to extend its
influence over all who obey its edicts; and thus the poor creature who
sells his fruit at the corner of the street sees his wares under the
safeguard of one of these mysterious figures, who glide about here and
there, half in listlessness, and whose dress may vary from the patched
rags of almost mendicancy to the fashionable attire of a man of rank and
condition.
In the cafés where men sit at chess and dominoes, the Camorrist appears,
and with his well-known whisper demands his toll. In vain to declare
that the play is not for money; it is for the privilege to play at all
that his demand is now made. The newly appointed clerk in a public
office, the secretary to the minister, it is said, have been applied to,
and have not dared to dispute a claim which would be settled otherwise
by the knife.
Recognised by the old police of Naples, tolerated and even employed to
track out the crimes of those who did not belong to the order, the
Camorrists acquired all the force and consideration of an institution.
Men felt no shame at yielding to a terror so widespread; nor would it
have been always safe to speak disparagingly of a sect whose followers
sometimes lounged in royal antechambers as well as sought shelter under
the portico of a church.
It has been more than once asserted that Ferdinand II. was a sworn
member of the order, and that he contributed largely to its funds.
Certain it is the Camorra in his reign performed all the functions of a
secret police, and was the terror of all whose Liberalism made them
suspected by the Government. To the Camorra, too, were always intrusted
those displays of popular enthusiasm by which the King was wont to reply
to the angry remonstrances of French or English envoys. The Camorra
could at a moment’s notice organise a demonstration in honour of royalty
which would make the monarch appear as the loved and cherished father of
his people.
It was, however, by the Liberals themselves the Camorra was first
introduced into political life, and Liberio Romano intrusted the defence
of the capital to these men as the surest safeguard against the
depredations of the disbanded soldiers of the King; and, strange to say,
the hazardous experiment was a perfect success, and for several weeks
Naples had no other protectors than the members of a league who combined
the atrocities of Thuggee with the shameless rapine of the highwayman.
The stern discipline of Piedmont would not, however, condescend to deal
with such agents; and Lamarmora has waged a war, open and avowed,
against the whole system of the Camorra. Hundreds of arrests have been
made, and the jails are crowded with Camorrists; but men declare that
all these measures are in vain—that the magistracy itself is not free
from the taint: and certain it is that the system prevails largely in
the army and navy, and has its followers in what is called the world of
fashion and society.
The Mezzo Galantuomo is the most terrible ingredient in the constitution
of a people. The man who is too bad for society but a little too good
for the gallows, is a large element in this land, and it will require
something more than mere statecraft to deal with him.
A Parliamentary Commission is at present engaged in the investigation of
the whole question of Brigandage, and their “Report” will probably be
before the world in a few days. It is very doubtful, however, if that
world will be made much the wiser by their labours. There is, in fact,
no mystery as to the nature of this pestilence, its source, or its
progress.
It may suit the views of a party to endeavour to connect it with
Bourbonism, but it would be equally true to assert that the
peasant-murderers in Ireland were adherents of the Stuarts! The men who
take to the mountains in the Capitanata are not politicians. They have
no other “cause” at heart than their own subsistence, for which they
would rather provide at the risk of their heads than by the labour of
their hands. All that they know of civilisation is taxation and the
conscription. In these respects the old _régime_ was less severe than
the present; neither the imposts were so heavy, nor the levies so large;
not to add that, under the Bourbons, soldiers led lives of lounging
indolence, and “no one was ever cruel enough to lead them against the
Austrians.”
The Bourbon Government of Naples had many faults, but the Piedmontese
rule has had no successes. There is that of ungeniality in the Northern
temperament that renders even favours at their hands little better than
burdens, and their justice has a smack of severity in it that
wonderfully resembles revenge.
What may be the future fate of Southern Italy it is not easy to say; but
one thing at least is certain, the influence of Piedmont has not
obtained that footing there which promises to make _her_ cause _their_
cause, or _her_ civilisation _their_ civilisation. If the Bourbons
governed badly, their successors do not govern at all!