wished to do so.  Who was to feed and guard them?  Now, as subsequently, he bade the disbanded troops go where they listed, undertaking to send to Naples by sea as many as desired to go there.  About a thousand accepted; the rest dispersed, forming the first nucleus of the semi-political and wholly dastardly brigandage which was later to become the scourge of Southern Italy.  Their earliest exploit was the savage murder of General Briganti, whom they called a traitor, after the fashion of cowards.  This happened at Mileto on the 25th of August, when Briganti was on his way to join General Ghio, who had concentrated 12,000 men on the town of Monteleone.  Garibaldi, whose sound principle it was to dispose of his enemies one by one as they cropped up, prepared to attack Ghio with his whole available forces, but he was spared the trouble.  He came, he saw, and he had no need of conquering, for the soldiers of that bad thing that had been Bourbon despotism in the Italian south vanished before his path more quickly than the mists of the morning before the sun.  No grounds that will bear scrutiny have ever been adduced for the reactionary explanation of the marvel:  to wit, that the Neapolitan generals were bribed.  By Cavour?  The game would have been too risky.  By ‘English bank-notes,’ that useful factor in European politics that has every pleasing quality except reality?  It is not apparent how the corruptibility of the generals gives a better complexion to the matter, but the writers on the subject who are favourable to Francis II. seem to think that it does.  Panic-stricken these helpless Neapolitan officers may deserve to be called, but they were not bought.  And they had cause for panic with troops of whose untrustworthiness they held the clearest proofs, and with the country up in arms against them; for a few days after the taking of Reggio this was the case, and this was by far the greatest miracle operated by Garibaldi.  The populations shook off their apathy, and not in Calabria only but in the Puglie, the Basilicata, the Abruzzi, there was a sudden awakening as from a too long sleep.  When Garibaldi got to Monteleone he found that Ghio had evacuated the town.  He pursued him to Soveria, where, on the 30th of August, the 12,000 men laid down their arms.  A few days later, another officer, General Caldarelli, capitulated with 4000 men.  Garibaldi’s onward march was a perpetual fete; everywhere he was received with frantic demonstrations of delight.  Still there was one point between himself and the capital which might reasonably cause him some anxiety.  There were 30,000 men massed near Salerno, in positions of immense natural strength, where they ought to have been able to stop the advance of an army twice the size of Garibaldi’s.  How this obstacle was removed is far more suggestive of a scene in a comic opera than of a page in history.  Colonel Peard, ‘Garibaldi’s Englishman,’ went in advance of the army to Eboli, where he was mistaken, as commonly happened, for his chief.