which not all the crimes and follies of the two Ferdinands and the first Francis had succeeded in evoking.  How many bright lives, full of promise, were lost in that warfare which even the sacred name of duty could not save from being ungrateful and inglorious!  Italians who have lost their children in their country’s battles have never been heard to complain; nowhere was the seemliness of death for native land better understood than it has been in the Italy of this century, but to lose son or brother in a brigand ambush by the hand of an escaped galley-slave—­this was hard.  The thrust was sharpened by the knowledge that the fomenter of the mischief was dwelling securely in the heart of Italy, the guest of the Head of the Church.  From Rome came money and instructions; from Rome, whether with or without the cognizance of the authorities, came recruits.  The Roman frontier afforded a means of escape for all who could reach it, however red their hands were with blood.  What further evidence was needed of the impossibility of an indefinite duration of this state within a state?

King Francis held back at first, but his uncle, the Count of Trapani, who openly abetted the brigand partisans, drew him more and more into collusion with them and their works.  The Belgian ecclesiastic, Mgr. de Merode, who had then an influence at the Vatican not possessed even by Antonelli, looked, unless he was much belied, with a very kind eye upon the new defenders of throne and altar.  Efforts have been made to represent the war as one carried on by loyal peasants.  No one denies that every peasants’ war must assume, more or less, an aspect of brigandage; nevertheless there have been righteous and patriotic peasants’ wars, such as that of the Klephts in Greece.  The question is, Whether the political brigandage in South Italy had any real affinity with the wars of the Klephts, or even of the Carlists?  And the answer must be a negative.

The partisan chiefs in the kingdom of Naples were brigands, pure and simple, most of whom had either been long wanted by the police, or had already suffered in prison for their crimes.  They organised their troops on the strict principles of brigand bands, and proposed to them the same object:  pillage.  ‘Lieut-General’ Chiavone who had a mania for imitating Garibaldi, was the least bad among them; unlike his prototype, he did not like being under fire, but neither did he care to spill innocent blood.  What, however, can be said for Pilone, ‘commander of His Majesty’s forces’ on Vesuvius; for Ninco Nanco, Bianco dei Bianchi, Tardio, Palma; for Carusso, who cut the throats of thirteen out of fourteen labourers and told the one left to go and tell the tale; for the brothers La Gala, who roasted and ate a priest?  It was said that no horror committed during the Indian Mutiny was here without a parallel.