So much for the severity of penal justice.  You would laugh if I were to speak of its leniency.  The Duke Sforza Cesarini murders one of his servants for some act of personal disrespect.  For example’s sake, the Pope condemns him to a month’s retirement in a convent.

Ah! if any sacrilegious hand were laid upon the holy ark; if a priest were to be slain, a Cardinal only threatened, then would there be neither asylum, nor galleys, nor clemency, nor delay.  Thirty years ago the murderer of a priest was hewn in pieces in the Piazza del Popolo.  More recently, as we have seen, the idiot who brandished his fork in the face of Cardinal Antonelli, was beheaded.

It is with highway robbery as with murder.  I am induced to believe that the Pontifical court would not wage a very fierce war with the brigands, if those gentry undertook to respect its money and despatches.  The occasional stopping of a few travellers, the clearing out of a carriage, and even the pillaging a country house, are neither religious nor political scourges.  The brigands are not likely to scale either Heaven or the Vatican.

Thus there is still good business to be done in this line, and particularly beyond the Apennines, in those provinces which Austria has disarmed and does not protect.  The tribunal of Bologna faithfully described the state of the country in a sentence of the 16th of June, 1856.

“Of late years this province has been afflicted by innumerable crimes of all sorts:  robbery, pillage, attacks upon houses, have occurred at all hours, and in all places.  The numbers of the malefactors have been constantly increasing, as has their audacity, encouraged by impunity.”

Nothing is changed since the tribunal of Bologna spoke so forcibly.  Stories, as improbable as they are true, are daily related in the country.  The illustrious Passatore, who seized the entire population of Forlimpopoli in the theatre, has left successors.  The audacious brigands who robbed a diligence in the very streets of Bologna, a few paces from the Austrian barracks, have not yet wholly disappeared.  In the course of a tour of some weeks on the shores of the Adriatic, I heard more than one disquieting report.  Near Rimini the house of a landed proprietor was besieged by a little army.  In one place, all the inmates of the goal walked off, arm-in-arm with the turnkeys; in another a diligence came to grief just outside the walls of a city.  If any particular district was allowed to live in peace, it was because the inhabitants subscribed and paid a ransom to the brigands.  Five times a week I used to meet the pontifical courier, escorted by an omnibus full of gendarmes, a sight which made me shrewdly suspect the country was not quite safe.

But if the Government is too weak or too careless to undertake an expedition against brigandage, and to purge the country thoroughly, it sometimes avenges its insulted authority and its stolen money.  When by chance the Judges of Instruction are sent into the field, they do not trifle with their work.  Not only do they press the prisoners to confess their crimes, but they press them in a thumbscrew!  The tribunal of Bologna confessed this fact, with compunction, in 1856, alluding to the measures employed as violenti e feroci.