But we are Camorrists—
The devil take the others!
In Italy, when it rains, the man on the street mutters: “Piove! Governo ladro!” (“It rains! Thief of a government!”) Oddly enough, this expression, originally coined by the Fanfulla, an influential journal, to ridicule the opponents of the government, really epitomizes the attitude of the average Italian toward the central authority. It is the vital word spoken in jest. The Italian—and particularly the Italian of the southern peninsula—is against government—any government, all government—on general principles. He and his forefathers went through a grim school, and they have not forgotten.
The Italian, however republican in form his institutions may be, is still the subject of a monarchy, and he has never fully grasped the Anglo-Saxon idea that even a king is subject to the law. In Italy no one thinks of questioning the legality of an arrest. With us, to do so is the first thought that comes. On the Continent, the fact that an act is done by an official, by a man in striped trousers, places it above criticism. No matter how obvious an error may have been committed, one is inevitably met by the placid assertion: “The government makes no mistakes.” Neither has the idea of the sanctity of personal liberty ever been properly developed. There is nohabeas corpus in Italy. Release on bail is legally possible, but difficult of achievement and little availed of. A man’s house is not “his castle.” The law itself is usually complicated and slow in remedial and criminal matters, and justice is apt to be blind unless the right sort of eye doctor—a deputy or a senator—is called in. Bureaucracy has perpetuated the Italian’s inherited distrust of government and distaste for legal process, and drives him still to seek his ends in many cases by influence, bribery, or—the Camorra.
Rarely can we point to a social phenomenon in this country and say: “This is so because of something a hundred years ago.” With us some one has an idea, and presto! we are recalling judges, pulling down idols, “elevating” women to be sheriffs, and playing golf on Sundays. Where are the gods of yesterday? The pulse of the nation leaps at a single click of the Morse code. An injustice in Oklahoma brings a mass meeting together in Carnegie Hall. But the continuance of the Camorra in Italy to-day is directly due to the succession of tyrants who about a century ago allowed the patriots of Naples and Sicily to rot in prison or hung them up on scaffolds in the public squares.
The Bourbon rule in the “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”[5] was one of the most despicable in history. In eleven days in 1793 one hundred and twenty professors, physicians, and priests were executed by the public hangman in Naples. This was a mere foretaste of what was coming. When Napoleon dethroned the Bourbons in 1805 and made his brother Joseph “King of Naples,” there dawned an era of enlightenment and reform which continued when Joseph was succeeded by Joachim Murat in 1808; but the Congress of Vienna in 1815 reinstated the old dynasty and recalled Ferdinand I, who had been lurking in Sardinia, to the throne. Then the horrors began again. A period of retrogression, of wholesale persecutions and executions, followed. Never was there anything like the nightmare of bloody politics which lasted through the reigns of Ferdinand I (1825), of Francis I (1830), of Ferdinand II (1859), and of Francis II, until the entry of Garibaldi into Naples in 1860.
The oppressions of the Bourbons and the struggle of the patriots of Italy for freedom and the Risorgimento stimulated secret organization. No other means to combat tyranny was, in fact, possible. To be known to have liberal ideas meant instant arrest, if not death. Under Ferdinand II there had been over twenty thousand political prisoners actually in prison at one time and thirty thousand moreattendibili, confined in their houses.[6] The governor of Genoa complained to Mazzini’s father because the youth “walked by himself at night, absorbed in thought.” Said he: “We don’t like young people thinking without knowing the subject of their thoughts.” The great society of the Carbonari had provoked the counter-organization of the Calderoni, and had in turn given way to the “New Italy” of Mazzini. It is said on excellent authority that in 1820 there were seventy thousand persons in the city of Naples alone who belonged to secret societies. In this year we first hear of the Camorra by name, and for the next forty years it spread and flourished until it became so powerful that the government of the “Two Sicilies” had perforce to enter into treaty with it and finally (in 1860) to turn over to it the policing of the city of Naples. Indeed, it may be that some such extra-legal organization was a practical necessity if existence were to be tolerable at all.
Lombroso, in the “Growth of Crime,” writes: “When the royal postal officials were in the habit of tampering with correspondence, when the police were bent on arresting the honest patriots and making use of thieves as agents provocateurs, the necessity of things enhanced the value of the Camorra, which could always have a letter or a packet safely conveyed, save you from a dagger thrust in prison, redeem you a stolen article for a fair sum, or, when quarrels and disputes arose, could get these settled on much more equitable terms and less costly than any one else or indeed the ordinary process of the law.”
This was the heyday of the Camorra as an organization of criminals. Later it developed into something more—a political ring under whose leash the back of southern Italy still quivers.
The Neapolitan Camorra had its origin in Spain. The great Cervantes, in “Rinconeto y Contadillo,” has drawn a marvellous picture of a brotherhood of thieves and malefactors who divided their evil profits with the police and clergy. This was “La Garduna”—the mother of the Camorra. As early as 1417 it had rules, customs, and officers identical with those of the Camorra of the nineteenth century, and, like it, flourished in the jails, which were practically under its control. Undoubtedly this organization found its way into Sicily and Naples in the wake of the Spanish occupation of the thirteenth century, and germinated in the loathsome prisons of the period until it was ready to burst forth into open activity under the Bourbons.