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.