The “Government” was, in fact, very little else than an organised conspiracy against the spread of all civilisation. Its efforts were directed to keeping the people in a degraded ignorance—the slaves of priestly superstition, thinking little of the present and utterly regardless about the future. The Neapolitan temperament was well suited for such a system. Caring wonderfully little how life was sustained, so that no labour was exacted for its maintenance,—light-hearted, even to recklessness—indifferent to almost all privations,—such a people were neither subject to the same fears nor stirred by the same hopes as the Northern Italian. They asked, in fact, for little beyond the permission to exist. Discontent, in its political significance, had no place among them; they had never heard of any better liberty than idleness, and if they had, they could not have prized it. With natural acuteness, however, they saw the corruption that surrounded them—how the minister took bribes from the contractor, and how the contractor cheated the State—how the customs officer was bribed by the smuggler, and how the first merchants of the capital filled their warehouses with contraband goods. They saw that no man’s integrity ever interfered to his disadvantage, but that self-interest was the mainspring of every action; and could a people so acute to learn be slow to profit by the lesson they acquired? Out of this system of terror, for it was and is a system, grew two institutions in Southern Italy—Brigandage and the Camorra. The former of these asserted its influence over the country at large; the latter, which was an “organised blackmail,” limited its operations to towns and cities. Brigandage is no new pestilence in Italy; it has existed for centuries. From the character of the country, so difficult to travel and so interlaced with cross paths only known to the inhabitants, all pursuit of these robbers has been rendered difficult; but besides this, another and far greater obstacle has presented itself in the sympathy of the peasantry, who, partly from affection and partly from fear, have always taken part with the brigands to protect or to conceal them. The same disposition of the country people to side with those who break the law that we see every day in Ireland, is recognisable here. Like the Irish, the lower Italians have never regarded the law but as a harsh and cruel tyranny. They only know it in its severity and in its penalties—they have never had recourse to it for protection or defence; it has never been to them a barrier against the exactions of the great man, or the unjust pressure of the powerful man; they have felt it in its moods of vengeance, and never in its moments of commiseration. Elevated above their fellows by a certain wild and savage chivalry, the brigands have long exercised a terror over the people of the South. Their lives were full of marvellous adventures, of terrible