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