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not have a day’s existence, if the ex-King were compelled to leave that capital, and the favour of the Papal Court withdrawn from its support.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.