While the report of General Lamarmora shows that no disparity of force, not even ninety thousand to four hundred, is sufficient to deal with the Neapolitan Brigandage, it affects to explain why. In fact, the report is one insinuated accusation of the French, who by their occupation of Rome supply arms and money to the reactionists, and feed a movement which, if left to its own resources, must perish of inanition. The report shrinks from the avowal that the whole inhabitants of two great provinces are friends and sympathisers with the brigands; that however little political reasons enter into the issue, the priests have contrived to give a political colouring to the struggle, and by contrasting the immunities of the past with the severities of the present, have made the peasant believe that the rule of the Bourbon was more favourable to him than that of the House of Savoy. It is not merely in the conscription for the regular army that the pressure is felt, but in the very enrolment for the National Guard, which, liable as it is to being “mobilised,” exacts all the services and all the privations of soldiering. So much as 3000 francs have been paid for a substitute, rather than serve in a force which compels the shopkeeper to desert his business or the farmer his fields for eight or ten months of the year! If we have heard much of the personal unpopularity of the Piedmontese in Southern Italy, it is a theme which cannot be exaggerated. There is not, perhaps, throughout Europe a people who have less in common than the sub-Alpine and the South Italian. If Garibaldi and his followers came as liberators, the Piedmontese entered Naples as conquerors. The Garibaldians won all the suffrages of a people who loved their free-and-easy manners, their indiscipline, that “disinvoltura” so dear to the Italian heart;—their very rags had a charm for them. The rigid, stiff, unbending Piedmontese, almost unintelligible in speech and repulsive in look, were the very reverse of all this. Naples was gay, animated, and happy under the sway of the same lawless band of red-shirted adventurers, but she felt crushed and trampled down by the regular legions of the King.