Or you may enter into the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine and find a throng of evil-faced men and women worshipping at the shrines and calling for the benediction of the Holy Trinity upon their criminal enterprises. It is said that sometimes they hang votive offerings of knives and daggers upon the altars, and religiously give Heaven its share out of the proceeds of their crimes, much as some of our own kings of finance and merchant princes, after a lifetime of fraud and violation of law, will seek to salve their consciences and buy an entrance to Paradise by founding a surgical hospital or endowing a chair of moral philosophy. But until, by chance, you meet a Camorrist funeral, you will have no conception of the real horror of the Camorra, with its procession of human parasites with their blinking eyes, their shuffling gait, their artificial sores and deformities, all crawling from their holes to shamble in the trail of the hearse that carries a famous _basista_, a _capo paranze_, or a _capo in testa_ to his grave. It is undoubtedly a fact that ease of living, which generates indolence, induces moral laxity, and a society composed in part of a hundred thousand homeless people, so poor that a few soldi represent a feast or a festival, who sleep in alleys, on the wharves, in the shrubbery of parks, or wherever night finds them, is a fertile recruiting ground for criminals. The poverty of the scum of Naples passes conception. Air and sky, climate and temperature, combine to induce a vagabondage which inevitably is hostile to authority. The strong bully the weak; the man tyrannizes the woman; the _padrone_ easily finds a ragged crew eager to do his bidding for a plate of macaroni and a flask of unspeakable wine; a well-dressed scoundrel becomes a demi-god by simple virtue of his clothes and paste-diamond scarf-pin; the thief that successfully evades the law is a hero; and the crook who stands in with the police is a politician and a diplomat. The existence of the Camorra in its broad sense turns, not on the vigor of the government or the honesty of the local functionaries, so much as on the conditions of the society in which it is to be found. Such is a glimpse of the Camorra, past and present, which, with its secret relations to the police, its terrors for the superstitious and timid, its attraction for the weak and evil-minded, its value to the politicians, its appeal to the natural hatred of the southern Italian for law and government, will continue so long as social conditions in Naples remain the same—until reform displaces indifference and incapacity, and education[12] and religion effectively unite to lift the Neapolitans out of the stew of their own grease. This is the sociological key to the Camorra, for _camorra_ means nothing but moral delinquency, and moral delinquency is always the companion of ignorance, superstition, and poverty. These last are the three bad angels of southern Italy.