There the law is so little confident of its own powers that the accused are herded together in one steel cage, apparently with the idea of preventing attempts at rescue by a public largely sympathetic with organized robbery and assassination, while the witness for the prosecution is secluded in another cage, lest he be torn to pieces by the prisoners or their friends. The pleadings on each side seem to consist largely of denunciations and threats aimed at the other, tears of rage alternate with shrieks of the same origin, and order is only occasionally restored, when the din rises too high, by the curiously gentle expedient of suspending the session of the court. How justice is to be the outcome of proceedings such as these, and thus conducted, may be comprehensible to what is called—with little reason—the Latin mind, but others are lost in amazement. It is all highly interesting, no doubt, but one is no more likely to regret that we do not carry on our trials in this way than he is to be sorry that our criminals are not such important and powerful persons as the members of the Camorra seem to be. Only one fact stands out clearly at Viterbo—the fact that the attack on the banded brigands has been so long delayed that the authority of the law can not now be vindicated without producing a sort of civil war. Which ought to be humiliating for somebody. Only one conclusion could have been reached by the half million readers of this particular editorial, and that—the immense superiority of our own legal procedure and method of handling criminal business over those of Italy. Yet (to examine the statements in this editorial _seriatim_) it is not true that scenes similar to those enacted at Viterbo are unknown in our criminal courts; that the lack of confidence of the authorities in their own power is the cause of the prisoners being confined in court in a steel cage; that the public is “largely sympathetic with organized robbery and assassination”; and that tears and shrieks of rage alternate to create a pandemonium which can be stilled only by adjourning court; and, while there is enough justification in fact to give color to such an editorial, the only extenuation for its exaggeration and the false impression it creates lies in the charitable view that the writer had an equally blind confidence in the sincerity of his resident Italian correspondent and in the latter’s cabled accounts of what was going on. Unfortunately, the reporters at Viterbo have sent in only the most sensational accounts of the proceedings, since, unless their “stuff” is good copy, the expense of collecting and cabling European news deprives it of a market. The press men at Viterbo have given the American editors just what they wanted. Such opportunities occur only once or twice in a lifetime, and they have fully availed themselves of it.