The Italian, however republican in form his institutions may be, is still the subject of a monarchy, and he has never fully grasped the Anglo-Saxon idea that even a king is subject to the law. In Italy no one thinks of questioning the legality of an arrest. With us, to do so is the first thought that comes. On the Continent, the fact that an act is done by an _official_, by a man in striped trousers, places it above criticism. No matter how obvious an error may have been committed, one is inevitably met by the placid assertion: “The government makes no mistakes.” Neither has the idea of the sanctity of personal liberty ever been properly developed. There is no _habeas corpus_ in Italy. Release on bail is legally possible, but difficult of achievement and little availed of. A man’s house is not “his castle.” The law itself is usually complicated and slow in remedial and criminal matters, and justice is apt to be blind unless the right sort of eye doctor—a deputy or a senator—is called in. Bureaucracy has perpetuated the Italian’s inherited distrust of government and distaste for legal process, and drives him still to seek his ends in many cases by influence, bribery, or—the Camorra. Rarely can we point to a social phenomenon in this country and say: “This is so because of something a hundred years ago.” With us some one has an idea, and presto! we are recalling judges, pulling down idols, “elevating” women to be sheriffs, and playing golf on Sundays. Where are the gods of yesterday? The pulse of the nation leaps at a single click of the Morse code. An injustice in Oklahoma brings a mass meeting together in Carnegie Hall. But the continuance of the Camorra in Italy to-day is directly due to the succession of tyrants who about a century ago allowed the patriots of Naples and Sicily to rot in prison or hung them up on scaffolds in the public squares. The Bourbon rule in the “Kingdom of the Two Sicilies”[5] was one of the most despicable in history. In eleven days in 1793 one hundred and twenty professors, physicians, and priests were executed by the public hangman in Naples. This was a mere foretaste of what was coming. When Napoleon dethroned the Bourbons in 1805 and made his brother Joseph “King of Naples,” there dawned an era of enlightenment and reform which continued when Joseph was succeeded by Joachim Murat in 1808; but the Congress of Vienna in 1815 reinstated the old dynasty and recalled Ferdinand I, who had been lurking in Sardinia, to the throne. Then the horrors began again. A period of retrogression, of wholesale persecutions and executions, followed. Never was there anything like the nightmare of bloody politics which lasted through the reigns of Ferdinand I (1825), of Francis I (1830), of Ferdinand II (1859), and of Francis II, until the entry of Garibaldi into Naples in 1860.