The oppressions of the Bourbons and the struggle of the patriots of Italy for freedom and the Risorgimento stimulated secret organization. No other means to combat tyranny was, in fact, possible. To be known to have liberal ideas meant instant arrest, if not death. Under Ferdinand II there had been over twenty thousand political prisoners actually in prison at one time and thirty thousand more _attendibili_, confined in their houses.[6] The governor of Genoa complained to Mazzini’s father because the youth “walked by himself at night, absorbed in thought.” Said he: “We don’t like young people thinking without knowing the subject of their thoughts.” The great society of the Carbonari had provoked the counter-organization of the Calderoni, and had in turn given way to the “New Italy” of Mazzini. It is said on excellent authority that in 1820 there were seventy thousand persons in the city of Naples alone who belonged to secret societies. In this year we first hear of the Camorra by name, and for the next forty years it spread and flourished until it became so powerful that the government of the “Two Sicilies” had perforce to enter into treaty with it and finally (in 1860) to turn over to it the policing of the city of Naples. Indeed, it may be that some such extra-legal organization was a practical necessity if existence were to be tolerable at all. Lombroso, in the “Growth of Crime,” writes: “When the royal postal officials were in the habit of tampering with correspondence, when the police were bent on arresting the honest patriots and making use of thieves as _agents provocateurs_, the necessity of things enhanced the value of the Camorra, which could always have a letter or a packet safely conveyed, save you from a dagger thrust in prison, redeem you a stolen article for a fair sum, or, when quarrels and disputes arose, could get these settled on much more equitable terms and less costly than any one else or indeed the ordinary process of the law.” This was the heyday of the Camorra as an organization of criminals. Later it developed into something more—a political ring under whose leash the back of southern Italy still quivers. The Neapolitan Camorra had its origin in Spain. The great Cervantes, in “Rinconeto y Contadillo,” has drawn a marvellous picture of a brotherhood of thieves and malefactors who divided their evil profits _with the police and clergy_. This was “La Garduna”—the mother of the Camorra. As early as 1417 it had rules, customs, and officers identical with those of the Camorra of the nineteenth century, and, like it, flourished in the jails, which were practically under its control. Undoubtedly this organization found its way into Sicily and Naples in the wake of the Spanish occupation of the thirteenth century, and germinated in the loathsome prisons of the period until it was ready to burst forth into open activity under the Bourbons.