“The guardian is the true sentinel of the people and government, liberty, the circulation of the press”--was a sentence of Passanante’s, which at first seems a mere play on words, but he explained it to experts in these terms: “The liberty of the press, the free circulation of journals constitute a surveillance over the rights of the people.” When I asked Bosisio why he was so eccentric as to wear sandals and walk about bare-headed and half-naked in the heat of July, he replied, “To imitate the Romans, and to keep the head healthy, and, lastly, to call public attention to my theories by some visible sign. Would you have stopped to speak to me if I had not been dressed like this?” Moreover, mattoids--the reverse being the case both with genius and with insanity--are united by common interest and sympathy, and, above all, by hatred to the common enemy, the man of genius. They form a kind of free-masonry,--all the more powerful that it is irregular--founded on the common need of resisting the ridicule which inexorably attacks them on every side, on the need of extirpating, or at least opposing, their natural antithesis, genius. Though hating one another, they are firmly united; and though they do not enjoy one another’s triumphs, they rejoice in common over the victims who never fail to fall to the lot of one or the other. For, as we have seen, the vulgar, called upon to choose between the mattoid and the man of genius, never hesitate to sacrifice the latter. Even at the present day, many practitioners who take the dosimetricians seriously, laugh at homœopathy; and the academic multitudes who laugh at Schliemann and Ardigò never treated the archæological discoveries of Father Secchi in the same way. This is also shown by the emphatic and senseless addresses presented to Coccapieller and Sbarbaro by many individuals who were still more insane than their idols.[348] This explains why, in spite of the fact that universal suffrage was introduced under the Roman Republic of 1849, the populace never thought of electing Ciceruacchio to the parliament. Ciceruacchio was a rough workingman, but he was sane.