soners named Nisco, who in turn had sent him to a third person named Ambrosio, who finally initiated him into this secret revolutionary association. On being questioned, however, he knew neither the forms of initiation, nor the rules of the sect, nor the words of the oath he had taken! He was equally unable to render a satisfactory answer to many other questions; and on the whole it was transparently clear to every intelligent person that the crime and the accusation had been fabricated by the executive to procure the ruin of a liberal statesman. On the other hand, Poerio was not allowed to produce witnesses-although many were at hand whose evidence would have exculpated him in every honest mind from the slightest suspicion-with the exception at least of one who deposed that Jervolino was in the receipt of twelve ducats a month from Government for his services as informer, and also mentioned two other persons who could prove the same fact. The issue of the trial was that three of the judges voted for his acquittal; two for his confinement in irons; and three, including Navarro, for death; and accordingly his sentence was modified to confinement in irons for the space of twenty-four years! By a refinement of cruelty it was ordered just about the same time, as Mr. Gladstone states, that the prisoners should be chained to one another, two and two. The chains, which are sufficiently heavy to occasion a limping gait, permit the prisoners to stand six feet apart, and are never unfastened day or night for any purpose whatever! This is the treatment to which a late Cabinet Minister of the King of the Two Sicilies-in a felon's dress, consisting of a rough red jacket, black trousers, and small cap of the same coarse cloth is now subjected. The mother of the victim of such systematic cruelty, his sole near relative, has so sunk under the shock as to have lost her mental powers. The object of the Government doubtless is, to use Mr. Gladstone's expressive language, "to obtain the scaffold's aim by means more cruel than the scaffold, and without the outcry which the scaffold would create !"

This is only one instance out of many. Mr. Gladstone makes an exception of the case of Faucitano, not as regards the mode of punishment, but the nature of the evidence adduced in which there was some appeal to facts. He was accused of attempting to destroy the King and his Ministers by explosive agencies, and a bottle was really found in his pocket, which, however, exploded without injury to himself or anybody else. It must not be inferred that the Government prefers the punishment of imprisonment in a dungeon from any sensitive dislike to shed human blood. A lingering course of confinement, with the addition of every circumstance that can give poignancy to suf

fering, is best accommodated to its policy; but that it will sometimes resort to sanguinary measures is proved by the fact that, in the state prison of Procida, a revolt was allayed by the soldiers in charge throwing hand-grenades among the prisoners, which destroyed as many as one hundred and seventy-five, including seventeen innocent invalids in the infirmary!

The reader may think it necessary that we should say something of Mr. Macfarlane's reply to Mr. Gladstone's pamphlet ; but it would be well not to waste much space on a production which carries such a coxcomb air and is truly flimsy. Mr. Macfarlane, as often as he does trespass on facts, confirms all the main features in Mr. Gladstone's statements, on which the question really turns; but it contains very little that is relevant to the topics under dispute. He tells us that King Ferdinand is an amiable prince and the father of six children; that the Prince of Satriano, as well as the Prince of Ischitella, the present Ministers, are both his excellent friends, as Prince Cariati was before them; that it is the Neapolitan custom to confine prisoners two and two in irons; that the Neapolitans are not fit for constitutional government; and he quotes a letter, written to him by a Neapolitan exile in London, which concludes as follows: I know the King's clemency; and, could I only get back to my own dear country, I would be satisfied to expiate my offences in a dungeon and in irons !" He produces some prison lists with which the Neapolitan police authorities have favoured him, from which it seems that they understand the art of doctoring statistics at Naples as well as elsewhere, and the art of forging them much better. In addition to this, he affords some personal information as to himself and family. He is, he assures us, a great Italian scholar-a great traveller-a great literary character. The late poet Wordsworth was his "dear old friend." Sir Stratford Canning is his "old and muchhonoured friend:" he dislikes the "Saints of Exeter Hall :" he hates Liberalism and Liberals; is not a Quaker, nor a John Howard: he has a son in India; and is himself fifty-two years. of age, scarcely a Nestor, but not quite so puerile as his writings. We opened the pamphlet in the hope of perusing a clear exposition of facts, and have found only a stupid piece of egotism. The Official Gazette of Naples announces Mr. Macfarlane's promotion; so that he is no less susceptible to the touch of gold and the fascination of office than Navarro or Pecheneda.

We doubt whether Tacitus drew with more pith or accuracy the tyrannical government of one of the Roman emperors than Mr. Gladstone has depicted the despotism

under which the south of Italy is now groaning. If we only substitute the emperor Tiberius for Ferdinand King of Naples -some of the Cyclades to which the former transported his victims, Gyarus or Seriphos, for Procida or Nisida-the imperial dilatores for the Neapolitan informers and policethe analogy will be manifest. The system of espionage and bribery the ensnaring a victim by forged letters or by hints apparently let drop at random-the condemning him, if other means fail, on suborned evidence-the preference of the dungeon to the scaffold-are as true of the one as of the other. Ferdidinand tyrannizes from Caserta-Tiberius tyrannized from a secluded tower in Capri: one is surrounded by Romish priests and Jesuits-the other was beset by astrologers and necromancers. Let only the accidents of time and manners be omitted, and the traveller might almost think, in visiting the Italy of today, that he was carried back to the barbarism and cruelties of eighteen centuries ago. There is no sign of progress.

We have now to consider the causes in which a state of thingswhich is "an outrage on religion, on humanity, on civilization, and on decency"-has originated. Some of these lie quite upon the surface. The King of the Two Sicilies, like the Emperor of Austria, has falsified his most solemn oath, more than once renewed to his people, that they should enjoy the blessings of constitutional government through a representative senate. Trial by jury, a representative legislature, and all the other securities against the abuse of power, which had been conceded in a moment of fear, have now been as entirely uprooted from his land as if they had never been allowed a momentary seat there. The judges are removable at the royal pleasure and receive small incomes in compensation of their services, and hence another inlet is laid bare to bribery and corruption. But it is idle to imagine that, when these secondary causes have been mentioned, the sources of mischief have been adequately exposed; nor can we say that Mr. Gladstone appears to us as happy in evolving the origin of the evil as he is in detailing the evils themselves. He explains the vicious process in the mind by which, after the law is once broken in upon, tyranny becomes a necessity, as follows:

"On the severity of these sentences I would not endeavour to fix attention so much as to draw it off from the great fact of illegality, which seems to me to be the foundation of the Neapolitan system: illegality, the fountain-head of cruelty and baseness and every other vice: illegality which gives a bad conscience-that bad conscience erentes fears-those fears lead to tyranny-that tyranny begets resentment that resentment creates true causes of fear where they were

not before; and thus fear is quickened and enhanced, the original vice multiplies itself with fearful speed, and old crime engenders a necessity for new."

Here, however, there is no resolving facts by patient analysis into their grand cause; for, surely, illegality is itself in one point. of view an effect, and results from one or more circumstances which render it possible and desirable. Again he writes:—

"No such extremities of fear, cruelty, and baseness, as it has been my irksome duty to describe, could be reached by any Government but one already unmanned by a bad conscience, and driven on by necessity to cover old misdeeds by heaping new ones on them."

All this is true enough; but the real primordia of the mischief are not reached, nor is it explained how the bad conscience is nurtured and maintained. Mr. Gladstone's nerve fails him when he begins to probe the wound a little more deeply; and it is happy that his truthfulness, which shines transparently throughout both letters, has supplied to others the means of seeing what he will scarcely dare to discern. He is scrupulously careful to prevent the reader from attributing the abominable practices he has exposed to the debasement of the Neapolitan people:

"Some will say all these abuses and disgraces are owing to the degradation of the people. I do not deny that there is some share of what we think degradation there: nor can it be wondered at, when we consider from what source the polluted waters of fraud and falsehood flow; but this I say, that the Neapolitans are over-harshly judged in England. Even the populace of the capital is too severely estimated : the prevailing vices lie on the surface and meet the eye of every one; but we scarcely give them the credit they deserve for their mildness, their simplicity, their trustfulness, their warm affection, their ready anxiety to oblige, their freedom from the grosser forms of crime. What will be said in England when I mention, upon authority which ought to be decisive, that during four months of the constitution, when the action of the police too was much paralysed, there was not a single case of any of the more serious crimes in Naples among 400,000 people?"

This statement may be accepted as an answer to Mr. Macfarlane's allegation that the Neapolitans are in every way unfit for constitutional government; and, ergo, their King was justified in violating his solemn oath! But were the degradation of the Neapolitan people as entire as is commonly supposed, it would itself require to be accounted for and could not be the prime cause of evils. Mr. Macfarlane laments that they have vices he "cannot cure:" so we should conjecture, for incorrigible lying is one, in the exercise of which they vie with the Cretans so

notorious in the apostle's age. It remains to be seen "from what source the polluted waters of fraud and falsehood flow."

Mr. Gladstone, at the close of his second letter, shows much anxiety to prevent the infamous deeds he has recounted from being associated in the reader's mind with the domination of the Roman Catholic Church :

"I write at a moment when public feeling in this country is highly excited on the subject of the Roman Catholic Church, and I must not wilfully leave room for extreme inferences to the prejudice of her clergy in the kingdom of Naples, which I know or think to be unwarranted by the facts. That clergy, no doubt, regular and secular, is a body of mixed character, which I am not about to attempt describing; but it would, in my opinion, be unjust to hold them, as a body, to be implicated in the proceedings of the Government. A portion of them, beyond all question, are so. I am convinced from what has reached me that a portion of the priests make disclosures from the confessional for the purposes of the Government; and I have known of cases of arrest immediately following interviews for confession in such a manner that it is impossible not to connect them together. But, on the other hand, there are many of the clergy, and even of the monks, who are among the objects of the persecution I have endeavoured to describe. The most distinguished members of the celebrated Benedictine Convent of Monte Cassino have for some time past been driven from the retreat to which they had anew given the character of combined peace, piety, and learning. Several of them were in prison when I was at Naples: others, not in actual confinement, but trembling, as a hare trembles, at every whisper of the wind. One was in prison for liberal opinions-another for being the brother of a man of liberal opinions. There was no charge against these men; but the two brothers were confined because it was thought that through the first of them might possibly be learned something against some other suspected person or persons. Among the arrests in December last, there were, I believe, between twenty and thirty of the clerical order. It may indeed be, and perhaps is, true that the greater part of the whole body stand by and look on, without any sympathy, or at least any effective sympathy, for those on whom the edge of this sharp affliction falls; but this is, perhaps, no less true of the nobles, whose general tone I believe to be that of disapproval towards the proceedings of the Government, while they have a kind of armistice with it, and it is the class beneath them that bears the brunt of the struggle. The Church at Naples is presided over by a Cardinal Archbishop of high birth, simple manners, and entire devotion to the duties of his calling, who, I am certain, is entirely incapable of either participating in, or conniving at, any proceedings unworthy in their character. The Jesuits are the body who, perhaps, stand nearest to the Government; but they were ejected from their college during the time of the constitution with flagrant illegality and some considerable harshness: and even their doctrines do not seem to satisfy those in power, for a periodical which they conduct, under the name of 'La Civiltà Cattolica,'