the return of a despot; and all efforts to raise the people in favor of Francis II. failed disastrously. Borjès made fair trial of the business, when, after landing in Calabria, with a few Spaniards at his back, and the commission of the Bourbon in his pocket, he proclaimed his purpose of restoring the true king. The people almost without exception received his proclamation with the utmost coolness, when it did not excite their enmity, and the Spaniards marched through the whole length of the kingdom to the place of their capture within five hours of the Papal frontier, without finding a single honest man in their favor. "I was going," Borjès said to the Italian officer, "to tell King Francis II. that he has none but rogues and scoundrels to defend him, that Crocco is a miscreant, and Langlois a beast."

Still, a disaffection toward the Italian government existed, and this disaffection, arising in the capital and pervading all classes of people throughout the kingdom, was the condition that has made political brigandage possible in Naples since her union with Italy; and it is this internal element of weakness in which the Bourbon and Papistical party at Rome have found their chief strength.

We suppose the reader need hardly be told that all the brigandage of the last four years has been inspired by the friends of Francis II. and Pius IX., who have alone recruited robbers, armed, clothed, and fed them, and despatched them into every part of Naples, or rather to such parts as the cautious. rogues choose to enter. This brigandage, therefore, has been chiefly confined to the Papal frontier, which the assassins could easily pass and repass. It is not our present purpose to enter fully either into a discussion of the nature of the reaction, or to recount the events of campaigns, which have ended uni formly in the defeat and dispersion of the brigands, after they have destroyed a certain amount of life and property. If the reader will turn to the old newspapers which describe the incursions of the Missourians into Kanzas, and record the horrors of that cruel and lamentable warfare, he will have some notion of the kind of war which has been waged upon the frontier provinces of Naples; but if he desires to trace carefully the course of the miserable events in those provinces, and to under

stand at all steps of the progress how they were possible, there is no book so much to his purpose as that of Count SaintJorioz.

The numbers engaged in the so-called reaction have not been sufficient to lift it to the dignity of civil war; and the conduct of the struggle has not been such on either side as to qualify it with the character of organized defence and invasion. The largest band of brigands was that of Crocco; it once amounted to four thousand, but after Melfi was reduced to obedience again, this band broke up and disappeared. The assassins under Chiavone once reached the number of five hundred; but the robbers seldom have herded together in troops of more than threescore. They crossed the frontiers as quietly as possible, having their lives in their hands, and crept back at the approach of danger. They spared neither life nor property; and if they were taken by the Italian troops, they were shot at once. They have always had, however, the privilege of surrender, with exemption from the death-penalty, and trial for non-capital crimes.

The humane government of Italy has never approved the severe and effective measures of Manhès, in striking at the roots of brigandage, by cutting up the system of Manutengoli; and General Pinelli, the first sent to deal with the evil, was recalled because of his disposition to adopt the measures of Manhès, by which, indeed, many innocent suffered with the guilty. The plan of the government has been to guard the frontier with numerous posts, under instructions for swift mutual assistance at preconcerted signals. But the frontier is long, and the chain of surveillance was inevitably weak. There was little danger to the troops, for the brigands rarely attacked them, but there was peril to the peaceful inhabitants; and in a country where every peasant was forbidden by deadly fear to give the troops information of the brigands, while the brigands perfectly informed themselves concerning the troops from his terror, and from the voluntary good offices of the unmolested Manutengoli, there was so much safety for brigandage that there was small probability of its destruction. Unluckily for themselves, the brigands combined politics and religion so unskilfully with their profession, that they after a while fell into the error of murder

ing French soldiers, and even taking Papistical Monsignori and holding them to ransom. The French, therefore, began to cooperate with the Italian troops for their destruction, driving them back into the Italian territory when they attempted to recross the Papal frontier after a raid. Brigandage also began to be regarded as a doubtful means of grace at Rome, and so it gradually came to commit suicide upon the frontier. As an element of political disturbance, it may now be pronounced dormant at least; but the reader is not to suppose that brigandage as a private calling is by any means unknown in Naples. It still exists in all the wilder regions of the kingdom, (that is to say, in most parts of it,) and the seeker of the fair and old may find it on the way to Pæstum, at little distance from the capital.

We have already intimated the slighter esteem in which we hold the part of Mr. Hilton's book treating of recent and contemporary brigandage. He leaves the course of history after recounting the transactions under Ferdinand II., and in several chapters, written with admirable intelligence and force, enters into discussion of the political, moral, religious, and natural causes of brigandage. It is a fault of arrangement which the excellence of these chapters goes far to redeem; but it is the author's misfortune that, when he resumes his narrative, the really less careful chapters of the end fail to sustain the higher interest awakened. Perhaps, however, the greatest skill would fail to sustain it, for the soul revolts at last from the story of horror, and the events and characters of these closing scenes of brigandage are so like all that have gone before, that they pall upon the mind.

There is a philosophy teaching that men may rise to higher things and better life through suffering from their sins, to which we think it might be especially comfortable for its disciples to turn from these events and characters of brigandage. It would not be impossible to find reason for hope in the worst deeds of our time; and it may be that the evil-doers will prove to be chief agents of good to others, if not to themselves. The blessing of Christ's Vicar on earth has been upon robbers and assassins, and from the capital of Christendom the most infamous crimes against helpless people have been planned; but it

seems that the temporal power of the Pope, so cruelly perverted, is about to fall. In this day, two hulking German despotisms have combined to rend from a constitutional government a part of its slender territory, but it is not one of the vainest hopes of mankind that they may yet fall into deadly quarrel over their spoils. The Polish revolution has been crushed with circumstances that make us a little ashamed of the effusion which America displays in caressing the bloody paw of the great Bear, but the suppression of the revolt has completely enfranchised the Polish peasants. We ourselves presented to the nineteenth century (which its friends have puffed into unmerited consequence) the spectacle, anything but gratifying, of a great nation dead to honor and humanity, building its ghastly temple of peace and concord upon the agony of slaves; but the unconditional abolitionists of Charleston, who fired upon Fort Sumter, have changed all that. Our redemption has developed the worst passions and prejudices in those who have witnessed it; but the aggressive hatred of democracy which it has vivified, especially in the privileged classes of England, has alarmed the democratic principle in the English people to new and active life.

It must certainly be confessed, however, that the sins of others against the Neapolitan people have been many and grievous enough to do them good, without favorable result; and also that, so far, their own crimes have failed to reform them. But we do not yet refuse to hope for them, and we trust even to see some good effected by the freedom and justice which Italian unity seeks to bestow upon them.

Indeed, who are we, to doubt of any nation's future, who have the Union to reconstruct, and the whites of the South to civilize?

ART. VIII. The Rebellion Record. Edited by FRANK MOORE. New York: G. P. Putnam. 1860-64. Six volumes. 8vo.

IT has been said that the American people are less apt than others to profit by experience, because the bustle of their lives keeps breaking the thread of that attention which is the material of memory, till no one has patience or leisure to spin from it a continuous thread of thought. We suspect that this is not more true of us than of other nations, than it is of all people who read newspapers. Great events are perhaps not more common than they used to be, but a vastly greater number of trivial incidents are now recorded, and this dust of time gets in our eyes. The telegraph strips history of everything down to the bare fact, but it does not observe the true proportions of things, and we must make an effort to recover them. In brevity and cynicism it is a mechanical Tacitus, giving no less space to the movements of Sala than of Sherman, as impartial a leveller as death. It announces with equal sangfroid the surrender of Kirby Smith and the capture of a fresh Rebel Governor, reducing us to the stature at which posterity shall reckon us. Eminent contemporaneousness may see here how much space will be allotted to it in the historical compends and biographical dictionaries of the next generation. In artless irony the telegraph is unequalled among the satirists of this generation. But this short-hand diarist confounds all distinctions of great and little, and roils the memory with minute particles of what is oddly enough called intelligence. We read in successive paragraphs the appointment of a Provisional Governor of North Carolina, whose fitness or want of it may be the turning-point of our future history, and the nomination of a minister, who will at most only bewilder some foreign court with a more desperately helpless French than his predecessor. The conspiracy trial at Washington, whose result will have absolutely no effect on the real affairs of the nation, occupies for the moment more of the public mind and thought than the question of reconstruction, which involves the life or death of the very principle we have been fighting for these four years. Undoubtedly the event of the day, whatever it may be, is apt