ASSASSINATION IN ROME.

Press, Volume VII, Issue 745, 20 March 1865, Page 3

ASSASSINATION IN ROME.

The correspondent of the London Star at Rome, writing on the 13th of December, gives a shocking picture of the insecure condition of the city. He says : — Two nights ago an assassination took place under my windows. A man of the common class, returning from the cafe with a jug of coffee for his wife at home, was accosted by two men who stood in his way, with, "We have been waiting for you." " Here I am," replied the unsuspecting victim, receiving an instant after a blow on the head from a hatchet. The hatchet flying from its handle with the blow, the poor fellow was finished with poignards, and, being carried home, only a few yards, had just strength to tell the above particulars. In the course ol the night I heard the shrieks of the wife to whom they brought her dying husband, and ran down into the street, knowing that in a case of real distress a foreigner was worth the whole population of the quarter besides. I found the usual crowd around the house, two men, apparently of the same class as the wounded man, holding the frantic young wife, apparently a mere girl, and three or four ruffianly gendarmes joking and laughing about the affair, and evidently amused with the frantic display of agonised humanity, but doing nothing in any way. I worked my way to them, and asked of the least ruffianly-looking of the set what was the matter. He turned on mc with an indescribable brutality of manner, and said, ' What do you want here ? What business is it of yours ? Go away immediately,'— accompanying his words with a liberal offer of violence in case his invitation was insufficient. The manner and air of these guardians of public peace and propriety are sufficient to indicate their unreliability, and to explain the fact that in Rome, as a general thing, one must cultivate largely the virtue of self-reliance, and, where the police authorities will give you permission, cherish a resolve if you want to go out at night with a reasonable degree of assurance. lam told that the city police is raked from the worst part of the Roman population, and can well believe it on the evidence of physiognomy. But wherever they come from, there is but one voice in Rome as to their value as policemen. A friend, to-day, assures mc positively that on Sunday night week, there were no less than three men stabbed in the vicinity of the Forum; and doubtless there are many cases that take longer than ten days to become known, since the newspapers never notice such things at all. When murder rises to the dignity of a political action it may be noticed, not otherwise. Mr Severn told .mc one day that, having complained to the authorities of a highway robbery committed on an Englishman, he was replied to by * What can we do ? We have on an average ten or eleven such cases a day; how can we investigate them all?' And this is undoubtedly true to a certain extent—that the Government with all the means that it can dispose of in this way, wpuld find it impossible to investigate the tithe of these cases. The root of the difficulty lies in the demoralisation of the lower classes, the indifference they feel towards crime of every kind, and a disposition rather to profit by it than assist in detecting it. Crime itself has no horror for them, and they rather side against the agents of the law than with them. They have not the most shadowy perception of the common interest of all men to prevent crime, and a criminal is instantly lost sight of in the multitude of those from whom he is in no way distinguished, except the actual commission of a crime which in itself would bring him rather sympathy than the reverse. The most active and energetic Government in the world would find itself in the pursuit of crime in such a community like men running in soft clay, opposed by a passive bnt universal resistance. London has its garotters, and every large city its classes of dangerous criminals, and Rome is, 'perhaps, no worse in the actual commission of crime than many others; but what is so awful here is the utter indifference felt towards it by most of the people—it attracts no attention in the greater number of cases — lit goes by and is forgotten-—a man shrugs his shoulders when you speak of it, and replies ' uno coltellato, only a stabbing affray,' and gives it no second thought. The gendarmes consider it a nuisance to be told of such things, and in one case in my personal knowledge, where two Englishmenhad arrested a man in the act of stabbing his landlady, and handed him over to a squad of policemen, they were told to mind their own affairs, and the man was actually set free by them—' it was nothing,' they coolly informed the amazed Britons. Within the last three years I have known positively of at least a dozen murders, not one of the perpetrators of which has been executed, and most of them never have been discovered—one hears of them fiequentlv in the common gossip of the town, rarely in any other way.