THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1899.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 11243, 12 December 1899, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1899.

Fortunately, New Zealand has only an indirect interest in the suppression of the Maffia, whose defiance of all civilised law seems to have at last stirred to action the reluctant Italian authorities. We are so far outside the range of Sicilian migration. But in many American towns, both North and South, the imported Maffia has been, and still is, a serious menace to public order. For instance, within the present decade, it occasioned in New Orleans a veritable social earthquake in which the organised lawlessness of the AngloSaxon met the organised lawlessness of the Latin, and Judge Lynch tested the efficacy of his rope against the dagger of the Maffia. On that memorable occasion, it will be remembered, the lynchers avenged on prominent members of the Sicilian organisation the brutal assassination of public servants who had attempted to suppress it. There resulted farcical negotiations between the Italian and the American Governments, and finally the Americans paid indemnity as proof of national good will. But, indirectly, we are all interested. All antisocial institutions are commonly dangerous to the whole of civilisation. There are evil elements in every country which are encouraged and strengthened by any successful and persistent resistance to civilised Government. Anarchism seems to spread, as from a plague centre, from that part of the Mediterranean where Law is commonly and successfully challenged under the cloak of ancient and authoritative custom. The Maffia in its Sicilian home is not a secret society in the ordinary meaning of the term, though it seems to assume that form abroad from its native haunts. It is something far more deadly. It is a tacit understanding, existing among Sicilians generally, having for its purpose the avoidance of Italian Law and the maintenance of a loose form of chieftainship and clientage peculiar to the island. Its weapo is, as are the weapons of all such organisations, are the boycott and the dagger. Tribute is paid, or blackmail, for protection. Wrongs, real or imaginary, are revenged for a consideration. And so forth, with results which need no recounting. Against this intangible organisation, rooted in the customs and thoughts of an ignorant and bigoted people, all past governments have failed to make any real head, though often brigandage—which once flourished under its aegis—has of late years been suppressed. The British Consul at Palermo reported a few years since that the tacit organisation was so widespread that the very deputies sent to the Italian Chambers were prominent Maffiosi. The cabled arrest of one of the Par lermo deputies on a charge of inciting assassination shows that this sweeping charge was not unfounded. What we have in Sicily is really a population of 3,500,000 people actively or passively agreeing that "the King's writ" shall not run among them; that the recognised duty of all civilised government to protect life and property according to definite laws shall' be made ineffective by the opposition of every .'citizen; that instead of established law, administered without re-

gard to place or person, a barbarous usage shall persist and continue. Sicily has been the football of every Mediterranean Power in turn. Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Vandal, Saracen, Norman, German, Frenchman, Spaniard, and Bourbon, have all had their turn. A race of slaves always produces something fitting to it, and Sicily soon produced its Mafia. Six hundred years ago every Frenchman on the island was assassinated at the Sicilian Vespersfor which an adjective is not to be found. Forty years ago Sicily rose as one man against the Bourbon when Garibaldi landed and voted afterwards to join Sardinia by 100 to 1. It has never been wise in Sicily to exercise private judgment. To submit, to revolt, to slay, to spare, as to buy and to sell, to marry and to give in marriage, is settled for the client on occasion by the chief. Woe betide him who has no chief, for there is no living outside the Maffia. This is what the Italian Government has to face. It has laid its hand on a chief of the Sicilians, a leader at whose bidding the dagger will be aimed at the heart of any man or woman in Sicily, perhaps in Italy. It has to find witnesses, where to testify against the Maffia is to invite death; to assert itself in a community where great and small alike are, by love or fear, Oil the side of the law-breaker. Yet it can hardly be supposed that after more than a generation of comparatively good government, of some education and a considerable *ncrease in wealth, this intolerable tyranny of the merely cunning and unscrupulous can be really acceptable to the Sicilian people. IE the terror of it be but once dispelled the Maffia must certainly disappear. Civilised law is to civilised peoples such a most natural, necessary, and unavoidable thing that resistance to its establishment at the end of the nineteenth century, and in Europe, is hardly to be understood. Yet little more than 150 years ago the King's writ did not run in the Scottish Highlands. -Vr.d old lira among us can remember easily when for a time civilised law had a struggle to maintain supremacy even within the United Kingdom itself.