"GARIBALDI AND THE THOUSAND."

Otago Witness, Issue 2913, 12 January 1910, Page 82

"GARIBALDI AND THE THOUSAND."

: A FORGOTTEN EPISODE IN GLADSTONE'S LIFE. • Gladstone in the year 1851 was 42 years of age. It was a critical, and, in many ways, a sad epoch in his life. He had up to that year possessed two friends who were near to his heart, for whom he had an affection that was as deep as though they had been brothers in the iiesh instead of in the spirit. One of the two was Hope Scott, the other was Henry Edward Manning, that year an Archdeacon in the Anglican Church, destined to be a Cardinal of the- Catholic Church. The friendship for Hope Scott was the deeper of the two. "My affection for him," wrote Gladstone, ''was, I may almost sa\ r , intense; there w?i& hardly anything, I think, which he could have asked me to do which I would not have done." And then Hope 'Scott and Manning became Catholics, and Gladstone could never be to them what he had been ; nor they to him. There is a bitter wail in Gladistone's diary which reveals the extent of his grief at this tearing asunder of friendships so precious. "They were," he writes, "my two props. Their going may be to me a, sign that my work is gone with them." "Such terrible blows," is another entry, "not only overwhelm me, but, I fear, demoralise me." This painful episcde followed a severe domestic affliction. In. the April of the previous year a little daughter, between four and five years old, had died. Her illness •had been long and painful, and her father had borne his share in the night-watch-big and the nursing. "He was," says Lord Mctrley, "tenderly fond of his little children, and his sorrow had a peculiar bitterness. It was the first time that death hadentered his married home." This grief was followed by another. The wonderful old man, his father, deeply revered and loved by his son, died just as he was approaching his eighty-seventh- year. | These were the circumstances, as well as the desire to benefit the eyesight of ; one of his daughters, that induced Gladstone and his wife to make a journey to Southern Italy. No one suspected lees than Gladstone the momentous consequences which this journey was going to have on the future history of all Europe. It was the epoch in Italy when the coun- [ try was still divided up among many ! different sovereigns ; when there was rei action on the throne on the one side and ' almost anarchic revolution in a deadly combat with it on the other. It was possible to condemn, and even hate. Loth the one extreme and the other; and Conservative opinion in, England, as well as in most countries; in Europe, had no difficulty in making its choice. It hated Anarchy, Revolution, and the gospel of the.dagger more than it hated even tyrannical go- | vernment. And Gladstone at the time was a Coneei'vativej and shared the general trend of that party with regard to Italy | as with regard to other things. 1 It was therefore with no desire or in- ! tent ion of preaching political rhodomontade that he went to Naples. If he had any prepossession, at all it was in favour of the Government: it represented order both in Naples and elsewhere. "He had nothing to do." writes Morley, "with the subterranean forces at work in the kingi dom of the Two Sicilies." Probably, as ' he wandered under the glorious sunlight j of Naples, be was more concerned with i the loveliness of the climate, the heavenly I beauty of the bay, and all the other j things which make a visit to Italy one of the epochs in everybody's life. But he was always a social man, anxious to pick up knowledge, and so it came to pass that he went into native society: He met eome 30 or more Italian gentlemen in society at Naples, of Avhom seven or eight only were in any sense Liberals, and not one of them a Republican. It was now that he made the acquaintance of Lacaita, afterwards; so valued a friend of his, and so well known in. many circles in England for his geniality, cultivation, and enlightenment. He was the legal adviser to the British Embessy. He met Mr Gladstone constantly: they talked politics and literature day and' •night under the acacias and palm's, between the fountains and statues of the , Villa Reals, looking now to the sea, now to the world of fashion in the Corso, Here Lacaita first opened the traveller's eyes to the condition of things, though lie was able to say with literal truth that not a single" statement of fact was made upon Lacaita's credit. _ Mi- Gladstone saw Bourbon absolutism no longer in "the decorous ■hues of conventional diplomacy, but as the black and execrable thing' it really was, "the negation of God erected into a system of government." ■ ■ —" Bomba."—> Tluj King of Naples at that moment *>was Ferdinand, commonly known by the

"Tim cognomen of "Bomba," or "the bombardier." There is an excellent sketch of this curious compound of abilities, mostly evil, in the brilliant book ("Garibaldi and the Thousand") which Mr Trevelyan has just issued, and I make no apology for making a long quotation from it:

Like other exceedingly bad he had a fair share of domestic virtues, and he was not devoid of a queer persona:! attractiveness. It is true that his first wife, the refined and lovable Maria Christina of Savoy, the representative of a higher type of civilisation, was miserable at Naples. Whether or not the traditional story be true—that ho pulled away the chair from under her as she sat, and that she leapt up in anger and called him the "King cf Lazzaroni," he certainly was bored by what he regarded as her airs of superiority, and treated her with scant attention. She died in 1836, revered as a saint by the Neapolitans, and leaving a son Francis, feeble alike in body and mind, destined, to forfeit the throne and end the dynasty. Ferdinand's second wife, the Austrian Maria Theresa, .suited him better. Re was invariably faithful to her. They lived a simple, secluded, and frugal life, somewhat after the manner cf George 111 and bi,3 queen, except for the coarse practical jokes which were Ferdinand's delight. It would have been well for him if he had been of a more widely sociable disposition. A few jovial Words spoken, as he knew so well how to speak them, when he wished, to the leading men of the kingdom, a few more Court ceremonies, a few more public appearances, a few largesses and smiles to the mob would, in the opinion of those who knew Naples, have done much to establish his dynasty. But ho could not endure either Court functions or genera] society. He would not even hove the clargy as his companions, though he was superstitious to a degree that was remarked and ridiculed oven in Naples, and though it wa>s his fixed, policy to increase the already extravagant privileges of the Church. When he chose be could fascinate an enemy in a few minutes' conversation; but there was >ften a malicious humour under his cordiality. "Keep beside him," wrote one shrewd observer, "and he Was all that you could desire. Lose sight of him for a moment and you might find yourself in the next five minutes under arrest." He was clever with the cunning of a Neapolitan street lounger, but ignorant, and. proud of his ignorance. Men of education he always spoke of a.s "scribblers" (peunaruli). He wass politically a .complete cynic, disbelieving in all public virtue, and disliking those who had a reputation for it as tedious fellows who would not play the game. Deceit and tyranny were the two main principles of the art of government which had been taught him in voulh, and to which he adhered all his'life. But although unscrupulous as to means, he was faithful to what he regarded ais the end of politics. He was a true Neapolitan patriot; he disliked the idea of Italy a- nation, but he kept . Austria at arm's length more than his predecessors had done, refusing a strict alliance that would have made his throne secure. He knew how to resent with spirit the hostile interference of England and France. He was abler than his father He reformed and strengthened the army within the limits ret by the universal system of corruption, which he made no effort to change in any department of government. He worked with industry as the head of an over-centralised system. He was his own Prime Minister and his own favourite. —Repression. —■ Ferdinand, confronted by the movement of which Mazzini was the .guiding spirit a movement of violent .methods—sought to preserve his throne by a system of repression, and thus a state of things came about which would have been declared incredible if it had not been attested by such tragic and irresistible testimony. The number of political prisoners languishing in prisons in Naples in the year when Gladstone was making his visit is computed at 20,000. Some of them were there awaiting trial; some were retained even after acquittal ; many were already expiating the offences they were supposed to have committed, and for which venal and dependent tribunals bad condemned them on. the evidence of policemen and spies. The hatred and condemnation of the Government were so universal that men of all classes and of all characters joined in the revolution. By a combination of circumstances oue 'of these prisoners became known to the whole world, aud his remains to tin's day one of the names that count in the history of Italy. He was called Carlo Pcerio ; 'and this is a sketch of his character. I quote Mr Trevelyan, again: Carlo Poerio, a man who held what would In England be called Conservative > Views, had opposed everv sort of armed insurrection in Sicily, or elsewhere. This man, whom Mr Gladstone iustly compared to the most high-minded ' of" hi* own English colleagues and rivals, was by reason of his character and abilities regarded as the natural head of the Constitutional party. He had been, one Of Ferdinand's Ministers under the Comfititution of 1843, and as such had been, treated bv his master with even more than usual bonhomie. Ferdinand introduced him with, effusion, to the called him Carlino. and pressed on him his best cigars. For the "King of Lazzaroni" had a very real, though •r-pU-liar, sense of humour, and be had determined that his Carlino should rot irf a noisome dungeon.

Poeiio was onlv one, however, of many.

More than 40 other men, among the most ] exalted a.r.d intelligent spirits oi the king- j dom, were put on trial with Poerio in June, 1850. The trial lasted till February, 1851, although, as Mr Trevelyan grimly comments, ''it was shortened by the fact that the prisoners were not allowed to bring their witnesses into court." And this was the character of the trial: After a patently forged document had come to grief and been "reserved for further investigation," a fake witness named Jervolino was set up to swear one ridiculous absurdity after another against Poerio, floundering through with the help of the judges. There was this difference between Jervolino and Titus Oates: that no one in court believed a word he said. This formality sufficed to secure for the most respected subject of the Crown a sentenre of 24 years in irons. While the- tragic faroe pro:oeded, Poerio's 40 fellow-prisoners, including several of the noblest men in Italy, looked on in despair, predoomed, as they knew, to ruin and long years of 'horror. —Farce and Tragedy. —■ The farce of the trial was. followed by the terrible tragedy of the prison. They were put in foul dungeons, were chained, Mere subjected to all sorts of hideous minishments, and apparently their case was destined to make the round of the world, and to gain the sympathy, as well .-; the attention, of all mankind, thereby bringing the breakdown of the tyranny under which they suffered. Foi when Jberio was being tried Mr Gladstone was 'r.duced by some of his Italian friends to •nter the court; and that man, younger at 40 as far as spirit was concerned than v.osfc men of 30, with his laughing black nee, looking out of the always ivory•olonred face, listened and wondered and -as horrified, and laid up in his heart very hour a bigger store of hot indignaion, which, like Vesuvius, on which he gassd dailv, was - scon to burst into devastating flame: After that the glories of the most beautiful bay in Europe lost hold upon his imagination, and when lie looked out at "the picturesque and romantic forms" of "those .lovely islands scattered along the coast," knowing now that they were the prisons, he could think of nothing but "what huge and festering masses of human sufl'erino' they conceal." His spirit, shaking itself free of every impediment of interest and old association, rose in its native majesty, and, heed,less alike of the scandal to official Europe, of the discomfiture of his own colleagues, of the triumph of ~ Palmerston, to whom he would be forced to apologise, he determined on a line of action which, a.r his friend and biographer tells us, was the turninc point of his own life, and may well be counted as the turning point in the shrunken tide of Italy's fortune. The hideous partisanship of the courts was the first thing that struck Gladstone with horror; to him, with his intense Conservative instincts, this clothing of despotism wit!}) the forms of legality was especially shocking; and this side of the Neapolitan questior seemed to strike him first with even greater horror than the cruelties of the nrison treatment which he afterwards discovered: Even these inhuman and revolting scenes, writes Morley, stirred him less, as it was right they should, than the corruptions of the tribunals, the vindictive treatment for long periods of time of uncondemned and untried men, and -,11 the other proceedings of the Government, "desolating entire classes upon which the life and growth of the nation depend, undermining the foundation of all civil rule." It was this violation of , all law and of the Constitution to which King Ferdinand had solemnly sworn fidelity only a year ci two before that outraged him more than even rigorous sentences and barbarous prison practice. "Even on the severity of these sentences," he wrote, "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, creates 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 the old crime engenders a necessity for new." But Gladstone went to the prisons all the same, where he saw "the official doctors not going to the sick prisoners, but the sick prisoners, men with almost death on their faces, toiling upstairs to them, because the lower regions of such ai place of darkness are too foul and loathsome to allow it to be expected that professional men should consent to earn bread by entering them." On the island prison of Nisid a, whither he next proceeded, he found Poerio and other distinguished men, in the coarse red garb of convicts, each of them chained either to a fellowsufferer in the cause or else to a common criminal. "The prisoners had: a heavy limping movement, much as if one leg had been shorter than the other. But the refinement of suffering in this case arises from the cireumstanoe that _ here we have men of education and high feeling chained incessantly .together." The couplings weTe never removed on any occasion either by day or by night. "I myself," wrote Mr Gladstone, "saw a' political prisoner, Borneo, chained in pie manner I have described

to an ordinary offender, a young man with one of the meet ferocious and ff" sullen countenances I have seen among | hundreds of the Neapolitan -luminals." : Another unfortunate, by a refinement i of cruelty, was chained to the false witness named Margheiita, who had been suborned aerainst him at his trial. The mildness Avith which these unfortunates spoke of those at whose hands they were enduring these abominable persecu- j tions astonished him, as did their "Chris- { tian resignation" and their "forgiving temper," for they seemed to him ready to undergo with cheerfulness whatever might be in store for them. —T. P.'s Weekly. !