the whole of Italy and Europe. From that epoch the king assumed the title of king of the United kingdom of the two Sicilies. A very great advantage has accrued to Italy as respects the future, from this despotic step of the Neapolitan government, for it diverted the mind of the Sicilians from a path altogether opposite to that pursued by the whole of Italy, calling upon them to form part of the Italian people by making them share in the common slavery. Whatever affection had been manifested by the Sicilians for the Bourbon dynasty when they fraternized with the English in defending its rights against France, so much the more aversion do they now manifest towards it.

Sicily is governed at present in the same way as the kingdom of Naples; it pays the same taxes and suffers the same oppression. The code that by the royal decree of 1818, is now in operation, is that of France, modified in some points, and augmented in what relates to leze-majesty divine and human. Heresy, and sacrilege against the eucharist, are regarded in it as deserving the punishment of death, and blasphemy of seven years' imprisonment. To this last law there is usually given a monstrous latitude, by making disrespect exhibited towards the endless number of the saints of both sexes, and sometimes also towards images and the hierarchy, to be regarded as an offence against God. The French code, which proceeded from the most enlightened minds of France, acting at the instance of the vast genius of Napoleon, is one of the few benefits that many European nations have reaped from the warlike agitations of the monarchs of this century. Laws are the formulary of the morality of nations, and therefore the surest way to civilization. Under this point of view, the kingdom of Naples which, equally with that of Sardinia, has retained upon the whole the legislation of Napoleon, has seeds of moral progress in its bosom, which will sooner or later bear its fruits. According to the French civil code the bonds of matrimony were not made strong enough, there being an immense facility given to divorce, and a certain strictness was desiderated; but in the code of Ferdinand marriage was reduced to such strictness as to be indissoluble, except in the cases contemplated by the council of Trent, which perpetuity reduced families to despair and introduced worse customs. Some reform was hoped for in the augmentation of the paternal authority which may be said to have been annihilated in the French code, but the reform was carried to such an excess as almost to make matters as bad as they were according to the laws of ancient Rome. There was added, as if in contempt of personal liberty, voluntary imprisonment in civil contracts. So much for the civil code. As for

the penal, the severity of the punishments is excessive, and that of death frequent enough. The severity of the French code is unsuitable and unjust for the character of the Italians, particularly for those of the southern division of Italy. The basis of penal laws being to be found in the physical and moral nature of society, and feeling and suffering varying in different nations, the culpability involved in misdeeds, the power of enduring suffering, are not the same in all men ; hence punishments adapted to some are for others either excessive or too light. The rigour of the punishments, and the too great readiness with which that of death is threatened in that code, might suit the circumstances of France when she had just emerged from the vortex of a bloody and unbridled revolution, but it was not adapted to Italy. It was hoped that in the new code of

Ferdinand the scale of crimes and punishments would at once undergo a certain modification, but they have been left as they were, for the severity of the penal code served the interests of absolute power, and the sanctioning of the penalty of death for crimes of leze-majesty divine and human, would without that severity have had too monstrous an aspect. The only changes are to be found in the abolition of the pillory and of the confiscation of a criminal's goods. The pillory, just and useful perhaps among nations which from education and civilization have an ordinary sense of shame, was most unjust in Italy where we find shame either nullified by corruption of morals or ignorance in the common people, or from natural disposition excessive. A young woman who had exposed her infant, the fruit of illicit love, in a winter's night, on the public road, where it died, on being convicted of the crime, was condemned to a long imprisonment, according to the French code, and to the pillory. Upon the first insults that were offered to her, she fell down dead, suffocated with shame. The punishment of confiscation, most unjust, in as much as it involves the punishment of innocent survivors and the enrichment of the public treasury, presented powerful inducements to an absolute monarch as Ferdinand IV. to preserve it for his own advantage; but public indignation and the general wish made him cautious, and the new code, in spite of the defects it retained, and notwithstanding the terror inspired by the law of lezemajesty, was received with much satisfaction. In the new code, we find altogether taken away in many cases, and restricted in very many others, the discretionary power given by the French code to the judges, within certain limits, of mitigating the penalty-a discretionary power tending to equalize differences of age, condition, sex, and capacity of feeling. In the reform of the two codes, the civil and the criminal, the former was made worse, the latter was improved, if we could but forget the inevitable laws of despotic governments dependant on Rome, as respects religious and political intolerance. The code of civil procedure has remained as it was. Regard is had in it to the competency of the judges being carefully ascertained; to judges being appointed according to the interests and the wants of the people; to property being secured by means of a public register of civil acts and hypothecs; to the uninterrupted order of the judges; to the independence of the judges; finally, which is a proof of the wisdom of the age, to the institution of a supreme tribunal, called the court of cassation, the prop and guarantee of the laws, one of the fruits of modern philosophical and legislative science. On the other hand the code of criminal procedure has been rendered worse. The old hope of having a jury, frustrated under the government of the French king, was once more doomed to disappointment; the power of imprisonment per mandato d'accompagnamento, which it was hoped would be abolished, was confirmed, the judging of an accusation which according to the French code was confided to four or six judges, is confided in the new one to three, or to five, revoking the benefit of an equality of voices; in the French code the judges of the accusation were not judges of the process, and in the new they are, thus involving the greatest peril to justice and obstacle to fairness of discussion, from the judges being already prepossessed against the accused; restrictions were imposed on cases of appeal to the supreme magistracy of the Cassation, and by limiting that tribunal, which is the grand support of the laws, and hence of liberty and of jus

tice, it was intended that the wretched condition of the accused should be rendered still more wretched. Another most grievous defect of the French code has been preserved in the new one, that is, magistrates of exception, police courts, special courts, and military commissions. The false doctrine that the process is the arena on which the law combats the accused person, makes it seem advisable to the governments to deprive the law's enemy of arms and to give them to the law's defenders. It is sought accordingly in crimes that are most hateful to the government, to curtail the defences to the persons accused and to give greater scope for attack to the accusers. But if the process were considered as a device for the detection of crime, people would not fall into so very grievous an error as to pervert the true nature of the law by attributing to it a shameful partiality, and exposing it to the risk of rashly striking the innocent. One of the most valuable parts of the criminal procedure, preserved in the new code, is the public pleadings, a means of promoting justice more available as a security for the execution of the laws than the jury, which is a means of civilization. The publicity of trials, the moral conviction of the judges, public opinion acting as a check upon iniquitous sentences, are the fruits that proceed from it. The laws called correctional form another valuable part of the criminal code. Insults, slight assaults, violations of modesty, are severely punished; forming a most holy censureship which initiates the people to civilization, necessary for the Italian people, which, during past ages of feudalism and of the distinction of conditions, had lost the sense of their own dignity.

It now remains for us to speak of the military code, of that relating to commerce and the public administration. The military code or statute, which may be considered as preserving throughout the legislation of the ten years' domination of the French king, contains four most grievous blunders; these are, the absence of any distinction between a state of war and a state of peace; the excessive latitude given to the jurisdiction of military tribunals; the appointment of a prolongation of service and flogging as punishments; and the silence of the laws respecting the abuse of power. From the first there follows impunity or arbitrary punishments, in consequence of the rapidity of trials, and hence want of discipline and justice; the second separates the military from the civil state even in that which touches directly the social order, constituting it an exceptional body; the third blunder tends to tarnish that moral lustre of the military career, which forms the very nerve of armies, in as much as military service is given as a punishment, and stripes involve infamy. Finally, the fourth is contrary to all civilization and justice. Duties and rights are reciprocal, and the counterpart to the obedience of the soldiers is justice in commanding the troops. Every one sees that all these blunders tend to convert the army into a prop to despotism and a scourge to the people. The commercial code is made up of laws for the most part French as respects internal traffic, and of the old pragmatics of Charles III. as respects international trade, inasmuch as the French code, having been promulgated when the fury of war placed Europe under the oppression of the continental system, which aimed at the destruction of the commerce of England, made no provision for the external part of commercial legislation. The internal part is carefully drawn up; there may appear to be an excessive rigour in the trammels imposed on merchants with the view of preventing fraud, but it will appear most

just to every one who sets himself to consider the corruption of past times and the growing avarice that accompanies the wants of a new civilization. The tribunals of commerce are formed of merchants chosen by merchants, and liable to be changed from time to time-commercial juries. The external or international part is regulated according to the treaties concluded with various other powers. The administrative code which, in the time of the French king, was faulty in the way of leaving too much to arbitrary power, tending to favour the persons and affairs of the administration, by establishing an exceptional magistracy, has become worse than before, inasmuch as it is no longer controlled by the council of state and is dependent on the ministry. The council of intendency in each of the provinces takes up in the first instance causes connected with the administration, and, in case of appeals being made, they are submitted to the royal court of Conti; but the whole is subject to the absolute will and pleasure of the minister for the Home department.

From the outline we have just traced of legislation in the kingdom of the two Sicilies, it follows that the germs of civilization, of equality, and of freedom, that are budding there so vigorously, exist in the legislation itself, and hence that the state of slavery and oppression in which people would have it to remain fixed, is absurd and contradictory. While the government with one hand presents to the people a law of progress, saying to it, Go forward and advance towards your own improvement, with the other it presents its weapons and enchains the people, so that they cannot move a step towards the generous object it proposes to their aim. The first to condemn arbitrary power and oppression are the codes, while the supreme absolutism of the king condemns the desires felt by the nation for a better condition, in the name of the codes. The law fructifies morality and ideas of justice to the people, while the government endeavours to demoralize society and destroys its rights. The equality of all in the eye of the law is indeed the fundamental principle of the code, but practically, on the other hand, the avenues to justice. are closed against the poor, in consequence of the very heavy expense required in trials, much, as it has been already hinted, under the financial spirit of the code of civil procedure. That is so contrived as to impoverish private persons and to enrich the royal treasury. In this manner the advocates, a class which has in its hands the interests of the nation, have been brought to adopt the interests of the government. To paralyze the beneficial effects of the criminal code there is the secret code of police. In this manner the severity of the law that should properly be applied to crimes, is made to fall upon opinions. In this manner the magistracy is led to adopt the interests of a despotic government. Horrible to say, yet it is too true! Ignominious sentences are often pronounced, not based on conclusions from facts, but on grounds of mere probability, in order to stamp the seal of infamy upon the liberals. Secret ordinances of the ministry of justice acting in concert with the ministry of police, enjoin the judges to take account of the political and turbulent opinions (for this is the ministerial definition of liberal opinions) of the accused. In a trial for murder at the criminal court of Teramo, two persons were charged with the crime, Antonio Tomei, an artisan, and Signor Firmani, a young man of the best family connections. The former lay under two heavy proofs of guilt; a few hours after the commission of the been

the public prosecutor (il Giudice Regio) had found in his house, while making the legal investigation, a fresh-washed dagger hidden beneath a bundle of twigs, and this dagger was found exactly to fit the wounds of the murdered person. Numerous testimonies established the fact of his having, on the day that the crime was committed, put on white pantaloons; in the search made at his house these were nowhere found, and he insisted that he had never put them on. The destruction of these pantaloons, when stained perhaps with blood, by himself or his relations, was a negative argument of the utmost importance when joined to that other of the dagger, for the moral conviction of the judges. The charge against Firmani was founded on his having, a year before, asked in marriage a rich young lady who had given her preference to the youth who had been slain. In Firmani's favour, in fine, there were honest testimonies to the fact of his having been, in the evening about the time that the crime was committed, engaged in light and cheerful talk with a family who were his friends. Tomei was acquitted, and was merely placed for two years under the surveillance of the police. Firmani was condemned to twenty-five years of imprisonment. Firmani was a liberal.

In

The decision of the courts is not based on the bare words of the text of the law, but on equity and the spirit of the law, which, under a liberal government, would be a source of immense advantages, and would prove a light of wisdom to the people, but under an absolute government leaves an open field for injury and injustice. Provided acts of injustice do not remain concealed from the conscience of a people enlightened by the eloquence of the bar in the course of public pleadings, they will only form and mature the people for better destinies. order to comprehend the advantage to be found in the present state of legislation in the kingdom of the two Sicilies, in the face, too, of the contradictory tendency which it assumes under the impulse of an absolute government, it is well to know what it was before the French invasion. Down to the reign of Charles III. of Bourbon, the founder of the existing dynasty of Naples, eleven different legislations prevailed in the kingdom; these were the ancient Roman, the Lombard, the Norman, the Suabian, that of Anjou, the Aragonese, the Austrian-Spanish, the Austrian-German, the Feudal, the Ecclesiastical; in addition to which there were the customs required by the Greek empire of the east in the cities of Naples, Amalfi, Gaeta, and others governed at one time by officials sent from Constantinople. What has been an incalculable improvement is the unity of the codex and the law courts in which the law and the decisions are understood by the people. It would be desirable that the partial advantages that result from the comprehension of the laws to those who frequent criminal trials, might be rendered general, by introducing the system of teaching in public national schools the maxims of law, as those of religion, in the catechism, are taught by the parish priests, in order to instil into their minds the lessons of social morality which ought to be their guide.

In every commune there is to be found a supplente giudiziario, and a conciliatory judge. The attributions of the first (who is a substitute for the judge residing at the capo circondario, head office of the circuit, which comprehends four and more communes) are to watch over the peace of the commune and to take the first steps in inquests into crimes, giving immediate notico of