Arizona Republican

THE ITALIAN PEOPLE.

A View of Their Present Condition and Prospects for the Future.

What are the prospects of the people? That depends in the present case largely upon the people themselves. A people that are not united will never bear taxation patiently, because a disunited people cannot be commercially prosperous, and, therefore, cannot afford to pay the taxes.

The difference between north and south Italy, or between Piedmont and Sicily, are not, indeed, like those between Ireland and England, largely religious, but they are certainly radical, and the gulf between the easygoing, but passionate, children of the two Sicilies and the hardy mountaineer and stalwart cultivator of the Piedmont plains is almost as wide as the chasm between the Teuton and the Celt. Victor Emanuel's favorite unifier of Italy was the army, but, says the Fortnightly Review, it has turned in the hands of his successor into a disintegrator. It was all very well to move the army up and down Italy when the army was a symbol of common liberation from which so much was expected; but now the tyrants are gone there is no longer halo of romance about the army, nothing but army bills. The tyrant now is the tax collector.

Undoubtedly the people have a grievance. The taxes have been not only cruelly but unjustly exacted. The collector has entered Sicilian cottages, backed by the police, and, seeing the pot-au-feu smoking, argued that those who could afford to eat could afford to pay a "supplement" or excess tax, and if it turned out there was no money, the officers of the law have been known to seize the dinner and throw it out the window, under the noses of the poor peasant and his hungry family. There was no redress for the subjects of Humbert any more than for those of Bomba.