Musolino will remain a hero for many long years to come. "He did his
duty ": such is the popular verdict on his career. He was not a brigand,
but an unfortunate - a martyr, a victim of the law. So he is described
not only by his country-people, but by the writers of many hundred
serious pamphlets in every province of Italy.
At any bookstall you may buy cheap illustrated tracts and poems setting
forth his achievements. In Cosenza I saw a play of which he was the
leading figure, depicted as a pale, long-suffering gentleman of the
"misunderstood" type - friend of the fatherless, champion of widows and
orphans, rectifier of all wrongs; in fact, as the embodiment of those
virtues which we are apt to associate with Prometheus or the founder of
Christianity.
Only to those who know nothing of local conditions will it seem strange
to say that Italian law is one of the factors that contribute to the
disintegration of family life throughout the country, and to the
production of creatures like Musolino. There are few villages which do
not contain some notorious assassins who have escaped punishment under
sentimental pleas, and now terrorize the neighbourhood. This is one of
the evils which derange patriarchalism; the decent-minded living in fear
of their lives, the others with a conspicuous example before their eyes
of the advantages of evil-doing. And another is that the innocent often
suffer, country-bred lads being locked up for months and years in prison
on the flimsiest pretexts - often on the mere word of some malevolent
local policeman - among hardened habitual offenders. If they survive the
treatment, which is not always the case, they return home completely
demoralized and a source of infection to others.
It is hardly surprising if, under such conditions, rich and poor alike
are ready to hide a picturesque fugitive from justice. A sad state of
affairs, but - as an unsavoury Italian proverb correctly says - il pesce
puzza dal capo.
For the fault lies not only in the fundamental perversity of all Roman
Law. It lies also in the local administration of that law, which is
inefficient and marked by that elaborate brutality characteristic of all
"philosophic" and tender-hearted nations. One thinks of the Byzantines.
. . . That justices should be well-salaried gentlemen, cognizant of
their duties to society; that carbineers and other police-functionaries
should be civilly responsible for outrages upon the public; that a
so-called "habeas-corpus" Act might be as useful here as among certain
savages of the north; that the Baghdad system of delays leads to
corruption of underpaid officials and witnesses alike (not to speak of
judges) - in a word, that the method pursued hereabouts is calculated to
create rather than to repress crime: these are truths of too elementary
a nature to find their way into the brains of the megalomaniac
rhetoricians who control their country's fate. They will never endorse
that saying of Stendhal's:
