of thousands of inhabitants, the machinery of government is in all cases the same. The number of members in the elective communal council varies, indeed, in proportion to that of the population between a minimum of fifteen for less than 3,000, and a maximum of eighty for over 250,000 inhabitants. The electoral qualification varies also between a yearly payment of 5 francs in direct taxes for the lesser, and 25 francs for the greater, communes. Renewed every five years by annual election of a fifth of its members, the functions of the council are the same for all. These are practically delegated to the junta, a body consisting of from four to ten of its members, assisted by from two to ten assessors, which is in constant session, and forms the working committee of the generally fainéant village parliament. It is supposed to control, but is more often controlled by, the syndic, or mayor, whose acts require its nominal sanction. This dignitary, at once the local magistrate and a State official, since he is nominated by the Crown, is practically the despotic chief of his microscopic realm. Neither he nor the councillors are entitled to salaries, but may claim to be indemnified for actual expenses.

The organisation of the province repeats that of the commune, a State official, the prefect, presiding over its elective council. The lesser body is nominally subordinated to the greater, the communal accounts being subject to revision, and increased taxation to the prefect's veto, on petition from a tenth of the taxpayers. These restrictions are, however, practically illusory, as Madame Galletti tells us in the following paragraph:

'Every deliberation must be passed by the giunta, which assembles once a week, approved by the council, which generally meets twice a year, and must be signed by the sub-prefect, or by the prefect of the provincia, occasionally even by the ministry. But the giunta is often composed of the mayor's particular friends, and in the little villages of the servants and dependants of the same. The council is exceedingly careless and indifferent. As for the prefect, he has the deliberations of so many communes to attend to, that he signs papers having but a vague idea of their contents; so that the elaborate system of superintendence instituted by the Government results simply in making all business matters very tedious. It is no check upon dishonesty; on the contrary, the extreme complication of all arrangements makes confusion excusable and fraud hard to discover.'

Such a system sets a premium on peculation, and in the particular case under consideration the guardians of the

VOL. CLXV. NO. CCCXXXVII.

I

public purse, described as follows, were not likely to be behindhand in availing themselves of their opportunities :---

'He (the syndic) was connected by ties of the closest relationship with a member of the Camorra who had betrayed his associates, and who had been murdered by them; and it was rumoured that he himself was no stranger to that secret and formidable society. His assistants in municipal work appeared ill-chosen; the village magistrate (giudice conciliatore) could not read or write, and most of the members of the giunta had had the misfortune to have spent some portion of their lives in jail.'

If we turn to Signor Turiello's pages in the work among our headings, we find that the circumstances of this commune were nowise exceptional, and it is in the south that the abuses of municipal government, like all other abuses, attain their maximum.

In the Neapolitan provinces (he says) those partisan struggles which were glorified in the famous historic communes by great aims or great men, are repeated at the present day on a smaller scale, and on a meaner field of action, between rival families and their clients in every little village.'

The concentration of all local authority in these cases in the hands of a clique renders the manipulation of the electorate easy, and reduces the minority to a condition of despairing impotence. In the commune of Amatrice (Abruzzi), we are told that in the summer of 1877 not one of the eight hundred communal electors went to the poll to take part in the annual election of councillors, because, according to a local paper, the public saw no remedy for the grievous economic conditions of the commune. In Corata, again, an Apulian city of thirty thousand inhabitants, there polled in 1879 but thirty voters. In this case a group of progressist' politicians had devoted their energies during a triennial rule to the destruction of public gardens and monuments.

6

The circle of political corruption is completed by an alliance between the municipal authorities and the parliamentary representatives, whose influence, in return for due servility, is brought to bear on the Ministry to shield them in their malpractices.

'We have come to this' (writes the 'Pungolo' of Naples, October 11, 1877), 'that if the communal council of a municipality opposes a deputy, he puts such pressure on the Minister of the Interior that the council is dissolved.'

A docile majority, on the other hand, may, according to

Signor Turiello, be retained unchanged for twenty years by either of two very simple expedients.

In the revision of the lists on the eve of the election, as many voters are added by the authority of the provincial council as are notoriously required to secure the return of the favoured candidates; or, if by some strange accident the council elected should prove unacceptable, the election is annulled under some pretext.'

In

The rural administration is such as might be expected from this confederacy of corrupt interests. many districts-notably throughout the Calabrias and Basilicata-the communal roads, newly made at the expense of the ratepayers, are fast lapsing into ruin; while the product of excessive taxation is lavished on showy public buildings, in which each little market town seeks to rival the great capitals.

In some cases the rates are farmed out to a creature of the syndic, and the two combine to exact double or treble the amount legally due. Signor Turiello knows of one commune in which the public burdens were thus quadrupled during a period of five years, the poorer peasants who are not municipal electors being the chief sufferers. This mode of extortion, in addition to its main end of enriching the perpetrators, also serves to punish opposition. Thus in the case of a miller who was rate collector as well, the municipal taxes were mainly levied on the customers of a rival millowner, whose competition was thus successfully crushed despite a rising of the peasantry in his favour.

We read of one commune in the Basilicata where the syndic had not convoked the council for three years, during which he regularly fabricated reports of its proceedings; and of another where neither syndic nor schoolmistress could read or write, and the municipal secretary used his command of those accomplishments to alter or amend at his pleasure all official acts. We are not surprised to learn that the carriage road to this enlightened community is fast degenerating into a mule track.

The legal remedy constitutionally available is by no means sought in all cases where it is required. Yet in the first half of 1875 no fewer than 203 syndics-of whom 140 belonged to Sicily and 38 to the kingdom of Naples-were arraigned for various acts, such as peculation, forgery, and arbitrary arrests. The ruder redress of revolt is sometimes sought by the peasantry, generally to the cry of Long live the king!'Down with the municipality!' A series of such risings, leading to armed encounters with the public

forces, took place throughout South Italy in 1880-81, and some politicians have given expression to the fear that advantage might be taken of any national crisis to massacre the hated ruling class.

Individual liberty is hampered by vexatious restrictions. One syndic prescribes the date of all agricultural operations, another enacts repressive bylaws prohibiting the most innocent actions, such as partially unloading a cart by the wayside to lessen the labour of a horse in drawing it up a hill. Thus Ouida's fiction of A Village Commune,' though coloured by her florid imagination, is seen to be based on actual fact.

Intercommunal traffic is checked by a network of customs. barriers, the dazio di consumo or tax on comestibles being the foundation of municipal revenue. The working of this system may be illustrated by the case of one of the Sorrentine hotels, which, being situated in the adjoining commune of Sant' Agnello, can only get its supplies duty free from the market by the stratagem of receiving them through a neighbour's garden with a back door on the right side of the frontier. Ingenious smugglers are occasionally detected in the practice of fraudulent devices, like that of a lady whose carriage when stopped at the gates of Rome was found to have a ham secreted under each of its cushions.

But it is the financial aspect of the communal system in Italy that fills her statesmen with the gravest alarm for the economic future of the country. Self-government, even on this minute scale, implies the privilege or penalty of selftaxation, and the result is that the peninsula is devoured from end to end by a triple-headed monster of accumulating indebtedness. Financial ministers declare that they 'tremble' at the number of decrees for fresh loans they are called on to present for the royal signature,* and parliamentary reports pronounce the communal and provincial budgets to be the darkest page of the future.' †

The rate of growth both of debt and expenditure is so prodigious as to threaten a catastrophe. While from 1863 to 1879 the State budget had grown, in round numbers, from 800 to 1,500 millions (francs), that of the communes had risen from 262 to 479 millions, and that of the provinces in a somewhat less rapid ratio. Communal indebted

* Financial Statement of Seismit Doda, June 3, 1878.

Report to the Budget Commission, March 1879, by Signor Corbetta.

ness, on the other hand, rose from 534 millions, due on December 31, 1873, to 701 millions at the close of 1876; and there is said to be scarcely a single commune in Italy which is not reduced to maintain by borrowing the equilibrium of income and expenditure required by law. Signor Corbetta's report, just quoted, sums up the situation by saying that the communal debt in 1877 attained the figure of 701 millions, of which 500 were owed by those communes (only twenty-one in all) with a population exceeding 50,000; that these debts are increasing at the rate of 40 millions a year; that the communes pay in interest, charges, and sinking fund, 110 millions a year; that the provinces have a debt of 90 millions; and that provinces and communes, taking into account the diminution of their incomes from alienation of their lands, close their budgets with an annual deficit of 40 to 45 millions.

These figures show that local government is a somewhat expensive luxury, and are a fresh illustration of the impotence of elective machinery as a check upon administrative prodigality and corruption. But the communes of Italy are by no means peculiar in their financial abuses. In France the vast indebtedness of the communes is a serious aggravation of the public burdens of the nation. In 1883 fifty-three departments could not balance their receipts and expenditure without assistance from the State; and in some of them the communal rates are doubled by the interest payable on the communal debt. Nor is our own country free from the same symptoms of municipal extravagances. We showed not long ago that within the last twenty years the corporations of our great towns have raised upwards of 150 millions in loans on the security of the rates. Wherever local autonomy has got possession of the public purse, there is far more disposition to spend than to

sare.

We hold the Royal Government of Italy to be one of the wisest and ablest in Europe, especially in the management of the finances of the kingdom, which it has raised to a high pitch of credit; but it would seem that the communal administration escapes its vigilance or lies beyond its control. Against these and other similar abuses Madame Galletti and her husband, in their Home by the Adriatic,' made a gallant, and in the end successful, fight. They underwent many persecutions and annoyances, but eventually triumphed; not only was the fraudulent syndic superseded, but M. Galletti di Cadilhac was appointed in his place, with results best summed up in the authoress's own words.