racters to mistake a very peaceable talk for a violent quarrel,
I know of only one case that ended tragically. There a savage quarrel,
begun at _Mora_, was with difficulty pacified by the bystanders, and one
of the parties withdrew to an _osteria_ to drink with his companions.
But while he was there, the rage which had been smothered, but not
extinguished, in the breast of his antagonist, blazed out anew. Rushing
at the other, as he sat by the table of the _osteria_, he attacked him
fiercely with his knife. The friends of both parties started at once to
their feet, to interpose and tear them apart; but before they could
reach them, one of the combatants dropped bleeding and dying on the
floor, and the other fled like a maniac from the room.

This readiness of the Italians to use the knife, for the settlement of
every dispute, is generally attributed by foreigners to the
passionateness of their nature; but I am inclined to believe that it
also results from their entire distrust of the possibility of legal
redress in the courts. Where courts are organized as they are in Naples,
who but a fool would trust to them? Open tribunals, where justice should
be impartially administered, would soon check private assassinations;
and were there more honest and efficient police courts, there would be
far fewer knives drawn. The Englishman invokes the aid of the law,
knowing that he can count upon prompt justice; take that belief from
him, he, too, like Harry Gow, would "fight for his own hand." In the
half-organized society of the less civilized parts of the United States,
the pistol and bowie-knife are as frequent arbiters of disputes as the
stiletto is among the Italians. But it would be a gross error to argue
from this, that the Americans are violent and passionate by nature; for,
among the same people in the older States, where justice is cheaply and
strictly administered, the pistol and bowie-knife are almost unknown.
Despotism and slavery nurse the passions of men; and wherever law is
loose, or courts are venal, public justice assumes the shape of private
vengeance. The farther south one goes in Italy, the more frequent is
violence and the more unrepressed are the passions. Compare Piedmont
with Naples, and the difference is immense. The dregs of vice and
violence settle to the south. Rome is worse than Tuscany, and Naples
worse than Rome,--not so much because of the nature of the people, as of
the government and the laws.

But