such a mass and such a class of irreclaimable malcontents exercised, when a special point of attack was offered to them, by any particular subject of discontent felt by the bulk of the population against any particular part of the conduct of the new government.
Such a point of attack was offered to them by the conscription laws.
Military service was in the highest degree repugnant to the feelings of the Romagnole peasant. He had been used to suffer almost every evil that could result from bad and oppressive government, but he had not been used to this. It presented itself to his mind as a new and unheard-of form of calamity—a burthen the more intolerable in that the back had never been trained to bear it. It was not that the Romagnole peasant is especially averse from the business of fighting. By no means so! Call on him to fight for any cause he approves, there and then, on his own plains and hillsides, and put his wonted weapon, the knife, into his hand, and there could be no reason to complain of his unwillingness to fight. But to submit to strict discipline, to move at word of command, and above all to go away from family, friends, neighbours, from the well-known and well-loved localities and names into a strange land, this was what was intolerable to the imagination of these people.
But was there any prospect of probability that the Romagnole conscript would be sent forth on foreign service? Was it not for the defence of his native land, for service on Italian ground that he was needed? Such considerations were urged on the young men of Romagna in vain. Native land! Their native land was Romagna,—the flank of the Apennine, the banks of the Metauro, the shore of the Adriatic, the fat soil and fertile fields which make their district the granary of Italy. To their imagination Piedmont was as much a foreign country as France, or as China! A country the ways and manners, and, above all, the language of which were utterly and distastefully different from their own.
To be seized and forcibly sent away from his home, from his interests, from his loves, from his habitudes, into an unknown and distant land, where the people were hard and unfriendly by nature (the constant prejudice of Italian provincialism against the inhabitants of other districts), where they talked an unintelligible and disgusting gibberish, where they made bad bread, and grew intolerable wine, and the girls were all ugly, and not kind like the dear ones of their own genial land, this was what the Romagnole youths, especially those of the rural districts, could not make up their minds to endure.
Great, accordingly, was the amount of discontent and trouble occasioned by the inevitable enforcement of the conscription in these districts, and very numerous were the refrattarj or runaways, who “took to the hills” rather than submit to the fate which an unlucky number at the drawing of the dreaded conscription had awarded them.
And the natural peculiarities and conformation of their country afforded especial facilities for such means of escape. The fertile low-lands of Romagna are but a narrow strip shut in between the sea and the mountains. The latter are nowhere far off—nowhere beyond the reach of one day’s journey on foot. And these mountains represent not only a physical but a political barrier; a frontier which, in the case of the ill-regulated and ill-agreeing governments of Italy, always involved an extra degree of lawlessness in the habits of the people. The Apennine frontier line between Tuscany and the Papal provinces of the Bolognese and Romagna was always, especially on the Papal side, a district notorious for evil deeds and lawless violence of all kinds. And although the great majority of the Romagnole conscripts, who took to the hills to escape from military service, were for the most part very honest, and in some cases well-to-do country bumpkins, who contemplated no other breach of the law than simple escape from the conscription, yet resistance to the law, and the manner of life to which it necessarily leads, are not good training-schools for the civic virtues. Between breakers of the law, whatever may be the nature of the difference which puts them at odds with it, there is a fellowship and a community of interests which is apt fatally to widen the breach between the law and those whose quarrel with it is of the lesser gravity.
All which, of course, made the disorders arising from the dread of the conscription, prevailing specially among the rustic populations of Romagna, so much the more mischievous and deplorable, and ought to have prevented the ministers of religion, who understood the nature of the case perfectly in all its bearings, from manifesting their political hostility to the Italian government by contributing to place the young men of their parishes in positions of so much moral danger.
Yet the clergy were everywhere the agents of and inciters to desertion.
Did a Romish clergy ever yet hesitate to sacrifice morality to a political object? Their own reply would be, that they never do so because the political objects which they have at heart are, in fact, essential to the good morality of generations yet unborn, and that whatever sacrifice may be made of the moral good of present units is justified and compensated by the advantage gained for future thousands;—not to mention that the moral harm done in the meantime can all be put right by a stroke of their own art!
Throughout the Romagna, accordingly, during those first years that followed the incorporation of that province with the new Italian kingdom, wherever a conscript wished to abscond instead of joining the depôt, his parish priest was ready to aid and abet his flight; and wherever his courage failed to take that step, or his good feeling towards the new order of things struggled against the temptation to take it, the priest was at hand to suggest, to counsel, to persuade, to urge it. Had it not been for the clergy, the evil would have been easily eradicated; and that state of things in the Romagna, which gave rise to the events related in the following pages, would not have existed.
CHAPTER II. BELLA LUCE.
