And Whether Legal Proceedings Of Every Kind Would Not
Tend To Diminish?
There is a village of about three hundred inhabitants not far from Rome;
fifteen carbineers are quartered there. Before they came, those
inevitable little troubles were settled by the local mayor; things
remained in the family, so to speak. Now the place has been set by the
ears, and a tone of exacerbation prevails. The natives spend their days
in rushing to Rome and back on business connected with law-suits, not a
quarter of which would have arisen but for the existence of the
carbineers. Let me not be misunderstood. Individually, these men are
nowise at fault. They desire nothing better than to be left in peace.
Seldom do they meddle with local concerns - far from it! They live in
sacerdotal isolation, austerely aloof from the populace, like a colony
of monks. The institution is to blame. It is their duty, among other
things, to take down any charge which anybody may care to prefer against
his neighbour. That done, the machinery of the law is automatically set
in motion. Five minutes' talk among the village elders would have
settled many affairs which now degenerate into legal squabbles of twice
as many years; chronic family feuds are fostered; a man who, on
reflection, would find it more profitable to come to terms with his
opponent over a glass of wine, or even to square the old syndic with a
couple of hundred francs, sees himself obliged to try the same tactics
on a judge of the high court - which calls for a different technique.
Altogether, the country is flagrantly over-policed. [28] It gives one a
queer sense of public security to see, at Rome for instance, every third
man you meet - an official, of course, of some kind - with a revolver
strapped to his belt, as if we were still trembling on the verge of
savagery in some cowboy settlement out West. Greek towns of about ten
thousand inhabitants, like Argos or Megara, have about ten municipal
guardians each, and peace reigns within their walls. How can ten men
perform duties which, in Italy, would require ten times as many? Is it a
question of climate, or national character? A question, perhaps, of
common sense - of realising that local institutions often work with less
friction and less outlay than that system of governmental centralisation
of which the carbineers are an example.
Meanwhile we are still at Alatri which, I am glad to discover, possesses
five gateways - five or even more. It is something of a relief to be away
from that Roman tradition of four. Military reasons originally, fixing
themselves at last into a kind of sacred tradition.... So it is, with
unimaginative races. Their pious sentimentalism crystallises into
inanimate objects. The English dump down Gothic piles on India's coral
strand, and the chimes of Big Ben, floating above that crowd of
many-hued Orientals, give to the white man a sense of homeliness and
racial solidarity.
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