to the society. The Grand Council, undoubtedly influenced by the fear of further denunciations on the part of Cuocolo, passed sentence of death on the couple. Cuocolo himself was induced to meet several camorristi, on the night of June 5, at a suburb of Naples called San Giovanni a Teduccio, and from thence lured on to a deserted part of the sea shore, where he was murdered. One of the murderers, a certain Di Gennaro, then went to the neighbouring restaurant of Mimi al Mare, where Enrico Alfani, the working head or capintesta of the Camorra was supping with friends, to report success. Shortly afterwards two of the gang, Sortino and Salvi, returned to Naples, and assassinated Maria Cutinelli, the wife of Cuocolo, in her apartment in the Via Nardones. So far as Cuocolo was concerned the secrets of the Camorra were safe.

This is the thesis of the prosecution in the Viterbo trial, based mainly on the denunciation of Abatemaggio. The trial still drags on, and, whatever be its result, it will have dealt a terrible blow to the Camorra, whose proceedings have never before been so ruthlessly dragged into the light of day. This has been due to Captain Fabroni, for whose intelligence and courage no praise seems too great. He has been exposed to every kind of interruption and insult, for order is not kept in an Italian law-court as in an English one, but has continued to give his evidence day by day, and to press home its logical consequences to the ghastly criminals with whom he is confronted, and of whom it is to be hoped that he will be able to free society.

Three special types of criminality stand out among the horde crowded into the cage of the accused at Viterbo: Enrico Alfani, or Erricone, Maestro Rapi, and-in a way the most sinister figure of the three-Don Ciro Vitozzi, known as the chaplain of the Camorra. Erricone is the managing head of the whole Camorra; he has been in office for ten years, and has worked up the association to a pitch of great efficiency. He escaped to America as soon as he knew that a warrant was out against him, but was arrested in New York and extradited by the United States Government. He admitted in his defence that he practised usury at a very high rate of interest, but pleaded that the people who borrowed money from him were usually unable to afford serious guarantees of repayment. Persons of substance who were in need of a loan would naturally go to a respectable bank and pay small interest. Erricone introduced a new feature into the organisation of the Camorra, that of the camorrista scelto of the day, whose duty is to watch everybody else, picciotti and camorristi alike, in the interests of the society. Maestro Rapi, so-called because he was once

Professor of Literature in a young ladies' school, is another type of criminal. Affable, handsome, and welldressed, he moves in good society, where he induces young men to come and play roulette at a comfortable little club he knows of round the corner. Fabroni, who interviewed him before his arrest, says that he never met a more charming and courteous person. His conversation was highly cultured and his manners perfect. He spent many years in France, from which he was expelled on account of some gambling scandal in which he became involved, through what was, in his judgement, an unfortunate mistake of the police. The prosecution maintain that all the subtler enterprises of the Camorra are due to his clever brains. He was so sure of his position that, although he was out of Italy when the warrant was issued against him, he returned at once and gave himself up to justice. Don Ciro Vitozzi, officially the chaplain of the Cemetery of Naples, is the spiritual adviser of the society. He is actually charged with having given false information to the police in the Cuocolo affair. His power among the mala vita of Naples was practically unbounded. The police frequently made use of his services in the discovery of crime. His profession enabled him to penetrate where neither Erricone nor Rapi could arrive, and to arrange ‘affairs' that would have been hopelessly beyond their scope. An amusing episode occurred at his arrest. The police commissioner found among his sequestrated belongings a number of illustrated postcards, representing ecclesiastics under the influence of a pre-occupation singularly remote from the sacerdotal profession. Asked to explain this curious circumstance, he adroitly replied that he had confiscated these deplorable objects which had been in the possession of one of his penitents. He did not say why he had not destroyed them.

We think that there can be no doubt that, with the Viterbo trial, the knell of the Camorra has begun to sound. It is, however, equally certain that something more than imprisonment, however severe, or in fact than any merely repressive measures, is needed to prevent a recurrence of this sinister phenomenon. Nothing short of a great change in the intellectual, economic and moral conditions of the people will bring about a state of things in which such an institution will be impossible. Speaking on his deathbed of the Neapolitans, Cavour kept on repeating si lavi, si lavi. It is the confident hope of all friends of Italy that this social purification of the fairest city of the south will become an accomplished fact. The Viterbo trial is at once a necessary preliminary and an earnest of that accomplishment.

ART. VII.-A CRISIS IN THE HISTORY OF THE
REPUBLICAN PARTY
PARTY RECIPROCITY, TARIFF

REVISION AND MR. TAFT.

Congressional Record. Sixty-second Congress, First Session: April to August 1911. Government Printing Bureau, Washington, D.C.

ONGRESS at Washington was in extra session during the present

CONGRES

year from April 4 to August 28. Except for the measures for admitting Arizona and New Mexico as states of the Union, it was occupied exclusively with the legislation to give effect to the reciprocity agreement with Canada, and with a series of bills to reduce the high duties of the Payne-Aldrich tariff bills that failed of enactment because they were all vetoed by President Taft. American newspapers and the 'Congressional Record' published during these five eventful months-the most disastrous for the Republican party since the Presidential election of 1884 when Mr. Blaine was defeated by Mr. Cleveland-can be searched in vain for a clearer or more explicit statement of the origin of the reverses of the Republican party since 1909, and of all Mr. Taft's troubles during the extra session of Congress, than the explanation offered in the editorial columns of the New York' Indepen'dent' in the second week of August. The opposition to Mr. Taft, and to all his tariff policy except as concerned reciprocity, had been in control of the House of Representatives and the Senate from the early weeks of the extra session; and in the second week of August it was certain that three bills reducing duties in the tariff would be sent from Congress to the President for approval. The expectation at Washington then was that Mr. Taft would veto all tariff bills that might be carried by the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and by the majority in the Senate brought into existence early in the session by a coalition of Democrats and Insurgent Republicans. Commenting editorially on the pending conflict between Congress and the President, the Independent,' which is the oldest New York weekly journal of its class, and since 1860 an advocate of the protectionist policy of the Republican party, said:

"If President Taft decides to write veto messages, they will be forcible ones. But we fear his arguments, if he shall send any such messages to Congress, will have little weight with a considerable part of the American public. There is a popular demand for a sharp reduction of tariff rates; and the drift is away from the doctrines

VOL. CCXIV. NO. CCCCXXXVIII.

DD

of protection. This is so because the Republican party so foolishly and even shamefully failed to improve its opportunity in 1909. It may be that both the party and its elected leader will be forced hereafter to pay a heavy penalty for that colossal blunder.' *

Much the same estimate of Mr. Taft's first great failure was made in these pages within a month after he had signed the Payne-Aldrich bill. It was then affirmed that about all the good that could be said for that measure was that it must constitute a new starting point for a revision of the tariff that should end the corruption of the protective system, and the further statement was then made in these pages that Mr. Taft, by his action on the tariff during the extra session of 1909, had disappointed more of the rank and file of the Republican party than any President since the Civil War.† Full realisation of this failure by the Republican party and by Mr. Taft came in November 1910, when at the Congressional elections the Republican party lost control of the House of Representatives -a control that had been continuous since 1897. The Democrats then obtained a majority of sixty-three in the Lower House; and also as a result of the state elections increased their numbers in the Senate. Both Mr. Taft and the leaders of the Stand-Pat Republicans must have known from the summer of 1909 that defeat in November 1910 was inevitable; for Senators and Congressmen were not back in their constituencies from the extra session of 1909, called by Mr. Taft solely for the revision of the Dingley tariff, before Mr. Taft was made to realise that he had made the most disastrous failure of any Republican President since the days of General Grant, and that by grouping himself with the Stand-Pat Republicans in the House and Senate from the beginning to the end of the extra session of 1909 he had done more to weaken and disrupt the Republican party than anything that had happened within its ranks since the nomination of Mr. Blaine, at the national convention at Chicago in 1884.

A downward revision of the tariff was popularly expected in 1909. An agitation for such a revision had been going on within the Republican party since 1906. The platform adopted by the Republicans' national convention of 1908, the convention at which Mr. Taft was nominated-fully warranted this

* Independent,' New York, August 10, 1911.

†The Revision of the United States Tariff. 'Edin. Review.' No. 430, p. 302.

Cf. The United States and the Tariff.-Edin. Review,' No. 435, Article II.

popular expectation. So did Mr. Taft's speeches and public utterances from 1907 to the eve of the assembling of Congress for the extra session of 1909.*

The epoch-making developements in American industry from 1897 to 1909, and particularly the part of daring financiers in these developements, and in the organisation of great industrial mergers with much watered capitalisations that had put an end to competition in the home market, as well as the practice of many of these industrial aggregations of selling their output at lower prices abroad than in the American market, all warranted reductions in the extortionately high duties of the Dingley Act. So did the popular uneasiness and unrest due to the great increase in the cost of living that at least synchronised with the ending of competition in so many lines of industry and trade.

A few reductions were made at the revision of 1909. More reductions would have been made, and there would have been few increases in duties had the House of Representatives controlled the revision; for members of the House of Representatives go back to their constituencies for re-election every two years; and in the spring and summer of 1909, as the elections in November 1910 adequately proved, no Congressman could hope to make his election safe by supporting higher duties than those of the Dingley tariff. But while, as at Westminster, all revenue bills must originate in the House, long usage as distinct from any provision in the Constitution, gives the Senate almost absolute power in tariff making. It has enjoyed this power for a hundred and twenty years; and since 1861, and increasingly since 1890, it has used it relentlessly

*The party is pledged to a genuine revision, and as the temporary head of that party and President of the United States, if it be successful in November, I expect to use all the influence that I have by calling immediately a special session and by recommendations to Congress to secure a genuine and honest revision of the tariff in accordance with the principles of protection laid down in the platform, based upon the examination of appropriate evidence and impartial as between the consumer and manufacturer. . . . It is my judgement that a revision of the tariff in accordance with the pledge of the Republican party will be, on the whole, a substantial revision downward, though there probably will be a few exceptions in this regard. As the temporary leader of the party I do not hesitate to say, with all the emphasis of which I am capable, that if the party is given the mandate of power in November it will perform its promises in good faith.' (Mr. Taft at Des Moines, Iowa, September 25, 1908.)