444 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



directly into the plague-stricken city, and there, in the streets, 

 public places, and hospitals, encouraged the living, comforted the 

 sick and dying, and took means to prevent a further spread of the 

 pestilence. To the credit of the Church it should also be said that 

 the Cardinal Archbishop San Felice joined him in this. 



Miracle for miracle, the effect of this visit of the king seems 

 to have surpassed anything that St. Januarius could do, for it 

 gave confidence and courage which very soon showed their effects 

 in diminishing the number of deaths. It would certainly appear 

 that in this matter the king was more directly under divine inspi- 

 ration and guidance than was the Pope, for the fact that King 

 Humbert went to Naples at the risk of his life, while Leo XIII 

 remained in safety at the Vatican, impressed the Italian people 

 in favor of the new regime and against the old as nothing else 

 could have done. 



In other parts of Italy the same progress is seen under the new 

 Italian .Government. Venice, Genoa, Leghorn, and especially 

 Rome which under the sway of the popes was always scandalous- 

 ly filthy, are now among the cleanest cities in Europe. What the 

 relics of St. Januarius, St. Anthony, and a multitude of local 

 fetiches throughout Italy were for ages utterly unable to do, has 

 been accomplished by the development of the simplest sanitary 

 principles. 



Spain shows much the same characteristics of a country where 

 theological considerations have been all-controlling for centuries. 

 Down to the interference of Napoleon with that kingdom, all 

 sanitary efforts were looked upon as absurd if not impious. The 

 most sober accounts of travelers in the Spanish Peninsula until 

 a recent period are sometimes irresistibly comic in their pictures 

 of peoples insisting on maintaining arrangements more filthy than 

 any which would be permitted in an American backwoods camp, 

 while taking enormous pains to stop the pestilence by bell-ring- 

 ings, processions, and new dresses bestowed upon the local Ma- 

 donna ; yet here, too, a healthful skepticism has begun to work 

 for good : the outbreaks of cholera in recent years have done some 

 little to bring in better sanitary measures.* 



* As to recourse to fetichism in Italy in time of plague, and the pictures showing the 

 intercession of Januarius and other saints, I have relied on my own notes made at various 

 visits to Naples. For the general subject, see Peter Etudes, Napolitaines, especially chap- 

 ters v and vi. For detailed accounts of the liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood by eye- 

 witnesses, one an eminent Catholic of the seventeenth century, and the other a distinguished 

 Protestant of our own time, see Murray's Handbook for South Italy and Naples, description 

 of the Cathedral of San Gennaro. For the incredible filthiness of the great cities of Spain, 

 and the resistance of the people, down to a recent period, to the most ordinary regulations 

 prompted by decency, see Bascome, History of Epidemic Pestilences, especially pp. 119, 120. 

 See also Autobiography of D'Ewes, London, 1845, vol. ii, p. 446 ; also, for various citations, 

 the second volume of Buckle, History of Civilization in England. 



