110 TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND SPORT. 



This same question of freedom appears in a very 

 prosaic light to our peasants, who have, on the whole, 

 a limited understanding of the whole business, and 

 speak with a grotesque familiarity of " Vittorio," 

 whose identity seems altogether doubtful and un- 

 certain to them. Even in Capri the people are aware 

 what the name of Garibaldi means ; but Vittorio is 

 altogether an arbitrary sound. And liberty is dear, 

 as somebody says very dear, costing a great deal 

 more than a paternal government ; and its advantages 

 are not so evident to the honest man whose affairs 

 and interests are all limited by the precipices of 

 Capri, as were the advantages of another exchange of 

 government to the sober Savoyard in Chamouni, who 

 explained that under French rule one could drink as 

 much as one pleased and could pay for, without any 

 tyrannical limit of communal law to stop one's liquor, 

 as under the Italian regime a sensible sign of libera- 

 tion, which was plain to the most ordinary capacity. 

 But no such relaxation of tyranny has been felt at 

 Capri, where the only thing quite certain and apparent 

 is that liberty, as we have said, is dear. Nothing can 

 be more apparent indeed, throughout all this region 

 of Italy, than that the political revolution is in no 

 sense a peasant's question. The multitude on the 

 lowest level has been mute except for Garibaldi ; and 

 it is only in the class which has attained at least to 

 the beginnings of education, that any real compre- 

 hension of the matter is to be found. No distinction 



