each you how to treat a captured enemy; and we cannot help
thinking that Mrs. Moens, who will not spare the American Unionists a
sneer in the first chapter of her diary, would have understood us better
if her husband had been in the hands of Captain Wirz instead of Captain
Manzo. Had Mr. Moens been a soldier of the Union, taken while fighting
to defend his country against rebellion, he would have been carried into
the midst of a people inured to the practice of cruelty by slavery, and
all the more abominable because they believed themselves Christian and
civilized. There he would have been thrust into a roofless close,
already densely thronged with thousands of famished, sick, and maddened
men. He would have had no shelter from the blazing sun or drenching
storm, except such as the happier wild creatures make themselves in
holes and burrows. Guards, emulous in murder, would have been set over
him, with instructions to shoot him, if he reached, in the delirium of
famine, across a certain line to clutch a bone, or stooped to moisten
his lips in a pool less filthy than those at which his comrades quenched
their thirst within the bounds. In the mountains of Naples, the brigands
gave him to eat and drink of their scanty fare, and shared with him the
last crust and the last drop. In Georgia, in the midst of plenty, his
keepers would have slowly starved him to death, and would have driven
away, with threats and curses, any that offered to succor his distress.
If he escaped, they would have hunted him with bloodhounds, and so
brought him back; and if he sickened under his torture, they would have
left him, naked and unsheltered, to languish with wasting disease and
devouring vermin,--to die, or to rot and drop away piecemeal while yet
alive.

Other writers on brigandage, besides Mr. Moens, relate anomalous facts
concerning it, which can, perhaps, be matched only in this country,
where alone the cruelty and impunity of Italian brigandage can be
matched. It is well known that for a long time the heirs of Fra Diavolo
received from the government a pension bestowed in recognition of that
distinguished chief's services to humanity. The retired chief, Talarico,
is now in the undisturbed enjoyment of the gains of brigandage upon his
place near Naples; and Count Saint-Jorioz, in his interesting work, _Il
Brigantaggio alla Frontiera, Pontificia,_ declares that in some cases
the _employes_ of the Italian government in the Neapolitan provi