rsica they have done much for the island
by improving its harbours and making good roads, and endeavouring
to mitigate the ferocity of the people. But they have many things to
contend against, and Corsica is still behind the other provinces of
France. The people are idle, haughty, umbrageous, fiery, quarrelsome,
fond of gipsy life, and retentive through generations of old feuds and
prejudices to an almost inconceivable extent. Then the nature of the
country itself offers serious obstacles to its proper colonisation
and cultivation. The savage state of the island and its internal feuds
have disposed the Corsicans to quit the seaboard for their mountain
villages and fortresses, so that the great plains at the foot of the
hills are unwholesome for want of tillage and drainage. Again,
the mountains themselves have in many parts been stripped of their
forests, and converted into mere wildernesses of macchi stretching
up and down their slopes for miles and miles of useless desolation.
Another impediment to proper cultivation is found in the old habit of
what is called free pasturage. The highland shepherds are allowed
by the national custom to drive down their flocks and herds to the
lowlands during the winter, so that fences are broken, young crops
are browsed over and trampled down, and agriculture becomes a mere
impossibility. The last and chief difficulty against which the French
have had to contend, and up to this time with apparent success, is
brigandage. The Corsican system of brigandage is so very different
from that of the Italians, Sicilians, and Greeks, that a word may be
said about its peculiar character. In the first place, it has nothing
at all to do with robbery and thieving. The Corsican bandit took to a
free life among the macchi, not for the sake of supporting himself by
lawless depredation, but because he had put himself under a legal and
social ban by murdering some one in obedience to the strict code of
honour of his country. His victim may have been the hereditary foe of
his house for generations, or else the newly made enemy of yesterday.
But in either case, if he had killed him fairly, after a due
notification of his intention to do so, he was held to have fulfilled
a duty rather than to have committed a crime. He then betook himself
to the dense tangles of evergreens which I have described, where he
lived upon the charity of countryfolk and shepherds. In the eyes of
those simple people it was a sacred