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 inspiration 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 régime 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 scandalously 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-ringings, processions, and new dresses bestowed upon the local Madonna; 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.[1]
- ↑ 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 Études, Napolitaines, especially chapters v and vi. For detailed accounts of the liquefaction of St. Januarius's blood by eyewitnesses, 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.
