who, even after the fall of Palermo, refused to embrace
the national cause. The Italian revolution had pro-
duced martyrs by the hundred; could it now produce
effective soldiers by the thousand? The active patriots
came from among all classes of the town population,
and from the leaders of the rural districts, but the com-
mon peasantry of the North, though most of them had
now been converted to the National cause, did not cross
the sea to join Garibaldi. A severe strain was therefore
put on the cities of North Italy, not at that date as
wealthy as they have since become, to supply at a few
weeks' notice, out of the civil population, a complete
army of volunteers. The strain was the more severe
because so large a portion of the patriotic youth of the
Peninsula had already enlisted in the regular army of
Piedmont, which, so long as Garibaldi was on the war-
path, was urgently required for home defence against a
possible attack from Austria. Yet within three months
of the capture of Palermo more than 20,000 volunteers
were shipped off south from Genoa and Leghorn. ¹

The great majority of these Northerners proved in
the battle of the Volturno that they could fight bravely.
And it is reasonable to suppose that nine-tenths of them
went to the war mainly from patriotic motives, for there
was no compulsion to enlist except public opinion, no
reward except mental satisfaction. The pay offered was
insufficient to supply their daily needs on a campaign
where the plunder even of food was punished by death,
and where the improvised commissariat was always in-
sufficient, and often non-existent. When Garibaldi at
Palermo heard complaints of the irregularity of the pay,
he said to Bandi: 'What do you want with pay? When
a patriot has eaten his bowl of soup and when the affairs
of the country are going well, what more can any one
want?' However, he agreed to fix a scale, and thence-
forward officers received two francs a day, and privates
one franc or less. The Intendant General calculated two

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