13 JULY 1861, Page 2

%dlr.—The Italian Parliament has been busy with work, and has

passed one most important bill. It is an Act enabling Government to seize any convent or monastery it may require, either for barracks, hospitals, or schools, and distribute the inmates among other religious houses of their own order. This Act practically enables the Adminis- tration to suppress any religious house it pleases, by-Merely marching a few soldiers into it and to punish any house of the kind which disseminates treason in the most crushing style. The Act is revolu- tionarv, but it seems acceptable in Italy, and anythi g which diminishes the number, wealth, or influence of monks, is beneficial to society. The bill for expending 20;000;0001. on Neapolitan railways has also passed, and will do much towards finding work for the dis- tressed classes. Some members actually proposed that no one should be employed on the works but distressed patriots, and the proposi- tion, instead of being laughed down, excited a debate so angry, that the sitting was suspended. An account of the state of affairs in Naples will be found in another column, but we may add here that General Cialdini has been appointed to the command, and his plan is to send flying columns to drive the brigands into the open country, and there destroy them. The respect- able classes are to be urged to self-defence and reinforcements are declined. The brigands, as fast as seized, should be sent to Sardinia, and there settled as military colonists, under strong discipline. Killing them is a very clumsy remedy for an evil produced by blun- dering mismanagement.

From Rome we have only rumours of the ill health of the Pope. Garibaldi has issued an address from Caprera, calling on Italian ladies to form benevolent societies for the poor. The idea is ob- viously derived from England. He says :

" Some foreign ladies have formed the design of improving the condition of oar people, morally and materially.

"They say that a political liberty acquired by the greater portion of the pe- ninsula does not suffice for the great mass of the people. They must likewise materially partake of its benefits, and attain that degree of education which can alone emancipate them from the degrading prejudices in which the corrupt portion of mankind are desirous of maintaining them. " Food, employment, and education are the objects which their generous hearts ardently wish to bestow. Woman, with her innate tendency to educate a family, is more fit for such a purpose than man. -.She is more delicate in feeling and more generous.

" There exist already among us societies of mutual aid, societies of the working classes, and these institutions are deserving of all praise. But do the wealthier classes, occupying a higher standing in the social scale, come down to meet the children of the poor? Do they visit their huts to get acquainted with their privations and sufferings? No. "These societies, composed mostly of men of worth, but without wealth, carry words of comfort and sympathy to the bed of the infirm, to the hovel of the destitute, but often nothing else than words of comfort and sympathy.

" Let the powerful of the earth approach the poor; - let them comfort, educate, and assist them ; then will disappear in human societyy that immense gulf which separates the poor from the rich, which often makes them enemies, and in many parts of Europe makes the labouring classes desirous of upsetting social order and proscribing the masters as the only means in their opinion of bettering their own condition in this world, which, for them, is a world of misery and affliction."