"They had knives," he explained, and it
seemed a good reason for the cara-biniere's forbearance, as far as it
went; but I thought of the short work the brute locust of an Irish
policeman at home would have made of the knives. My friend said he had
himself gone to one of the municipal police who was looking on at a
pleasant remove and said, "Those fellows have knives; they will kill
each other," and the municipal policeman had answered, with the calm of
an antique Roman sentinel on duty in time of earthquake, "Let them
kill."
I could not approve of so much impartiality, but afterward it seemed to
me I had little to be proud of in the shorter and easier method of our
own police, as contrasted with the caution of that Roman carabiniere who
left the combatants to the mild might of their friends' moral suasion.
It was better that the youth should escape, if he did, without a
vexatious criminal trial; he may have been no more to blame than the
other, who, I learned, had been carried off, in the honorable manner I
saw, to a doctor and had his stab looked to.
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