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 travellers 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 pestilence by bell-ringings, processions, and new dresses bestowed upon the local Madonnas; yet here, too, a healthful scepticism has begun to work for good.

The outbreaks of cholera in recent years have done some little to bring in better sanitary measures.( 334) (334) As to the 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, Etudes Napolitaines, especially chapters v and vi.