By the middle of September, Italian affairs in general were driving on at what Lord Palmerston called ‘railway speed’, but the island of Sicily seemed to have been left in something of a backwater, and Sicilian politics had again taken on the appearance of being more local than national. As a French observer in the south commented on 18 September, ‘on ne semble être d'accord en Sicile que sur un seul point, la haine du nom napolitain, et de tout lien politique, même abstrait, avec ce royaume’. Apart from this one point of agreement, Sicilians were becoming ever more restless and anxious as the battle moved farther away. Depretis's attempt to find a highest common factor of consent had ended in his resignation on the 14th. As a result of this, Garibaldi had most reluctantly to leave his military preoccupations in order to come and repair these growing differences. On the 17th the dictator arrived unexpectedly in Palermo for a six-hour visit, intending to find out for himself what was amiss and to select a new civil governor.

Crispi's candidacy for the vacant prodictatorship was out of the question, since he had aroused too much personal antipathy to be the instrument of pacification, and was too much of a partisan and too little of a diplomat to be able to find a compromise and secure people's consent to it. Before returning to Sicily the dictator had, it is true, asked Crispi to come with him as adviser, but the latter was too much frightened of the changed atmosphere of backbiting and popular demonstrations, and was too eager to remain on the centre of the stage at Naples.