“I dare do whatever I deem right to do.  You should know that by this time.”

“You think this right?”

“I think it right to repeat exactly what has been said to me.  I do not of necessity approve because I repeat.”

“You know no compensation is possible!”

“Morally, none.  I speak of but what the law allows.”

“The law of pirates, of cut-throats!”

“The law of the State, alas!”

Adone laughed.  His hearer had heard such laughter as that in madhouses.

“The State kills a soldier, and gives his family a hundred francs!  That is the compensation of the State.  If they emptied their treasuries, could they give the soldier back his life?  If they emptied their treasuries, could they give us back what they will take from us?”

“My dear son, do not doubt my sympathy.  All my heart is with you.  But what can be done?  Can a poor village, a poor commune, struggle with any chance of success against a rich company and a government?  Can a stalk of wheat resist the sickle?  Can an ear of wheat resist the threshing-flail?  I have told you the story of Don Quixote della Mancha.  Would you fight the empty air like him?”

Adone did not reply.

His beautiful face grew moody, dark, fierce; in his eyes flamed passions which had no voice upon his lips; his white teeth ground against one another.

“Believe me, Adone,” said his friend, “we are in evil days, when men babble of liberty, and are so intent on the mere empty sound of their lips that they perceive not the fetters on their wrists and feet.  There was never any time when there was so little freedom and so little justice as in ours.  Two gigantic dominions now rule the human race; they are the armies and the moneymakers.  Science serves them turn by turn, and receives from each its wage.  The historian Mommsen has written that we are probably inferior both in intelligence and in humanity, in prosperity and in civilisation, at the close of this century to what the human race was under Severus Antonius; and it is true.”

Adone did not seem to hear.  What were these abstract reasonings to him?  All he cared for were his river and his fields.

“I sought for an old friend of mine in Rome,” said Don Silverio, endeavouring to gain his attention and divert his thought, “one Pamfilio Scoria.  He was a learned scholar; he had possessed a small competence and a house of his own, small too, but of admirable architecture, a Quattrocentisto house.  I could not find this house in Rome.  After long search I learned that it had been pulled down to make a new street.  Pamfilio Scoria had in vain tried to preserve his rights.  The city had turned him out and taken his property, paying what it chose.  His grief was so great to see it destroyed, and to be turned adrift with his books and manuscripts, that he fell ill and died not long afterwards.  On the site of the house there is a drinking-place kept by Germans; a street railway runs before it.  This kind of theft, of pillage, takes place every week.  It is masked as public utility.  We are not alone sufferers from such a crime.”