by the trampling of heavy cattle in wet weather, all caused by the want of a few sheds, which it is impossible to have under the present system, and you will appreciate the position of a farmer holding under landlords who are careless as to the future, and merely live from hand to mouth.

“There is another improvement, which I offered to make at my own expense.  I asked permission to dam up a little stream, dig some trenches, and irrigate the fields, by which I could have doubled the produce both in quantity and quality.  You will hardly imagine the answer I received.  The monks declared the extraordinary fertility which would result from the irrigation, would be a sort of violence done to nature, by which in the end the soil could not fail to be impoverished.  What could I reply to such reasoning?  These good fathers only think of nursing their income.  I tax them neither with ignorance nor bad intentions.  I only regret that the land should be in their hands.”

“Pasture-farming under such conditions as these is a terribly hazardous pursuit.  A single year of drought will suffice to ruin a breeder completely.  In the years 1854-5 we lost from twenty to forty per cent. of our cattle; in 1856-7 from seventeen to twenty per cent:  and bear in mind that every beast, before it died, had been taxed.”

A champion of the Pontifical system offered to prove to me by figures that all is for the best even in the ecclesiastical estates.

“We have our reasons,” he said,

“for preferring pasture to arable land.  Here is a property consisting of a hundred rubbia[16] (not quite three hundred acres).  If it were farmed on the proprietor’s own account, the cultivation, harvesting, threshing, and storing would amount to the value of 13,550 days’ labour.  The wages, seed, keep of horses and cattle, the interest of capital invested in stock, cost of superintendence, wear and tear of tools, etc., would stand him in 8,000 scudi, or 80 scudi per rubbio.  The earth returns sevenfold on the seed sown.  If 100 measures of seed are sown, the return will be 700.  The average price of the measure of corn may be taken at 10 scudi.  Thus the value of the crop will be 7,000 scudi, whereas the same crop cost to raise 8,000 scudi.  Here are 1,000 scudi (about L215) flung clean into the gutter; and all for the pleasure of cultivating 100 rubbia of land.  Is it not much better to let the 100 rubbia to a cattle-breeder, who will pay a rent of thirty or forty shillings per rubbio?  On one side we have a clear loss of L215, and on the other a clear income of L160 or L184.”

This reasoning is founded upon the calculations of Monsignore Nicolai, a prelate of considerable ability[17]:  but it proves nothing, because it attempts to prove too much.  If the cultivation of corn be really so ruinous an operation, it is strange that farmers should continue to grow it merely to spite the government.