have plucked some wild flowers by the roadside.  The boy is crowned with roses, like Lucullus at table.  The father buys a handful of vegetables, and a cake of maize, which will furnish the family supper.  They will sleep well enough on this diet—­if the fleas allow them.  If you like to follow these poor people home, they will give you a kindly welcome, and will not fail to ask you to partake of their modest meal.  Their furniture is very simple, their conversation limited; their heads are as well furnished as their dwellings.

The wife who has been awaiting the return of her lord, will open the door to you.  Of all useful animals, the wife is the one which the Roman peasant employs most profitably.  She makes the bread and the cakes; she spins, weaves, and sews; she goes every day three miles for wood, and one and a half for water; she carries a mule’s load on her head; she works from sunrise to sunset, without question or complaint.  Her numerous children are in themselves a precious resource:  at four years old they are able to tend sheep and cattle.

It is vain to ask these country people what is their opinion of Rome and the government:  their idea of these matters is infinitely vague and shadowy.  The Government manifests itself to them in the person of an official, who, for the sum of three pounds sterling per month, administers and sells justice among them.  This individual is the only gift Rome has ever conferred upon them.  In return for the great benefit of his presence, they pay taxes on a tolerably extensive scale:  so much for the house, so much for the livestock, so much for the privilege of lighting a fire, so much on the wine, and so much on the meat—­when they are able to enjoy that luxury.  They grumble, though not very bitterly, regarding the taxes as a sort of periodical hailstorm falling on their year’s harvest.  If they were to learn that Rome had been swallowed up by an earthquake, they certainly would not put on mourning.  They would go forth to their fields as usual, they would sell their crops for the usual price, and they would pay less taxes.  This is what all towns inhabited by peasants think of the metropolis.  Every township lives by itself, and for itself; it is an isolated body, which has arms to work, and a belly to fill.  The cultivator of the land is everything, as was the case in the Middle Ages.  There is neither trade, nor manufactures, nor business on any extended scale, nor movement of ideas, nor political life, nor any of those powerful bonds which, in well-governed countries, link the provincial towns to the capital, as the members to the heart.

If there be a capital for these poor people, it is Paradise.  They believe in it fervently, and strive to attain it with all their might.  The very peasant who grudges the State two crowns for his hearth-tax, willingly pays two and a half to have Viva Maria scrawled over his door.  Another complains of the L3 per month paid to the Government official, without a murmur at the thirty priests supported by the township.  There is a gentle disease which consoles them for all their ills, called Faith.  It does not restrain them from dealing a stab with a knife, when the wine is in their brains, or rage in their hearts; but it will always prevent them from eating meat on a Friday.