A variable, but generally mild climate, brings to maturity the products of extreme latitudes.  Half the country is favourable to the palm and the orange.  Numerous and thriving flocks roam across the plains in winter, and ascend to the mountains in summer.  Horses, cows, and sheep live and multiply in the open air, without need of shelter.  Indian buffaloes swarm in the marshes.  Every species of produce requisite for the food and clothing of man grows easily, and as it were joyfully, in this privileged land.  If men in the midst of it are in want of bread or shirts, Nature has no cause to reproach herself, and Providence washes its hands of the evil.

In all the three states raw material exists in incredible abundance.  Here are hemp, for ropemakers, spinners, and weavers; wine, for distillers; olives, for oil and soap makers; wool, for cloth and carpet manufacturers; hides and skins, for tanners, shoemakers, and glovers; and silk in any quantity for manufactures of luxury.  The iron ore is of middling quality, but the island of Elba, in which the very best is found, is near at hand.  The copper and lead mines, which the ancients worked profitably, are perhaps not exhausted.  Fuel is supplied by a million or two of acres of forest land; besides which, there is the sea, always open for the transport of coal from Newcastle.  The volcanic soil of several provinces produces enormous quantities of sulphur, and the alum of Tolfi is the best in the world.  The quartz of Civita Vecchia will give us kaolin for porcelain.  The quarries contain building materials, such as marble and pozzolana, which is Roman cement almost ready-made.

In 1847, the country lands subject to the Pope were valued at about L34,800,000 sterling.  The province of Benevento was not included, and the Minister of Commerce and Public Works admitted that the property was not estimated at above a third of its real value.  If capital returned its proper interest, if activity and industry caused trade and manufactures to increase the national income as ought to be the case, it would be the Rothschilds who would borrow money of the Pope at six per cent. interest.

But stay!  I have not yet completed the catalogue of possessions.  To the present munificence of nature must be added the inheritance of the past.  The poor Pagans of great Rome left all their property to the Pope who damns them.

They left him gigantic aqueducts, prodigious sewers, and roads which we find still in use, after twenty centuries of traffic.  They left him the Coliseum, for his Capuchins to preach in.  They left him an example of an administration without an equal in history.  But the heritage was accepted without the responsibilities attached to it.