The same system of repression prevails in everything.  In the print-shops one never sees a picture which even verges on impropriety.  The few female portraits exhibited in their windows are robed with an amount of drapery which would satisfy the most prudish “sensibilities.”  All books, which have the slightest amorous tendency, are scrupulously interdicted without reference to their political views.  The number of wine-shops seems to me small in proportion to the size of the city, and in none of them, as far as I could learn, are spirits sold.  There is another subject, which will suggest itself at once to any one acquainted with the life of towns, but on which it is obviously difficult to enter fully.  It is enough to say, that what the author of “Friends in Council” styles, with more sentiment than truth, “the sin of great cities,” does not “apparently” exist in Rome.  Not only is public vice kept out of sight, as in some other Italian cities, but its private haunts and resorts are absolutely and literally suppressed.  In fact, if priest rule were deposed, and our own Sabbatarians and total-abstinence men and societies for the suppression of vice, reigned in its stead, I doubt if Rome could be made more outwardly decorous than it is at present.

This then is the fair side of the picture.  What is the aspect of the reverse?  In the first place, the system requires for its working an amount of constant clerical interference in all private affairs, which, to say the least, is a great positive evil.  Confession is the great weapon by means of which morality is enforced.  Servants are instructed to report about their employers, wives about their husbands, children about their parents, and girls about their lovers.  Every act of your life is thus known to, and interfered with, by the priests.  I might quote a hundred instances of petty interference:  let me quote the first few that come to my memory.  No bookseller can have a sale of books without submitting each volume to clerical supervision.  An Italian gentleman, resident here, had to my own knowledge to obtain a special permission in order to retain a copy of Rousseau’s works in his private library.  The Roman nobles are not allowed to hunt because the Pope considers the amusement dangerous.  Profane swearing is a criminal offence.  Every Lent all restaurateurs are warned by a solemn edict not to supply meat on fast days, and then told that “whenever on the forbidden days they are obliged to supply rich meats, they must do so in a separate room, in order that scandal may be avoided, and that all may know they are in the capital of the catholic world.”  Forced marriages are matters of constant occurrence, and even strangers against whom a charge of affiliation is brought are obliged either to marry their accuser, or make provision for the illegitimate offspring.  In the provinces the system of interference is naturally carried to yet greater lengths.  Nine years ago certain Christians at Bologna, who had opened shops in the Jewish quarter of the town, were ordered to leave at once, because such a practice was in “open opposition to the Apostolic laws and institutions.”  Again, Cardinal Cagiano, Bishop of Senigaglia, published a decree in the year 1844, which has never been repealed, to promote morality in his diocese.  In that decree the following articles occur: