The poor fellow looked sheepish and frightened enough, as he patrolled slowly with his escort up and down the crowded Porta Pia thoroughfare; but even this insult failed to effect its object.  The device was too transparent for an Italian crowd not to detect it, and the ill-omened cortege of the “Pope’s representative,” as the Romans styled the executioner, passed by without any comment.

MARCH 7.

The system of silent legal opposition which was carried on formerly at Milan, and now at Venice, is being organised here against the Papal rule.  By one of those mystical compacts to which I have before alluded, it has been resolved to suppress smoking and lottery-gambling.  Our anti-tobacconists, or our moral reformers, must not suppose that the Romans have suddenly become alive to the iniquity of either of these pursuits.  I wish, indeed, with regard to the latter, I could conscientiously assert that the Liberal faction had decreed its extinction from any conviction of the degradation and corruption inflicted by it upon their country.  I fear, however, from the extent to which lotteries are still encouraged by the Tuscan Government, that such is not the case.  The reason of the movement is, indeed, a very simple and material one.  From the lotteries and the tobacco monopoly the government derives a very large part of its revenues, and a part, too, which does not excite unpopularity in the same way as direct taxation.  Any extinction, therefore, or indeed any serious diminution of these sources of revenue, would place the Holy See in great difficulties.  The profits on the lottery go directly into the pockets of the Government, who are also supplied with very extensive and important patronage by the vast number of petty posts which the system employed for collecting tickets places at their disposal.  The tobacco monopoly is farmed out to a company, on whom any loss would fall in the first instance; but if the abstention from tobacco were continued long, the Government would soon feel the effects, through the inability of the company to keep up their present rate of payment.

Whether rightly or wrongly, an attempt to cut off the funds of the Papal exchequer in this manner is certainly being made.  Strangers, of course, are not interfered with; but Italians are warned at the doors of the cigar-shops and the lottery-offices not to enter and buy.  The sudden diminution in the number of people you meet smoking in the streets is quite remarkable, and, I am sure, would strike any observer who had never heard of the movement.  There have been already several disturbances between smokers and non-smokers.  The story goes, that in a quarrel arising out of this subject, a man was stabbed in the street the night before last; but in Rome it is almost impossible to make out the truth in a matter of this kind.  At several lottery-offices gendarmes have been placed to hinder purchasers of tickets from being molested; and a bitter feeling seems growing up on every side.  How long the Romans may have strength of mind enough to abstain from their favourite amusements of smoking and gambling, it is impossible to say; but since I witnessed their resolute abstention from the delights of the Carnival, I think better of their courage than I did before.