policy, while the extent to which barbers are still employed as surgeons shows that the medical profession is not of sufficient repute to be prosperous.  There is no native patronage for art, no public for literature.  The very theatres, which flourish in other despotic states, are here but losing speculations, owing to the interference of clerical regulations.  There are no commerce and no manufactures in the Eternal city.  In a back street near the Capitol, over a gloomy, stable-looking door, you may see written up “Borsa di Roma,” but I never could discover any credible evidence of business being transacted on the Roman change.  There is but one private factory in Rome, the Anglo-Roman Gas Company.  What trade there is is huckstering, not commerce.  In fact, so Romans have told me, you may safely conclude that every native you meet walking in the streets here, in a broadcloth coat, lives from hand to mouth, and you may pretty surely guess that his next month’s salary is already overdrawn.  The crowds of respectably-dressed persons, clerks and shopkeepers and artizans, whom you see in the lottery offices the night before the drawing, prove the general existence not only of improvidence but of distress.

The favourite argument in support of the Papal rule in Rome, is that the poor gain immensely by it.  I quite admit that the argument contains a certain amount of truth.  The priests, the churches, and the convents give a great deal of employment to the working classes.  There are probably some 30,000 persons who live on the priests, or rather out of the funds which support them.  Then, too, the system of clerical charity operates favourably for the very poor.  Any Roman in distress can get from his priest a “buono,” or certificate, that he is in want of food, and on presenting this at one of the convents belonging to the mendicant orders, he will obtain a wholesome meal.  No man in Rome therefore need be reduced to absolute starvation as long as he stands well with his priest; that is, as long as he goes to confession, never talks of politics, and kneels down when the Pope passes.  Now the evil moral effects of such a system, its tendency to destroy independent self-respect and to promote improvidence are obvious enough, and I doubt whether even the positive gain to the poor is unmixed.  The wages paid to the servants of the Church, and the amount given away in charity, must come out of somebody’s pockets.  In fact, the whole country and the poor themselves indirectly, if not directly, are impoverished by supporting these unproductive classes out of the produce of labour.  If prevention is better than cure, work is any day better than charity.  After all, too, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and nowhere are the poor more poverty-stricken and needy than in Rome.  The swarms of beggars which infest the town are almost the first objects that strike a stranger here, though strangers have no notion of the distress of Rome.  The winter, when visitors are here, is the harvest-time of the Roman poor.  It is the summer, when the strangers are gone and the streets deserted, which is their season of want and misery.