for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their
religion especially and particularly cursed; at this
very day, in that curious country, a Jew is allowed
to vote, hold office, yea, get up on a rostrum in
the public street and express his opinion of the government
if the government don’t suit him! Ah,
it is wonderful. The common people there know
a great deal; they even have the effrontery to complain
if they are not properly governed, and to take hold
and help conduct the government themselves; if they
had laws like ours, which give one dollar of every
three a crop produces to the government for taxes,
they would have that law altered: instead of
paying thirty-three dollars in taxes, out of every
one hundred they receive, they complain if they have
to pay seven. They are curious people.
They do not know when they are well off. Mendicant
priests do not prowl among them with baskets begging
for the church and eating up their substance.
One hardly ever sees a minister of the gospel going
around there in his bare feet, with a basket, begging
for subsistence. In that country the preachers
are not like our mendicant orders of friars—they
have two or three suits of clothing, and they wash
sometimes. In that land are mountains far higher
than the Alban mountains; the vast Roman Campagna,
a hundred miles long and full forty broad, is really
small compared to the United States of America; the
Tiber, that celebrated river of ours, which stretches
its mighty course almost two hundred miles, and which
a lad can scarcely throw a stone across at Rome, is
not so long, nor yet so wide, as the American Mississippi—nor
yet the Ohio, nor even the Hudson. In America
the people are absolutely wiser and know much more
than their grandfathers did. They do not plow
with a sharpened stick, nor yet with a three-cornered
block of wood that merely scratches the top of the
ground. We do that because our fathers did, three
thousand years ago, I suppose. But those people
have no holy reverence for their ancestors. They
plow with a plow that is a sharp, curved blade of iron,
and it cuts into the earth full five inches.
And this is not all. They cut their grain with
a horrid machine that mows down whole fields in a day.
If I dared, I would say that sometimes they use a
blasphemous plow that works by fire and vapor and
tears up an acre of ground in a single hour—but
—but—I see by your looks that
you do not believe the things I am telling you.
Alas, my character is ruined, and I am a branded speaker
of untruths!”
Of course we have been to the monster Church of St.
Peter, frequently. I knew its dimensions.
I knew it was a prodigious structure. I knew
it was just about the length of the capitol at Washington—say
seven hundred and thirty feet. I knew it was
three hundred and sixty-four feet wide, and consequently
wider than the capitol. I knew that the cross
on the top of the dome of the church was four hundred
and thirty-eight feet above the ground, and therefore
about a hundred or may be a hundred and twenty-five
feet higher than the dome of the capitol.—Thus
I had one gauge. I wished to come as near forming
a correct idea of how it was going to look, as possible;
I had a curiosity to see how much I would err.
I erred considerably. St. Peter’s did
not look nearly so large as the capitol, and certainly
not a twentieth part as beautiful, from the outside.