feet on solid masonry to preserve it from being washed
away by the floods which follow every violent or protracted rain.
Expensive arches to admit the passage of the streams whenever crossed,
and of the roads, are also numerous, so that these thirty miles, in
spite of the abundance and cheapness of Labor here, will cost at least
Three Millions of Dollars. Yet the road will pay when in full operation,
and will prove a new day-spring of prosperity to Genoa. From Turin,
branches or feeders will run to the Alps in various directions,
benefiting that city considerably, but Genoa infinitely more, since
nine-tenths of the produce even of Piedmont will run past Turin, without
unloading, to find purchasers and exporters here. A coal-mine of promise
has just been discovered at Aosta, at the foot of the Alps, to which one
of these branches is to be constructed. Genoa is now jealous of Turin's
political ascendency, which is just as sensible as would be jealousy of
Albany on the part of New-York. Even already, though it has not come
near her, the Railroad is sensibly improving her trade and industry; and
whenever it shall have reached her wharves every mile added to its
extent or to that of any of its branches will add directly and largely
to the commerce and wealth of this city. In time this Road will connect
with those of France and Germany, by a tunnel through some one of the
Alps (Mount Cenis is now under consideration), but, even without that,
whenever it shall have reached the immediate base of the Alps on this
side and been responded to by similar extensions of the French and
Rhine-valley Railroads on the other, Genoa will supplant Marseilles
while continuing preferable to Trieste as the point of embarkation for
Cairo and Suez on the direct route from England and Paris for India,
China and Southern Asia generally, and can only be superseded in that
preeminence by a railroad running hence or from Lake Maggiore and Milan
direct to Naples or Salerno--a work of whose construction through so
many petty and benighted principalities there is no present probability.

Still, Sardinia has very much before her unaccomplished. She needs first
of all things an efficient and comprehensive system of Popular
Education. With the enormous superabundance of Sixty Thousand Priests
and other Ecclesiastics to a generally poor population of Four Millions,
she has not to-day five thousand teachers, good, bad and indifferent, of
elementary and secular