knowledge. These black-coated gentry fairly
overshadow the land with their shovel hats, so that Corn has no fair
chance of sunshine. The Churches of this City alone must have cost Ten
Millions of Dollars--for you cannot walk a hundred steps without passing
one; and the wealth lavished in their construction and adornment exceeds
all belief--while all the common school-houses in Genoa would not bring
fifty thousand dollars. The best minds of the country are now pondering
the urgent necessity of speedily establishing a system of efficient
Popular Education.

But the Nation is deeply in debt, and laboring under heavy burdens. Its
Industry is inefficient, its Commerce meager, its Revenues slender,
while the imminent peril of Austrian invasion compels the keeping up of
an Army of Fifty Thousand effective men ready to take the field at a
moment's warming. But for the notorious and active hostility of
three-fourths of Continental Europe to the liberal policy of its rulers,
Sardinia might dispense with three-fourths of this force and save its
heavy cost for Education and Internal Improvement. As things are, women
must toil in the fields while Physical and Mental Improvement must wait
in order that the Nation may sustain in virtual idleness Fifty Thousand
Soldiers and Sixty Thousand Priests.

Yet mighty are the blessings of Freedom, even under the greatest
disadvantages. Turin is now increasing in Industry and Population with a
rapidity unknown to its former history. Looking only at the new
buildings just erected or now in progress, you might mistake it for an
American city. Unless checked by future wars, Turin will double its
population between 1850 and 1860. Genoa has but recently and partially
felt the new impulse, yet even here the march of improvement is visible.
Three years more of peace will witness the substitution for its long
period of stagnation and decay of an activity surpassed by that of no
city in Europe.

Turin is eligibly located and well built, most of the houses being
large, tall, and the walls of decided strength and thickness; but Genoa
is even superior in most respects if not in all. I never saw so many
churches so admirably constructed and so gorgeously, laboriously
ornamented as the half dozen I visited yesterday and this morning. My
guide says there are sixty churches in Genoa (a city about the size of
Boston, though with fewer houses and a much smaller area than Brooklyn),
and that they are nearly al