rope, from which
food is constantly and largely exported. There are at least one hundred
millions of dollars locked up in useless decorations of churches, and
not one common school-house from Savoy to Sicily. A little education,
after a fashion, is fitfully dispensed by certain religious and
charitable foundations, so that the child lucky enough to be an orphan
or illegitimate has a chance to be taught to read and write; but any
such thing as a practical recognition of the right to education, or as a
public and general provision for imparting it, is utterly unknown here.
Grand and beautiful structures are crowded in every city, and are
crumbling to dust on every side; a single township dotted at proper
intervals with eight or ten school-houses would be worth them all. With
infinite water power, cheaper labor, and cheaper food than almost any
other country in the civilized world, and millions of children at once
naked and idle because no one will employ them at even six-pence a day,
she has not one cotton or woolen factory that I have yet seen, and can
hardly have one at all, though her mountains afford vast and excellent
sheep-walks, and Naples can grow cotton if she will. England and Germany
manufacture nearly all the few fabrics of cotton or wool worn here,
because those who should lead, instruct, and employ this people, are
blind to their duty or recreant to its obligations. Italy, once the
light of the world, is dying of aristocratic torpor and popular
ignorance, whence come indolence, superstition, and wide-spread
demoralization and misery.

Bologna is a walled city of Seventy Thousand inhabitants, with about as
much trade and business of all kinds as an American village of ten to
twenty thousand people. I doubt that thirty persons per day are carried
into or brought out of it by all public conveyances whatever. It is well
built on narrow streets, like nearly all Italian cities, and manifests
considerable activity in the way of watching gates and _vise_ing
Passports. Though in the Papal territory, it is under Austrian
guardianship; an Austrian sentinel constantly paced the court-yard of
the "Hotel Brun" where I stopped. Though the second town in the Pope's
temporal dominions, strongly walled, it has no Military strength, being
commanded by a hill a short mile south of it--the last hill I remember
having seen till I reached Venice and looked across over the lagoons to
the Euganian hills on the main land to south-wes