as he found the turn the conversation
had taken, discreetly stepped out, and left it all to ourselves. "I
never in all my life," I remarked, "saw a city in which I found so many
beggars. The people seem to have nothing to do, and nothing to eat.
There are here some hundred thousand of you cooped up within these old
walls, and one half the population do nothing all day long but whine at
the heels of English travellers, or hang on at the doors of the
convents, waiting their one meal a-day. Why is this? Outside the walls
is a magnificent plain, which, were it cultivated, would feed ten Romes,
instead of one. Why don't you take picks, or spades, or
ploughs,--anything you can lay hands on,--and go out to that plain, and
dig it, and plant it, and sow it, and reap it, and eat and drink, and be
merry?" "Ah! so we would," said he. "Then, why don't you?" "We dare
not," he replied. "Dare not! Dare not till the earth God has given
you?" "It is the Church's," he said. "But come now," said he, "and I
will explain how it comes to be so." He went on to say, that one portion
of the Campagna was gifted to the convents in Rome, another portion was
gifted to the nunneries, another to the hospitals, and another to the
pontifical families,--that is, to the sons and daughters, or, as they
more politely speak in Rome, the nephews and nieces, of the Popes. These
were the owners of the great Roman plain; and in their hands almost
every acre of it was locked up, inaccessible to the plough, and
inaccessible to the people. Even in our country it is found that
corporations make the worst possible landlords, and that lands in the
possession of such bodies are always less productive than estates
managed in the ordinary way. But what sort of farming are we to expect
from such corporations as we find in the city of Rome? What skill or
capital have a brotherhood of lazy monks, to enable them to cultivate
their lands? What enterprise or interest have a sisterhood of nuns to
farm their property? They know they shall have their lifetime of it, and
that is all they care for. Accordingly, they let their lands for
grazing, on payment of a mere trifle of annual rent; and so the Campagna
lies unploughed and unsown. A tract of land extending from Civita
Vecchia to well nigh the gates of Rome,--which would make a Scotch
dukedom or a German principality,--belonging to the _San Spirito_, does
little more, I was told, than pay its working. The land labours under an
e