g
in the streets here, in a broadcloth coat, lives from hand to mouth, and
you may pretty surely guess that his next month's salary is already
overdrawn. The crowds of respectably-dressed persons, clerks and
shopkeepers and artizans, whom you see in the lottery offices the night
before the drawing, prove the general existence not only of improvidence
but of distress.

The favourite argument in support of the Papal rule in Rome, is that the
poor gain immensely by it. I quite admit that the argument contains a
certain amount of truth. The priests, the churches, and the convents
give a great deal of employment to the working classes. There are
probably some 30,000 persons who live on the priests, or rather out of
the funds which support them. Then, too, the system of clerical charity
operates favourably for the very poor. Any Roman in distress can get
from his priest a "buono," or certificate, that he is in want of food,
and on presenting this at one of the convents belonging to the mendicant
orders, he will obtain a wholesome meal. No man in Rome therefore need
be reduced to absolute starvation as long as he stands well with his
priest; that is, as long as he goes to confession, never talks of
politics, and kneels down when the Pope passes. Now the evil moral
effects of such a system, its tendency to destroy independent
self-respect and to promote improvidence are obvious enough, and I doubt
whether even the positive gain to the poor is unmixed. The wages paid to
the servants of the Church, and the amount given away in charity, must
come out of somebody's pockets. In fact, the whole country and the poor
themselves indirectly, if not directly, are impoverished by supporting
these unproductive classes out of the produce of labour. If prevention
is better than cure, work is any day better than charity. After all,
too, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and nowhere are the poor
more poverty-stricken and needy than in Rome. The swarms of beggars
which infest the town are almost the first objects that strike a stranger
here, though strangers have no notion of the distress of Rome. The
winter, when visitors are here, is the harvest-time of the Roman poor. It
is the summer, when the strangers are gone and the streets deserted,
which is their season of want and misery.

The truth is, that Rome, at the present day, lives upon her visitors, as
much or more than Ramsgate or Margate, for I should be disposed to