ood, so that the poor inmates could never get a
glimpse of the loggia, that perfect example of a Venetian court of
justice. The hospital at Split was a damp cellar, and outside it was a
ditch of stinking water. The foundling home, which was called _Pieta_,
was a room so horrible that, out of six hundred and three new-born
children who had been there in ten years, _not one had gone out
alive_.

But were not these abuses general at that epoch? And can we demand
that the Venetians of that time shall answer the reproaches which it
pleases us to make? And what answer did they give to the reproaches of
their subjects, illustrious Dalmatians, such as Tommaseo and Pietro
Alessandro Paravia, who, although belonging to the Italophil party,
passed the sternest judgment on the authorities? What excuse could
there be in 1797, seeing that, the wars having concluded at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, Venice was free to undertake a
humanitarian and civilizing work? Venice was by no means in a
disarming state of decrepitude. On her own lands she had brought her
stock-raising, her agriculture and her industries to such a pitch of
development that she had the experience, as well as the initiative and
the means, to do something for the Dalmatians who, and especially in
the interior, knew no other trade than that of arms. Terrible was the
desolation of those days; over large areas there was no
drinking-water; the land was merely used to pasture the herds of
almost wild cattle; instead of the superb forests were hundreds of
miles of naked rock; and nowhere had the Venetian families, to whom
the Government had given great holdings, come to settle down among
their peasants. Nothing at all had been done in the way of
canalization or of drainage, so that the land was devastated with
malarial fever. In 1797 only 256,000 inhabitants remained; a hundred
years later the number had doubled. It had much more than doubled if
we take into account those who emigrated from a land which could no
longer support the population of the early Middle Ages.

In 1797 the Venetian democrats begged Napoleon not to take Dalmatia
from them, since the harbours and the population were indispensable to
them. They made no allusion to the sentiments of affection which
united these provinces to the Mother Country.

But are we unfair to the Venetians? Are we omitting the salient fact
that, even if they were not model administrators, they at all events
kept out t