ude. But, this
yet uncivilized world, in which the friends of humanity are
misrepresented, is still doomed to look without feeling at victims, who
honor our degraded race!--May the true God, who is in heaven, listen to my
prayer! A short prayer, but a true one!--Foreigners who call us
effeminate, must be effeminate themselves, unless they are so ignorant as
to call Brutus an effeminate, because they find him in chains with a
slave, and forced to work with the last of men! Travelers, and Mr. Headley
blame italians, because they find under that sky, worthy of a better
fortune, beggars, and wretches "selling their rich ornaments that were the
objects of their ancestors' affection, and veneration, like the trinkets
of a toy shop." But, you, spoiled children of more happy governments, you
should not, at least, laugh at our nakedness!--And the pretty piedemontese
who gave you a fall, Mr. Headley, because her necessity forced her to
stand before you with a little pewter dish in her hand, most humbly asking
for a few sous, rather as charity, than as a recompense of her mountain
songs; instead of throwing her the coppers, and thinking her inspiration
nothing but a love of money, your good, american heart should have
prompted a feeling, if not mixed with tears, at least, with a smile of
sympathy, which would have been, by far, more pleasing to an italian
heart, than your few coppers. That poor delicate female was singing not
for the love of money, a love which wrongs rather too much this country of
America. She charmed you for the urgent necessity of hunger! And who knows
that the loaf of bread she bought with your few coppers, had not been
mixed with her innocent and bitter tears? And that hunger is originated
from the continual plunders which the despotical foreign powers in Italy,
and surrounding Italy, are unlawfully forcing on us to maintain an
exorbitant army, with which to distress us. Who knows, that the father of
the poor piedmontese had not been hanged for having claimed the rights of
man, the very rights to which God did create us?

The other ragged woman to whom your american navy taught how to say: 'God
damn' without knowing the meaning of it, would prove, that if such
americans are found in Italy, passing their christian time with such
women, your americans must have looseness of morals as much as my
italians. But, as I think the cursing women in Broadway cannot take off
the merit of the american ladies, you have no