Rome in 1860 | Page 6

comfort, and the thousand live in
misery." I believe this picture is only too true. The middle classes, who
live by trade or mental labour, must have a hard time of it. The
professions of Rome are overstocked and underpaid. The large class of
government officials or "impiegati," to whom admirers of the Papacy
point with such pride as evidence of the secular character of the
administration, are paid on the most niggardly scale; while all the
lucrative and influential posts are reserved for the priestly
administrators. The avowed venality of the courts of justice is a proof
that lawyers are too poorly remunerated to find honesty their best
policy, while the extent to which barbers are still employed as surgeons
shows that the medical profession is not of sufficient repute to be
prosperous. There is no native patronage for art, no public for literature.
The very theatres, which flourish in other despotic states, are here but
losing speculations, owing to the interference of clerical regulations.
There are no commerce and no manufactures in the Eternal city. In a
back street near the Capitol, over a gloomy, stable-looking door, you
may see written up "Borsa di Roma," but I never could discover any

credible evidence of business being transacted on the Roman change.
There is but one private factory in Rome, the Anglo-Roman Gas
Company. What trade there is is huckstering, not commerce. In fact, so
Romans have told me, you may safely conclude that every native you
meet walking 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
consider the native commerce of either of these bathing-places quite as
remunerative as that of the Papal capital. The Vatican is the quietest
and the least showy of European courts; and of itself, whatever it may
do by others, causes little money to be spent in the town. Even if the
Pope were removed from Rome, I much doubt, and I know the Romans
doubt, whether travellers would cease to come, or even come in
diminished numbers. Rome was famous centuries before Popes were
heard of, and will be equally famous centuries after they have passed
away. The churches, the museums, the galleries, the ruins, the climate,
and the recollections of Rome, would still remain equally attractive,
whether the Pope were at