class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="p. 13" id="pgepubid00015"/>a dim dust-discoloured light.  Fancy all this, and you will have before you a Roman church.  On your way you pass no fine buildings, for to tell the honest truth, there are no fine buildings in Rome, except St Peter’s and the Colosseum, both of which lie away from the town.  Fragments indeed of old ruins, porticoes built into the wall, bricked-up archways and old cornice-stones, catch your eye from time to time; and so, on and on, over broken pavements, up and down endless hills, through narrow streets and gloomy piazzas, by churches innumerable, amidst an ever-shifting motley crowd of peasants, soldiers, priests, and beggars, you journey onwards for two miles or so; you have got at last to the modern quarter, where hotels are found, and where the English congregate.  There in the “Corso,” and in one or two streets leading out of it, there are foot-pavements, lamps at night, and windows to the shops.  A fair sprinkling of second-rate equipages roll by you, bearing the Roman ladies, with their gaudy dresses, ill-assorted colours, and their heavy, handsome, sensual features.  The young Italian nobles, with their English-cut attire, saunter past you listlessly.  The peasants are few in number now,

but the soldiers and priests and beggars are never wanting.  These streets and shops, brilliant though they seem by contrast with the rest of the city, would, after all, only be third-rate ones in any other European capital, and will not detain you long.  On again by the fountain of Treves, where the water-stream flows day and night through the defaced and broken statue-work; a few steps more, and then you fall again into the narrow streets and the decayed piazzas; on again, between high walls, along roads leading through desolate ruin-covered vineyards, and you are come to another gate.  The French sentinels are changing guard.  The dreary Campagna lies before you, and you have passed through Rome.

And when our stroll was over, that sceptic and incurious fellow-traveller of mine would surely turn to take a last look at the dark heap of roofs and chimney-pots and domes, which lies mouldering in the valley at his feet.  If I were then to tell him, that in that city of some hundred and seventy thousand souls, there were ten thousand persons in holy orders, and between three and four hundred churches, of which nearly half had convents and schools attached;

if I were to add, that taking in novices, scholars, choristers, servitors, beadles, and whole tribes of clerical attendants, there were probably not far short of forty thousand persons, who in some form or other lived upon and by the church, that is, in plainer words, doing no labour themselves, lived on the labour of others, he, I think, would answer then, that a city so priest-infested, priest-ruled and priest-ridden, would be much such a city as he had seen with me; such a city as Rome is now.

CHAPTER II.  THE COST OF THE PAPACY.

In foreign discussions on the Papal question it is always assumed, as an undisputed fact, that the maintenance of the Papal court at Rome is, in a material point of view, an immense advantage to the city, whatever it may be in a moral one.  Now my own observations have led me to doubt the correctness of this assumption, which, if true, forms an important item in the whole matter under consideration.  It is no good saying, as my “Papalini” friends are wont to do, Rome gains everything and indeed only exists by the Papacy.  The real questions are, What class at Rome gain by it, and what is it that they gain?  There are four classes at Rome: the priests, the nobles, the bourgeoisie, and the poor.  Of course if anybody gains it is the priesthood.  If the Pope were removed from Rome, or if a lay government were established (the two hypotheses are practically identical), the

number of the Clergy would undoubtedly be much diminished.  A large portion of the convents and clerical endowments would be suppressed, and the present generation of priests would be heavy sufferers.  This result is inevitable.  Under no free government would or could a city of 170,000 inhabitants support 10,000 unproductive persons out of the common funds; for this is substantially the case at Rome in the present day.  Every sixteen lay citizens, men, women, and children, support out of their labour a priest between them.  The Papal question with the Roman priesthood is thus a question of daily bread, and it is surely no want of charity to suppose that the material aspect influences their minds quite as much as the spiritual.  Still even with regard to the priests there are two sides to the question.  The system of political and social government inseparable from the Papacy, which closes up almost every trade and profession, drives vast numbers into the priesthood for want of any other occupation.  The supply of priests is, in consequence, far greater than the demand, and, as the laws of political economy hold good even in the Papal States, priest labour is miserably underpaid.  It is a Protestant delusion that the priests in Rome

live upon the fat of the land.  What fat there is is certainly theirs, but then there are too many mouths to eat it.  The Roman priests are relatively poorer than those in any other part of Italy.  It is one of the great mysteries in Rome how all the priests who swarm about the streets manage to live.  The clue to the mystery is to be found inside the churches.  In every church here, and there are 366 of them, some score or two of masses are said daily at the different altars.  The pay for performing a mass varies from a “Paul” to a “Scudo;” that is, in round numbers, from sixpence to a crown.  The “good” masses, those paid for by private persons for the souls of their relatives, are naturally reserved for the priests connected with the particular church; while the poor ones, which are paid for out of the funds of the church, are given to any priest who happens to apply for them.  So somehow or other, what with a mass or two a day, or by private tuition, or by charitable assistance, or in some cases by small handicrafts conducted secretly, the large floating population of unemployed priests rub on from day to day, in the hope of getting ultimately some piece of ecclesiastical patronage.  Yet the distress and want amongst them are often pitiable,

and, in fact, amongst the many sufferers from the artificial preponderance given to the priesthood by the Papal system, the poorer class of priests are not among the least or lightest.

The nobility as a body are sure to be more or less supporters of the established order of things.  Their interests too are very much mixed up with those of the Papacy.  There is not a noble Roman family which has not one or more of its members among the higher ranks of the priesthood, and to a considerable degree their distinctions, such as they are, and their temporal prospects are bound up with the Popedom.  Moreover, in this rank of the social scale the private and personal influence of the priests, through the women of the family, is very powerful.  The more active, however, and ambitious amongst the aristocracy feel deeply the exclusion from public life, the absence of any opening for ambition, and the gradual impoverishment of their property, which are the necessary evils of an absolute ecclesiastical government.

The “Bourgeoisie” stand on a very different footing.  They have neither the moral influence of the priesthood nor the material wealth of the nobility to console them for the loss of