year 1858 may therefore be fairly regarded as a normal year under the present Papal system.  For this year the net receipts of the Government were,

Now the census, taken at the end of 1857, showed a little over 600,000 families in the Papal States.  The head therefore of every family had, on an average, to pay about 16 sc. and a half, or £3. 7s. 9d. annually for the expenses of the Government, which for so poor a country is pretty well.  Let us now see how that money is professed to have been spent,

The net expenses are,

Now the Pontifical army is kept up avowedly not for purposes of defence, but to support the Government.  The public debt of 66 millions of scudi has been incurred for the sake of keeping up this army.  The expenses of the Interior mean the expenses of the police and spies, which infest every town in the Papal dominions, and the grant for Special Purposes, whatever else it may mean, which is not clear, means certainly some job, which the Government does not like to avow.  The only parts, therefore, of the expenditure which can be fairly said to be for the benefit of the nation, are the expenses of the

Currency, Census and Public Works, amounting altogether to 785198 scudi, or not a twelfth of the net income raised by taxation.  Commercially speaking, whatever may be the case theologically, I am afraid the Papal system can hardly be said to pay.

CHAPTER III.  THE MORALITY OF ROME.

We all know the story of “Boccaccio’s” Jew, who went to Rome an unbeliever, and came back a Christian.  There is no need for alarm; it is not my intention to repeat the story.  Indeed the only reason for my alluding to it, is to introduce the remark that, at the present day, the Jew would have returned from Rome hardened in heart and unconverted.  The flagrant profligacy, the open immorality, which in the Hebrew’s judgment supplied the strongest testimony to the truth of a religion that survived such scandals, exist no longer.  Rome is, externally, the most moral and decorous of European cities.  In reality, she may be only a whited sepulchre, but at any rate, the whitewash is laid on very thick, and the plaster looks uncommonly like stone.  From various motives, this feature is, I think, but seldom brought prominently forward in descriptions

of the Papal city.  Protestant and liberal writers slur over the facts, because, however erroneously, they are deemed inconsistent with the assumed iniquity of the Government and the corruptions of the Papacy.  Catholic narrators know perhaps too much of what goes on behind the scenes to relish calling too close an attention to the apparent proprieties of Rome.  Be the cause what it may, the moral aspect of the Papal city seems to me to be but little dwelt upon, and yet on many accounts it is a very curious one.

As far as Sabbatarianism is concerned, Rome is the Glasgow of Italy.  All shops, except druggists’, tobacconists’, and places of refreshment, are hermetically closed on Sundays.  Even the barbers have to close at half-past ten in the morning under a heavy fine, and during the Sundays in Lent cafés and eating-houses are shut throughout the afternoon, because the waiters are supposed to go to catechism.  The English reading-rooms are locked up; there is no delivery of letters, and no mails go out.  A French band plays on the Pincian at sunset, and the Borghese gardens are thrown open; but these, till evening, are the only public amusements.  At night, it is true, the theatres are open, but then in Roman Catholic countries,

Sunday evening is universally accounted a feast.  To make up for this, the theatres are closed on every Friday in the year, as they are too throughout Lent and Advent; and once a week or more there is sure to be a Saint’s day as well, on which shops and all are closed, to the great trial of a traveller’s patience.  All the amusements of the Papal subjects are regulated with the strictest regard to their morals.  Private or public gambling of any kind, excepting always the Papal Lottery, is strictly suppressed.  There are no public dancing-places of any kind, no casinos or “cafés chantants.”  No public masked balls are allowed, except one or two on the last nights of the Carnival.  The theatres themselves are kept under the most rigid “surveillance.”  Every thing, from the titles of the plays to the petticoats of the ballet-girls, undergoes clerical inspection.  The censorship is as unsparing of “double entendres” as of political allusions, and “Palais Royal” farces are ‘Bowdlerized’ down till they emerge from the process innocuous and dull; compared with one at the “Apollo,” a ballet at the Princess’s was a wild and voluptuous orgy.

The same system of repression prevails in everything.  In the print-shops one never sees a

picture which even verges on impropriety.  The few female portraits exhibited in their windows are robed with an amount of drapery which would satisfy the most prudish “sensibilities.”  All books, which have the slightest amorous tendency, are scrupulously interdicted without reference to their political views.  The number of wine-shops seems to me small in proportion to the size of the city, and in none of them, as far as I could learn, are spirits sold.  There is another subject, which will suggest itself at once to any one acquainted with the life of towns, but on which it is obviously difficult to enter fully.  It is enough to say, that what the author of “Friends in Council” styles, with more sentiment than truth, “the sin of great cities,” does not “apparently” exist in Rome.  Not only is public vice kept out of sight, as in some other Italian cities, but its private haunts and resorts are absolutely and literally suppressed.  In fact, if priest rule were deposed, and our own Sabbatarians and total-abstinence men and societies for the suppression of vice, reigned in its stead, I doubt if Rome could be made more outwardly decorous than it is at present.

This then is the fair side of the picture.  What is the aspect of the reverse?  In the first place,

the system requires for its working an amount of constant clerical interference in all private affairs, which, to say the least, is a great positive evil.  Confession is the great weapon by means of which morality is enforced.  Servants are instructed to report about their employers, wives about their husbands, children about their parents, and girls about their lovers.  Every act of your life is thus known to, and interfered with, by the priests.  I might quote a hundred instances of petty interference: let me quote the first few that come to my memory.  No bookseller can have a sale of books