I have endeavoured in former chapters to exhibit a picture of the frightful desolation of this once magnificent plain. He that set his mark on the brow of the first murderer has set his mark on this plain, where so much blood has been shed. "Now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. When thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength." But God has cursed this plain through the instrumentality of this evil system the Papacy, and I shall show you how.
I have already shown that there is not, and cannot be, anything like trade in Rome, beyond what is necessary to repair the consumpt of articles in daily use. In the absence of trade there is a proportionate amount of idleness; and that idleness, in its turn, breeds beggary, vagabondism, and crime. The French Prefect, Mr Whiteside tells us, published a statistical account of Rome; and how many paupers does he say there are in it? Why, not fewer than thirty thousand. Thirty thousand paupers in one city, and that city, in its usual state, of but about a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants! Subtract the priests, the English residents, and the French soldiers, and every third man is a beggar. I was fortunate enough one evening to meet, in a certain shop in Rome, an intelligent Roman, willing to talk with me on the state of the country. The shopkeeper, as soon as he found the turn the conversation had taken, discreetly stepped out, and left it all to ourselves. "I never in all my life," I remarked, "saw a city in which I found so many beggars. The people seem to have nothing to do, and nothing to eat. There are here some hundred thousand of you cooped up within these old walls, and one half the population do nothing all day long but whine at the heels of English travellers, or hang on at the doors of the convents, waiting their one meal a-day. Why is this? Outside the walls is a magnificent plain, which, were it cultivated, would feed ten Romes, instead of one. Why don't you take picks, or spades, or ploughs,--anything you can lay hands on,--and go out to that plain, and dig it, and plant it, and sow it, and reap it, and eat and drink, and be merry?" "Ah! so we would," said he. "Then, why don't you?" "We dare not," he replied. "Dare not! Dare not till the earth God has given you?" "It is the Church's," he said. "But come now," said he, "and I will explain how it comes to be so." He went on to say, that one portion of the Campagna was gifted to the convents in Rome, another portion was gifted to the nunneries, another to the hospitals, and another to the pontifical families,--that is, to the sons and daughters, or, as they more politely speak in Rome, the nephews and nieces, of the Popes. These were the owners of the great Roman plain; and in their hands almost every acre of it was locked up, inaccessible to the plough, and inaccessible to the people. Even in our country it is found that corporations make the worst possible landlords, and that lands in the possession of such bodies are always less productive than estates managed in the ordinary way. But what sort of farming are we to expect from such corporations as we find in the city of Rome? What skill or capital have a brotherhood of lazy monks, to enable them to cultivate their lands? What enterprise or interest have a sisterhood of nuns to farm their property? They know they shall have their lifetime of it, and that is all they care for. Accordingly, they let their lands for grazing, on payment of a mere trifle of annual rent; and so the Campagna lies unploughed and unsown. A tract of land extending from Civita Vecchia to well nigh the gates of Rome,--which would make a Scotch dukedom or a German principality,--belonging to the _San Spirito_, does little more, I was told, than pay its working. The land labours under an eternal entail, which binds it over to perpetual sterility. It is God's, _i.e._ it is the Church's; and no one,--no, not even the Pope,--dare alienate a single acre of it. No Pope would set his face to such a piece of reformation, well knowing that every brotherhood and sisterhood in Rome would rise in arms against him. And even though he should screw his courage to such an encounter, he is met by the canon law. The Pope who shall dare to secularize a foot-breadth of land which has been gifted to the Church is by that law accursed. Here, then, is the price which the Romans pay for the Papacy.