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get everything out of his land, and to have no money to spend." Indeed there can be no worse customers for the manufactures of a country than a population of peasant proprietors. Whether the land is fit for it or not, say the Italian and French reports over and over again, they will grow vines, olives, maize, and corn to sell, and hemp, barley for chickens, potatoes for pigs, oats for horses, and vegetables for use.

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'Promiscuous culture, which tries to grow a little of everything, results in producing nothing well.' Facility of communication has destroyed the advantages of being self-sufficing, and enables the producers to grow only what the land is most fitted for and to buy the rest. Specialisation is the great feature of modern agricultural progress, and the same ground will often, under such a change, increase four or five times in value.' The métayer system of dividing the profits is a great obstacle to such improvements; the expense of substituting vines for flax would cost 3,000 or 4,000 lire the hectare. Only an absolute proprietor, cultivating for himself, could undertake such an expense. The métayer always cultivates all sorts of things at once, in order that, if one fails, he may fall back on another. The produce of corn in Italy, which makes us blush, amounts only to 11 hectolitres the hectare, while in England it is 32, in the German Empire 23, in Holland 22, in Belgium 20, and only 15 in France. Our piecemeal agriculture without machines must fail, and machines are perfectly impossible with extremely small properties. Not only would the cost be as much as the value of the land, but no machine could act in such extremely small limits, where now even a wooden plough tied to the horns of a couple of half-wild oxen has difficulty in turning.' The time and trouble wasted by these short furrows is said by experienced agriculturists to make the difference between a small profit and none at all in the extremely narrow margin only possible at present.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the miserable condition of the agricultural population in Italy as described here, the wretched dwellings, the unwholesome food, the amount of disease, the low wages, the want of morality and of education. The diseases induced by unsanitary conditions are fearful. In the 'pellagra, which is akin to leprosy, the body dries up and wastes away, the skin grows yellow and black and is covered with scales; it loses all feeling, so that a prick or cut is scarcely perceived; finally, the patient, inert, apathetic, motionless, half dead, with sunken eyes, becomes a mere mummy, unconsciously awaiting the opening of his grave. It is sometimes said to arise from excessive poverty and starvation, but,' says the report, 'why are there so many villages where the country people are almost dying of hunger without a single case, while it is found in others not worse lodged and fed?' The probable cause is the use of putrid and mouldy maize, often exchanged by the millers for better corn, but also brought in from abroad; the bread is made

into enormous loaves, baked thus to save firing, the inside of which grows putrid before the week's end which they are intended to last. 'Other diseases, though less heard of, are quite as numerousscrofula, chest complaints, and, in some valleys, cretinism.' It sounds strange in our ears to talk of consumption as one of the scourges which desolate Italy, of which we have considered the North to have a sad monopoly. Malaria and fevers of different kinds are extremely common in Latium, Lombardy, and other parts. Tertian fevers are as dangerous as the pellagra in the Roman Campagna and the irrigated country in Lombardy. Where marshes exist man cannot live. If he does not destroy the marsh, the marsh destroys him.'

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The excessively divided property in parts of Italy is such as to reduce it to a mere proletariate of owners, abominably lodged and ill nourished, who could not possibly carry out any sanitary improvements, even if decreed by the law. Health and morality are inseparably bound up together; for instance, about Rome there is a zone of small properties amounting to about 20,000 acres. Here the want of water, of proper houses, and of cultivation, and the total absence of roads at the very gates of the Eternal City, greatly diminishes the value of the soil.

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The result is curious as told by a Catholic observer. The few times when the peasants earn money they drink to excess, so as to be seen rolling on the ground; they have no morality, and live in abominable vice. Education is almost nil. In place of religion there is the grossest superstition; children are taught to go to church as horses and dogs are drilled; the men gabble Latin prayers and have no notion of duty. By a few observances bad women and brigands contrive to consider themselves very religious.' Wages are from 10d. to 18. a day, but there are nearly a hundred festival days. Farm servants, who are clothed and fed, have from 48. to 68., the women from 1s. to 3s. a month.

The condition of the small proprietor is even inferior to that of the labourers. Half the children die under seven years old in the Marches. The families live together, sometimes to the number of forty. The food is wretched, bread bad, without salt, made of maize, beans, and sometimes even acorns, with but little wheat.

The account of the island of Sardinia is even worse. Wages are from 8d. to 10d. Men may be seen wandering in the fields picking up herbs to eat. The little proprietors are quite as wretched. Animals which die of disease are eaten under the notion that fire purifies the flesh; healthy beasts are kept for the market. Neither the peasant proprietors nor the labourers, most of whom leave their homes to work in gangs during some months of the year in order to live, ever bring back their money; they eat and drink it, and give way to all sorts of excesses, so that the families do not benefit at all.

The excessive hard work which the small properties entail upon the women appears at every turn. The wife's position is such in the central provinces that it is said 'women are bargained for like cattle

and toil like Indian squaws.' No one indeed who has seen that dreadful human being an Italian peasant old woman-wrinkled, decrepit, squalid, with three hairs on the top of her bare skull as her only head-gear-can doubt the severe life of toil and privation to which she has been condemned.

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One result of the excessive poverty is that rural thefts are increasing, and are committed by fathers in the presence of their children. It is the parents who teach the children the path to crime,' said the judge of Ravanusa. In the centre and south of Italy thefts are so common as to be a serious obstacle to cultivation. In Latium, the Marches, the Neapolitan territory, fruit, grapes, olives, corn, vegetables, and even cattle are stolen, and flocks are led to pasture upon other people's lands. To steal wood is not considered dishonourable in the Marches. The stolen wood is sold publicly at prices which do not pay for the cutting down and the transport. Public opinion is in favour of the thief when taken by the law. The grapes for the vintage must be picked before they are ripe, greatly to the detriment of their value, or there would not be a bunch left in many provinces.

One very original mode of theft is mentioned. When the grain is threshed, the peasant girls walk round the heap praying for the blessing of Heaven upon the corn, and picking up a handful surreptitiously as they pass; the prayers are ended when the aprons are full.

In Sicily it is almost a proverb that in ever peasant you see a man capable of theft. The miserable condition of their dwellings is one cause of this.' And, again, it is said the health and the morality of a nation depend on each other.'

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The difficulty of entrusting power to local boards, a course which we seem about to adopt to a great extent, is much insisted on.

It is impossible to abandon regulations concerning drainage, sanitary questions, roads, &c., to the caprices of communal administration, while the State could perhaps not make rules wisely applicable to such different conditions as those in different parts of Italy. Probably the most feasible unit would be the province, which should consult the communes as to what is required, but which must receive the sanction of Government before these can become law.

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Another perplexing point is the enormous amount of mortgages upon all properties both great and small. The small cultivators are ruined by the usurers; complaints are unanimous.' The interest in Sicily and Sardinia is usurious, sometimes 25 per cent. It is 12 per cent. in the Veronese districts.' 'Small loans to farmers are habitually lent at 60 per cent. in the Roman provinces.' 'In Apulia short

5 To praise one's country is not considered effective, but must be allowed a little bit of village glorification. H. was riding past some of his cottages where a splendid crop of apples, just ripe, hung in the half garden, half orchard. I think, John, I would fasten a dog to one of the trees till the apples are picked,' said he. ‘What, Sir H—, you a magistrate,' answered John, laughing, but a little proud, ' and not know that nobody ever steals an apple in the three C—ns ! '

loans are charged at 120 per cent. interest.' A kind of public loan. institution was begun by Cavour in 1853, but it seems to do as much harm as good; the interest is called 5 per cent., but, as the principal is repaid in a fixed time, it amounts to 7. About Mantua it is said that the institutions for agricultural credit will finish by ruining themselves after having ruined agriculture.'

Then comes the question, How can these penniless owners pay for labour?

If individuals cannot guarantee work to the labourers, is it supposed to be possible that the State could do so? If the farmers and owners can only employ labour at a loss in the present state of things, who is to compel them to this loss? Can any one desire to repeat the experiment of national workshops instituted by the Paris Republic in 1848, and which ended in blood?

These are important considerations incidentally introduced. Again :

The abstract question whether large, medium, or small properties are preferable is an entirely idle discussion in a country of free trade. That extent is best which enables the greatest amount of produce to be got out of the soil-large ownerships where the agricultural conditions make the use of machinery profitable, smaller ones where the amount of labour required for the crop, as with vines, silk, olives, and market gardens, constitutes the chief value of the land.

Of late, nevertheless, the diseases both of the vines and the silkworms and the low prices of agricultural produce have reduced the peasant proprietors to the greatest straits in France and Italy.

The prospects for the future, however, given in the report, are more hopeful than might have been expected from the state of things described in the body of the work :—

Still a commercial and industrial revival is now certain for Italy. It is greatly a question of geography. Italy is a mighty promontory, thrown into the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and from the earliest times her fortunes in the development of civilisation have followed its fate. The discoveries of Columbus and Vasco di Gama displaced the current of modern commerce, and the Turkish conquests reduced the Mediterranean almost to the conditions of a canal. After the fall of the Italian republics of the middle ages and the disappearance of Arabian civilisation its shores became desert, inhospitable, squalid, and infested by the Barbary pirates. Commerce and manufacture ceased, agriculture was limited to home consumption, and to a few productions of luxury, such as silk and fruit. The opening, however, of the Suez Canal has brought back commerce to its ancient course, fourfold indeed in quantity, so that the Mediterranean will once again become the centre of the economical activity of the globe, when Italy must of course benefit enormously.

Such a result would be welcome to all who remember how much the world has owed to Italy, to her art in pictures, sculpture, and architecture, her music, her poetry, her science and philosophy. We cannot afford that so potent a factor in our common civilisation should lie dormant; Italy has of late been overweighted by her material cares and necessities, but if a good time is indeed coming for her, Europe would very truly have reason to rejoice.

F. P. VERNEY.

WILLIAM COBBETT.

THE lover of contrasts will find food for speculation in the year 1762. In the circumstances of their birth and education, in the economy of their lives, in the complexion of their thoughts, in their marriages, in the cares and troubles of every-day existence, and in their influence over their contemporaries, it would be difficult to discover two men more dissimilar than were William Cobbett and the Prince of Wales. In one condition only they shared, the abuse that was so freely lavished upon both of them. Cobbett was born on the 9th of March; his royal contemporary on the 12th of August. The first published a life of the second (his worst piece of literary work), and of both the fullest details have reached us. A train of courtiers and satirists has handed down to us, in verse and in prose, the vices and follies of the Prince; while Cobbett, that he might not be unwept and unsung, never lost an opportunity of telling us every experience and every sensation of his life. He was his own Lockhart and Boswell. Whatever he writes about he illustrates by his own example. Compared to him, Lord Erskine and Montaigne are hardly worthy to be called egotists.

Egotism in conversation is difficult to escape from, and therefore distasteful, but in literature it is impossible to have too much of it. History has to be written to pander to our tastes in this respect. The movements of troops and the sieges of towns have little interest for

us.

What men paid for their breakfasts, what furniture they had in their houses, the relations between one class and another, these are the topics we wish now to have presented to us and enlarged upon. Fonblanque laughed in the Examiner at the growing disposition of the English for gossip, and at the way in which the minutest movements of the Duke of Wellington were chronicled; but the habit has grown upon us with a steadily increasing force, and society consists of an aggregation of children taking notes with a view to the publication of future biographies. It is not the fault of Cobbett if we do not know how he was dressed, what he liked for dinner, what authors he despised, what pleasures he enjoyed. There are two classes of men of whom it is easy to speak with confidence: men who, like Savage or Gray, have left very little behind them, and whose work can be

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