Besides this, speculators are
tolerated, who burn down whole forests, for the production of potash.

The estates of the Roman princes are somewhat better cultivated than
those of the Church: but they are involved in the same movement, or,
more strictly speaking, enchained in the same stagnation. The law,
which retains immense domains for ever in the hands of the same
family, and custom, which obliges the Roman nobles to spend so large a
portion of their incomes upon show, are equally obstacles to the
subdivision and to the improvement of the land.

And while the richest plains in Italy are thus lying dormant, a
vigorous, indefatigable, and heroic population cultivates with the
pickaxe the arid sides of mountains, and exhausts its strength in
attempting to extract vegetation from flints.

I have described the small mountain proprietors who form the
populations of the towns of 10,000 inhabitants towards the
Mediterranean. You have seen with what indomitable resolution they
combat the sterility of their meagre domains, without any hope of ever
becoming rich. These poor people, who spend their lives in getting
their living, would fancy themselves transported to Paradise, if
anybody were to give them a long lease of half-a-dozen acres in the
country about Rome. Their labour would then have a purpose, their
existence an aim, their family a future.

Perhaps you think they would refuse to labour in an unhealthy country.
Why, these are the very men who at present cultivate the Roman
Campagna to such extent as it is allowed to be cultivated. They it is
who, every spring, come down in large companies from their native
mountains, to break up the heavy clods with pickaxes, and complete the
work of the plough. It is they, too, who return to harvest the crop
under the fatal heat of the summer sun. They attack a field waving
with golden corn. They reap from dawn to dusk, with no food more
nourishing than bread and cheese. They sleep in the open field,
regardless of the nocturnal exhalations which float around them--and
some of them never rise again. Those who survive ten days of a harvest
more destructive than many a battle, return to their native village
with some four or five scudi in their pockets.

If these men could obtain a long lease, or merely take the land from
year to year, they would make more money, and the dangers to be
encountered would be no greater. They might be established between
Home and Montepoli, Rome and Ci