place of the moral importance she now enjoys as the
headquarters of the Catholic world. Those efforts at a spurious growth
would ruin her financially, and the hatred of Romans for Italians of the
north would cause endless internal dissension. We should be subjected to
a system of taxation which would fall more heavily on us than on other
Italians, in proportion as our land is less productive. On the whole, we
should grow rapidly poorer; for prices would rise, and we should have a
paper currency instead of a metallic one. Especially we landed
proprietors would suffer terribly by the Italian land system being
suddenly thrust upon us. To be obliged to sell one's acres to any peasant
who can scrape together enough to capitalise the pittance he now pays as
rent, at five per cent, would scarcely be agreeable. Such a fellow, from
whom I have the greatest difficulty in extracting his yearly bushel of
grain, could borrow twenty bushels from a neighbour, or the value of
them, and buy me out without my consent--acquiring land worth ten times
the rent he and his father have paid for it, and his father before him.
It would produce an extraordinary state of things, I can assure you.
No--even putting aside what you call my sympathies and my loyalty to the
Pope--I do not desire any change. Nobody who owns much property does; the
revolutionary spirits are people who own nothing."

"On the other hand, those who own nothing, or next to nothing, are the
great majority."

"Even if that is true, which I doubt, I do not see why the intelligent
few should be ruled by that same ignorant majority."

"But you forget that the majority is to be educated," objected Del
Ferice.

"Education is a term few people can define," returned Giovanni. "Any good
schoolmaster knows vastly more than you or I. Would you like to be
governed by a majority of schoolmasters?"

"That is a plausible argument," laughed Del Ferice, "but it is not
sound."

"It is not sound!" repeated Giovanni, impatiently. "People are so fond of
exclaiming that what they do not like is not sound! Do you think that it
would not be a fair case to put five hundred schoolmasters against five
hundred gentlemen of average education? I think it would be very fair.
The schoolmasters would certainly have the advantage in education: do you
mean to say they would make better or wiser electors than the same number
of gentlemen who cannot name all the cities and rivers in Italy, nor
translate a