ve had to run races naked
through the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in
carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a
church every Sunday for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their
religion especially and particularly cursed; at this very day, in that
curious country, a Jew is allowed to vote, hold office, yea, get up on a
rostrum in the public street and express his opinion of the government if
the government don't suit him! Ah, it is wonderful. The common people
there know a great deal; they even have the effrontery to complain if
they are not properly governed, and to take hold and help conduct the
government themselves; if they had laws like ours, which give one dollar
of every three a crop produces to the government for taxes, they would
have that law altered: instead of paying thirty-three dollars in taxes,
out of every one hundred they receive, they complain if they have to pay
seven. They are curious people. They do not know when they are well
off. Mendicant priests do not prowl among them with baskets begging for
the church and eating up their substance. One hardly ever sees a
minister of the gospel going around there in his bare feet, with a
basket, begging for subsistence. In that country the preachers are not
like our mendicant orders of friars--they have two or three suits of
clothing, and they wash sometimes. In that land are mountains far higher
than the Alban mountains; the vast Roman Campagna, a hundred miles long
and full forty broad, is really small compared to the United States of
America; the Tiber, that celebrated river of ours, which stretches its
mighty course almost two hundred miles, and which a lad can scarcely
throw a stone across at Rome, is not so long, nor yet so wide, as the
American Mississippi--nor yet the Ohio, nor even the Hudson. In America
the people are absolutely wiser and know much more than their
grandfathers did. They do not plow with a sharpened stick, nor yet with
a three-cornered block of wood that merely scratches the top of the
ground. We do that because our fathers did, three thousand years ago, I
suppose. But those people have no holy reverence for their ancestors.
They plow with a plow that is a sharp, curved blade of iron, and it cuts
into the earth full five inches. And this is not all. They cut their
grain with a horrid machine that mows down whole fields in a day. If I
dared, I would say that so