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PENCIL SKE TCHES IN ROME. 3 2
1
this yoke from it. The thought presupposes a beh’ef
like his, that nothing which ought to be done, is too heavy
for the unselfishly devoted will, and that every good
thing has within itself the pledge of success ; but it will
be harder yet to free the Campagna from depopulation
and marsh fever, than it was to cleanse Italy from great
and little tyrants.
But a few years ago, more than half of the Agro Ro-
mano—that is to say, the Campagna between the Sabine
mountains and the sea, and between the Alban moun-
tains and Soracte—was still in the hands of the church,
and more than a third, in those of certain families of the
Roman nobility. Not only from habit and inertness,
or want of impelling force, but on pure principle, had
these owners preferred waste land to arable. The com-
monwealth must always see its best riches in the number
of its well-educated, healthy and well-to-do citizens, in
the number of its arms to work, brains to think, and
hearts to love the fatherland : the individual land-owner,
on the contrary, who only looks at the rents his posses-
sions yield, may ask himself whether these many little
tenant homes, when what their own mouths need and
what the state and village law for their ends claim from
them has been subtracted, have as much remaining for
the purse of the land king, as the wide-stretching pas-
tures bring in, when their spontaneous growths feed as
many cattle and as few of human kind as possible.
Whether, now. the ecclesiastical or princely land-owners
have reckoned rightly or not, must be left untouched;
but the result to which they have come, is that they are
better off, if the Campagna be allowed to remain as it is.
Their property now causes them no other trouble than
that of receiving annually in ringing coin the established
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