XII

'That loving heart, that patient soul,Had they indeed no longer spanTo run their course, and reach their goal,And read their homily to man?'

I think that not only is their affection undervalued, but that the intelligence of animals is greatly underrated. Man having but one conception of intelligence, his own, does not endeavour to comprehend another which is different, and differently exhibited and expressed. I have before now said in print that if our mind exceeds the mind of animals and birds in much, theirs exceeds ours at least in some things, as their sight, scent, and hearing far surpass ours.

When we remember also that these other races are absolutely alone, are never aided by man, are only, onthe contrary, hindered by him, opposed, thwarted, and persecuted by him, their achievements are, relatively to their opportunities, much more wonderful than any of his. The elements which are his great foes are likewise theirs; they have to encounter and suffer all the woes of tempest, hurricane, flood, the width of barren seas, the hunger on solitary shores; and they have also in his ruthless and unceasing spite an enemy more cruel than any with which he himself has to contend. If we meditate on this unquestionable fact, we shall be forced to admit that Cristoforo Colombo was not a greater hero than many a little swallow.

But scarcely anyone does meditate on these marvels; one in a million, one in a generation, at the most. To nearly the whole of humanity the wonderful and beautiful races with which the world teems, which are for ever living side by side with the human, do not exist except in so far as they contribute to the pleasure of slaughter, or the greed of commerce, or of gambling. For to the majority of men and women all organisms except their own are as though they were not.

There is no sympathy with these interesting and mysterious lives led side by side with man, but ignored by him entirely, except when by him persecuted. The nest of the weaver bird is to the full as ingenious and as marvellous as the dome of St Peter's or St Paul's. The beaver State, and the bee State, are as intricate in organisation as the Constitution of the French Republic, and the British Monarchy, and are distinctly superior in many parts of their organisation to either of these. The passage of the white ants through ajungle and across a continent is quite as admirable in unison and skill and order as the human march to Chitral; and the annual flights of the storks, of the Solan geese, of the wild ducks, exhibit qualities of obedience to a chosen commander, of endurance, of observation, and of wisdom, not exceeded by any human Arctic or Australian exploring party.

The vain-glorious assumption that we have a monopoly of what is called reason cannot be allowed by those who bring a reason of their own, unbiassed, to the study of animals, not under the unnatural conditions of the laboratory, but in natural freedom and peace.

No skill of a Stanley or a Nansen ever exceeded that of the hound Maida in tracing Sir Walter Scott, and no journey of a Burton or a Speke was ever so wonderful as the migratory voyage of a martin or a nightingale. I have said this ere now; and it can never be repeated too often, for nothing is so cruel as the vanity of man, and nothing so opposed to his own true progress as his blind and dogged contempt for all races not shaped exactly like his own.

The correspondence which has been general in the English press regarding the muzzling of dogs, has been conspicuous for its silliness, ignorance, and cruelty, but above all by its disgusting selfishness; and an editor of a very popular organ was not ashamed to print that if only one human life could be saved, etc., etc., disregarding the fact that men were at the time being slaughtered by dysentery and fever, by the scores, for no better object than to go and cut down cotton trees at Coomassie; whilst deaths by starvation, a perfectlypreventible cause, are so common in English cities that the reports of them scarcely awaken a passing regret or compassion. The veneration for human life which is developed by journalists when a lion kills his gaoler, or when a dog is supposed to have been the cause of his tormentor's death, is comical in these gentlemen of the press, who, to help a speculation, open out a new mart, or influence the share lists, will ravenously demand a military expedition, or a naval demonstration, to sabre, shell, burn, and ravage upon distant strands.

The attitude of the Brahmin, to whom all forms of life are sacred, is intelligible, estimable, and consistent; the attitude of the savage conqueror, to whom thousands of dead men and thousands of dead beasts are alike so much carrion, is intelligible and reasonable, whilst brutal. The attitude of the journalist and county councilman is not either; it possesses neither logic nor common sense, and is not estimable or reasonable, but only contemptible.

If there be one thing more loathsome than the carnage of war, it is the Red Cross societies following in its train. But the modern world, being conscious that the butchery of war ill accords with its æsthetic and religious pretensions, gives a sop to its conscience by sending the ambulance side by side with the gun carriage. A more robust and more honest temper did not evade the truth that the least brutal war is the one most immediately and conclusively destructive; the slaughter of wounded men was more truly merciful than the modern system of surgery and nursing, which saves shattered constitutions and ruined healthto drag out a miserable and artificially prolonged existence.

There is, however, something which the ordinary human mind finds soothing and delightful in this formula of 'the sanctity of human life,' when combined with a corresponding disregard for human and for all other life. The good Christian likes to be raised aloft, in his own eyes, from all those other races which he imagines were given to him for his use and abuse by a gracious Deity. He loves to think that both God and the neighbouring policeman are watching over him; and taking care alike of his soul and of his greatcoat. In the enormous vanity of the Christian who believes all the laws of the universe altered for him, or in the equally enormous vanity of the scientist who arrogates to himself the right to dogmatise on the mysteries of creation, this attitude is not surprising. But in either the philosophic mind; or the poetic temperament, it is so because to the philosopher the difference between the human and the other races cannot appear very great, whilst to the poet the solidarity of all sentient life must always seem unquestionable. That friend, and scholar, and poet for whom I mourn as freshly as though he had died but yesterday did not disdain to greet a brother's spirit in

'That liquid, melancholy eyeFrom whose pathetic, soul-fed springsSeem'd surging the Virgilian cry,The sense of tears in mortal things,'

for these lines were written by Matthew Arnold to 'only a dog.'

It is not in foolishly endeavouring to make animals our prisoners and puppets, in trying to force them to count, to caper, or to play cards, that we reach insight into their natures and their minds. It is in loving them and respecting them as he loved and respected Geist and Kai. I use the latter word advisedly, for whoever does not in a fair degree, as with a human friend, respect the freedom, the preference, and the idiosyncrasy of an animal will never reach true comprehension of him.

A writer wrote the other day, 'People speak of the law of nature; but who feels it? There is no such emotion known in the ordinary life of the world.' The persons who will let their dinner wait whilst they watch a sunset fade over sea or moor, or who will leave the share list unread to see the morning dew make silver globes of the gossamer in the grass, are so few that they may almost be said not to exist, if we except a poet here, an artist there; and the sense of kinship with races not human can only come to those whose own kinship with earth and air and sky is strong enough to resist the dulling and debasing influences of artificial life, of life amongst men and their trivialities, frauds, and vanities.

'The sun is God,' said Turner, when he lay dying, and, alas! saw that sun only through the mists of London. But how many see the sun at all, even when they live where it is most radiant? How many think of the sun during the long day it illumines? The light is taken as a matter of course, as our breath is drawn through our lungs. There is no gratitude for it.

In similar manner there is no sense of kinship with the winged children of the air, with the four-footed dwellers beside us on the earth. Almost the only recognition we give them is maltreatment. At other times the indifference of our unspeakable fatuity rises in a dust cloud between us and them. Of gratitude for their companionship, their aid, their patience, their many virtues, there is not a trace in those who use them and abuse them, no more than there is gratitude for the beauty of the rose or the fragrance of the violet.

As 'the winds of March take the world with beauty,' every pasture and coppice is full of blossom, passed unnoticed by thousands in every daily country walk; so in the same manner do the multitudes trample down, and pass by, the ineffable charm and fragrance of disregarded affections, and unappreciated qualities, in the other races of earth.

Hang a poor woodland bird in a cage, if you can bear to look on such a captive, above a blossoming honeysuckle or hawthorn, and note his anguish of remembrance, his ecstasy of hope, his frantic effort to be free. But the accursed wires are between him and the familiar blossoms, between him and the blue sky; in a little while he realises that he is a prisoner; the fluttering joy goes out of his heart and his wings; his feathers grow ruffled and dull, his eyes are veiled, he sits motionless and heartbroken, and the breeze of the springtime blows past him, and never more will bear him on its buoyant way.

Living wild song-birds are sold at a halfpenny each by thousands in the London slums, and as many moredie—nay, thrice as many more—before they reach the streets, packed close and jammed together in hampers and crates.

Yet the English Home Secretary, on being asked by a deputation to put an end to this abominable traffic, answered that it was desirable to do as little as possible in the way of legislation!

For legislators, always eager to make cruel and coercive laws, prefer to let humane ones be substituted by what they call 'the gradual education of the people.' But this gradual education is so extremely gradual that its progress is imperceptible; it may even be justly suspected that it is chiefly a backward movement; and such education, as far as education by example goes, is hindered, not helped, by what are called the cultured classes.

In this, our own present day, bull fights become at once popular wherever they are allowed, and with women as much so as with men, and I am certain that if the gladiatorial shows of Imperial Rome were introduced at Olympia the London crowds would in the main be delighted with them, and the London women would eagerly turn down their thumbs.

Why not? They go to see the tight-rope walking and the trapeze jump at the Crystal Palace and the Aquarium; and the only possible attraction in these is the probability that in each case the performers will be killed one day; apart from this chance there is no interest whatever in the spectacle. If the authorities were induced to permit them, gladiatorial shows would become so popular with the women of Belgravia and Mayfair that no one would care for anything lessexciting, and the Oxford and Cambridge sports would be deserted with contempt as offering no attraction.

The desire for excitement is the most conspicuous feature, and the most dangerous disease of the age; anything which provides it is welcome; people are bored despite their incessant search of distraction, and anything which will exorcise the spectre of boredom is eagerly received; and after all it would be absurd if persons who go to see steeplechases pretended to be too squeamish to cry the 'Habet'! Let the managers of Olympia obtain permission for gladiatorial games (death being guaranteed), and I will promise them that "all London" in the most fashionable sense of those words will crowd from April to August to see the sport. If the ladies could be allowed to descend into the arena, to touch the dying bodies, as Nero used to like to do, to see the faint life still lingering shrink and writhe, this success would be still greater; and Nero was but a primitive creature, he had but a heated iron wand, whereas my ladies could be provided by their favourite scientist with the much more excruciating torment of electricity. Imagine what exquisite little jewelled instruments of torture, made to fasten on to a bracelet, or hide within a ring, would fill the shops in Bond Street and Piccadilly. 'We are going electrolysing!' would be heard from all the pretty lips of the leaders of society; and they would cease to care for their bicycles, and auto-cars, and even for the discussion of actresses' new gowns. 'How many dead 'uns did you knock off last night?' their most intimate friend would ask, as he would lean over the rails in Rotten Row, sucking the crook of his cane.

Does this appear exaggerated and libellous?[11]Well, let us look at the example given by a London leader of fashion and politics as she goes down at election time to shed sweetness and light around her in Poplar or Shoreditch.

In her bonnet is, of course, an osprey aigrette; she knows it was torn from a living creature, but then that was done far away in some Asiatic or American creek or forest, and so really does not matter. Her Suède gloves fit like her skin; they were the skin of a kid, and were probably stripped from its living body as this lends suppleness to the skin. The jacket she carries on her arm is lined with Astrakhan fur, which was taken from an unborn lamb to give to the fur that curl and kink which please her; it has been cut from its mother's ripped-up womb. Her horses, as they wait for her at the corner of the street, have their heads fixed in air, and the muscles of their necks cramped by immovable bearing-reins. Her Japanese pug runs after her, shaking his muzzle-tortured nose. She has a telegram in her pocket which has momentarily vexed her. She sent her sable collie to the dog-exhibition at Brussels, and the excitement, or the crush, or the want of water, or something, has brought on heat apoplexy, and they wire that he is dead, poor old nervous Ossian! She really has no luck, for her Java sparrows died too at the bird show in Edinburgh, because the footman, sent with them, forgot to fill their water-glasswhen it got dry on the journey; a great many people send birds to shows with nobody at all to take care of them, so she feels that she was not to blame in the very least.

'Why will you show?' says her husband, who is vexed about Ossian; 'you don't want to win and you don't want to sell.'

'Oh, everybody does it,' she answers.

He goes into his study to console himself with a new model of a pole trap; and she, her canvassing done, runs upstairs to see her gown for the May Drawing-Room. The train is of quite a new design, embroidered with orchids in natural colours, and fringed with the feathers of the small green parrakeet, a beautiful little bird which has been poisoned by hundreds in the jungles of New Guiana to make the border to thismanteau de cour.

If she were told that she is a more barbaric creature than the squaw of the poor Indian trapper who poisoned the parrakeets, she would be equally astonished and offended.

Let us now look at her next-door neighbour; he is a very wealthy person and seldom refuses a subscription, thinks private charity pernicious and pauperising, attends his church regularly, and votes in the House of Commons in favour of pigeon-shooting and spurious sports. If anyone asks him if he 'likes animals' he answers cheerily, 'Oh, dear me, yes. Poor creatures, why not?' But it does not disturb him that the horse in the hansom cab, which he has called to take him to the City, has weals all over its loins, and a bit that fills its mouth with blood and foam; nor does he notice theover-driven and half-starved condition of a herd of cattle being taken from Cannon Street to Smithfield, but only curses them heartily for blocking the traffic.

He eats a capon, drives behind a gelding, warms himself at a hearth of which the coal has been procured by untold sufferings of man and beast, has his fish crimped, and his lobsters scalded to death, in his kitchens, relishes the green fat cut from a living turtle, reads with approbation his head keeper's account of the last pair of owls on his estate having been successfully trapped, writes to that worthy to turn down two thousand more young pheasants for the autumn shooting, orders his agent to have his young cattle on his home-farm dishorned, and buys as a present for his daughters a card case made from the shell of a tortoise which was roasted alive, turned on its back on the fire to give the ruddy glow to its shell. Why not? His favourite preacher and his popular scientist alike assure him that all the subject races are properly sacrificed to man. It is obviously wholly impossible to convince such a person that he is cruel: he merely studies his own convenience, and he has divine and scientific authority for considering that he is perfectly right in doing so. He is quite comfortable, both for time and for eternity. It were easier to change the burglar of the slums, the brigand of the hills, than to change this self-complacent and pachydermatous householder who represents nine-tenths of the ruling classes.

Let us not mistake; he is not personally a cruel man; he would not himself hurt anything, except in sport which he thinks is legitimate, and in science which he is told is praiseworthy; he is amiable, good-natured,perhaps benevolent, but he is wrapped up in habits, customs, facts, egotisms, tyrannies which all seem to him to be good, indeed to be essential. His horse is a thing to him like his mail phaeton; his dog is a dummy, like his umbrella stand; his cattle are wealth-producing stores, like his timber or wheat; he uses them all as he requires, as he uses his hats and gloves. He sees no more unkindness in doing away with any of them than in discarding his old boots, and he passes the most atrocious laws and by-laws for animal torment as cheerfully as he signs a cheque payable to self.

His ears are wadded by prejudice, his eyes are blinded by formula, his character is steeped in egotism; you might as well try, I repeat, to touch the heart of the Sicilian brigand or the London crib-cracker as to alter his views and opinions; you would speak to him in a language which is as unintelligible to his world as Etruscan to the philologist.

The majority of his friends, like himself, lead their short, bustling, bumptious, and frequently wholly useless lives, purblind always and entirely deaf where anything except their own interests is concerned. They think but very rarely of anything except themselves, and the competitions, ambitions, or jealousies which occupy them. But in their pastimes cruelty is to them acceptable; it is an outlet for the barbarian who sleeps in them, heavily drugged but not dead; the sight of blood titillates agreeably their own slow circulation.

Between them, and the cad who breaks the back of the bagged rabbit, there is no difference except in the degree of power to indulge the slaughter-lust.

Alas! it were easier 'to quarry the granite rock with razors' than to touch the feelings of such as this man, or this woman, where their vanities, or their mere sheep-like love of doing as others do, are in question. Princesses wear osprey tufts and lophophorus wings, and so society wears them too, and cares not a straw by what violence and wickedness they are procured; as the ladies, who attend their State concerts, sleep none the worse when in their country houses because the rabbit screams in the steel gins, and the hawk struggles in the pole trap, in the woods about their ancestral houses, and have no less appetite for luncheon amongst the bracken or the heather because shot and bleeding creatures lie half dead in the game bags around, or because the stag often is stretched in his dead majesty before their eyes. Why, then, should they care because in far distant lands little feathered creatures, lovely as flowers, innocent as the dew and the honey they feed on, are killed by the thousands and tens of thousands because a vulgar and depraved taste demands their tender bodies?

What does it matter to them that, through their demands, the bird of paradise has become so rare that, unless stringent measures be taken at once, it will be soon totally extinct, and the golden glory of its plumes will gleam no more in tropical sunlight? What does it matter to them that the herons in all their various kinds, the osprey, the egret, the crane, the ibis, are scarcely seen now in the southern and middle States of America, and, when seen, are no longer together in confident colonies, as of yore, but nesting singly and in fear? 'Practically allour heronries are deserted. The birds have been slaughtered for their plumes,' writes a physician[12]dwelling in the Delaware valley. 'What were common birds in their season half a century ago are now rarely seen. The struggle for existence has been a violent one and the herons have been worsted. Scarcely a word of protest has been heard, and none that has been effectual.' Women of the world know this, or at least have been told it fifty times; but it makes no impression on them. They will wear osprey-aigrettes as long as any are left in commerce, and they think a humming-bird looks so pretty in their hair. What else matters?

That their example is copied by the women of the middle classes with swallows and warblers, and by the servant girl and factory girl with dyed sparrows and finches, makes no impression on them; if the fact be noticed to them they say that the common people always will be ridiculous, and stop their carriage in Bond Street to buy fire-screens made of owls, or an electric lamp hung in the beak of a stuffed flamingo.

Why should they care, indeed!—they who walk with the guns, even if they do not do more and secure a warm corner for their own shot; they who bring up their young sons to regard the cowardly and brutal sport of battue-shooting as the supreme pleasure and privilege of youth, and see unmoved their beautiful autumnal woods turned into slaughter-places?

One cannot but reflect how different might the world have been if women had been different in mind and temper; if, instead of their smiling, self-complacenttittering approbation of brutality, they had shown scorn for and abhorrence of brutality. They clamour for electoral rights and leave all this vast field of influence unoccupied and untilled! They do little or nothing to soften the hearts or refine the feelings of the men who love them, or to bring up their children in any sympathy with animal life. Sport has become fashionable with them in the last twenty years, and the crack shot in the coverts of Chantilly this winter was a woman. Sporting clothes, breeches and gaiters, are now a recognised part of the fashionable woman's toilet.

I would not affirm (anomaly as it appears) that the pursuit of sport cannot co-exist with a love of animals, for I have known many sporting men and hunting men who were in a sense sincerely devoted to some animals. But sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all; and it is impossible for the sportswoman logically and effectively to exercise any influence on her young children which could incline them to mercy—such an influence as Lamartine's mother had on him to the day of his death.

There are two periods in the life of a woman when she is almost omnipotent for good or ill. These are when men are in love with her; and, again, when her children are young enough to be left entirely to her and to those whom she selects to control them. How many women in ten thousand use this unlimited power which theythen possess to breathe the quality of mercy into the souls of those who for the time are as wax in their hands? They will crowd into the Speaker's Box to applaud debates which concern them in no way. They will impertinently force their second-hand opinions on Jack and Jill in the village or in the City alleys. They will go on to platforms and sing comic songs, or repeat temperance platitudes, and think they are a great moral force in the improvement of the masses. This they will do, because it amuses them and makes them of importance. But alter their own lives, abandon their own favourite cruelties, risk the sneer of society, or lead their little children to the love of nature and the tenderness of pity; these they will never do. Mercy is not in them, nor humility, nor sympathy.

Can written words do anything to touch the hearts of those who read? I fear not.

On how many do written words, even dipped in the heart's blood and burning with the soul's fire, produce any lasting effect? Is not the most eloquent voice doomed to cry without echo in the wilderness? And what wilderness is there so barren as the desert of human indifference and of human egotism?

Pity is only awakened in those who are already pitiful. We cannot sow mustard seed on granite. The whole tendency of the age is towards cynicism, indifference, self-engrossment. The small children sneer much more often than they smile.

From Plutarch to Voltaire, from Celsus to Sir Arthur Helps, the finest and most earnest pleading against cruelty has been made by the finest and most logical minds. But the world has not listened; themajority of men and women are neither just nor generous, neither fine nor logical. In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have passed away the last smile of the world's youth. For in the future the human race will have no tenderness for those of its own kind who are feeble or aged, and will consign to lethal chambers all those who weary it, obstruct it, or importune it: since the quality of mercy will day by day be more derided, and less regarded, as one of the moral attributes of mankind.

I have read with the attention due to the author's name the essay of Professor Sergi on the decadence of the Latin nations. It seems to me, when reflecting on it, that the esteemed author gives to every slight change, the much-used, and much-abused, name of progress; and considers mere change as an indisputable betterment. He also considers that the Latin races cannot exist under modern conditions unless they form themselves on the models and follow the examples of non-Latin races; if, that is to say, they do not imitate what is foreign and alien to them. It is clear that he does not for a moment doubt that the non-Latin are infinitely superior to the Latin peoples, and he rebukes the latter for remaining immovable, although, somewhat oddly, he excepts France from his censure on account of her great commerce, and only includes in his ban his own country and Spain.

With Spain I do not occupy myself, as I am not sufficiently well acquainted with her to do so; indeed, Professor Sergi himself says very little about her; but of Italy I cannot consider that his condemnation is merited. If she do merit it, why does she do so?

Both questions are interesting. Professor Sergi, like too many writers of the present time, assumes as an indisputable fact that the mere innovation, the mere alteration of a thing, is of necessity improvement, advancement, amelioration; and this being his rooted conviction, he considers Great Britain and the United States the models and ideals of modern life. For this reason he would force Italy to abandon entirely her traditions, her instincts, and her natural genius, and substitute for them an exact and servile imitation of these two foreign peoples who have tastes in common with her. Unfortunately he does not inform us to what point he carries this desire, and if the immense changes he advises are to be dynastic and political, or merely social and intellectual. He prints in capital letters his chief advice to the Latin nations tomove on new lines; but he does not explain whether he means to move to a new Constitution, to a new Representation, to a new theory and practice of Government; and he does not even say whether he thinks or does not think that the Church is the greatest enemy of national progress in Latin nations. It would be interesting to know in what proportions he holds the two antagonistic forces of Church and State to be guilty of opposing progress; that each is an obstacle to the higher forms of progress there can be no question in the mind of any dispassionate thinker. But he is careful not to commit himself to this view. Since he gives us so little information on this head, and limits himself to the counsel, somewhat meagre in its expression, tomove on new lines, we may endeavour to find out for ourselves how far his advice goes: ifItaly do actually merit his contempt for her inertia, and if the non-Latin races deserve or do not deserve the admiration with which he pronounces on their superiority.

That the Italian nation is immovable is not true: for good or evil it moves as its great son Gallileo said of the earth. The fault, the peril, lie the other way. It is to be feared that the Italian people run the risk of losing their finest instincts, and their most gracious characteristics, through the exaggerated and obsequious imitation of foreign peoples, and by a too ready adoration of new things merely because they are new. They are the ideals of many a modern Italian. Guglielmo Ferrero has dedicated many hundreds of pages to the celebration of their perfections. I believe that such worship is chiefly founded on illusion, for it is as easy to cherish illusions about a steam mill as about a mediæval saint.

Let us look at the actual situation of Great Britain, setting aside her imperialist swagger, and regarding only facts. The English themselves admit that if a European naval coalition succeeded in preventing grain reaching their shores from America and the colonies, the nation in a fortnight would want bread. Is that an ideal or a safe position? If, in a sea-war, the British fleet would be successful is wholly uncertain, since no one can say how the metal battleships would behave in any distress; the manœuvres have not shed much light upon this question, and many of the marine monsters, as regards their utility in active warfare, are still unknown quantities. Equally uncertain is what would be the conduct ofthe Indian population were Great Britain vanquished in any great war, for the majority of the peoples of Hindostan most unwillingly endure through coercion the yoke of the British rule.

In Ireland there is a racial hatred which nothing can extinguish, and only demands a favourable occasion to show itself. Canada may any day embroil England with the United States; and so may the West Indies, and the Nebraskan and Nicaraguan questions; and so may Newfoundland with France, and East or West Africa with Germany. In every part of the globe Great Britain has on her hands conquests, colonies, intrigues, enemies, open questions, and concealed questions, of every kind. Her greed is great, and her entanglements are innumerable. There are many weak points in her fortifications. To meet her obligations she is obliged to use legions of Asiatics, or Africans, or employ as mercenaries men from her distant colonies, or send the soldiers of one vanquished nation to help vanquish another. Thus did Imperial Rome, and so went to her undoing. Doubtless Great Britain is rich, powerful, strong, proud, and vain. So was Rome; so was Spain. It is possible, even probable, that at some, perhaps not distant day, Great Britain also will give way under the enormous weight of her self-sought responsibilities, and the still more ponderous weight of her many enemies.

Internally, also, England is not what she used to be. The old nobility is elbowed out of prominent place by a new aristocracy which has been created entirely on a money basis. Every ministry, when going outof office, creates a new batch of titled rich men, lifted into the Lords in return for political or financial service. Wealth is now the dominant factor of English social life; and a commerce, wholly unscrupulous, is the sole scope of the tawdry and noisy empire of which Joseph Chamberlain is the standard-bearer.

What is there in all this to admire or to imitate?

Again we have seen that in the United States, since they abandoned their wise policy of non-intervention in external affairs, the national life resembles the English, is vain, boastful, hypocritical, cruel, and bellicose. The thirst of gain devours the nation. There is no other land in which the contrast between rich and poor is so sharp and terrible; none in which millions are thrown away with more frightful indifference and conceited display. Lynch law in all its horror reigns over many provinces, and unblushing corruption mounts into the highest places and poisons all the sources of national life. Guglielmo Ferrero stands stupefied before their innumerable newspaper offices, which he says use up every day as much paper as would go round the circumference of the earth! But he forgets, or ignores, that the literary quality of those journals is usually of the poorest and vulgarest kind, and that the chief part of their columns is filled by advertisements. He is also transfixed with rapture before the colossal houses which Americans call sky-scrapers, and sees the revelation of a stupendous genius in their passion for what is big, costly, eccentric; nor does he hesitate to compare it with the Florentine and Venetian genius!

Actually there was never on earth two more differentkinds of creation than these; never one more absolutely soulless, and one more nobly penetrated by the soul. The genius of the Italian masters was lofty, generous, at once humble and sublime, never interested, always consecrated to Art and Country; the skill of the American constructors has no other scope than that of getting money, of making the world stare, of producing the huge, the gross, the extravagant, the enormous, and labours for only one God, the venal Mercury of the market-place. In these new cities, so vehemently extolled, with their towering constructions which hide the smoke-obscured clouds, and their network of electric wires, of railways in the air, and trams running across each other, there is not the faintest spark of that divine light which is called Liberty. Americans boast of their freedom, but it only exists in words; it has no abiding place outside a boisterous rhetoric. The old Puritanism still exists in religious bigotry and persecution; office is bought and sold; justice is a matter of money; private life suffers from conventionalities and social tyrannies innumerable; political and municipal elections are the work of a Caucus. A man cannot drink, or stir, or do aught without his neighbour knowing and judging what he does; even marriage is to be made a matter for doctors to allow or disallow; the whole press is but a gigantic Paul Pry, a vast Holy Office where the persecution by the pen ends in the execution by the revolver.

Such is American liberty.

What can Italy learn from such a model?

Amongst the maladies of the brain known in this day is one which is called the mania of grandeur. Itseems to me that not only individuals, but entire nations, are possessed by it. It is perilous and contagious. Italy has already been inoculated by its virus.

There is also everywhere a fatal tendency to open the door of Italy to every foreign syndicate, and every foreign speculation, which puts forward a prospectus or launches shares on the market. The preponderance of Jews is enormous as owners of ground rents and estates in Italy; the chief part of Italian cities and towns is owned by Jews; and the greater number of the industries of all kinds in the country are in the hands of foreigners, like the newly-projected mining enterprise in Elba. If these mines be worth the working, why does not Italy work them herself, and take all the profits?

These facts are not due to any immovability; but to a dangerously lax tendency to run into foreign roads. The Italian Faust is only too susceptible to the invitations of the foreign Mephistopheles.

On the other hand a very marked inclination in the Italian is towards the modern forms of co-operation and communism. This tendency is not due in any way to the influence of the past, but to that mixture of jealousy and envy, of hatred of the rich, and detestation of labour, and of humble ways and of poor means, which is as general in Italy as it is everywhere else in our time, and which is the modern translation of the old classic clamour for Panem et Circenses. Is it towards this already popular communism that Professor Sergi would direct the Italian nation? The direction is already taken, and does not need hispropulsion. If there be one thing more certain than another in the Italy of to-day it is the preference of a large proportion of the people for different forms of socialism and collectivism; and the persecution these doctrines receive lends them a dangerous force. At the same time as it persecutes them, the State, with strange self-stultification, recognises and grants one of the largest and most insolent of socialistic and communistic demands,i.e., that for the expropriation of private land in the Agro Romano, and in the various latifundi in Sicily and elsewhere; and thus opens the door either to a most high-handed and unjust spoliation, or to an agrarian civil war in a not distant future.

Again, the most terrible disease of modern society—corruption—is not due to the past in Italy or anywhere else; it exists wherever men exist, and is as general in the republic of France or of the United States as under the autocracy of Russia or of Persia. The Italian disasters of Eritrea were due rather to corruption than to incapacity. When the mules were bought in Naples for 100 lire per head, and sold to the State at 500 lire per head, the battle of Abba-Garima, called by English people the battle of Adowa, was lost before it was fought.

Professor Sergi speaks of the defeat of Abba-Garima as a proof of the decay of the Italian race; but this is a very unfair deduction. As well might the continual defeats of the British in the first months of the present war in South Africa be held as a proof of British poltroonery. Any shortcomings which may have existed in the Italian army in Abyssinia, and exist at home, are, moreover, certainly not to betraced to old-world influences; or to any emasculating tenderness for tradition. There is no reverence for the armies of the past in the actual Italian army, for it is unlike any of them; it does not resemble the armies of the Duchies, or of the Republics, or of the Florentine Carraccio, or of the Lombard trained bands, or of the levies of the Neapolitan Bourbons, or of the legions of Varus. The only model it resembles is that idol of its commanders, the German Army, on which it is shaped and governed, in all the cut-and-dried narrowness and hardness inseparable from the German system. All this may be considered to be inevitable now, but modern militarism is unsuited to the character of Italians, and reacts injuriously on the genius and temper, and physical and mental life, of the people.

Unhappily militarism is the most conspicuous and the most tenacious of all modern influences, and the failure of the Conference of the Hague so immediately followed by the war of aggression in South Africa, is a sad and irrefutable proof that the nations are not in the least likely to free themselves from its yoke.

Taking the modern temper in its civil systems, as in its military, it does not seem to me any better adapted to the Italian idiosyncrasies; and all its worst features already exist in all which is here called government. Italian legislation confounds perpetually regulations with laws; is fidgeting, irritating, inquisitorial, insolent, harassing; its tyranny spoils the lives of the populace; by means of its agents it penetrates into all the privacies of family life; its perpetual interferencebetween father and son, between master and man, between mother and child, between buyer and seller, between youth and free choice, between marriage and celibacy, between the man who takes a walk and the dog who goes with him, constitutes incessant causes of irritation, and is a perpetual menace which lowers over the popular life from sunrise to sunset, and scarcely even leaves in peace the hours of the night.[13]

More or less there is too much of this in all modern nations, but in Italy it is especially odious, being in such absolute antagonism to the courtesy and gaiety, and warm domestic affections, natural to the Italian public, and a source of continual fret and friction to it both in pleasure and in pain.[14]

There is certainly no necessity to incite Italians to admiration of foreign products and inventions. Such enthusiasm is only too general, and too blind, at least in that portion of the nation which is under the influence of the schools, the press, and the universities. An electrical machine has many more admirers thanthe bell-tower of Giotto, and a shop-window of a Bon Marché than the Palace of the Doges. The modern temper, cynical, trivial, avaricious, vulgar, which now discolours human life as theoidiumdiscolours the leaves of the vines, has affected too deeply the Italian mind, and has dried up its natural sense of, and capacity for, beauty. The glorious cities of Italy have been ruined by scandalous disembowelling; its ancient small towns are made ridiculous by electric light and steam tramways; the useful and picturesque dress of its peasantry is abandoned for the ugly and stupid clothes of modern fashion, cut out of the shoddy cloths furnished by English manufacturers; and this want of good sense, of good taste, of all true instincts towards form and colour, is a moral and mental malady due to that contagion of foreign influence which has poisoned Italy as it has poisoned Japan and India, Africa and Asia.

Therefore every counsel to her to follow modern impulses is pernicious. She is but too ready to do so, believing that, by this way, riches lie. Moreover, the advice to the Italians to rise, and change, and follow new paths, seems to me at the present time a cruel derision; because the Italian who gives it must be well aware that the nation is not free to do anything or make any change. It is not even allowed to speak. No public meeting can gather together without intervention of the police. The press cannot publish any opinions which are disapproved of by the Government without incurring sequestration of the journal, perhaps imprisonment of editor, writer, and printer. Where, then, can any fresh field be found in which toplant any flowers of thought with any hope to see them root and blossom in action? The hand of the Public Prosecutor would pluck them up before they could stretch out a single fibre.

Take that question so dear to the country; the question of Italia Irredenta. Where could it be discussed in public without 'authority' intervening and silencing the speakers? Professor Sergi forgets, or avoids, to say that in Italy the first conditions of a 'movement on new lines' are wanting; civil liberty is wanting, and free speech and free acts are forbidden. Who can walk out into the country when barriers block up the end of every street? On the man, as on the dog, under pretence of public safety, the muzzle is fastened, and by its enforced use all health is destroyed.

The Italian of our time is too quickly intimidated, forgets too soon, wears the rosette in his button-hole when he should put crape round his arm, dances with too ready an indifference on the grave of his hopes and of his friends. To form a virile character there is no education so good as the exercise of political and civil liberty; this education is but little given anywhere; it is not given at all between Monte Rosa and Mount Etna. The Italian is by nature too ready to be over-anxious and over-distressed at trifles; he thinks too much of trifling difficulties and the petty troubles of the hour; he is quickly discouraged, he is soon overwhelmed with despair, he has small faith in his own star, and he has not the elasticity and rebound of the Gaulois temper. Nothing therefore can possibly be worse for him than the kind of galling public tutelage and the perpetual molestation in which he is condemned to live; alwaysesteemed guilty, or likely to be guilty, however harmless he may be. It is illogical to condemn a nation for having no virility of character, when the systems under which it is reared, and forced to dwell, destroys its manhood, and forbid all independence of thought, speech, and action.

Let us take for instance that uninteresting person, a small tradesman, native and citizen of any Italian town; in all his smallest actions relative to his little shop, such, for instance, as altering or re-painting his signboard, he must obtain the permission of his Municipality. If he venture to clean or refurbish his board without authorisation, he will receive a summons and be compelled to pay a fine. The same kind of torment occurs in a dozen other daily trifles, magnified into crimes and visited with condign punishment; and, inevitably, the worried citizen becomes timid, nervous, and either afraid or incapable of judging or acting for himself. You cannot keep a man in the swaddling clothes of infancy and expect him to walk erect and well.

A shopkeeper, a tailor in Florence, known to me, cut the cord with which a municipal dog-catcher had throttled his dog; he did no more; he was immediately arrested, dragged off to prison, and kept there for months without trial: when tried he was condemned to four months of prison and a heavy fine.

Herbert Spencer has said, 'Govern me as little as you can';i.e., leave me to regulate my existence as I please, which is clearly the right of every man not a criminal. The Italian is, however, 'governed to death,' and tied up in the stifling network of aninfinity of small ordinances and wearisome prohibitions. In the sense, therefore, in which the sufferer from tuberculosis may be said to want health, the Italian may be accused of wanting spirit; but this is not the sense of the reproach of Professor Sergi. Professor Sergi, like so many others of his teachers and masters, desires to propel him along a road which has already cost him dear. How many millions has it not cost in the last score of years, that fatal weakness of Italians for imitating others? The rural communes of the country have more than a milliard of debts, almost all due to the senseless mania for demolition, for novelty, for superfluous alterations and imitations, works worse than useless, commended or proposed by the Government, and eagerly accepted by the communal and provincial councils, since each member of these hoped to rub his share of gilding off the gingerbread as it passed through his hands. All the vast sums thus expended are all taken out of the enormous local and imperial taxation, are divided between contractors, engineers, members of the town and county councils, lawyers, go-betweens, and all the innumerable middlemen who swarm in every community like mites in cheese, at the same time that the poor peasant is taxed at the gates for a half-dozen of eggs, or a bundle of grass, and the poor washerwoman carrying in her linen has her petticoats pulled up over her head by a searcher to ascertain if she have nothing saleable or taxable hidden on her person. These are new ways, no doubt; but they are ways on which walk the ghost of ruin and the skeleton of famine.

If it be true, as Professor Sergi considers, that Italy can never hope to extend her conquests and her commerce as northern and western nations will do, then it is surely all the more needful to hold her own place in the world by the culture and development of her own natural genius. A nation, like a person, should be always natural; to be fashioned on others is to be without any confidence in oneself, and lose one's equilibrium in the stress of every difficulty. The rigid and indigestible character of modern education is not adapted, I repeat, to the Italian temperament, which isprime-sautier, subtle but inflammatory, impressionable but unresisting, and loses enormously when it is shut down in the hot stove of the so-called 'highest studies.' Even the national manners, naturally so graceful and charming in all ranks of Italian society, lose their suavity, their ease, their elegance, under the influence of the foreigner and the vulgarity of modern habits. Good taste passes away with good manners; and pigeon-shooting, sleeping-cars, automobiles, bicycles and tramway crowds bring with them the breeding suitable to them; and the modern monuments, the modern squares, the modern houses, the whitewash daubed on old walls, the cast-iron bridges spanning classic waters, the straight, featureless, glaring, dusty streets, the electric trolleys cutting across ancient marbles, all conduce to make ignoble what was noble, and belittle all which was great.

All this is not the fault of a too reverent admiration for an incomparable Art, for a glorious history; it is a much worse thing; it is an oblivion of both history and art, ingrate, unworthy, and ruinous.

Many say that Italians are unfit for freedom; it is certain that they have never been tried by it. Whatever their government is called, freedom is unheard of under its rule. Year after year, century after century, all the Italian provinces, however differently governed, have been held down under an absolutism more or less disguised. The general character, with heroic exceptions, has been inevitably weakened. The man of easy temper and pleasure-loving disposition consoles himself with amusement; the serious man seeks refuge in study or in science; one and all accept inaction as their lot. A politicalcamorraguides the chariot of the State, and the people draw aside, and stand silent, only hoping to escape being crushed under its wheels. Professor Sergi must be well aware of this sad truth; then why speak to Italy as if she were a free country, why speak to her of expansion and vitality when he sees her without power to purge herself of the fiscal and constitutional disease which is in her blood?

With as much reason might he chain up a greyhound, and bid him course the hare; clip the wings of a skylark, and bid it mount to the clouds.

'Our cities are fast losing their best characteristics,' said Pompeo Molmenti at Montecitorio, in one of those eloquent speeches which the Chamber hears often from him, and hears, alas! always in vain. His name is no doubt known to many English readers although his beautiful books are not as widely read outside the peninsula as they merit. His conspicuous position as President of the Venetian Academy has perhaps in a manner obscured, out of Italy, his infinite merits and vast erudition as a writer on history and art, and even Wyzewa reproaches him with making Venice too exclusively his universe. But surely Venice is wide enough, and great enough, to be the world of a man penetrated from his earliest years with her beauty, and with the grandeur of her past, and who, in his childhood, saw, accomplished by his seniors, that union of Venice to northern and central Italy, which raised such high hopes and caused such glorious dreams.

His works are, as I have said, but little known in England, not known at least as the classic scholarship, the historic learning and the artistic erudition of theirwriter deserve; nor are the debates of the Italian Chamber truthfully enough represented in the English press for the brilliant oratory of the deputy for Salo to have found any echo in English ears. Many-sided as great Italians usually are, politics, literature, and history alike claim his allegiance, and art is his adored mistress. Eloquent, dauntless, and sarcastic, his periods pierce like arrows and lash like scourges, whether he condemns the miserable blasphemies of the modern spirit, or holds up to mockery such individual vanity as that of the Under-Secretary of State, who caused his own name and titles to be cut under a verse of Dante's on one of the stones of the church of S. Francesco at Assisi!

I can imagine nothing more painful than for a man of fine taste and high culture, born and bred in such a city as Venice, venerating every shadow on its waters, the moss upon its walls, to be forced to see, day by day, roll up and break over it the mud-wave of modern barbarism. So may have watched, from the marble atrium of his villa, some Roman patrician of the days of Honorius the approach, upon the golden horizon, of the unlettered tribes drawing nearer and nearer as the sun descended, to burn, to slaughter, to deflour, to desecrate. 'Great and sublime attainment would be his who should save Venice from the dreadful menace now hanging over her!' cries Pompeo Molmenti, with the bitter consciousness that none will succeed in that endeavour, since her lot is now cast in times when her treasures of art are in the hands of tradesmen and speculators, to whom her past glory is naught.

His years have been passed amongst her art and her disciples of art; he has watched the spoilers at their work amongst her treasures, and, with the grief of a son who beholds his mother dishonoured, he has been overwhelmed in these most recent times by the indignity and injustice of her lot.

She shares that lot with her sisters; the burden of her chains lies also on them; every city throughout the peninsula from Monte Rosa to Mount Etna has been insulted, dishonoured, defamed, defiled, even as she herself. But Venice is threatened with something still more than this; she is threatened with absolute extinction. There are schemes now simmering in the brains of speculators by which she will disappear as completely as one of her own fishing-boats, when it is sucked under the sea, canvas, and timbers, and crew, in a night of storm.

A few weeks ago, Molmenti gave the solitary vote against the destruction of more of the Calle, and the establishment of a night service of steamers on the Canalezzo. The record of that single unsupported vote is his own highest honour, and the shame of his contemporaries and co-citizens. But he wrestles in vain with the forces of cupidity and stupidity. Whether in the Council Chamber of Venice, or in the Parliament of Montecitorio, he strives in vain to resist the trampling hoofs of those devastating barbaric hordes which a pseudo civilisation vomits over his country.

What he justly calls the burial of the lagoons goes on every day; loads of clay and sand and stones being poured into that silent water which so lately mirroredwalls which were green with the hart's-tongue, penny-wort, and ivy-leaved toad's-flax, and reflected statues white through ages in the dustless air, shining acacia leaves, boughs of fig and laurel, carved niches, illumined shrines; the rubble and the rubbish are shot down into the canals which are chosen for extinction, and the walls are scraped, the acacias, the fig-trees, the laurels are cut down, the fruit-boat, thesandalo, the bridal gondola, are pushed out of the way by the brick-laden launches; where marble fretwork crossed the air, there is a cast-iron pontoon, and higher still a telephone wire; under foot there is a paved or macadamised way. Marco Polo could not find his house now; it still exists, but all around it is disfigured, dismantled, defaced.

The Palazzo Narni and the Ponte del Paradiso made, a few years ago, together one of the most beautiful corners in the world; go look at that spot now; it is enough to make the grey-beard of Cadore rise from his grave. There still remains on high, between the two houses, the admirable cuspide of the Trecento, on which there is sculptured the Madonna, who opens wide her mantle and her cloak to receive the kneeling people; but the beautiful bridge has been destroyed, and in its place has been built a frightful structure, with asphalte roadway and painted metal parapet. In similar manner the elegant, yet bold, arches of the three bridges at S. Nicolo di Tolentino exist nowhere, now, except upon the canvases of painters, and the three banks, near the Campo di Marte, which those graceful arches united, are nowbasely conjoined by three erections of stucco and cast-iron.

'In theArzereof Santa Marta,' Molmenti writes in his latest work, 'once so green and gay and sunlit, a poor quarter no doubt, but one intensely interesting by customs and traditions, there blocks the way now, in all its stolid vulgarity, a cotton factory. Between the public gardens and the Lido, instead of the lovely verdure of the island of Sant' Elena, in its grace and its green twilight of drooped boughs, is a shapeless expanse of mud and cinders, which spreads farther every season, and threatens to invade the water-space which separates it from the gardens and S. Pietro di Castello. On this desert of coke and dirt there have been lately erected offices, sheds, warehouses, chimneys, engines, in the midst of which there still stands, hiding as though ashamed, the beautiful church of the Quattro Cento. But the invasion has been useless; the speculations have failed; and art and history mourn unavailingly the senseless and profitless destruction of this fairest gem of the lagoons:insularum ocellus. The ruin of Sant' Elena, of the view of San Giorgio, of the bridge of San Lio, the hideous new wing added to the noble brown marbles of the Pal Tiepolo, the hideous iron warehouse fronting and affronting the Ca d'Oro, the whitewash daubed on the Pal Sagredo, the indecent alterations and additions to that jewel of Pietro Lombardo the Pal Corner-Spinelli, the new red (like ruddle or red ochre) with which the Pal Foscari has been insulted, these are all offences which every traveller of taste, everyartist of culture, can see, and number, and denounce. But countless, and unknown to the world in general, and undreamed of by those who knew not Venice fifteen years ago, is the enormous loss to the city by the destruction at the hands of the Muncipal Councillors of theCalli, of theArzere, of the mediæval bridges, as of those of which I have spoken above, of innumerable nooks and corners, historical and beautiful; old wells, old fountains, old shrines, beautiful fragments of sculpture and fresco, solemn convent walls, graceful church spires and monastic belfries, parapets, arches, doorways, spiral staircases winding up to hand-forged iron balconies, lamps of metal-work fine as lace-work, all these in innumerable numbers have been effaced, pulled down, built over, or sold; and, above all, there have been destroyed those lovely quiet green places, called eachil Campooril Campiello(the field or the little field), where, of old, the Venetians fed their sheep, stretches of grass enclosed by old houses, old convents, old towers, old quays, old bridges, with always a sculptured well in the centre of each, and the splash of oars near at hand.'

These have nearly all had a similar fate to that of the beautiful house in the Campo di S. Margherita, which Molmenti especially laments, of which the Venetian colouring, the carven galleries, the climbing vines, the bronze railing, the falling water with its spouting jets, have all disappeared, to give place to a yellow, plastered modern building, while its basso-relievo of the Virgin, so long dear to all artists, has been sold to a picture dealer.

'One must be blind indeed,' writes Molmenti, 'not to see the horrible misgovernment of Venice in this latter half of the century, and persons still young can remember a Venice poetic, picturesque, filled with fascination and mysterious charm, now destroyed for no other reason than a senseless and brutal craze for novelty.'

What language can strongly enough denounce such wicked and insensate acts?

He quotes the well-known lines of Philippe de Commines as to the 'most triumphant city' that he had ever seen, 'the most beautiful street' (the Canal Grande) 'that there could be found in all the world'; and he adds, 'the stranger who comes now into this street only finds himself in a vast alley of shopkeepers.'

The Canalezzo is now, indeed, as he says, little more than a huge bazaar of tradesmen and dealers in curios, in which hundreds of advertisements, in many-coloured posters, announce the wares which are now for sale within the ancient palaces. The syndicate of foreign traders, now being established in Venice, will achieve its degradation.

Italian ministers and Italian municipalities are often accused of not encouraging warmly enough English, German, and American tradesmen and manufacturers to establish themselves in Italy, and of putting upon foreign commercial establishments in Italy a prohibitive taxation; the truth is that it would be much better were such foreign firms discouraged more effectively. It is urged on their behalf that they bring capital into the country; they may do so, but only to take it outagain for their own profit, and Italian labour sweats and groans only that some millionaire of Eaton Square or Fifth Avenue may increase his wealth, whilst at the same time Italian tradespeople, trading in their own right, on their own soil, are undersold by the shop-keeping and store-keeping Briton and Yankee.

I am far from entire agreement with Molmenti in many of his views (as for instance his admiration of English pre-Raphaelism), but I am wholly with him in his views of the claims of Venice, and of the sacrilege which is destroying her; wholly with him in his severe and scornful denunciation of what he rightly calls thegretta e meschina arte dei nostre tempi(the mean and trivial art of modern times), and of the modern density of perception and invulnerable self-conceit which render it impossible for the modern mind to appreciate harmony of hues and of proportions, and impossible for the modern architect to place a new building beside an ancient one without injury or vulgarity. Giotto could place his church at Padua on the remains of the Roman amphitheatre, with perfect unity, although in absolute contrast. When a modern mind has sufficient intuition to enable it to admire a work of other times, it can think of no better way of showing its admiration than to desire to pull down all the houses in its vicinity to lay it bare.

Molmenti says, with entire truth, 'It is a supreme duty for the few, who are capable of feeling them, to assert the sentiment of, and respect for, Art against the destructive and impious tendencies of the time.'

But, alas! it is labour of Sisyphus.

There is now under consideration a scheme to make a tramway-road raised on piles from Mestre to Venice parallel with the line now followed across the lagoon by the railway. It is difficult to comprehend the motives and views of persons who desire to turn a beautiful water-city into a commonplace land one, or rather it is easy to perceive that the motive inspires the views, since nothing but the greed of concessionaires and of contractors could ever have evolved such a plan out of any human mind.

The concessionaire and the contractor are the modern representatives of ghouls and vampires of old-world romance. Truly, to them, as to the Sabreur of Offenbach, nothing is sacred. They are guided entirely by their lust of percentage, and to this they are ready to sacrifice every other consideration; indeed, no other consideration exists for them. They have settled on Italy for many years past as they are now settling on Abyssinia. Venice is essentially a water-city; dealt with as land cities are, under the present system, it will not only be disfigured and mutilated like them, but it will be swept away; it will cease to be. The world will have in its stead a dreary, dingy, trading port, with warehouses, factories, docks, grain elevators, electric works, all the polluted, crowded, discoloured, monotonous frightfulness which you can have now at any moment on any coastline of the United States of America. The Venice of Giambellini and the Veronese will be no more; you will have in its stead a petty maritime Pittsburg.

At the present moment Molmenti has successfully combated this Mestre project, but as the abominablescheme of the night steamers on the Canalezzo, and the pontoon under S. Zeno, was almost unanimouslyrejectedfour times by the Venetian Council, yet, on its presentation a fifth time, wasaccepted(unacknowledged influences having been at work), it is impossible to all those who love Venice as she merits not to feel the greatest anxiety. For these speculators resemble the Röntgen rays, and find means to penetrate through closed doors and all other barriers. Iron still resists the Röntgen rays, and such iron the speculators find now and then opposed to them in the scorn of such men as the Count Antonio Donà della Rosa, who dismissed with offence and disdain the offer of two millions in gold for the purchase of the historic tapestries of his palace in Venice.

Were there only fifty such men as Count Donà in every Italian province they would be able to hold in check the rage of destruction. But the character of Count Donà is very rare in these days anywhere, and grows rarer with every decade. The sordid Mephistopheles of a buyer usually finds as sordid a temper in the Faust of a seller whom he tempts. This may be a temper which enriches individuals; it is not one which ennobles or elevates a nation: and frequently not even individual wealth is realised for any length of time by the base barter, for the gambling on the Bourse, or at the club-house, often makes the ill-got gains vanish almost as soon as they are obtained. Such persons as find no attraction in either form of gambling, unhappily for the most part, shrink from action and from public life. Few have the courage of Molmenti, who throws himselfinto the strife careless of what enmity he incurs, and rarely even buoyed up by any hope of success in his efforts, since to weave ropes of sand were scarcely more hopeless labour: it is impossible to succeed in any public work where there is no response to your appeal from the multitudes. And the voices of those who do secretly respond in feeling are dumb in Italy; people are afraid to speak; they are intimidated by the cry cast against them of want of energy, and of enmity to progress (progress, good heavens! a gin-shop instead of a temple!); they are afraid to be called reactionary, romantic, unpatriotic; and in municipal government, as in other government, everything is done by the wire-pullers, the money-grubbers, the speculators.

The timid public huddles together, mute, submissive, and afraid, shorn of its fleeces like a flock of sheep, but not daring to complain.

Those who do so dare are either ignored, or, if they give trouble, are repressed. The gondoliers of Venice have again and again risen against the ruin of their livelihood by the 'black devils' of thevaporetti, but force is at once called in and they are brutally silenced, flung into prison, and deprived of their licence,i.e., of their daily bread. Because it is so picturesque a calling, and the balancing of the oar looks so easy a work, those who are outside it do not realise the hardships of a gondolier. In summer, if Venice be full, it is well enough, and brings a fair, though never a high, wage; but in the other seasons it is a life of great and continual exposure and fatigue. In cold weather, and Venice is intensely cold in the winter solstice, the longvigils on thetraghettoare most tedious and trying, especially through the long chill nights. When the icy winds blow in from the Alps or the Adriatic, the gondolier stands exposed to all their fury, whilst the passenger he carries sits warm and sheltered under the felze.

Strong and lithe in form, often handsome in feature, almost invariably intelligent and acquainted with legend and verse, invariably courteous and well-bred, the gondolier should have received the utmost attention from his rulers. It is painful to know that no body of men has ever been so slighted, so injured, and so wantonly outraged.

There is nowhere any more interesting and deserving community than the Venetian gondoliers, and few more worthy of regard; yet they have been dealt with as though they were no more than so much scum of the sea. Their long-established rights receive no consideration, and their injuries no compensation.

If the vote of Venice could have been honestly polled, no steam-boat would ever have been allowed on the Grand Canal, as, if the vote of Florence could have been honestly polled, the centre of Florence would be now standing untouched, and would have remained untouched for many a generation.

Meanwhile, it is said, by those competent to judge, that the great Murazzi, which protect Venice from the onslaught of the sea in winter storm, and which we all know so well as we pass out from the Lido by the Bar of Malamocco to Chioggia, are being dangerously undermined by the attacks of the high tides in rude weather, and require costly andimmediate repair. It is in vain that this most necessary work is urged upon the Government in Rome. The Government neither undertakes it itself, nor allows Venetians to undertake it. For any foolish, needless disfiguring work, such as the installation of the electric light in the ducal palace, against which Venetians in vain protested, the Government is always ready to waste millions. But for a work of obvious and vital necessity, such as that of the strengthening of the Murazzi, it has not a soldo to spare.

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