INFLUENCE OF ROMANISM ON TRADE--(CONTINUED).
Why does the Church systematically discourage
Trade?--Railways--Much needed--Church opposes them--Could not a man
take a journey of twenty or two hundred miles and be a good
Catholic?--Motion is Liberty--Motion contributed to overthrow the
Serfdom of the Middle Ages--Popes understand the connection between
Motion and Liberty--Romans chained to the Soil--Gregory XVI. and
the Iron-bridge--Gas in Rome--Spread of the Malaria--The Pontine
Marshes--Neglect of Soil--Number of Paupers--How the Church
prevents the Cultivation of the Campagna--Church Lands in England
and Scotland--The price which Italy pays for the Papacy--Whether
would the old Roman Woman or an old Scotch Woman make the better
Ruler?
Let us pause here, and inquire into the cause of this most deplorable
state of matters. Is not the Papal Government manifestly sacrificing its
own interests? Would it not be better for itself were Italy covered with
a prosperous agriculture and a flourishing trade? Were its cities filled
with looms and forges, would not its people have more money to spend on
masses and absolutions? and, instead of the Government subsisting on
foreign loans, and being always on the eve of bankruptcy, it might fill
its exchequer from the vast resources of the country, and have,
moreover, the pleasure of seeing around it a prosperous and happy
people.
This is all very true. None knows better the value of money than Rome;
but she knows, too, the infinite hazard of acquiring it in the way of
allowing trade and industry to enter the Papal States. Indeed, to do so
would be to record sentence of banishment against herself. Every one
must have remarked the difference betwixt the artizan of Birmingham and
the peasant of Ireland. They seem to belong to two different races of
men almost. The former is employed in making a certain piece of
mechanism, or in superintending its working. He is compelled to
calculate, to trace effects to their causes, and to study the relations
of the various parts before him to the whole. In short, he is taught to
think; and that thinking power he applies to all other subjects. His
habits of life teach him to ask for reasons, and to accept of opinions
only on evidence. The mind of the latter lies dead. Were Italy filled
with a race of men like the first, the papacy could not live a day. Were
trade, and machinery, and wealth to come in, the torpor of Italy would
be broken up; and--terrible event to the papacy!--mind would awaken.
What though the Pope reigns over a wasted land and a nation of beggars?
he _does_ reign; he counts for a European sovereign; and his system
continues to exist as a power. As men in shipwreck throw overboard food,
jewels, all, to save life, so Romanism has thrown all overboard to save
itself. Nothing could be a stronger proof of this than the fact that, as
the effects and benefits of trade become the more developed, the
pontifical Government tightens its restrictions. The note of Antonelli,
the present ruling spirit of the papacy, was the most prohibitive ever
framed against the introduction of iron, in other words, of
civilization. This is the price which Italy must pay for the Pope and
his religion. She cannot participate in the advantages of foreign trade;
she cannot enjoy the facilities and improvements of modern times;
because, were she to enjoy these, she would lose the papacy. She must be
content to remain in the barbarism of the middle ages, covered with that
moral malaria which has smitten all things in that doomed land, and
under the influence of which, the cities, the earth itself, and man, for
whom it was made, are all sinking into one common ruin.[3]
We have yet other illustrations of the pestiferous influence of Romanism
on the temporal happiness of its subjects. We have already alluded to
the determined manner in which the Pontifical Government has hitherto
withstood the introduction of railways. And yet, if there be a country
in Europe where railways are indispensable, it is the Papal States. The
roads in the territory blessed by the Government of Christ's vicar, are
more like canals than roads, with this difference, that there is too
little water in them for floating a boat, and far too much for
comfortable travelling. Besides, they are infested by brigands, whose
pursuit a railway might enable you to distance. But a railway the
subjects of the Pontifical Government cannot have. And why?
One would think that the mere mode of conveyance is a very harmless
affair. What is it to the Pontifical Government whether the peasant of
the Alban hills, or the citizen of Bologna, or the merchant of Ancona,
visit Rome on foot, or in his waggon, or by rail? Is he not the same
man? Will his ride convert him into a heretic, or shake his faith in
Peter's successor? or will the laying down of a few miles of railroad
weaken the foundations of that Church which boasts that she is founded
on a rock, and that the gates of hell themselves shall not prevail
against her? Or if it be said that it is not the mode of the journey,
but the length of the journey, what difference can it make whether the
man travel twenty miles or two hundred miles? The stability of the
Church cannot be seriously endangered by a few miles less or more. Is
the Pope's system of so peculiar a kind, that though it is possible for
the man who walks twenty miles on foot to believe in it, it is wholly
impossible for the man who rides two hundred miles by rail to do so? We
know of no Roman doctor who has attempted to fix the precise number of
miles which a good Catholic may travel from home without endangering his
salvation. One would think that all this is plain enough; that there is
no element of danger here; and yet the sharper instincts of the papacy
have discovered that herein lies danger, and great danger, to its power.
If the influence of Rome is to be preserved, it is not enough that the
Bible be put out of existence, that the missionary be banished, and that
the art of printing, and all means of diffusing ideas, be proscribed and
exterminated: the very right of moving over the earth must be taken from
man. Even _motion_ must be placed under anathema.
We have a saying that _knowledge is power_. I would say that _motion is
liberty_. The serfdom of the middle ages was in good degree maintained
by binding man to the soil. Astriction to the soil was at once the
foundation and the symbol of that serfdom. The baron became the master
of the body of the man; he became also the master of his mental ideas.
But when the serf acquired the power of locomotion, he laid the
foundation of his emancipation; and from that hour feudalism began to
crumble. As the serfs' power of motion enlarged, their liberty
enlarged. As formerly they had known slavery by its symbol
_immovability_, so now they tasted freedom by its symbol _motion_. The
serf travelled beyond the valley in which he was born; he saw new
objects; he met his fellow-men; and learned to think. At last motion was
perfected; the steam-engine hissed past him, and he felt that now he was
completely unchained. I do not give this as a theory of the rise and
progress of modern liberty; but unquestionably there is a close and
intimate connection between motion and liberty.
The Popes are shrewd enough to see this connection; and herein lies
their opposition to railroads. They have attempted, and still do
attempt, to perpetuate papal serfdom, by tying their subjects to their
paternal acres and their native town. Were my reader living in London or
in Edinburgh, and wished to visit Chelsea or Portobello, how would he
proceed? Go to the railway station and buy a ticket, and his journey is
made. But were the country under the Pontifical Government, he would
find it impossible to manage the matter quite so expeditiously. He must
first present himself at the office of the prefect of police. He must
state where he wishes to go to; what business he has there; how long he
intends remaining. He must give his name, his age, his residence, and a
certificate, if required, from his parish priest; and then, should the
object of his journey be approved of, a description of his person will
be taken down, a passport will be made out, for which he must pay some
six or eight pauls; and after this process has been gone through, but
not sooner, he may set out on his little journey. Very few of those who
live in Rome were ever more than outside its walls. Even the nobles have
the utmost difficulty in getting so far as Civita Vecchia; very few of
them ever saw the sea. The Popes know that ideas as well as merchandise
travel by rail; and that if the Romans are allowed to go from home, and
to see new objects, new faces, and to hear new ideas, a process will be
commenced which will ultimately, and at no distant day, undermine the
papacy. But among men of ordinary intelligence there will be but one
opinion regarding a system that sees an enemy not only in the Bible, but
in the most necessary and useful arts,--in the steam-ship, in the
railroad, in the electric telegraph; in short, in all the improvements
and usages of civilized life. Such a system assuredly has perdition
written upon its forehead.
The late Pope Gregory XVI. would not allow even an iron bridge to be
thrown across the Tiber. The Romans solicited this, to get rid of a
ferry-boat by which the Tiber is crossed at the point in question; but
no; an iron bridge there could not be. And why? Ah, said Gregory, if we
have an iron bridge in Rome, we shall next have an iron road; and if we
have an iron road, "_adio_," the papacy will take its departure, and
that by steam.
But the Pope had another reason for withholding his sanction from the
iron bridge; and as that reason shows how some wretched crotchet,
springing from their miserable system, is sure to start up on all
occasions, and defeat the most needed improvement, I shall here state
what it was. At the point where it was wished to have the bridge
erected, the Tiber flows between two populous regions of the city. There
is in consequence a considerable concourse, and the passengers are
carried over, as I have said, in a ferry-boat, for which a couple of
baiocchi is paid by each person to the ferryman. The money thus
collected forms part of the revenues of a certain church in Rome, where
the priests who receive it sing masses for the souls in purgatory. If
you abolish the ferry-boat, it was argued, you will abolish the penny;
and if you abolish the penny, what is to become of the poor souls in
purgatory? and for the sake of the _souls_, the _living_ were forced to
do without the bridge.
I need scarcely say that there is no gas in Rome. And sure I am, if
there be a dark spot in all the universe,--a place above all others
needing light of all kinds, moral, mental, and physical,--it is this
dark dungeon termed Rome. It has a few oil-lamps, swung on cords, at
most respectable distances from one another; and you see their hazy,
sickly, dying gleam far above you, making themselves visible, but
nothing besides; and after sunset, Rome is plunged in darkness,
affording ample opportunity for assassinations, robberies, and evil
deeds of all kinds. I know not how many companies have been formed to
light Rome with gas. An attempt was made to light in this way the
Eternal City during the pontificate of Gregory XVI. A deputation went to
the Vatican, and told the Pope that they would light his capital with
gas. "Gas!" exclaimed Gregory, who had an owl-like dread of light of all
kinds; "there shan't be gas in Rome while I am in Rome." Gregory is not
in Rome now; Pio Nono is in the Vatican: but the same oil-lamps which
lighted the Rome of Gregory XVI. still flourish in the Rome of Pio
Nono.[4]
All have heard of the Pontine Marshes,--a chain of swamps which run
along the foot of the Volscian Mountains, and are the birthplace of the
malaria,--a white vapour, which creeps snake-like over the country, and
smites with deadly fever whoever is so foolhardy as to sleep on the
Campagna during its continuance. These marshes, I understand, are
increasing; and the malaria is increasing in consequence. That fatal
vapour now comes every summer to the gates of Rome: it covers a certain
quarter of the city, which, I was told, is uninhabitable during its
continuance; and if nothing be done to lessen the malaria at its source,
it will, some century or half century after this, envelope in its
pestilential folds the whole of the Eternal City, and the traveller will
gaze with awe on the blackened ruins of Rome, as he does on those of
Babylon on the plain of Chaldea: so, I say, will he see the heaps of
Rome on the wasted bosom of the Campagna deserted by man, and become the
dwelling-place of the dragons and satyrs of the wilderness. But matters
are not come to this yet. An English company (for every attempted
improvement in Rome has originated with English skill and capital) was
formed some years ago, to drain the Pontine Marshes. They went to the
Vatican; and Sir Humphrey Davy being then in Rome, they induced him to
accompany them, in the hope that his high scientific authority would
have some weight with the Pontiff. They stated their object, which was
to drain the Pontine Marshes. They assured the Pontiff it was
practicable to a very large extent; and they pointed out its manifold
advantages, as regarded the health of the country, and other things.
"Drain the Pontine Marshes!" exclaimed Pope Gregory, in a tone of
surprise and horror at this new project of these everlastingly scheming
English heretics,--"Drain the Pontine Marshes! God made the Pontine
Marshes; and if He had intended them to be drained, He would have
drained them himself."
The barrenness that afflicts all countries which are the seat of a false
religion is a public testimony of the Divine indignation against
idolatry. For the sin of man the earth was originally cursed: and
wherever wicked systems exist, there a manifest curse rests upon the
earth. The Mohammedan apostacy and the Roman apostacy are now seated in
the midst of wildernesses. And, to make the fact more striking, these
lands, which are deserts now, were anciently the best cultivated on the
globe. There stood the proudest of earth's cities,--there the arts
flourished,--and there men were free after the measure of ancient
freedom. All this is at an end long since. Ruins, silence, and a sickly
and sinking population, are the mournful spectacles which greet the eye
of the traveller in Papal and Mohammedan countries. Thus God bears
outward testimony against the Papal and Mohammedan systems. He has
cursed the ground for their sakes; not in the way of miracle,--not by
sending an angel to smite it, or by raining brimstone upon it, as he did
on Sodom: the angel that has smitten the dominions of the Pope and of
the False Prophet,--the brimstone and fire which have been rained upon
them,--are the wicked systems which have there grown up, and by which
Government has been rendered blind, infatuated, and tyrannical, and man
stupid, indolent, and vicious. But the laws the Almighty has
established, according to which idolatry necessarily and uniformly
blights the earth and the men who live upon it, only show that his
indignation against these evil systems is unchangeable and eternal, and
will pursue them till they perish. Of this the state of the plain around
Rome, the _Agro Romano_, forms a terrible example.
I have endeavoured in former chapters to exhibit a picture of the
frightful desolation of this once magnificent plain. He that set his
mark on the brow of the first murderer has set his mark on this plain,
where so much blood has been shed. "Now art thou cursed from the earth,
which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy
hand. When thou tillest the ground it shall not henceforth yield unto
thee her strength." But God has cursed this plain through the
instrumentality of this evil system the Papacy, and I shall show you
how.
I have already shown that there is not, and cannot be, anything like
trade in Rome, beyond what is necessary to repair the consumpt of
articles in daily use. In the absence of trade there is a proportionate
amount of idleness; and that idleness, in its turn, breeds beggary,
vagabondism, and crime. The French Prefect, Mr Whiteside tells us,
published a statistical account of Rome; and how many paupers does he
say there are in it? Why, not fewer than thirty thousand. Thirty
thousand paupers in one city, and that city, in its usual state, of but
about a hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants! Subtract the priests,
the English residents, and the French soldiers, and every third man is a
beggar. I was fortunate enough one evening to meet, in a certain shop in
Rome, an intelligent Roman, willing to talk with me on the state of the
country. The shopkeeper, as soon as he found the turn the conversation
had taken, discreetly stepped out, and left it all to ourselves. "I
never in all my life," I remarked, "saw a city in which I found so many
beggars. The people seem to have nothing to do, and nothing to eat.
There are here some hundred thousand of you cooped up within these old
walls, and one half the population do nothing all day long but whine at
the heels of English travellers, or hang on at the doors of the
convents, waiting their one meal a-day. Why is this? Outside the walls
is a magnificent plain, which, were it cultivated, would feed ten Romes,
instead of one. Why don't you take picks, or spades, or
ploughs,--anything you can lay hands on,--and go out to that plain, and
dig it, and plant it, and sow it, and reap it, and eat and drink, and be
merry?" "Ah! so we would," said he. "Then, why don't you?" "We dare
not," he replied. "Dare not! Dare not till the earth God has given
you?" "It is the Church's," he said. "But come now," said he, "and I
will explain how it comes to be so." He went on to say, that one portion
of the Campagna was gifted to the convents in Rome, another portion was
gifted to the nunneries, another to the hospitals, and another to the
pontifical families,--that is, to the sons and daughters, or, as they
more politely speak in Rome, the nephews and nieces, of the Popes. These
were the owners of the great Roman plain; and in their hands almost
every acre of it was locked up, inaccessible to the plough, and
inaccessible to the people. Even in our country it is found that
corporations make the worst possible landlords, and that lands in the
possession of such bodies are always less productive than estates
managed in the ordinary way. But what sort of farming are we to expect
from such corporations as we find in the city of Rome? What skill or
capital have a brotherhood of lazy monks, to enable them to cultivate
their lands? What enterprise or interest have a sisterhood of nuns to
farm their property? They know they shall have their lifetime of it, and
that is all they care for. Accordingly, they let their lands for
grazing, on payment of a mere trifle of annual rent; and so the Campagna
lies unploughed and unsown. A tract of land extending from Civita
Vecchia to well nigh the gates of Rome,--which would make a Scotch
dukedom or a German principality,--belonging to the _San Spirito_, does
little more, I was told, than pay its working. The land labours under an
eternal entail, which binds it over to perpetual sterility. It is God's,
_i.e._ it is the Church's; and no one,--no, not even the Pope,--dare
alienate a single acre of it. No Pope would set his face to such a piece
of reformation, well knowing that every brotherhood and sisterhood in
Rome would rise in arms against him. And even though he should screw his
courage to such an encounter, he is met by the canon law. The Pope who
shall dare to secularize a foot-breadth of land which has been gifted to
the Church is by that law accursed. Here, then, is the price which the
Romans pay for the Papacy. Outside the walls of the city lie the estates
of the Church, depastured at certain seasons by a few herds, tended by
men clad in skins, and looking as savage as the animals they tend; while
inside the walls are some hundred thousand Romans, enduring from one
year's end to another all the miseries of a partial famine. Nor is there
the least hope that matters will mend so long as the Papacy lasts. For
while the Papacy is in Italy, the Campagna, once so populous and rich,
will be what it now is,--a desert.
And the Papal States, lapsed into more than primeval sterility, overrun
by brigandage and beggary, are the picture of what Britain would be
under the Papacy. Let the Roman Church get the upper hand in this
country, and, be assured, the first thing it will do will be to demand
back every acre of land that once belonged to it. Before the
Reformation, half the lands of England, and a third of the lands of
Scotland, were in the possession of the Church. She keeps a chart of
them to this hour: she knows every foot-breadth of British soil that at
any time belonged to her: she holds its present possessors to be robbers
and sacrilegious men; and the first moment she has the power, she will
compel them to disgorge what she holds to be ill-gotten wealth, and
endow her with the broad acres she once possessed. Nor will she stop
here. By haunting death-beds,--by putting in motion the machinery of the
confessional,--by the threat of purgatory in this case, and the lure of
paradise in that,--she will speedily add to her former ample domain. And
what will our country then become? We shall have Mother Church for
landlord; and while she feasts daily at her sumptuous board, we shall
have what the Romans now have,--the crumbs. We shall have monks and
nuns for our farmers; and under their management, farewell to the
smiling fields, the golden harvests, and the opulent cities, of Scotland
and England. Our country will again become what it was before the
Reformation,--a land of moors, and swamps, and forests, with a few
patches of indifferent cultivation around our convents and abbacies.
Vagabondism, lay and sacerdotal, will flourish once more in Britain;
trade and commerce will be put down, as savouring of independence and
intelligence; indolence and beggary will be sanctified; and troops of
friars, with wallets on their backs, impudence on their brows, and
profanity and filthiness on their tongues, will scour the country,
demanding that every threshold and every purse shall be open to them.
This result will come as surely as to-morrow will come, provided we
permit the Papacy to raise its head once more among us.
Let no one imagine that this terrible wreck of man, and of all his
interests,--of civilization, of industry, of trade and commerce,--has
happened of chance, and that there is no connection between this
deplorable state of matters and the system which has prevailed in Italy.
On the contrary, it is the direct, the necessary, and the uniform result
of that system. The barbarian hates art because he does not understand
its uses, and dreads its power. But the hatred the Pope bears to the
useful arts is not that of the barbarian. It is the intelligent, the
consistent hatred of a man who knows what he is about. It is the hatred
of a man who comprehends both the character of his own system, and the
tendency of modern improvements, and who sees right well, that if these
improvements are introduced, the Papacy must fall. Self-preservation is
the first law of systems, as of individuals; and the Papacy, feeling the
antagonism between itself and these things, ever has and ever will
resist them. It cannot tolerate them though it would. Speculatists and
sentimentalists may talk as they please; but the destruction of that
system is the first requisite to the regeneration of Italy.
Such, then, is the condition of Italy at this day. Were we to find a
state of things like this in the centre of Africa, or in some barbarous
region thousands and thousands of miles away from European literature,
arts, and influences, where the plough and the loom had yet to be
invented, it would by no means surprise us. But to find a state of
matters like this in the centre of Europe,--in Italy, once the head of
civilization and influence, the birthplace of modern art and
letters,--is certainly wonderful. But the wonder is completed when we
reflect that this state of things obtains under a Government claiming to
be guided by a higher than mortal sagacity,--a Government which says
that it never did, and never can, err,--a Government that is
supernatural and infallible. Supernatural and infallible! Why, I say, go
out into the street,--stop the first old woman you meet,--carry her to
Rome,--put a three-storied cap on her head,--enthrone her on the high
altar in St Peter's,--burn incense before her, and call her
infallible,--I say that old woman will be a more enlightened ruler that
Pio Nono. The old Scotch woman or English woman would beat the old Roman
woman hollow.
The facts I have stated are sad enough; but the more harrowing picture
of the working of the papal system has yet to be shown.