Roman Holidays, and Others eBook

There has been a great deal of industrial adversity; the cost of living has advanced; the taxes are very heavy, and the burdens are unequally adjusted; many speculators have been ruined, and much honestly invested money has been lost.  But wages have increased with the prices and rents and taxes, and in a country where every ounce of coal that drives a wheel of production or transportation has to be brought a thousand miles manufactures and railroads have been multiplied.

The state has now taken over the roads and has added their cost to that of its expensive army and navy, but no reasonable witness can doubt that the Italians will be equal to this as well as their other national undertakings.  These in Rome are peculiarly difficult and onerous, because they must be commensurate with the scale of antiquity.  In a city surviving amid the colossal ruins of the past it would be grotesque to build anything of the modest modern dimensions such as would satisfy the eye in other capitals.  The Palace of Finance, at a time when Italian paper was at a discount almost equal to that of American paper during the Civil War, had to be prophetic of the present solvency in size.  The yet-unfinished Palace of Justice (one dare not recognize its beauty above one’s breath) must be planned so huge that the highest story had to be left off if the foundations were to support the superstructure; the memorial of Victor Emmanuel II. must be of a vastness in keeping with the monuments of imperial Rome, some of which it will partly obscure.  Yet as the nation has grown in strength under burdens and duties, it will doubtless prove adequate to the colossal architectural enterprises of its capital.  Private speculation in Rome brought disaster twenty-five years ago, but now the city has overflowed with new life the edifices that long stood like empty sepulchres, and public enterprises cannot finally fail; otherwise we should not be digging the Panama Canal or be trying to keep the New York streets in repair.  We may confide in the ability of the Italians to carry out their undertakings and to pay the cost out of their own pockets.  It is easy to criticise them, but we cannot criticise them more severely than they criticise themselves; and perhaps, as our censure cannot profit them, we might with advantage to ourselves, now and then, convert it into recognition of the great things they have accomplished.

XIII

CASUAL IMPRESSIONS

The day that we arrived in Rome the unclouded sun was yellow on the white dust of the streets, which is never laid by a municipal watering-cart, though sometimes it is sprinkled into mire from the garden-hose of the abutting hotels; and in my rashness I said that for Rome you want sun and you want youth.  Yet there followed many gray days when my age found Rome very well indeed, and I would not have the septuagenarian keep away because he is no longer in the sunny sixties.