The rich man, the man of business, the man of cities, may receive in such transactions compensation, which is greatly to their advantage, because traffic is their trade, because to buy and sell, and turn and return, and roll the ball of gold so that it grows bigger every hour, is their custom and interest.  But the poor man, the rustic, the man with the one ewe lamb, loses always, whether he assents to the sale or has it forced upon him.  These people of the valley might have a little ready money given them on valuation, but it would be money clipped and cropped by the avarice of intermediates until little of it would remain, and they would be driven out to begin life anew; away from their old rooftree and the fruits of long years of labour.

From far and near men came to Ruscino to take counsel of its vicar; his wisdom being esteemed and his intelligence known in the valley beyond the confines of his parish:  and what advice could he give them?  He could but tell them that it was useless to kick against the pricks.  He knew so well the cold, curt, inflexible official answer; the empty, vapouring regrets, false, simpering, pharisaical; the parrot-phrases of public interests, public considerations, public welfare; the smile, the sneer, the self-complacent shrug of those who know that only the people whom they profess to serve will suffer.  To him, as to them, it seemed a monstrous thing to take away the water from its natural channel and force the men who lived on it and by it to alter all their ways of life and see their birthplace changed into a desert in order that aliens might make money.  But he could not counsel them to resist; no resistance was possible.  It was like any other tyranny of the State:  like the fiscal brutality which sold up a poor man’s hayrick or clothing because he could not pay the poll-tax.  If the poor man resisted, if he fired his old fowling-piece, or used his knife on the minions of the State, what use was such resistance?  He went to rot in prison.

His calling, his conscience, his good sense, his obedience to law, all alike compelled him to urge on them patience, submission, and inaction before the provocation of a great wrong.  He dared not even let them see one tithe of the sympathy he felt, lest if he did so they should draw from it an incentive to illegal action.

The part which he was obliged to take in thus persuading the people to be tranquil under injustice estranged him farther and farther from Adone Alba, who found it a cowardice and a treachery, although he dared not say so in words.  Had he retained the coolness of reason the youth would have known and acknowledged that in the position of Don Silverio no other course would have been possible or decent.  But reason had long left him, and inaction and impulse alone remained.  He would not allow that a wrong might be condemned, and yet endured.  To him all endurance had in it the meanness of condonation.