for instance, are almost confined to the inhabitants of particular outlying districts.  The masons, carpenters, carvers, and other mechanical trades, are filled by men who do not belong to the city, and who are called and considered foreigners.  Of course the rule is not without exceptions, and you will find genuine Romans amongst the common workmen, but amongst the skilled workmen hardly ever.  There is a very large, poor, I might almost say, pauper population in Rome, and in some form or other these poor must work for their living, but their principle is to do as little work as possible.  There still exists amongst the Romans a sort of debased, imperial pride, a belief that a Roman is per se superior to all other Italians.  For manual work, or labour under others, they have an equal contempt and dislike.  All the semi-independent trades, like those of cab-drivers, street-vendors, petty shopkeepers, &c. are eagerly sought after and monopolized by Romans.  The extent to which small trades are carried on by persons utterly without capital and inevitably embarrassed with debt, is one of the chief evils in the social system which prevails here.  If the Romans also, like the unjust steward, are too proud to dig, unlike that worthy, to beg they are not ashamed.  Begging is a recognized and a respected profession, and if other trades fail there is always this left.  The cardinal principle of Papal rule is to teach its subjects to rely on charity rather than industry.  In order to relieve in some measure the fearful distress that existed among the poor of Rome in the early spring, the Government took some thousand persons into their employment, and set them to work on excavating the Forum.  The sight of these men working, or, more correctly speaking, idling at work, used to be reckoned one of the stock jokes of the season.  Six men were regularly employed in conveying a wheelbarrow filled with two spadefuls of soil.  There was one man to each handle, two in front to pull when the road rose, and one on each side to give a helping hand and keep the barrow steady.  You could see any day long files of such barrows, so escorted, creeping to and from the Forum.  It is hardly necessary to say that little progress was ever made in the excavations, or, for that matter, intended to be made.  Yet the majority of these workmen were able-bodied fellows, who received tenpence a day for doing nothing.  Much less injury would have been inflicted on their self-respect by giving them the money outright than in return for this mockery of labour.  Moreover the poor in Rome, as I have mentioned elsewhere, are not afraid of actual starvation.  “Well-disposed” persons, with a good word from the priests, can obtain food at the convents of the mendicant friars.  I am not saying there is no good in this custom; in fact, it is almost the one good feature I know of connected with the priestly system of government; but still, on an indolent and demoralised population like that of Rome, the benefit of this sort of charity, which destroys the last and the strongest motive for exertion, is by no means an unmixed one.