Now, where is the use of allowing all those riches to lie idle, while half of that community hardly know, from day to day, how they are going to keep body and soul together?  And, where is the wisdom in permitting hundreds upon hundreds of millions of francs to be locked up in the useless trumpery of churches all over Italy, and the people ground to death with taxation to uphold a perishing Government?

As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it.  She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and misery.  All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals.  And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred—­and rags and vermin to match.  It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.

Look at the grand Duomo of Florence—­a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet.  Like all other men, I fell down and worshipped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said, “O, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye?  Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don’t you rob your church?”

Three hundred happy, comfortable priests are employed in that Cathedral.

And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse every body I can think of.  They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in.  It sounds blasphemous, but it is true, and here they act blasphemy.  The dead and damned Medicis who cruelly tyrannized over Florence and were her curse for over two hundred years, are salted away in a circle of costly vaults, and in their midst the Holy Sepulchre was to have been set up.  The expedition sent to Jerusalem to seize it got into trouble and could not accomplish the burglary, and so the centre of the mausoleum is vacant now.  They say the entire mausoleum was intended for the Holy Sepulchre, and was only turned into a family burying place after the Jerusalem expedition failed—­but you will excuse me.  Some of those Medicis would have smuggled themselves in sure.—­What they had not the effrontery to do, was not worth doing.  Why, they had their trivial, forgotten exploits on land and sea pictured out in grand frescoes (as did also the ancient Doges of Venice) with the Saviour and the Virgin throwing bouquets to them out of the clouds, and the Deity himself applauding from his throne in Heaven!  And who painted these things?  Why, Titian, Tintoretto, Paul Veronese, Raphael—­none other than the world’s idols, the “old masters.”