I have described the small mountain proprietors who form the
populations of the towns of 10,000 inhabitants towards the
Mediterranean. You have seen with what indomitable resolution they
combat the sterility of their meagre domains, without any hope of ever
becoming rich. These poor people, who spend their lives in getting
their living, would fancy themselves transported to Paradise, if
anybody were to give them a long lease of half-a-dozen acres in the
country about Rome. Their labour would then have a purpose, their
existence an aim, their family a future.
Perhaps you think they would refuse to labour in an unhealthy country.
Why, these are the very men who at present cultivate the Roman
Campagna to such extent as it is allowed to be cultivated. They it is
who, every spring, come down in large companies from their native
mountains, to break up the heavy clods with pickaxes, and complete the
work of the plough. It is they, too, who return to harvest the crop
under the fatal heat of the summer sun. They attack a field waving
with golden corn. They reap from dawn to dusk, with no food more
nourishing than bread and cheese. They sleep in the open field,
regardless of the nocturnal exhalations which float around them--and
some of them never rise again. Those who survive ten days of a harvest
more destructive than many a battle, return to their native village
with some four or five scudi in their pockets.
If these men could obtain a long lease, or merely take the land from
year to year, they would make more money, and the dangers to be
encountered would be no greater.
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