Few nations are more deeply eaten by that ulcer of convents which I have endeavored to fathom.
In spite of your possessing Rome, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Turin, Florence, Sienna, Pisa, Mantua, Bologna, Ferrara, Genoa, Venice, a heroic history, sublime ruins, magnificent ruins, and superb cities, you are, like ourselves, poor.
You are covered with marvels and vermin.
Assuredly, the sun of Italy is splendid, but, alas, azure in the sky does not prevent rags on man.
Like us, you have prejudices, superstitions, tyrannies, fanaticisms, blind laws lending assistance to ignorant customs.
You taste nothing of the present nor of the future without a flavor of the past being mingled with it.
You have a barbarian, the monk, and a savage, the lazzarone.
The social question is the same for you as for us.
There are a few less deaths from hunger with you, and a few more from fever; your social hygiene is not much better than ours; shadows, which are Protestant in England, are Catholic in Italy; but, under different names, the vescovo is identical with the bishop, and it always means night, and of pretty nearly the same quality.
To explain the Bible badly amounts to the same thing as to understand the Gospel badly.
Is it necessary to emphasize this?
Must this melancholy parallelism be yet more completely verified?