Capitolo 42
the talent and the courage, of the medical and able men some rich and skilled
growers, were insufficient, in my opinion, to constitute a middle
class. I considered them so a lot of exceptions to a rule. And as it is
certainly that there can be no nation without a middle class, me the dreaded
so that not I should be forced to admit that there is no Italian nation.
Middle class seemed to me to flourish anybody best in the
Provinces of Mediterranean that to Rome. Half city, half clown the
people that represent him/it are absorbed in a coarse ignorance. Having solo
enough he/she means to live without working, they idles about away their time
in the houses desolate and mean-furnished, the many walls of what it seems
to exhale with _ennui_. Rumours of that that is passing in Europe that
it would possibly rouse them from their numbness, you/he/she is stopped to the
frontier. New ideas that would enrich rather their minds are
intercepted by the Custom House. If theirs read anything, it is the
Almanack, or from way of a taller order of the literature, the _Giornale of
Roma_, where the daily rides of the Pope are pompously made the chronicle of.
The existence of these people consists, in short, of a circle of
eating, drinking, sleeping, and reproducing their kind, up to that death
arrivals.
But over the matters of Apennines it is otherwise far. There, instead of
the citizen that comes down to the level of the farmer, is the farmer
who rises to that some citizen. Incessant jobs it is continually
improving the ground and man. A smuggling of the ideas that daily
more asset, custom-houses of set and customs officers it becomes to
challenge. Patriotism is stimulated and it held alive from the presence of
the Austrians. Common sense is outraged by the weight of taxation. The
different fractions of the middle class--promoters, physicians,
dealers, growers the artists--freely expresses among each other them
dissatisfaction and their hate, their ideas and their hopes. The
Apennineses that form a barrier among the Pope and they bring them