XX.

CHAP. London.* It is ascertained, by an authentic enumeration, that at the capture of the city, by Alaric, it 1796. contained 1,200,000 inhabitants. Its present population is only 140,000; and in the time of Napoleon's government, it had sunk to 120,000. Venice, Milan, Florence, and Genoa, so celebrated in history, poetry, and romance, are less considerable in point of wealth and population, than second-rate manufacturing towns of Great Britain; and the only really great city of Italy, Naples, will soon apparently be outstripped in numbers by Glasgow, a provincial town of Scotland. The industry and population of the great towns of Italy have sensibly declined during the last three centuries, in consequence of the alteration in the channels of commerce, the result of the rise of Great Britain, and the discovery of the 1 Gibbon's Cape of Good Hope. Florence, which formerly conRome, iv. tained 150,000 souls, now can hardly boast of half the number: Venice and Genoa have little more than a third of their former inhabitants. But the industry of the country is undecayed,-commercial wealth, deprived of its former channels of investment, has generally turned to rural occupation,—

31.

91, c. MalteBrun, vii.

By the census of 1841, London contained 1,864,000 souls, the greatest aggregate of human beings in a single city, of which the history of the world has preserved an authentic record. Glasgow, next to it in point of number, contained 267,000.

↑ The following is the populations of the principal cities of Italy, according to the latest statistical accounts (1836) :—

XX.

1796.

the towns have declined, but the provinces have in- CHAP. creased both in riches and inhabitants, and the population of Italy was never, either in the days of the Emperors, or of the modern Republics, so considerable as it is at the present moment. It amounts at this time (1842), to nineteen millions of souls, and exceeded sixteen millions in the days of Napoleon; a population which gave 1237 to the square marine league, a density greater than either that of France or England at that period.*

* The following table exhibits the population of the Italian States in 1810 under Napoleon, and in 1832, with the square leagues of territory, and density of the population to the square league :—

CHAP.

XX.

this vast

population

in Italy.

The causes of the extraordinary population which has thus survived the political decline of modern 1796. Italy, and the decay of the principal seats of its maCause of nufacturing industry, is to be found in the direction of its capital to agricultural investment, and the increasing industry with which, during a long course of centuries, its inhabitants have overcome the sterility of nature. The admirable cultivation which has crept up the mountain sides, furnishes food for a numerous population at the height of several thousand feet above the sea, and explains the singular fact, at first sight so inexplicable to a northern observer, that in scenes where, at a distance, nothing but continued foliage meets the eye, the traveller finds, on a nearer approach, villages and hamlets, and all the signs of a numerous peasantry. The terrace gardening of the hills in Tuscany, the irrigations in the valley of the Arno, are extraordinary monuments of human industry. Means have been taken to avert or regulate the devastating torrents which descend, charged with autumnal rains, from the mountains, and to diffuse them in an infinity of little canals over the whole face, whether broken or level, of the country. The chestnut forests, which grow spontaneously in the higher regions, furnish subsistence for a large part of the peasantry; while, on the summit of all, the cool pastures of the Appenines, from whence the shepherd can see from sea to sea, feed vast herds of cattle; and flocks of sheep and goats find a delicious pasture, which, during the summer months, are driven there from the great pasture-farms of the Maremme, then brown parched and intersected by cracks from the long-continued drought. Thus every part of the country is made to contribute its quota to the use of man; and Italy exhibits the extraordinary spectacle,

CHAP.

XX.

interesting alike to the philanthropist and the economical observer, of a country in which population and civilization have withstood the successive decline of 1796. two periods of political greatness, and the human race have found the means of happiness and increase amidst the destruction of all the sources of commercial prosperity, in the steady application of wealth and industry to the cultivation of the soil. It is a spectacle on which the eye of an inhabitant of these1 Chateauislands may well rest with complacency; for it affords, 58, 157. perhaps, the only solid ground for hope and confi- Young's dence in contemplating the future fate of the people 152, 157. of this empire, now resting, in a great degree, on the Agric. de splendid, but insecure and shifting, foundation of la Toscane, commercial greatness.1

vieux, 80,

Travels ii.

Sismondi's

102, 156.

sion of land

and its ad

effects.

Land in the Appenines is very much subdivided; there are eighty-seven thousand owners of little free- Great diviholds in Tuscany alone, producing below L.5 sterling in the Ap a-year, and thirty-one thousand between that and penines, L.25.* It is in the unremitting industry and con-mirable stant toil, generated by the attachments which this general diffusion of property produces, that one great cause of the extraordinary population and general wellbeing of the people in the mountain regions is to be found. It has not been the result, as in Republican France, of the violent spoliation of the clerical and the higher orders, nor of the boundless expansion of civilized man through the unappropriated recesses of the forest, as in North America, but the simple effect of industry steadily pursued, and frugality unceasingly practised, in a country not revolutionized and wholly appropriated during a long series of centuries. And what has been the consequence? Why, that Tuscany now exhibits the

* Cadastre of 1828, given in Raumer's Italy, ii. 28.

XX.

1796.

CHAP. marvellous and, to an economical observer, highly interesting combination of ancient civilization with social felicity, of density of population with general wellbeing, of declining commercial prosperity with increasing agricultural opulence. The high wages of manufacturing industry have not there been wasted in intoxication or devoted to extravagance: they were realized during the days of their prosperity in numerous little freeholds, which at once elevated the character and improved the habits of their possessors, and have communicated the same habits to their descendants; and, in consequence, Tuscany has sur1 Chateau- mounted equally the ruin of its commercial establishvieux, 80, ments and the fall of its political independence; and Young's population, duly regulated by the elevated standard 152, 157. of comfort among the poor, exhibits the features of general wellbeing in the latest stages of national existence :-Another proof among the many which history affords of the eternal truth, that the real issues of Italy, ii. national, equally as individual, felicity are to be found Cadastre, in the habits of the people; and that no misfortunes, 1832. how great soever, are irremediable, but such as undermine their virtue.1

97.

Travels, ii.

Sism.

Agric. de

la Tosc. 102.

Raumer's

28.

Personal

observa

tion.

Political weakness

of Italy.

In a political point of view, however, the importance of Italy is at an end; and the garden of Europe seems destined to no other fate, during the remainder of European story, but that of being the prize of the most valiant and powerful of the transalpine nations. Still its inhabitants are doomed to utter the mournful lamentation:

"Vincitrice, o vinta, sempre asserva."

The cause of this is twofold. Italy, though overrun successively by the Goths and the Lombards, never was the resting place of so considerable a portion of the northern nations as to acquire the