The same system of repression prevails in everything. In the print-shops
one never sees a picture which even verges on impropriety. The few
female portraits exhibited in their windows are robed with an amount of
drapery which would satisfy the most prudish "sensibilities." All books,
which have the slightest amorous tendency, are scrupulously interdicted
without reference to their political views. The number of wine-shops
seems to me small in proportion to the size of the city, and in none of
them, as far as I could learn, are spirits sold. There is another
subject, which will suggest itself at once to any one acquainted with the
life of towns, but on which it is obviously difficult to enter fully. It
is enough to say, that what the author of "Friends in Council" styles,
with more sentiment than truth, "the sin of great cities," does not
"apparently" exist in Rome. Not only is public vice kept out of sight,
as in some other Italian cities, but its private haunts and resorts are
absolutely and literally suppressed. In fact, if priest rule were
deposed, and our own Sabbatarians and total-abstinence men and societies
for the suppression of vice, reigned in its stead, I doubt if Rome could
be made more outwardly decorous than it is at present.

This then is the fair side of the picture. What is the aspect of the
reverse? In the first place, the system requires for its working an
amount of constant clerical interference in all private affairs, which,
to say the least, is a great positive evil. Confession is the great
weapon by means of which morality is enforced. Servants are instructed
to report about their employers, wives about their husbands, children
about their parents, and girls about their lovers. Every act of your
life is thus known to, and interfered with, by the priests. I might
quote a hundred instances of petty interference: let me quote the first
few that come to my memory. No bookseller can have a sale of books
without submitting each volume to clerical supervision. An Italian