far that the Council of Ten found it prudent to conceal important
political news from the Council of the Pregadi, and it was even
supposed that Lodovico il Moro had control of a definite number of
votes among the latter. Whether the hanging of single offenders and the
high rewards such as a life-pension of sixty ducats paid to those who
informed against them were of much avail, it is hard to decide; one of
the chief causes of this evil, the poverty of many of the nobility,
could not be removed in a day. In the year 1492 a proposal was urged by
two of that order, that the State should spend 70,000 ducats for the
relief of those poorer nobles who held no public office; the matter was
near coming before the Great Council, in which it might have had a
majority, when the Council of Ten interfered in time and banished the
two proposers for life to Nicosia in Cyprus. About this time a Soranzo
was hanged, though not in Venice itself, for sacrilege, and a Contarini
put in chains for burglary; another of the same family came in 1499
before the Signory, and complained that for many years he had been
without an office, that he had only sixteen ducats a year and nine
children, that his debts amounted to sixty ducats, that he knew no
trade and had lately been turned into the streets. We can understand
why some of the wealthier nobles built houses, sometimes whole rows of
them, to provide free lodging for their needy comrades. Such works
figure in wills among deeds of charity.

But if the enemies of Venice ever founded serious hopes upon abuses of
this kind, they were greatly in error. It might be thought that the
commercial activity of the city, which put within reach of the humblest
a rich reward for their labor, and the colonies on the eastern shores
of the Mediterranean would have diverted from political affairs the
dangerous elements of society. But had not the political history of
Genoa, notwithstanding similar advantages, been of the stormiest? The