On the whole, we should grow rapidly poorer; for prices would rise, and we should have a paper currency instead of a metallic one.

Especially we landed proprietors would suffer terribly by the Italian land system being suddenly thrust upon us.

To be obliged to sell one's acres to any peasant who can scrape together enough to capitalise the pittance he now pays as rent, at five per cent, would scarcely be agreeable.

Such a fellow, from whom I have the greatest difficulty in extracting his yearly bushel of grain, could borrow twenty bushels from a neighbour, or the value of them, and buy me out without my consent--acquiring land worth ten times the rent he and his father have paid for it, and his father before him.
It would produce an extraordinary state of things, I can assure you.
No--even putting aside what you call my sympathies and my loyalty to the Pope--I do not desire any change.

Nobody who owns much property does; the revolutionary spirits are people who own nothing." "On the other hand, those who own nothing, or next to nothing, are the great majority." "Even if that is true, which I doubt, I do not see why the intelligent few should be ruled by that same ignorant majority." "But you forget that the majority is to be educated," objected Del Ferice.
"Education is a term few people can define," returned Giovanni.