The rise in prices, however, has been counterbalanced, so far as the working population are concerned, by a rise in wages, which has been on the average from a Tuscan lire to a Sardinian franc, or about 20 per cent. On the whole, comparing the rise in prices with that in wages, the real pay of the labourer would seem to have slightly improved. So far, therefore, as the people’s stomachs are concerned, the comparison is not unfavourable to the new Government. To persons residing at Florence on fixed incomes, however, the increase in both instances is unfavourable, and they not unnaturally regard that which is inconvenient to themselves as ruinous to the country. The loss of the custom of the Court and its train, upon which so much stress has been laid, so far from having affected Tuscany, has not even really affected Florence. The amount taken on account of the “octroi” at the gates of Florence shows the consumption to be on the increase. We may therefore leave the market with the conviction that there is no material pressure at work to cause discontent. Some tradesmen really have suffered from the absence of the Court, as the jewellers and milliners for instance; but trade generally has not felt the difference. Continuing, however, our walk in search of public opinion, we come, in a street not far distant, to a real cause of complaint; and in Tuscany, where there is a cause, there will be no want of complaint. There are a couple of soldiers standing sentry before a large door, and all around knots of countrymen talking together in anxious expectation, or not talking, but silently taking leave. The conscription is a grievance. It is the only act of the new Government which is generally felt to be a hardship, and sometimes murmured against as an injustice. Rather more than one in every five of the youths who this year attain the age of twenty-one are being drawn for the army. This is the proportion of those taken from their homes and sent to the depots of different regiments, for all are liable to military service under one category or another. Being inscribed and left at home, however, is no great hardship: it is the separation from home which is dreaded, and therefore the numbers of the first category in the conscription which have alone to be considered. This heavy conscription is something new to the Tuscans. In the palmy days of Grand-ducal Government, before 1848, exemption from military service could be obtained for something less than £4 English; after the Austrian occupation, the conscription having grown severer, the cost of exemption was about doubled; but now it amounts to a sum which none but the wealthy can possibly pay.