The concessionaire and the contractor are the modern representatives of ghouls and vampires of old-world romance. Truly, to them, as to the Sabreur of Offenbach, nothing is sacred. They are guided entirely by their lust of percentage, and to this they are ready to sacrifice every other consideration; indeed, no other consideration exists for them. They have settled on Italy for many years past as they are now settling on Abyssinia. Venice is essentially a water-city; dealt with as land cities are, under the present system, it will not only be disfigured and mutilated like them, but it will be swept away; it will cease to be. The world will have in its stead a dreary, dingy, trading port, with warehouses, factories, docks, grain elevators, electric works, all the polluted, crowded, discoloured, monotonous frightfulness which you can have now at any moment on any coastline of the United States of America. The Venice of Giambellini and the Veronese will be no more; you will have in its stead a petty maritime Pittsburg. At the present moment Molmenti has successfully combated this Mestre project, but as the abominable scheme of the night steamers on the Canalezzo, and the pontoon under S. Zeno, was almost unanimously _rejected_ four times by the Venetian Council, yet, on its presentation a fifth time, was _accepted_ (unacknowledged influences having been at work), it is impossible to all those who love Venice as she merits not to feel the greatest anxiety. For these speculators resemble the Röntgen rays, and find means to penetrate through closed doors and all other barriers. Iron still resists the Röntgen rays, and such iron the speculators find now and then opposed to them in the scorn of such men as the Count Antonio Donà della Rosa, who dismissed with offence and disdain the offer of two millions in gold for the purchase of the historic tapestries of his palace in Venice.