The contractors, and concessionaires, and jerry-builders, and bureaucratic thieves, and foreign speculators would have the pleasure and profit of building a spick and span new town, north-east of Mestre: all tiresome reminiscences of the Lion of St Mark would have sunk with the bronze horses underneath the waves. Many public men would breathe more freely were Venice but a memory of the past entombed in seaweed and in sand. For there is nothing so curiously malignant or so restlessly jealous as the enmity of a feeble Present of a great Past. It is such malignity, it is such jealousy, which, even more than greed of gain, and vitiated taste, caused, and causes, and will cause, the destruction of the great cities of Italy by Italian deputies, syndics, and municipalities, and by those foreign companies and alien speculations to which they unhappily open their gates. If the fact did not face us at every step, it would seem incredible that, even in this age, such cities as Venice and Florence and Rome could have been sacrificed to the ignominious interests of wire-pullers. Each possessed, to protect it, unique beauty, splendour of association and tradition, an heroic past: and for each had the greatest of men laboured, in each had the charm of atmosphere and horizon lent a more than mortal loveliness to the architecture of man. And each is now wrecked, and ransacked, and despoiled, and obliterated, and destroyed as though a horde of savages had been let loose in their precincts. There is no language strong enough to condemn the injuries from which they suffer. On the walls of the Flavian Amphitheatre there grew in marvellous fertility countless plants unknown elsewhere; survivors of sylvan worlds destroyed, of botanical kingdoms for ever perished, the seeds of which perchance had lodged in the sandals of the legions as they came from Palmyra or Babylon; this most precious legacy of nature was, as everyone knows, mercilessily destroyed in the first years of the Italian occupation of Rome. The uprooting with knives and acids of the unique flora of the Colosseum was a type of the acts which, for the last fifteen years, have hacked away and corroded and destroyed off the face of the earth the supreme flowers of human genius. In the present debasement and desecration of Italian cities there is not even such motive and excuse as that which was urged by archaeologists for the ruin of these plants. There is everything lost, nothing whatever gained, in the debasement of classic and artistic cities to the level of Buluwayo or Klondyke.