A similar ignorance in matters belonging to their respective departments is expected of the Ministers of Education and Public Works. Were there a Minister of Fine Arts, he would undoubtedly be chosen from the attorneys, the manufacturers, the scientists, or the rural Boeotians. Another minister of agriculture, Count Francesco Guicciardini, had an admirable and thorough command of the objects of his Dicastero; skilled in agriculture himself, and the owner of large estates, he knew what to do and how to do it; and by his energy an outbreak of phylloxera was arrested before any great losses had ensued. But outside agriculture, his influence was less excellent, because he was unfortunately enabled to meddle with matters not agricultural and beyond his knowledge; as when he ordered the destruction of a whole quarter of the martial and ancient city of Pistoia, and the waste of the town funds in the erection of a new savings bank. Over the choice of a design for this building, the townspeople of Pistoia are now violently quarrelling, whilst many of their finest and noblest palaces are left to go empty to decay! A minister of the strictest probity, of the strongest desire to do what is just and wise, is never long able to resist the pressure of those around him, the force of example, the persuasions of local magnates, and the insistence of the crowd of hungry perquisite-hunters. It is such shocking and wicked waste of money as was this in Pistoia which impoverishes every town, and disfigures each with vulgar piles of brick and iron, and grotesque monuments of black metal, whilst a miserable woman at their gates pays four centimes duty on a pint of milk before she can take it past the guards to sell, and a wretched man, who owns a little road-fed flock of goats, is taxed two hundred francs a year before he may drive them into the streets to yield the little nourishment which they can afford to invalids and children. Should the law now under consideration pass, and the debts of the Communes be paid by the State, and monies be henceforth lent lavishly by the State to the Communes, this expenditure will increase tenfold, and the jobbery accompanying it will be multiplied in similar measure. No one of the governing classes is guiltless in the matter; cabinets, senators, deputies, prefects, mayors, town councils, provincial councils, each and all, sin alike in this matricide, and seem to vie with each other in suggesting and executing the abominable projects which disgrace the close of the century.