The _mercante di campagna_ is an obscure individual, usually very honest, very intelligent, very active, and very rich. He undertakes to farm several thousand acres of land, pasture or arable as may be, which the prince would never be able to farm himself, because he neither knows how, nor has the means to do so. Upon this princely territory the farmer lets loose, in the most disrespectful manner, droves of bullocks, and cows, and horses, and flocks of sheep. Should his lease permit him, he cultivates a square league or so, and sows it with wheat. When harvest-time arrives, down from the mountains troop a thousand or twelve hundred peasants, who overrun the prince's land in the farmer's service. The corn is reaped, threshed in the open field, put into sacks, and carted away. The prince sees it go by, as he stands on his princely balcony. He learns that a man of the _mezzo ceto_, a man who passes his life on horseback, has harvested on his land so many sacks of corn, which have produced him so much money. The _mercante di campagna_ comes, and confirms the intelligence, and then pays the rent agreed upon to the uttermost baioccho. Sometimes he even pays down a year or two in advance. What prince could forgive such aggravated insolence? It is the more atrocious, since the farmer is polite, well-mannered, and much better educated than the prince; he can give his daughters much larger fortunes, and could buy the entire principality for his own son, if by chance the prince were obliged to sell it. The cultivation of estates by means of these people is, in the eyes of the Roman princes, an attack upon the rights of property. Their passion for incessant work is a disturbance of the delightful Roman tranquillity. The fortunes they acquire by personal exertion, energy, and activity, are a reproach by inference to that stagnant wealth which is the foundation of the State, and the admiration of the Government. This is not all: the _mercante di campagna_, who is not nobly born, who is not a priest, who has a wife and children, thinks he has a right to share in the management of the affairs of his country, upon the ground that he manages his own well. He points out abuses; he demands reforms. What audacity! The priests would cast him forth as they would a mere advocate, were it not that his occupation is the most necessary of all occupations, and that by turning out a man they might starve a district. But the insolence of these agricultural contractors goes still further. They presume to be grand in their ideas. One of them, in 1848, under the reign of Mazzini, when the public works were suspended for want of money, finished the bridge of Lariccia, one of the finest constructions of our time, at his own expense. He certainly knew not whether the Pope would ever return to Rome to repay him. He acted like a real prince; but his audacity in assuming a part which was not intended for his caste, merited something more than contempt.