It is impossible to consider, without emotion, the reception which greeted the Holy Father in his former diocese of Spoleto. At every step proof upon proof was given of reverence and affection, which time had not diminished. Etiquette and state ceremony were laid aside. The youthful and the aged alike would see their good shepherd, and he was anxious to salute his people, and converse with them all. Many a face, familiar to him of old, was recognized with pleasure, and even names were not forgotten.
As has been seen, the days of the Holy Father's journey were not all spent in pleasurable greetings or official receptions. He never forgot or neglected the work of reform and improvement. Nor were such care and labor new to him. It had often been said that the Popes were hostile to all modern improvements. Why did they not favor railways? Why did they not drain the Pontine Marshes, and cause the _Campagna_ to be cultivated? Let the labors of Pius IX. reply. A railway through the States of the Church was one of his favorite ideas, and he beheld it realized. It must have afforded him no ordinary satisfaction to see the railway which his princely care had provided now winding along the valley of the Tiber, now climbing the heights and stretching its arms across the Apennines, reaching down to the seaboard at Ancona, now passing beyond the limits of the Papal territory, and extending away to the Tuscan capital.
The uneducated or half-educated traveller, who surveys the uncultivated and malarious plains around the city of the Popes, at once discovers, in this desolation which prevails, an argument against priestly rule. With a little more information, however, he would see the ruins and the vestiges of a mighty empire, the works of which, like its conquests, were the wonder of the world. How such works came to be so successfully executed is easily understood, when it is remembered that heathen Rome commanded the wealth, the intellect, and the strong arms of many subject nations. The Popes, on the other hand, though they often tried, as did Pius IX. among the rest, to cultivate the Campagna and drain the Pontine Marshes, had so little means at their disposal, that they could never accomplish anything important. Among other difficulties that the Roman Pontiffs had to contend with, was that of obtaining an outlet towards the sea, whilst ancient Rome commanded all the seas and lands of the known world. Surely it does not require a Solomon to understand that without access to the Mediterranean, it is physically impossible to drain and cultivate such low-lying lands as the Pontine Marshes.