In fact, the whole country and the poor themselves indirectly, if not directly, are impoverished by supporting these unproductive classes out of the produce of labour.

If prevention is better than cure, work is any day better than charity.

After all, too, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and nowhere are the poor more poverty-stricken and needy than in Rome.

The swarms of beggars which infest the town are almost the first objects that strike a stranger here, though strangers have no notion of the distress of Rome.

The winter, when visitors are here, is the harvest-time of the Roman poor.