Mutinelli, Ult. 169.
bronze and one of iron. With the help of his gang he scaled the wall of the Raimondo Fort one night, carried off the cannon, and sold them to the Turks for twenty-seven sequins.
The workmen of the Arsenal in Venice, who had formerly been the best-organised body of men in the Republic, had completely come to grief in the eighteenth century. The Arsenal was supposed to be governed by a voluminous code of laws, most of which were now either altogether disregarded, or were administered with culpable leniency. The disorder was incredible. Every son of a workman in the Arsenal had an hereditary right to be employed there, but the officials who were in command did not take any means of checking the men’s attendance; they paid so much a head for every workman on the payroll, according to his age, whether he ever appeared except on pay-days or not. In this way the State paid out vast sums to men who only entered the gates once a month to draw their wages for doing nothing. Many of them had other occupations, at which they worked regularly and industriously. Some were even actors, and one of the cleverest ‘Pantaloons’ was officially known as one of the best-paid Arsenal hands. The six hundred apprentices who were supposed to attend the technical schools attached to the different departments of the yard, only looked in now and then. When the time came for them to pass for the certificate of master workman they paid the sum of thirty-four Venetian lire, in consideration of which the Examiners pronounced them competent. In this way, as Mutinelli
Mutinelli, Ult. 145, 153.
truly says, ignorance became hereditary, as employment in the Arsenal already was, and the yard became a mere monument of former generous initiative, very expensive to maintain.
At the fall of the Republic, Bonaparte seized and sent to France a large number of vessels. When the Arsenal was sacked in 1797 it was
Rom. x. 162, note 2, and 304.
found to contain 5293 pieces of artillery, of which 2518 were of bronze, and the rest of iron; and at the last there were brought from the docks ten ships of seventy guns, eleven of seventy-six, one of fifty-five, thirteen of forty-two, two of thirty-two, twenty-three galleys, one floating howitzer battery, two ‘cutters,’ whatever the Italian writer may have meant,
BOAT-BUILDERS