We have had plenty of work in other years; but we have worked for
small wages, and have lived in squalor. We still work as we always
have worked, but we get better pay, and we get our better pay in
many ways; first in relatively higher wages, next in safeguards
thrown around labour, and restrictions on the predatory activities
of capital. The Socialists in government have forced many reforms
in housing, in labour conditions, in the distribution of the profits
of labour and capital, and we are living in hope of better things
rather than in fear of worse!" One may take his choice of answers;
probably the truth lies between the two. Prosperity has done something;
socialism in government has done something, and each has promoted
the other!

But the war has done one thing to Rome indisputably. It has paralysed
the tourist business. Rome was the greatest tourist city in the
world. But now her boarding houses and her ruins are deserted.
Occasionally in the shops one sees that mother and daughter, wistful,
eager, half-starved for every good thing in life, expatriated,
living shabbily in the upper regions of some respectable pension,
detached from the world about them, uprooted from the world at
home, travel-jaded, ruin-sated, picture-wise and unbelievably stupid
concerning life's real interests--the mother and daughter who in
the old days lived so numerously amid the splendeurs of Europe,
flitting from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Lucerne, from
Lucerne to Berlin, and thence to Paris and London, following the
seasons like the birds. But today war prices have sent that precious
pair home, and let us hope to honest work. It is a comfort to see
Rome without their bloodless faces! That much the war has done for
democracy at any rate!