party in the United States of 1912. We saw the works and ways of
these Socialists in every Italian town that we visited. Either they
or the times have done wonders. And at any rate this is the first
time in Italian history when industrial prosperity has so generally
reached the workers that they are lifted almost bodily into the
middle classes. Then there are the Socialists who emphasize the land
question, and they have had smaller success than their industrial
brethren. We went one fine day to Frascatti by automobile. Our road
took us out south of Rome over the New Appian way, through fertile
acres lying in a wide beautiful plain. We passed through half
a dozen little agricultural villages, mean but picturesque. None
of the splendid prosperity of the cities has penetrated here.
The people in these towns are peasants--and look it. They are the
peasant people who live in the canvasses of the artists of the
Renaissance. Half a thousand years has not changed them. Along
the dusty roads we passed huge wine-carts. Two bell-bearing mules
tandem gave warning to other passing carts of a cart's approach.
The driver of the cart was curled up in his shaded seat asleep. The
mules took their way. Carts passed and repassed each other on the
road. Autos whizzed by. Still the drivers slept. They were ragged,
frowsy, stupid looking. They all wore colour, one a crimson belt,
another a blue shirt, a third a red handkerchief about his head.
They would make better pictures than citizens, we thought. In Rome
and Genoa the people would make better citizens than pictures. All
day going to Frascatti and coming home we passed these beggarly
looking peasant farmers. At Frascatti, which stands proudly upon
a great hill overlooking the Roman plain, we saw the rich acres
stretching away for miles toward Rome and beyond it. Villages flashed
in the sun, white and iridescent, and the squares of vineyards and
the tall Lombardy poplars made a landscape that rested the eye and