Socialist. The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages,
the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich land
and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, striving
vainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out of
a dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yet
losing money by it--all these things were the meat of the answer,
which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of the
land. Wooden ploughs and oxen, women yoked with beasts of burden,
vines and vines planted and replanted through the centuries; no
capital to develop the land; insufficient profits to wake up the
tenants, master and servant going gradually down in a world where
labour and capital, sharing profits equitably, are rising; it was
a disheartening problem.

Then in due course we left Rome and went to the Italian army on the
front, and there we saw another side of the shield. From Udine in
Northern Italy we journeyed into the mountains where the Italian army
at that time was holding the mountain tops against the Austrians.
Wherever we ascended we saw white ribbons of roads twining up the
green soft mountain sides that face Italy. These roads have been
made since the war. Nearly four thousand miles of them furnish
approaches to the Alpine heights. They are hard-surfaced, low-graded,
wide highways gouged into the mountain side. Two automobiles may
pass at full speed anywhere on these roads. And all night they were
alive with wagon trains bearing supplies to the front. Women help
the men mend the roads. We saw few Austrian prisoners at work on
the Italian roads; possibly because we were too near the front line
trenches to see prisoners who are kept thirty kilos back of the line,
and possibly because they have better work for the Austrians--work
that old men and women cannot do. Whenever we threaded our way up