stagnant hesitation. One day I went out to the little town of Genzano
in the Alban Hills, with an Italian mother who wished to see her son
in garrison there. The regiment of Sardinian _Granatieri_, ordinarily
stationed near the King in Rome, had been sent to this dirty little
hill town to keep order. The populace were so threatening in their
attitude that the soldiers were confined in their quarters to prevent
street rows. We could see their heads at the windows of the old houses
and convents where they were billeted, like schoolboys in durance vile.
I read the word "_Socilismo_" scrawled in chalk over the walls and
half-effaced by the hand of authority. The hard faces of the townsfolk
scowled at us while we talked with a young captain. The Genzanans were
against the war, the officer said, and stoned the soldiers. They did not
want another African jaunt, with more taxes and fewer men to till the
fields.

Elsewhere one heard that the "populace" generally was opposed to war.
"We shall have to shoot up some hundreds of the rats in Florence before
the troops leave," the youthful son of a prefect told me. That in the
North. As for the South, a shrug of the shoulders expressed the national
doubt of Calabria, Sicily,--the weaker, less certain members of the
family. Remembering the dire destruction of the earthquake in the Abruzzi,
which wrought more ruin to more people than the Messina catastrophe, also
the floods that had destroyed crops in the fertile river bottoms a few
weeks before, one could understand popular opposition to more dangers and
more taxes. These were some of the perplexities that beset the Government.
No wonder that the diplomats were weighing their words cautiously at the
Consulta, also weighing with extreme fineness the _quid pro quo_ they
would accept as "compensation" from Austria for upsetting the Balkan
situation. It was, indeed, a delicate matter to decide how many of those
national aspirations might be sacrificed for the sake of present security