human society. And their poverty has had much influence in making the
Italians the sturdy people they are to-day. Poverty has some depressing
aspects, but in the main her very lack of economic opportunity--the want
of coal and factories and other sources of wealth--has kept most of these
people close to the soil, where one feels the majority of any healthy,
enduring race should be. Poverty has made the Italians hard, content with
little, and able to wring the most out of that little. It has cultivated
them intensively as a people, just as they have been forced to cultivate
their rock-bound fields foot by foot.

There are qualities in human living more precious than prosperity, and
in these Italians have shared abundantly--beauty, sentiment, tradition,
all that give color and meaning to life. These are the treasures of Latin
civilization in behalf of which the allied nations of Europe are now
fighting....

* * * * *

I am well enough aware that all this is contrary to the premises of the
economic and social polity that controls modern statecraft. I know that
our great nations, notably Germany, are based on exactly the opposite
premise--that the strength of a state depends on the economic
development of its people, on its wealth-producing power. Germany has
been the most convinced, the most conscious, the most relentless exponent
of the pernicious belief that the ultimate welfare of the state depends
primarily on the wealth-getting power of its citizens. She has exalted
an economic theory into a religion of nationality with mystical appeals.
She has taught her children to go singing into the jaws of death in order
that the Fatherland may extend her markets and thus enrich her citizens
at the expense of the citizens of other states, who are her inferiors in