Giolitti!" and "_Fuori i barbari!_" and sing Mameli's "L'Inno." I saw
the uproar melt away in the soft darkness of the Roman nights, leaving
the cavalry at their vigil before Santa Maria Maggiore, guarding the
repose of Giovanni Giolitti.

I can testify that the "piazza" was composed very largely of perfectly
respectable folk like myself. It varied more or less as chance gatherings
of men will vary. Sometimes there were more workingmen in dirty clothes,
sometimes more youths and boys with their banners, sometimes more
shouters and fewer actors. But the core of it was always that same mass
of common citizenship that gathered anciently in the Forum, that to-day
goes orderly enough to the polls in New York or Chicago,--plain men,
rather young than old, who are so distinctly left on the outside of
affairs, who must perforce turn to the newspaper for information and
to the open street for expression, who relieve themselves of uncomplex
emotions by shouting, and who symbolize the things they hate to the
depth of their souls with personalities like Giolitti and occasionally
shy bricks at the guarded home of authority. All this, yes, but not
"riff-raff," not anarchist, nor _mafia_, nor _apache_. Nothing of that
did I see those days and nights.

The greeting to D'Annunzio was made by men of the professional and
intellectual classes I should say, having wormed my way in and out
of that vast piazza gathering. The daily crowds before the poet's
hotel were composed chiefly of youths, at school or college, others
in working dress. The noisiest, most inflammable of all these mobs
was that in the Costanzi Theater the evening of D'Annunzio's appearance
there. They were citizens--and their wives--who could afford to pay
the not inconsiderable price charged--and seats were at a premium.
The men around me in evening dress, who were by no means silent, came