The Italian State Has, In Fact, So Far Taken The Matter In Charge As To
Have Established A Secular Holiday, Coming Once A Week, Which Has Almost
Disestablished The Holidays Of The Church, Formerly Of Much More
Frequent Occurrence.
This secular holiday, which every workman has a
right to, he may neither give nor sell to his master.
He may not even
loaf it away in the place where he works, lest he should be
clandestinely employed. He must go out of the shop or house or factory
or foundry, and spend his ten hours where he cannot be suspected of
employing them in productive industry for hire. This law has been
enacted in accordance with the will of the unions and no doubt in
correction of great abuses. Neither masters nor men now recognize the
old-fashioned _festa_ as they once did. Whether the men like the new
holiday so well, I did not get any of them explicitly to say. Of course,
they cannot all take it at once; they must take it turn about, and they
may not find their enforced leisure so lively as the old voluntary
saints' days, when their comrades were resting, too. As for the masters,
one of the employers of labor, whom I found filling his man's place,
would merely say: "It is the new law. No doubt we shall adjust ourselves
to it." He did not complain.
X
SEEING ROME AS ROMANS SEE US
Shortly after our settlement in the Eternal City, which has so much more
time to be seen than the so-journer has to see it, I pleased myself with
the notion of surprising it by visiting in a studied succession the many
different piazzas.
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