Though A Collectivist,
With A Firm Belief In The Government Ownership Of Railroads Everywhere,
I Might Have Been Tempted At
Times in Italy to abjure my creed if I had
not always reflected that the state there had just come
Into possession
of the roads, with all their capitalistic faults of management and
outwear of equipment which it would doubtless soon reform and repair. I
venture to suggest now, however, that its prime duty is to have
platforms level with the car-doors, as they are in England, and not to
let Italian ladies stand in the doorways with their umbrellas. I do not
insist that it shall impose silence and sobriety upon a party of young
French people in the next compartment, but I do think it should remove
those mountains back from the sea so that the trains carrying cultivated
Americans can run along the open shore the whole way to Genoa. Pending
this, it should provide strong and watchful employees to lower and raise
the windows at the mouth of each of the eighty tunnels in every car. I
do not demand that it shall change the site of the station in Genoa so
that it shall not always be the city's whole length away from the hotel
you have chosen, but I think this would be a desirable improvement,
especially if it is after dark when you arrive and raining a peculiarly
cold, disagreeable rain.
That rain was very disappointing; for, in the intervals between tunnels,
we had fancied, from the few brief glimpses we caught of the landscape,
that the April so backward elsewhere in Italy was forwarder in the
blossomed trees along the eastern Riviera; and we learned at our hotel
that the steam-heat had just been taken off because the day had been so
hot and dry, though the evening was now so cold and wet.
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