But Wages Have Increased With The Prices And Rents And Taxes, And In A Country Where Every Ounce Of Coal That Drives A Wheel Of Production Or Transportation Has To Be Brought A Thousand Miles Manufactures And Railroads Have Been Multiplied.

The state has now taken over the roads and has added their cost to that of its expensive army and navy, but no reasonable witness can doubt that the Italians will be equal to this as well as their other national undertakings.

These in Rome are peculiarly difficult and onerous, because they must be commensurate with the scale of antiquity. In a city surviving amid the colossal ruins of the past it would be grotesque to build anything of the modest modern dimensions such as would satisfy the eye in other capitals. The Palace of Finance, at a time when Italian paper was at a discount almost equal to that of American paper during the Civil War, had to be prophetic of the present solvency in size. The yet-unfinished Palace of Justice (one dare not recognize its beauty above one's breath) must be planned so huge that the highest story had to be left off if the foundations were to support the superstructure; the memorial of Victor Emmanuel II. must be of a vastness in keeping with the monuments of imperial Rome, some of which it will partly obscure. Yet as the nation has grown in strength under burdens and duties, it will doubtless prove adequate to the colossal architectural enterprises of its capital. Private speculation in Rome brought disaster twenty-five years ago, but now the city has overflowed with new life the edifices that long stood like empty sepulchres, and public enterprises cannot finally fail; otherwise we should not be digging the Panama Canal or be trying to keep the New York streets in repair. We may confide in the ability of the Italians to carry out their undertakings and to pay the cost out of their own pockets. It is easy to criticise them, but we cannot criticise them more severely than they criticise themselves; and perhaps, as our censure cannot profit them, we might with advantage to ourselves, now and then, convert it into recognition of the great things they have accomplished.

XIII

CASUAL IMPRESSIONS

The day that we arrived in Rome the unclouded sun was yellow on the white dust of the streets, which is never laid by a municipal watering-cart, though sometimes it is sprinkled into mire from the garden-hose of the abutting hotels; and in my rashness I said that for Rome you want sun and you want youth. Yet there followed many gray days when my age found Rome very well indeed, and I would not have the septuagenarian keep away because he is no longer in the sunny sixties. He may see through his glasses some things hidden even from the eyes of the early forties. If he drives out beyond the Porta Pia, say, some bright afternoon, and notes how the avenue between the beautiful old villas is also bordered by many vacant lots advertised for sale as well as built up with pleasant new houses, he will be able to carry away with him the significant fact that a convenient and public-spirited trolley-line has the same suburban effect in Rome, Italy, as in Rome, New York. If he meets some squadrons of cavalry or some regiments of foot, in that military necessity of constant movement which the civilian can never understand, he may make the useful reflection that it is much better to have the troops out of the city than in it, and he can praise the wisdom of the Italian government accordingly. On the neighboring mountains the presence or absence of snow forms the difference between summer and winter in Rome, and will suggest the question whether, after all, our one continental weather is better than the many local weathers of Europe; and perhaps he will acquire national modesty in owning that there is something more picturesque in the indications of those azure or silvery tops than in his morning paper's announcement that there is or is not a lower pressure in the region of the lakes.

At any rate, I would not have him note the intimations of such a drive at less worth than those of any more conventional fact of his Roman sojourn. If one is quite honest, or merely as honest as one may be with safety, one will often own to one's self that something merely incidental to one's purpose, in visiting this memorable place or that, was of greater charm and greater value than the fulfilment of a direct purpose. One happy morning I went, being in the vicinity, to renew the acquaintance with the Tarpeian Rock, which I had hastened to make on my first visit to Rome. I had then found it so far from such a frightfully precipitous height as I had led myself to expect that I came away and rather mocked it in print. But now, possibly because the years had moderated all my expectations in life, I thought the Tarpeian Rock very respectably steep and quite impressively lofty; either the houses at its foot had sunk with their chimneys and balconies, or the rock had risen, so that one could no longer be hurled from it with impunity. We looked at it from an arbor of the lovely little garden which we were let into beyond the top of the rock, and which was the pleasance of some sort of hospital. I think there were probably flowers there, since it was a garden, but what was best was the almond-tree covering the whole space with a roof of bloom, and in this roof a score of birds that sang divinely.

I am aware of bringing a great many birds into these papers; but really Rome would not be Rome without them; and I could not exaggerate their number or the sweetness of their song.

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