proportionalists, to help me in the cause.  This was the second gift of the kind I had received, for my friends in San Francisco had already helped me financially on my way to reform.  Socially I liked the atmosphere of America better than that of England, but politically England was infinitely more advanced.  Steadily and surely a safer democracy seems to be evolving in the old country than in the Transatlantic Republic.  I left England at the end of September, 1894.

My intended visit to Paris was cancelled through the death a short time before of the only friend I wished to meet there, the Baroness Blaze-de-Bury, and I went straight through to Bale.  I made a detour to Zurich, where I hoped to see people interested in proportional representation who could speak English.  An interesting fellow-worker in the cause was Herr Karl Burkli, to whom I suggested the idea of lecturing with ballots.  The oldest advocate of proportional representation on the Continent, M. Ernest Naville, I met at Geneva.  In that tiny republic in the heart of Europe, which is the home of experimental legislation, I found effective voting already established in four cantons, and the effect in these cantons had been so good (said Ernest Naville) “that it is only a matter of time to see all the Swiss cantons and the Swiss Federation adopt it.”  In Zurich Herr Burkli was delighted that they had introduced progressive taxation into the canton, but the effect had been to drive away the wealthy people who came in search of quiet and healthy residence.  Progressive taxation has not by any means proved the unmixed blessing which so many of its advocates claim it to be.  In New Zealand, we are told, on the best authority, that land monopoly and land jobbery were never so rampant in the Dominion as since the introduction of the progressive land tax.  One wondered how the three million Swiss people lived on their little territory, so much occupied by barren mountain, and lakes which supply only a few fish.  My Zurich friends told me that it was by their unremitting industry and exceptional thrift, but others said that the foreign visitors who go to the recreation ground of Europe circulate so much money that instead of the prayer “Give us this day our daily bread” the Swiss people ask, “Send us this day one foreigner.”

In Italy I saw the most intense culture in the world—­no pleasure grounds or deer parks for the wealthy.  The whole country looked like a garden with trellised vines and laden trees.  Italian wine was grown, principally for home consumption, and that was immense.  Prohibitionists would speak to deaf ears there.  Wine was not a luxury, but a necessity of life.  It made the poor fare of dry bread and polenta (maize porridge) go down more pleasantly.  It was the greater abundance of fruit and wine that caused the Italian poorer classes to look healthier than the German.  In Germany, which taxed itself to give cheap beet sugar to the British consumer, the people