Yet there was to me a change in Rome—­from the Rome one knew who had been there eight years before—­a change stranger and deeper than the change one felt in coming from Rome to Paris.  This new Rome was a cleaner Rome, a more prosperous Rome, a happier Rome.  Something had been happening to the people.  They wore better clothes, they seemed to live in cleaner tenements; they certainly had a different squint at life from the Romans of the first decade of this century.  One heard two answers to the question that arose in one’s heart.  One group said:  “It is prosperity.  Italy never has seen such prosperity as she has seen during the past ten years.  There has been work for everyone, and work at good wages.  So you see the working people well-clad, well-housed, clean and contented.”  Another answered the question thus:  “The Socialists have done it.  We have had plenty of work in other years; but we have worked for small wages, and have lived in squalor.  We still work as we always have worked, but we get better pay, and we get our better pay in many ways; first in relatively higher wages, next in safeguards thrown around labour, and restrictions on the predatory activities of capital.  The Socialists in government have forced many reforms in housing, in labour conditions, in the distribution of the profits of labour and capital, and we are living in hope of better things rather than in fear of worse!” One may take his choice of answers; probably the truth lies between the two.  Prosperity has done something; socialism in government has done something, and each has promoted the other!

But the war has done one thing to Rome indisputably.  It has paralysed the tourist business.  Rome was the greatest tourist city in the world.  But now her boarding houses and her ruins are deserted.  Occasionally in the shops one sees that mother and daughter, wistful, eager, half-starved for every good thing in life, expatriated, living shabbily in the upper regions of some respectable pension, detached from the world about them, uprooted from the world at home, travel-jaded, ruin-sated, picture-wise and unbelievably stupid concerning life’s real interests—­the mother and daughter who in the old days lived so numerously amid the splendeurs of Europe, flitting from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Lucerne, from Lucerne to Berlin, and thence to Paris and London, following the seasons like the birds.  But today war prices have sent that precious pair home, and let us hope to honest work.  It is a comfort to see Rome without their bloodless faces!  That much the war has done for democracy at any rate!