become of the Progressive party, and they pointed to themselves as the “captain and crew of the Nancy brig.”  Then they talked on for a time about many things—­such as would interest the Walrus and the Carpenter.  Then the accounts of the visit changed.  This is Henry’s:  “Well, finally after Medill began cracking his knuckles and the king began crossing and recrossing his legs, I saw it was time to go.  I knew how the king felt.  Every busy man has to meet a lot of bores.  I sit hours with bores who flow into the Wichita Beacon office, and I began to appreciate just how the king felt.  So I cleared my throat and said:  ’Well Medill, don’t you think we’d better excuse ourselves to his majesty and go?’ The king put up his hand mildly and said:  ‘O please!’ and the colonel in charge of the party gulped at my sympathy for the king; but I was not to be balked, and we all rose and after shaking hands around, the colonel led us out.  And I didn’t know that I had committed social manslaughter until the colonel exclaimed when we were in the corridor:  ’Oh you republicans—­you republicans, how you do like to show royalty its place!’” Medill has another version.  He declares that Henry stood the king’s obvious ennui as long as he could, then he rose and cried:  “O King! live for ever, but Medill and I must pull our freight!” This version probably is apochryphal!  The Italian colonel declares that Henry expostulated:  “Well, how in the dickens was I to know that a king always gives the high sign for company to leave!”

This Italian king is a vital institution.  He could be elected president.  For he is a mixer, in spite of his diffident ways.  When the army in Northern Italy was hammering away at the Austrians, the king was with the soldiers.  One gets the impression that he is with the people pretty generally in their struggle with the privileged classes.  For he has lived peaceably with a socialist cabinet for some time.  He is wise enough to realize that if the aristocracy is crumbling, the institution of royalty will crumble with aristocracy if royalty makes an ally of the nobility.  So the king and the Socialists get along splendidly.  Now the Socialists in Italy are of several kinds.  There are the city Socialists, who are chiefly interested in industrial conditions—­wages, old age pensions, employment insurance, and the like; a group much like the Progressive party in the United States of 1912.  We saw the works and ways of these Socialists in every Italian town that we visited.  Either they or the times have done wonders.  And at any rate this is the first time in Italian history when industrial prosperity has so generally reached the workers that they are lifted almost bodily into the middle classes.  Then there are the Socialists who emphasize the land question, and they have had smaller success than their industrial brethren.  We went one fine day to Frascatti by automobile.  Our road took us out south of Rome over the New Appian way, through fertile