And that revealed much; there was the whole program of the agrarian Socialist.  The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages, the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich land and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, striving vainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out of a dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yet losing money by it—­all these things were the meat of the answer, which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of the land.  Wooden ploughs and oxen, women yoked with beasts of burden, vines and vines planted and replanted through the centuries; no capital to develop the land; insufficient profits to wake up the tenants, master and servant going gradually down in a world where labour and capital, sharing profits equitably, are rising; it was a disheartening problem.

Then in due course we left Rome and went to the Italian army on the front, and there we saw another side of the shield.  From Udine in Northern Italy we journeyed into the mountains where the Italian army at that time was holding the mountain tops against the Austrians.  Wherever we ascended we saw white ribbons of roads twining up the green soft mountain sides that face Italy.  These roads have been made since the war.  Nearly four thousand miles of them furnish approaches to the Alpine heights.  They are hard-surfaced, low-graded, wide highways gouged into the mountain side.  Two automobiles may pass at full speed anywhere on these roads.  And all night they were alive with wagon trains bearing supplies to the front.  Women help the men mend the roads.  We saw few Austrian prisoners at work on the Italian roads; possibly because we were too near the front line trenches to see prisoners who are kept thirty kilos back of the line, and possibly because they have better work for the Austrians—­work that old men and women cannot do.  Whenever we threaded our way up a mountain side and came to a top, we found its flanks tunnelled with deep wicker-walled, broad-floored, well-drained trenches, and its top honeycombed with runways for ammunition and with great rooms for soldiers and holes for gun barrels.  Mountain top after mountain top has been made into a Gibraltar by the Italians.  That Gibraltar was 300 miles long, before they lost it to the Germans.  But they had few guns in their fortress.  They showed us emplacement after emplacement without a stick of artillery in it.  They had told the French and the English of their plight, and a few artillery companies had been sent in; but only a fraction of the need.  There was no central council of the allies then.  Every nation was running its own little war, and Italy was left to fall, and now the four thousand miles of Italian roads, and the 300 miles of Gibraltar are German military strongholds that will have to be conquered with our blood and iron.  Probably no battle line in the world today is more interesting than the Italian