generations that have elapsed since Germany took them, it is not at all
unlikely that many of their people have become a part of the national
consciousness of that country. The just way would be to let the adults
of Alsace-Lorraine decide at the end of another forty-eight years,
during which time it is united to France, by universal vote of its
adults, men and women, whether they want to have French or German
nationality. I should think France would be taking no risks in such a
plebiscite.

England will have Ireland to deal with after the war even more than
before the war. There is only one way that she can do it successfully
and that is on the principles of nationality. The Irish are no more like
the English than the Czechs are like the Austrians; in fact, they are
less so. They are different emotionally, intellectually, morally, and
physically, and England will not much longer be allowed to coerce them.
Her one privilege in Ireland is to force universal education upon her
people. If this had been done before, England would have long ere this
brought about that instinctive liking and common purpose which is the
basis of all sound union, whether it be between individuals or between
components of a nation.

Italy's chief difficulty is going to be with the Jugoslavs, as the
southern Slavs are called, and already these difficulties have begun.
The southern Slavs have not, so far as I can learn, formulated a
definite programme, and they were never recognized as belligerent allies
by the Entente. Italy had a hesitating recognition of southern Slav
aspirations forced from her, but there is no trust or confidence reposed
in the Slavs by the Italians. The Croatians, the Bosnians, the
Montenegrins, the Albanians do not know what they want, save change, and
that they have wanted since time immemorial. They have no specific
programme and there is no definite interlacement of their desires with
Serbia. So far as their plans can be gleaned, realization of them, even
in the most fundamental one of establishing a plebiscitary area, would
find itself in violent conflict with Italy's pre-bellum agreement with
the Allies known as the Treaty of London.

All things come to him who waits. If while waiting things do not come to
us that make life forever after unlivable, we shall be fortunate, and
forever grateful.

     November, 1918.

CHAPTER XIV

BANQUETS AND PERSONALITIES

I marvel how men in public life stand banquets, especially Italians, who
take to them like babes to mothers' milk. I fancy they often long for a
succulent chop and a baked potato, with a tray for mahogany and a book
for company! But the _banchetto_ gives them an alluring arena for
oratory, and my deliberate conviction is that the Italian has more
pleasure in speaking than in any other voluntary act. Not only does he
like to talk, but he likes to be talked to. The Italian language lends
itself to sonorous oratory, and one can become more impassioned while
delivering himself of simple thought and plain sentiment in it than in
any other tongue. Rome has always been the city of pilgrims. Formerly
they came in pursuit of the salvation of their souls; now they come to
help make the world safe for liberty. Missions, delegations, committees,
distinguished personages with their trains come nearly every day from
all parts of the world, and to each is given a banquet, to some many
banquets.

A diverting one was a luncheon given to a delegation of the Japanese Red
Cross headed by Prince Tokugawa. There were many distinguished
personages present, including the Premier Orlando, the minister of war,
the minister of the navy, Duke Torlonia, the directors-general of public
health and of military health, and other exalted or celebrated
personages "too numerous to mention." It was a pleasant party. The Japs
interested me very much. They looked less Oriental, if that means
anything, than their fellows with whom I have come in contact. I fancy
this is due partly to the fact that they were in uniform not unlike that
of American officers, and also they seemed bigger, that is--of greater
stature--and more deliberate and suave than many that I had previously
met. I talked to the Prince and found him intelligent and communicative,
without sign or display of royal prerogative. Professor Seigami
Sawamura, who sat on my left at lunch, is a lawyer who seemed to have
about the same point of view on ordinary topics that a well-educated,
cultured man of his profession in America might have. The man on my
right was----, who spoke English perfectly, and whom I discovered, after
a small attempt to draw him out on the political situation, to be an
adherent of Sonnino, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and of his entourage.
He seemed to be as devoid of capacity for constructive thought as any
educated Italian of thirty-five or forty in political life that I have
ever met, or perhaps it was that he had a wonderful facility for
concealing it. His small talk, however, was quite perfect, and I can
imagine that he might have radiated considerable luminosity in a
properly selected salon.

The speeches of the visitors and of the Japanese Ambassador to Italy
were most diverting. I have never been so entertained and instructed by
oratory of which I didn't understand a word. After the speeches were
delivered they were put into excellent Italian by a young attaché of the
Italian embassy who must have spent many years away from his native
sunny Italy in order to get the mastery of the Oriental language that he
displayed. Banquet speeches are, as a rule, a series of platitudes in
ornate dress, interspersed with sentiment and expressions of
appreciation and praise phrased diplomatically. These speeches had those
qualities--all save that of the Japanese Ambassador. His remarks had
been carefully prepared and were read. Undoubtedly they had been
submitted to the Mikado or his advisers before they were put before us,
for they stated the position of his government relative to the war,
narrated their reason for participation in its activities, and made
statement of their determination to have the efforts of the Allies
crowned with success.

The Italian premier, Orlando, replied. He is a real orator. Even below
the stature of the average Italian of the South, the large, shapely, and
well-poised head, surmounted with thick, closely cropped gray hair
brushed pompadour, the sparkling eyes, ruddy face, and genial expression
give you at once the feeling that you are in the presence of a man of
power, of resourcefulness, and of facility. No one could mistake that he
is a man of the people. There is no trace of arrogance or of
self-exaltation, and when he speaks you feel that his words are
fountained from sincerity. His remarks gave evidence of research and
careful preparation. After having pointed out the pleasant relations
that had always existed between Italy and Japan and the present intimate
solidarity, he cited some historic instances which bind the nations in
amity. It was a forebear of the Prince Tokugawa, the Shogun Yasu
Tokugawa, who in 1613 permitted a Western ship to land in Japan, and who
facilitated the advent of the first Japanese ambassador to Rome. The
visitors were apparently very much pleased with his remarks, as he
intended they should be. There was nothing said that seemed to indicate
that there was any general adhesion to the belief that if the Allies won
the war England would become the vassal of America, or of the yellow
people of the extreme Orient, such as the _Frankfurter Zeitung_ has
recently said would probably be the case.

All of the visitors with whom I spoke were loud, and seemingly sincere,
in praise of the treatment they had had at the hands of the Americans
during their visit there, and I gathered that there exists at the
present time between America and Japan a more generalized sentiment of
trustfulness than existed before the war. At least, it may be said that
the Jap loses no opportunity to say "nice things" of our country.

A benefit that flows from such a gathering is the opportunity it gives
to see, in their hour of semi-relaxation and at short range, some of
those who are helping to make history in this country and whose names
one sees every day in the newspapers. The first impression that one gets
is that they are substantial, serious, intelligent, earnest, alert in
their appearance, manner, and conduct, sincere in their efforts, and
unalterable in their determination. I fancy that they compare favorably
with a similar group of any nationality. Though perhaps you are
disappointed in finding that none of them bears any particular outward
manifestations of genius, if there be such thing, yet you have no
misgivings that they are individuals capable of constructive thought and
mature deliberation, self-reliant, and confident.

The next day I went to a midday banquet tendered by Melville E. Stone,
the general manager of the Associated Press, by the newspaper men of
Rome. It was a very different gathering. Newspaper men have a make-up, a
physiognomy, a general appearance, more or less founded in what may be
called personal neglect, that is, an insensitiveness to personal
æsthetics, which is quite characteristic. One can't pick a newspaper man
from a crowd with the same readiness and accuracy that he picks a monk
or an actor, but the majority of journalists become hall-marked after
they have plied their vocation for any considerable length of time. I
was impressed with the appearance of intelligence and seriousness of the
men of the Italian press. Few of them bore the somatic signs of intimacy
with Mr. Barleycorn. The company had a fair sprinkling of ministers,
including Nitti and Gallenga, deputies, and ex-ministers, but as far as
I could see there were no dukes or princes. The latter are ornamental
and not infrequently pleasing to look upon, but a gathering of newspaper
men is redolent of democracy, which is antipathic to princely presence.
We lunched at the restaurant in the Borghese Gardens. It was a much
simpler affair than the banquet tendered the Japs at the Grand Hotel,
but it was an ample, edible lunch, and you had the feeling that we had
foregathered to honor one who was deserving.

When one attempts to describe Mr. Stone he is tempted at once to say he
is a typical American. But what is a typical American? There are so many
types. William Jennings Bryan is a typical American. So is Henry Cabot
Lodge. Benjamin Franklin was a typical American, yet he fraternized with
dukes and flirted with duchesses, the sheer embodiment of _suaviter in
modo_ and _fortiter in re_. While successfully putting America on the
map and advancing the humanities generally, he immortalized himself and
affectioned the French people. Abraham Lincoln, we like to think, was a
typical American, but were one to encounter him incog. in ceremonial
circles, political or social, in Europe to-day, ninety-nine Americans
out of a hundred would deny him. Uncle Sam is supposed to depict the
somatic make-up of the typical Yankee, and at the same time to convey
the idea that he is a man to be reckoned with emotionally and
intellectually at all times, in his moments of relaxation and in his
hours of activity. Nevertheless the average person has something fairly
specific in mind when he says, "He is a typical American." He means a
man who displays and who often can't conceal a determination to put
through that which he has planned; who is self-confident, opinionated, a
stranger to ceremony and oftentimes unfamiliar with ordinary social
amenities; who is fully appreciative of the accomplishments and
potentialities of his country and its institutions, and who doesn't
hesitate to contrast them with those of other countries, often to their
disparagement; who speaks only one language, American, and that not
always either grammatically or elegantly; who is often a stranger to
culture and the last person in the world to find it out; whose dress is
that of a farmer or a fashion-plate, and who has bizarre tastes for food
and drink--cocktails and ice-water bulk large in his necessities, and he
despises Continental breakfasts; who is attracted by the treasures of
art and moved by the beauties of nature, but the immediate result of the
emotion is to enhance the value of something similar in his own country,
yet when he treads his native heath he is often a disparager of it, its
possessions, and its institutions.

Melville E. Stone is not that sort of typical American. His record is
not unlike that of thousands of his countrymen. He is temperamentally
and emotionally an Irishman, and intellectually and physically an
American. The son of an itinerant Methodist preacher who forsook the
cloth for commerce during the Civil War, and was thus able to provide
for the maintenance and education of his children, he gives you the
impression of a man who has made his way in the world, and made his own
way. Although he is now past the age allotted to man by the Psalmist, he
has the appearance and conduct of a man easily ten years younger. I had
opportunity of observing him at short range for three or four days, for
he was our guest, and as all the other members of our household were
away I saw more of him than I otherwise might. He is a man of vast
information, which he is not averse to sharing with others, and, unlike
many who have such possessions, his information is accurate. This, in a
measure, is due to the fact that it is largely personal. As the general
manager and general motivator of the greatest news-collecting bureau in
the world, he is constantly coming in contact with men who are making
history, and his personality is so ingratiating that they allow him a
personal contact which in many instances apparently reaches intimacy.
Although he is a man who talks freely, my impression is that he is not
indiscreet. In addition to this, he has been a studious reader. It was
interesting to find that he is a bed reader, for my belief is that the
man who reads attentively in bed has an impression of what he reads made
upon the memory cells of his brain cortex which sleep then stamps with
permanency.

I gather Mr. Stone had very little schooling; that is, he did not go to
college. As a boy he went to school in the winter and worked in the
summer and during other vacations, and apparently the work that he did
most willingly was newspaper work. He became editor of the Chicago
_Daily News_ while still a very young man, and continued in that
important post for a quarter of a century. He acquired the art of going
easily and successfully to men in political life and other avenues of
constructive activity while in Chicago, Washington, and the capitals of
Europe. The thing that has made him a man of culture, however, is an
inherent desire for knowledge, which, he early realized, is the only
means that man can successfully employ to add to his stature. He is a
true Celt, emotional, sensitive, tenacious of his opinions, reliant in
his judgments, a hater of his enemies, and an admirer of his friends. If
I were asked to enumerate his most distinctive possession, after a short
intimacy with him I should say it was a quality which we speak of as
justice. When he brings a question up to the threshold of his
consciousness for solution, or a problem for decision, the first thing
that he considers is "Is it just?" After that its feasibility and
advisability are discussed.

The representative gathering of Italians which greeted him at lunch were
prejudiced in his favor. In addition to that, they were saturated with
the belief that America was the young Lochinvar who came out of the West
to deliver them from threatened bondage. I doubt very much whether any
one in America to-day realizes the feeling that Italians had for
America, and it is one of great interest. Until the advent of America
into the war Italians practically knew nothing of the United States of
America, save that it was a place to which large numbers of their
poorest and most ignorant inhabitants emigrated, and where they made
money which enabled them to return to their native land, or to maintain
their families or dependents during their exile. Of the history of
America, of the men who made that history and who are making it, of its
institutions, its traditions, its accomplishments, its potentialities
they knew practically nothing. Undoubtedly there are many who would not
accept this statement as true, but I am convinced that it is. Naturally
there are men of culture, men of studious habits, men with inclination
for historic reading who are exceptions to this blanket accusation. I
was very much amused last winter, when dining with an admiral of the
navy on duty at Spezia, by the inquiry whether I came from North America
or from South America. There are many Italians who claim to be educated
who make very little differentiation between the two continents, and I
have never yet met an Italian, unless he was a bookish man, who knew
anything about our literature. In my own profession I doubt that there
are a half-dozen men in America whose fame has reached Italy, and those
whose names are familiar are known because of some eponymic association.

I could cite many examples to show not only the indifference which
Italians have to the history and literature of our country but also the
absence of any desire to know about them. Then, their conceptions or
ideas of Americans are quite extraordinary. They got them from tourists
whom they saw overrunning their country en prince or en Cook, and made
up their minds that they were a type of uncivilized Croesus or of
unæsthetic barbarian. They saw the effete, the effeminate and decadent,
or the semi-invalided business man surrounded by a bevy of overdressed
females whose chief interest seemed to be their luggage and the sights;
and they saw the weary and wearisome gapers constituting the "personally
conducted." Then again, the Italian is no great traveller. He likes his
country, he is content with it, and, although he rails against his
government, he would feel that a large part of the pleasure of life was
taken from him if he were not permitted to discuss critically, and often
disparagingly, what are commonly called politics. I don't mean to say
that the Italian "fancies" himself, but neither the spirit of admiration
nor of emulation distinguishes him. He is like the Roman in miniature.
The Roman still thinks he is the last cry of God's handiwork in the
human line.

When America declared war on Germany, and particularly when she declared
war on Austria, Italians quickly got interested in America; and when
they learned that America came so generously to Italy's aid, first, in
supplying the money for the conduct of the war, and then in supplying
the material needs of her people, Italians manifested a tremendous
interest in us and in our country, and they began to look upon us as
their guide and their savior. I never heard a disparaging word of our
country or of him who was directing our ship of state until after the
Peace Conference. They looked upon Woodrow Wilson as a man inspired.
There were times during the war when they would have been very glad if
America had acquiesced more readily and more whole-heartedly in their
requests, such as in July, 1918, when they believed that it was
imperative to have large numbers of American troops in Italy. But at the
same time, when their wishes were not met and their requests not
granted, they did not sit in adverse judgment upon him who made the
decision. In fact, they believed he could not err.

It is natural that they should have been concerned about the situation
that existed in the early summer of 1918. There were two millions of
American troops in Europe, with more constantly coming, and there were
only a very small number in Italy. The Italians saw themselves pitted
more or less alone against a country, Austria-Hungary, which had an army
nearly twice as large as theirs and which was more rapacious than a
hungry wolf goaded into renewed ferocity by recent defeat. They
sincerely believed that if they had received help at that time they
could have overcome their hereditary and acquired enemy promptly, and it
is likely that they could. That might have been a reason for sending
American troops to Italy, but it was not an adequate reason. The one
task in hand was to win the war, to win it expeditiously and to win it
in such a manner that would put Germany, as she was constituted and as
she had been constituted for the past twenty-five years, out of
existence; that is, to exterminate the war lords, to destroy them and
their influence. The man or men who were permitted to look at the
question from all angles were far better able to plan how this should be
done than the councillors of one nation who naturally saw the question
only from one side, that is, their own point of view.

It is likely also that the Italians constantly reminded themselves that
if they had received help from the Allies early in 1916 the war might
have been ended. I have heard many an Italian say that they were in a
position then to overcome the Austrian army had they received such help
and that with the simultaneous activity of the Russians on the eastern
front they would have carried the Allied arms into Vienna. But you do
not grind your grist more satisfactorily by regretting that the waters
that have gone over the mill were not used more efficaciously.

I have wandered far afield from the testimonial lunch to Mr. Stone, but
my reflections are apropos of the remarks which the Honorable Nitti, a
wizard with figures and a magician with men, made. Many of his
countrymen profess to distrust him and to say that Giolitti made him and
still controls him. Nothing could be more absurd. Nitti is the type of
man who is made by his endowment and by his environment. It would be
easier to think of any other public man in Italy as the tool of a
dictator, dethroned or enthroned, than it would be of Nitti. The son of
poor parents who sacrificed everything for his education, he has been
journalist, author, teacher, economist, professor, advocate, and
statesman. When he first went in the House he sat on the extreme left,
and gradually he moved up toward the centre, although he is always
inscribed in the radical party. He is unquestionably of formidable brain
and combines a will of iron with an audacity that has the appearance at
least of transcending all temerity.

In appearance he is the typical middle-class South Italian, short,
rotund, with thick neck and massive face adorned with a smile that
rarely comes off. He is a polished orator and his political papers read
like literary documents. He is reputed to be a master of political
stage-setting. Realizing that the most potent factor in shaping men's
judgment is the press, and realizing that the man who has his fingers on
the keyboard of the organ that makes the music was the honored guest of
the occasion, he embraced the opportunity to put before Mr. Stone and
his colleagues his convictions of the needs of Italy and his hopes that
they might be gratified. I am sure that he did not say publicly anything
that Mr. Stone had not already heard in private audience, for the doors
leading to the council chambers of the men of influence in this country
swing open welcomingly to Mr. Stone, but to say them in his presence to
the representative press of Italy convinced us that his hopes and
aspirations in this matter were the expression of the government, and he
was willing and wished to communicate them to the public.

The other speakers were entertaining but scarcely instructive. One
doesn't expect inspired sentiment or statement at testimonial banquets,
but I felt that the speakers missed an opportunity to herald the
democratization of the world through education and enlightenment via the
press. Many nice things were said about Mr. Stone, but I confess frankly
that I was disappointed that no one took it upon himself to interpret
his accomplishments or to dwell upon and elaborate his activities and
accomplishments symbolically. If they would stop telling us Germany's
motives in precipitating the Great War and give us instead a credo for
the present and the future, it would be a relief. I am firmly convinced
that Germany thrust the war upon the world because she couldn't inhibit
her latent and active cruelty which possesses and has possessed her for
generations, as lust possesses the satyric man who, when he becomes
intoxicated or unbalanced, throws prudence, precedent, precept, and
principles to the wind and gives himself and his possessions to the
orgy. The Central Powers will have to pay the full penalty for their
crimes, even though they deny their guilt, just as the wilful murderer
is electrocuted, even though he goes to the chair protesting his
innocence.

The guest's speech was felicitous. He dwelt briefly on Italy's
justification for entering the war when she did; he justly evaluated her
work and he paid a deserving tribute to her resourcefulness in having
extricated herself from the horns of the bull after the Caporetto
disaster. He brought Columbus, Mazzini, and Garibaldi, our debt to them
and their inspiration for us, into his remarks in such a way as to
convince his auditors that they constitute for us a revered Italian
trinity, and he adequately depicted the tenderness and affection that
his countrymen have for Italy.

It takes a big man, using that word in one of its conventional senses,
to conduct a successful publicity campaign. In the first place, he has
to understand the people with whom he works, and the first successful
step in understanding them is to want to understand them. If he has
preconceived ideas not founded in reliable information or experience, if
he is biassed and hypercritical, if he doesn't know how to elicit
testimony and evaluate evidence, if he hasn't habituated himself to look
at events, heralded or transpired, from different points of view, if he
isn't animated by the spirit of service--that is, to do his work for the
good of the cause--he is doomed to failure, or at least he can be only
partially successful. Then again, he must be a man who worthily
represents his government and his people. He should know his way about.
He should be familiar with ordinary social amenities, so that he may go
easily amongst his superiors and excite their approbation, and he must
have the capacity to bear true witness while constantly keeping the
burnished side of his shield before the people he is aiming to succor
and orient. There are few ways in which one can be of more service to
his country than by making proper propaganda in an allied country. The
narrow-minded, biassed, obsessed man has the worst possible equipment
for such position.

Propaganda is the priceless privilege of the press.

CHAPTER XV

SENTIMENTALITY AND THE MALE

It is a long time now that the belief has been generally accepted that
God made man, and, contemplating his work, realized that it was a
failure for the purpose for which man was created. He then made woman.
The way in which this was accomplished is full of interest to the
artificer, but it does not concern me, whose lifelong study has been of
the finished species; nor does the object of the creation of man,
alluring as it is, tempt me to digress from the subject of his
sentimental endowment. Soon after his organism was endowed with sentient
possession, man was made aware that he had imperious desires which not
only demanded satisfaction but which insisted upon being satisfied. It
pleased the Christian church to enshroud the most vital of these
God-given desires in the mantle of sin, save when its appeasement was
done in conformity with the restrictions laid upon it by the church. It
may quite well be that such restrictions were founded in wisdom. For a
long time England maintained that it was right to restrict the franchise
to owners of property of a certain value, and for many centuries the
world accepted slavery without a thought that it was wrong. Ruskin spoke
truly when he said: "The basest thought about man is that he has no
spiritual nature, and the foolishest that he has no animal nature."

The facts around which these remarks are spun are first: God reproduced
his image, and, finding that the image was incomplete and useless for
the purposes for which he was created, he made him whole, as it were, by
creating the female; and second: that he endowed man and woman with
mental and emotional qualities which were to aid them in living their
lives happily for themselves, usefully for others, and acceptably to
him. The moment this endowment was made known to them the fat was in the
fire. "She tempted me and I fell" has been the subject of picture and
poem, story and sermon, excuse or extenuation, since time immemorial.
Learned tomes and ponderous volumes have set forth specifically the
difference of the sexes, more or less uselessly too, for no one needs to
be convinced that there are anatomical and physiological differences.
The obvious is never interesting; the pleasurable quest is pursuit of
the elusive, the intangible. There are differences between the sexes
that defy specific designation, for I do not admit that specificity is
given to these distinctions by saying that men differ from women
emotionally, morally, spiritually, ethically, or that they react
differently to the same stimulus under the same circumstances, or that
there are soul differences of kind and degree. We do not have to decide
whether these distinctions are inherent or acquired. We have only to
admit that they exist. The plain fact is that tradition and experience
teach us that both the male and the female of the _genus homo_ have
certain spiritual endowments, both on the emotional and the intellectual
side, which have come to be looked upon as characteristic. Courage,
valor, secrecy are universally considered to be characteristics of the
male. On the other hand, patience, sentiment, vanity, and fickleness
have become traditionally linked up with the opposite sex. Women are
often braver than men, more continent, less vain, but to admit this does
not diminish the acceptability of the general proposition. No one is
likely to contend that either sex has a monopoly of any of these
qualities, but I fancy it will readily be admitted that sentimentality,
in its most flagrant display, is a more characteristic ancilla of woman
than of man. Bulwer Lytton was a shrewd observer when he wrote: "There
is sentiment in all women and sentiment gives delicacy to thought and
tact to manner." But sentiment with men is generally acquired, an
offspring of the intellectual quality, not as with the other sex, of the
moral. A man considers it a term of reproach to be called sentimental;
on the other hand, such designation in no way detracts from a woman's
estimate of herself, nor does it derogate her in the esteem of others so
long as she confines it within certain limits and so long as it does not
condition her conduct. Many a man on reviewing his past recognizes that
his ship of celibacy foundered upon the sandy shoals called
"tender-minded." The tender-minded girl is one with a mind somewhat
underdeveloped, saturated in sentimentality usually associated with a
streak of obstinacy which is beyond parental influence.

With nubility there comes to every girl a wealth of emotional endowment
which is often most bewildering--indeed, it upsets some unstable
organizations, while to others it is merely an intoxication. It disturbs
their equilibrium, it tends to break down their inhibitions and to befog
the perspectives that have been so carefully developed for them, and it
not infrequently roils the water of life in which they have been
floating and swimming without effort to such a degree that they
constitute a problem for parent and teacher. The average girl gradually
throws off these disequilibrilizing effects; and the moonlight walks in
the garden, or the romantic plans to spend an idyllic life in a tiny
cottage covered by a rambler rose-bush far from the madding crowd,
companioned by an Adonis and the poetry of Tennyson, her extravagant
protestations of love for another girl, her exuberant interest in some
mystic or fantastic cult, and other concomitants of this period, are
given proper valuation.

She emerges into womanhood with a "head" for the intoxicating libation
that wells up in her tissues, and is poured through her soul as sap
wells up in a tree, even to the smallest branches preparatory to its
bloom and fructification. The knowledge is borne in upon her that she
can manage the new possession conformably to the canons of church,
state, and society, and that the total of what has come to her at this
period may be split up into qualities or possessions to which are given
specific names, such as sentiment. Soon she realizes that these
qualities become important assets in her display of the _ars amoris_ and
they prepare the road that leads pleasantly and propitiously to the goal
which shall be the fulfilment of her physiological destiny, namely,
maternity via matrimony. When that gratifying stage has been reached and
fulfilled she understands that sentimentality, modestly displayed,
contributes largely to her success, not only in her family but in the
world.

How different with the opposite sex! He likewise feels the obscuring
mists of sex potency and of sentimentality settling over him as puberty
approaches. He is also bewildered, but it is early made clear to him by
his fellows who have gone through the experience that the slightest
manifestation of it will be the signal for loosing on him the floodgates
of their contempt and for opening for him the sluiceways of their scorn.
To be called a mollycoddle is worse than being called a sneak, a cad, or
a liar, and he is made to appreciate that if he merits such designation
his companions will give him the kind of reception the wedding guests
gave the ancient mariner. It is borne in upon him that display of
sentiment in any form whatsoever is not "manly"; so he not only
suppresses sentimentality, but in order to conceal it he goes much
farther and no longer treats his sisters with the same kindness and
consideration as before; he withdraws his intimacies and his confidences
from his mother, professes a contempt for the society of girls, and
embraces every opportunity to display a furious antagonism toward
sentimentality.

This period is oftentimes a trying one for the parent, and, as every one
knows, it is fraught with danger to the individual, particularly if he
is a weak character, because it is during these times that sinister
associations and injurious habits are formed which are prejudicial to
physical development and mental evolution. This is the period of life
which has furnished the fertile soil in which the modern English
novelist successfully sows his seed.

The average boy emerges from this period with a vision so adjusted to
his immediate environment and the world that he senses things as they
really are. He begins to get some idea of the purposes and value of
life, its obligations and its privileges, and as the result of intuition
or tuition, that happiness and usefulness, the chief aims and objects of
life, stand in direct and measurable relationship to the possession and
display of certain qualities which are commonly spoken of as virtues. As
his mind unfolds and he is able to give relativity to these qualities,
he becomes aware that sentiment in a man is not a deforming but a
meritorious possession, which, when used properly, is a great asset, but
that it is one of the qualities of his make-up that should not be
displayed to the vulgar gaze, and is a possession which he should rarely
use save to blend with other qualities to give them savor. He
appreciates that sentiment gives momentum to his designs and tone to his
accomplishments, while furnishing appropriate and fitting setting for
their display, and with discernment he is able to distinguish clearly
between sentiment and sentimentality and knows that the word sentiment
is used synonymously with feeling or conviction. Sentiment is a
composite of many of the virtues and is a subjective possession which,
when revealed in words, action, or conduct may become sentimentality,
providing the origin of these words, acts, and deeds is founded in
sentiment.

The possession of sentiment, that is, of feeling, is a most desirable
one so long as it does not warp the judgment, interfere with the
mission, or prevent a man from doing his duty. The man or woman who is
devoid of feeling is a species of monster, but the man or woman whose
plan of life is based upon sentiment and whose conduct conforms to
sentiment is mentally and morally unhealthy. As Lowell says: "Every man
feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh
less than a single lovely action." Decisions, plans of action, conduct
conditioned by or founded in sentiment can be followed safely only if
they are submitted to the acid test of reason before acceptation or
subscription. Sentiment as a possession may be compared to a ferocious
dog. He may be invaluable as a watch-dog, which adequately chained gives
you a feeling of security, and at appropriate times can be unleashed to
signal advantage, and accomplishes under guidance that which merits full
approval; but let loose at all times he is an intolerable nuisance and
may get you into one trouble after another.

The sentimentalist is a person who, in decisions, judgments, plans of
action, and conduct of them, point of view in dealing with persons
individually and collectively, has his conduct so colored by sentiment
that his plan of action and ability and methods of its execution seem
illogical and incapable of being subjected to the test of reason.
Carlyle put it tersely when he said: "The barrenest of mortals is the
sentimentalist."

The agonal struggle of the Great War was not necessary to convince us
that very little is to be accomplished in the world single-handed. The
individual can give birth to the idea, the plan, or possess the
initiative which may revolutionize some phase of the activities of the
world, but to carry out the idea he must have the co-operation of many.
It is in securing such co-operation that he has a great opportunity to
make a proper use of sentiment. There is nothing that an organizer or an
administrator finds out earlier or surer than that loyalty is the cement
that keeps his organization together, and the more it sets the more firm
and invulnerable becomes his organization.

How to engender such loyalty is a problem that each person confronted
with it must solve for himself. Some do it by meriting the respect and
admiration of their coworkers and subordinates by display of such
qualities as kindliness, justice, generosity, consideration of the
welfare of their fellows, while others encompass it by the whole-hearted
and unselfish way in which they give themselves to the work. Some do it
quite impersonally and may possibly not be on terms of intimacy with any
member of their organization. This does not necessarily mean that they
hold themselves aloof from those with whom they come in contact; on the
contrary, there may exist a genial comradeship from which mutual
respect, admiration, and possibly even affection are developed. Some few
develop loyalty from personal contact on the basis of sentimentality.
They proceed upon the plan that if they cannot secure the personal
admiration and affection of those associated with them, impelling them
to do their best because of this relationship rather than for the good
of the cause, they have not been completely successful in their
accomplishment. To this end they not infrequently resort to a display of
sentimentality which is distressing to the impartial onlooker. That
great dissector of the morals and motives of men, Thackeray, said: "One
tires of a sentimentalist who is always pumping the tears from his eyes
or your own." They lavish praise upon those who have not merited it,
substituting adulation for admonition; they profess a confidence that is
not justified by results; they claim to see only virtues in every
individual who is drawn into the sacred circle of their employment or
association. Should they have suspicions that some in their circle are
not deserving of confidence or do not have the qualities from which
loyal, useful associates can be made, they delude themselves with the
belief that they can engender a sufficient desire in the inadequate one
to compel him to be loyal and efficient in order that the confidence and
admiration of the chief may be requited.

People who work together should respect each other, and by it employer
and employee should be linked together. If a more intimate relation
flows naturally from this respect, well and good, but there should not
be the slightest attempt made to engender it on a sentimental basis. The
rugged mind of Carlyle eschewed the sentimental. He stated: "The
sentimental by and by will have to give place to the practical."

Most men if they strive sufficiently to make others like them can
succeed in their endeavor, but a man should be liked for the inherent
virtues or laudable qualities that he possesses and not for the
semblance of them which he assumes for a special purpose. We like a man
because he is trustworthy, loyal, efficient, reliable, truthful,
co-operative, sympathetic, understanding, but we do not necessarily like
him because some one else tells us that we ought to like him,
particularly if we have found that he does not possess any of the
qualities we desire and which would have made him acceptable. The
sentimentalist is often guided in his decisions and in his conduct
relative to others by the fear that, if he apprises the individual of
the reason why he no longer wishes to keep up business or professional
relations with him, the individual thus treated will devote some time
afterward to tarnishing the lustre of his halo.

The sentimentalist fears especially the criticism, disparagement, and
possibly one might say the malignity of those from whom he chooses to
separate after they have been weighed and found wanting. It is not that
he fears that injury will be done him, because not infrequently his
career is so successful that it can withstand an enormous amount of
disparagement and criticism without detrimental impression. The
disparagement of such individuals can do him no harm save in the
humiliation to his pride when it is brought home to him that he has not
been able to make the leopard change his spots. Self-interest is the
subconscious motive that often leads to a display of sentimentality. The
sentimentalist realizes that allegations of merit and of capacity are
"things that are graceful in a friend's mouth but blushing in a man's
own," and as such praise is the breath of his nostrils he will go to
great lengths to achieve its accomplishment. But, though he may be
deceived by flattery, there are others who know that "on ne trouve
jamais l'expression d'un sentiment qui l'on n'a pas; l'esprit grimace et
le style aussi." He is the easy prey for those who appeal to his vanity
or to his susceptibility to flattery, to advance their own or others'
projects and interests, and he may be led into doing things which his
sober judgment tells him are not desirable, because he feels that he
must not run the risk of lowering himself in the estimate of the
individual from whom he has accepted adulation, reverence, or adoration.

When the male sentimentalist habituates himself to this worshipful
attitude from the other sex he becomes covered with points which
Achilles had only immediately above the heel. The sex which has long
been popularly known as the weaker has an inherited or acquired code of
morality which permits them to make demands of the sentimental man which
a mere man, unless base, would scorn, and now that the sex has been
emancipated we begin to feel that they should come out in the open and
play fair. If they want to rely for their successes upon the weapons
that have been vouchsafed them heretofore, they should not have the
privileges which they are asking for and receiving to-day. Heaven knows
no one is more desirous that they should have what they ask for in that
direction than I am, but they should not use their sex quality to take
an unfair advantage. Thus oftentimes one who merits the designation of
"pillar of strength and tower of fire" becomes a reed in the emotional
wind that blows from the designing woman. She may not be designing in a
malignant sense; she may merely enjoy the display of power. It is
remarkable what a sentimentalist will put up with in the shape of
indignity and inefficiency rather than run the risk of being impaired in
the esteem of one who has this kind of influence over him. Emerson, one
of our deepest thinkers, said: "Man is the will and woman is the
sentiment. In this ship of humanity will is the rudder and sentiment the
sail; when woman affects to steer, the rudder is only the masked sail."

There is nothing more Jove-like than virility and continency, but a man
saturated with sentimentality produces a sensation akin to that which
the child experiences when she finds her doll is stuffed with sawdust.

Sentiment in a man is like scent in a rose. It is the finishing touch to
perfection; when it is deficient it thrills one no more than the painted
flower; when it is excessive the heaviness of its enervating odor is
oppressive.

CHAPTER XVI

THE PLAY INSTINCT IN CHILDREN

Italy's greatest recent patriot is Cesare Battisti, who suffered
martyrdom for love of his native land. He was an Austrian subject,
professor of biology and geography in the University of Trent and a
deputy in the Austrian House of Parliament. In the beginning of the war
he returned to Italy to fight against the country of his adoption and to
favor the fortunes of his native land, and his efforts were crowned with
great success. He entered the Italian Army as a lieutenant of the
Alpini, and in 1916 fell into the hands of the Austrians, who quickly
and cruelly despatched him by the most barbarous methods that they could
conceive. Streets and piazzas have been named for him, hospitals and
monuments have been raised in his honor, and his name is known to every
man, woman, and child in the kingdom.

But it is not of Battisti that I would write, but to record a train of
thought that was initiated by the sight of the orphans who were
occupying the building which Italy's most distinguished physician,
Ettore Marchiafava, aided by generous friends of the sick poor, has
taken over for a tuberculosis hospital, and which will be called after
Cesare Battisti. There were about two hundred girls, ranging in age from
six to fourteen, in the charge of an order of nuns. The building is
situated on a hill in the outskirts of Rome known as Monte Verde, which
is the southern continuation of the Janiculum. In former days it was a
palatial villa belonging to some dignitary of the church and latterly
church property. It commands a magnificent view of Rome, of the Tiber,
of the Campagna, the Castelli Romani, and the Alban Hills. When I
arrived the children were in the grounds about the house and more or
less segregated in a broad walk or alley lined by trees which led from
the street to the villa. They were walking up and down in twos or threes
or singly, apparently without other objective or display of desire than
to walk. They looked like children of many nationalities, healthy and
clean; but, more than that, they looked happy, contented, satisfied. As
I passed amongst them, nearly every one greeted me with a smile and
"_Buon giorno_." There was no show of embarrassment, shyness,
bashfulness, or artificiality.

I looked over the grounds of the place, several acres, and saw not the
slightest sign of games, swings, playgrounds, sand-piles, or other
feature with which children divert themselves or are diverted in other
lands. I went through the house from cellar to garret, and rarely have I
seen an inhabited building with fewer signs of habitation. The
dormitories contained long rows of beds with no sign of tables, chairs,
stands, comfort-bags--nothing save the beds. The refectory was equally
barren. The schoolroom was desolation itself--benches, long desks, and a
solitary blackboard. The only indication that anything was taught save
that which could be imparted by word of mouth was a typewriting machine.
Examine as carefully as I might, I wasn't able to detect the smallest
object for the diversion, entertainment, distraction, occupation of the
little ones that the place was utilized to harbor, to nurture, to
develop, and to instruct. When I returned to _terra firma_, there they
were, walking up and down the alley as they were when I went in. A
gentle-eyed sister was among the groups of the smaller ones, but they
seemed not to need care. They were self-sufficient.

For the first time I felt the sensation of oppression in the presence of
a crowd of joyous children. I felt they were in a prison-house narrower
and more restricting than that which closes in upon the budding man, and
I went away without thought of Cesare Battisti, but big with solicitude
for these lusty young beings whose best and most potential quality, the
play instinct, was being stultified, or at least not cultivated.

I marvelled that the country which made the most constructive
contribution to child pedagogy of the nineteenth century fails to see or
to realize that the most potent, directly God-sent possession of a child
is its imagery or fancy, which externalizes itself in every child in the
desire to play--to play parent, construction, warfare, games, or ape the
activities of their elders. The explanation cannot be that Italy is
ignorant of the cultivation of the child's instinct for play in other
countries or of the immense provision that is made to enhance it both in
public and in private life. I can readily understand that there might be
wilful opposition to it in church institutions, as its elaborate display
is considered inimical to that humility which is the essence of the
Christian religion. Punish the flesh, have a contempt and a disdain for
any of its clamorings, treat it as if it were a vessel unworthy of its
sacred cargo the soul, scourge it and humiliate it, and you will find
favor in His sight. It is extraordinary and inexplicable that man should
feel himself free to suggest to himself and to others that a
suppression, even abnegation, of God-given instincts which are as much
an integral part of the _genus homo_ as his speech capacity, is
necessary in order that the individual should find favor in God's eyes
and be worthy of reward when he is called to join Him. It seems so much
more consistent with reason that the species were provided with
instincts that they might be utilized, and therefore that the duty of
the teacher and the guide is to foster these instincts, to develop them,
and to direct them toward the channels where they may be utilized to the
advantage of the individual, the community, and the state. If it were
only the church that displayed an opposition to the development of the
play instinct in children I should not concern myself particularly with
it, as I am not inclined to take issue with the church, either in its
propaganda or in its teachings. I consider that it takes an unfair
advantage of infants and children, but I solace my indignation with the
thought that when the child comes to man's estate mentally he is free to
liberate himself from its enthralments and inhibitions. It may be said
that it has shaped his mental processes, activities, and inclinations to
such purpose that he does not see straight, and that accusation is true,
providing they have sterilized his mind to such a degree that he is no
longer capable of constructive thought. There is no doubt that they
often bring about such mental eunuchoidismus, but it is probable that
the great majority of those thus sterilized would have been dead-wood in
the stream of evolutionary progress had they been left intact. But
insensitiveness to the child's needs is not confined to parochial
schools and other church institutions where children are harbored and
taught. In Italy it is displayed in nearly every public and private
institution where the young are segregated for purposes of instruction
and maintenance.

I would not be understood to say that there are not playgrounds of any
kind connected with Italian schools, but the few that exist are scarcely
worthy of the name. The plain truth of the matter is that the play
instinct has been thwarted so long in the Italian that it doesn't seem
to exist any more. One of the things that strikes the stranger who
penetrates far enough into family life to permit him the opportunity of
observation is that the parent doesn't play with his children as does
the Anglo-Saxon, and children do not play with each other. I cannot
conceive that the child, left to itself, does not

    "Hold unconscious intercourse with beauty
    Old as creation,"

and give evidence of it and of the activity of its developing mind which
reveals itself constructively in that which we call play. But the
observation and experience of children in Italy lead me to believe that
when they grow up and recall

    "Those recollected hours that have the charm
    Of visionary things, those lovely forms
    And sweet sensations that throw back their life,
    And almost make remotest infancy
    A visible scene, on which the sun is shining,"

they do not expose a treasure-house in which are stored the
recollections of the most envied times of their lives.

The little _villino_ that I occupy is cared for by a couple whose only
child is a little girl of eight. From my window I survey her activities
and I have never yet seen her in play,

    "Seen no little plan of chart or fragment
    From her beam of human life
    Shaped by herself with newly learned art."

When I look out in the morning she is likely to be sitting outside the
gate as if awaiting something to transpire that would be worthy of
observation, attention, or participation. When I return in the middle of
the day and again in the evening and when Sundays or other times I am in
my rooms for a protracted period, I see her ever busily engaged in doing
nothing. The only imaginative or emotional activity that I have ever
witnessed her display is that sometimes I find her humming and she
always smiles and greets me most affably. At times I see other children
make a visit to her, but it is obviously a ceremonious one, for there
are no shrieks or yells, no tumbling or rolling, no scampering or
chattering, none of that display of physical vitality and joy of living
that lambs or colts or calves or even puppies or kittens make. They are
like a miniature group of Giacondas, older than the rocks upon which
they sit, who have tasted all the joys to satiety. The doll that I gave
her has apparently been put away, not at all unlikely with a scapular or
holy beads. At least, I have never seen her with it in her arms since
the day she received it. There is no sign of miniature wheelbarrow or
shovel or sandpile, no little wooden geegee, no bicycle or miniature
locomotive, no blocks or other material from which to construct a castle
or a kitchen, no indication whatsoever that she attempts to portray any
of the vagrant thoughts or fleeting fancies that arise in her budding
mind. When I go on a Sunday to the little villages in the Campagna or in
the Castelli Romani to which the proletariat repair with their families
in _villeggiatura_, I see hundreds of children, but never once have I
seen any of them playing, nor are they noisy and boisterous. If they are
clamorous and restless, it is for food or for appeasement of some other
physical need. Even the little boys do not play in the streets. Their
one source of amusement is for a number of them to gather around a pile
of small stones used for repair of the road and to divert themselves by
hurling them at one another when a carriage or an automobile is not
passing, at which time they concentrate their efforts on attempts to
slay the occupants of these vehicles with the deadly missiles at hand.

On the Janiculum where I live there is a paradise for children, a little
park with the roaring, splashing fountain of St. Paolo at one end of it
and the entrance to the broad, shaded driveway that traverses the
Janiculum to St. Onofrio at the other. On either side of this drive are
broad lawns interspersed with flowerbeds and shaded with most seductive
trees, amongst which is Tasso's oak, now fallen into such a state of
decrepitude that it has to have artificial support and braces. The place
is often alive with children, painfully decorous and silent. They often
remind me of Millet's "Man with the Hoe," bowed down with the weight of
ages. Not infrequently I meet in the morning and in the evening whole
troops of children going and returning from the accessible fields of
Monte Verde, always lined up like soldiers, two abreast, and the only
manifestation of externalized emotion I have ever seen in them is that
occasionally their keepers--priest, nun, or sour-visaged
guardian--permit them to break into song--patriotic anthem or lyric
wail.

It is notorious that games play no such part in the diversion of the
adult Italian as they do in the countries peopled by our own race. Golf,
tennis, football, cricket, baseball are practically unknown except as
they have been established by foreigners for their own use. Naturally
they have attracted some Italians, but there is no general interest in
them. Contests of endurance, such as bicycle races and rowing, they
have, and horse-racing has a certain vogue, but chiefly because it
facilitates taking chances on the winner. This is the more remarkable,
for when they do go in for games they often excel, showing aptitude,
endurance, and daring. There is no nationality that compares with them
in their riding, for instance. It is not true to say that they do not
play games. The Spanish game of ball known as _pelota_ is played in some
centres where the _jeunesse dorée_ segregate, and another game of ball
called _pallone_ is played a little, but with no enthusiasm, and it
arouses no considerable interest. In fact, nothing included under the
head of sport plays a great rôle in Italy. Fortunately it is being
encouraged, and within a generation we may confidently anticipate a
decided change. It would, of course, be ridiculous to say that they do
not shoot and fish. You often encounter in tramping through the country
a man with a gun on his shoulder, but usually he is a pot-hunter, and
now and then your rambles bring you face to face with a Nimrod, but in
nine cases out of ten he likewise is animated by the desire for
succulent food.

On superficial examination it seems extraordinary that this state of
affairs should exist in a country which for many centuries seemed to
have had its chief enjoyment in murder, sense-gratification, games, and
contests of courage, strength, and endurance. No one can read the
history of the days of Roman supremacy without being struck with the
fact that the chief amusement of the populace of those days was play,
display of strength, skill, dexterity, and inventiveness. Archæologists
and others interested in unearthing and interpreting archaic remains
tell us that the aphorism that there is nothing new under the sun is
true so far as games are concerned, and I expect any day to hear that
they have disinterred a golf course at Ostia, a diamond or a football
field at Salerno. However, after reflection, it occurs to me that there
are many reasons why the Italians, young and old, do not play
spontaneously and intentionally, or as naturally and pleasurably as
those of other nations. It is easy enough to understand why all play
ceased in those days of intellectual apathy, artistic sterility, and
emotional decay which, beginning with the fourth century A.D., continued
for nearly a thousand years. I have never looked into the matter with
sufficient care to be able to say whether or not there was a renaissance
of the play instinct or any elaborate and wide-spread manifestation of
it beginning with the fourteenth century, but my impression is that
there was. We have records of tournaments and jousts and games of
various kinds in certain cities of Italy, such as Salerno; there still
exist the physical features or foundations of such play. Any one who has
read Italian history until the successful movement of nationality of
1870 will not be astonished that play in any form did not have a great
vogue during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The people were
too busy devising plans to outwit their neighbors and to get possession
of their lands and their treasures to have time for play.

The Italian nature or temperament is not favorable to development of the
play instinct. The Italian likes to act, or to display histrionic
possession, more than anything else; it has often been remarked that
they are born actors, and not only do they produce more great actors and
actresses than any other country but you see more finished and artistic
acting in Italy than in any other country of the world. They are devoted
to mimicry, adepts in pantomime, and their "marionettes" have reached a
high degree of artistic development. As for the cinema, they go to it
with the ardor of a lover to his mistress. The theatre and gambling is
the Italian idea of diversion, relaxation, and amusement.

The display and satisfaction of the play instinct spell work, oftentimes
most laborious work carefully planned and elaborately carried out. The
successful pursuit of games of all sorts requires not only work but
oftentimes protracted physical training and profound physical effort.
The Italians do not take kindly to them. In the south of Italy there are
six months of the year and often more when no one is keenly disposed to
active physical effort and at no time in the year is there that
atmospheric incitation to physical activity that exists in England or in
our own country. It may well be that children of the South do not take
kindly to play because of the great and protracted heat, during which
they are taught to remain within doors several hours in the middle of
the day, and children of the lower classes are often obliged to work
during the cool hours.

Italian children mature very early, and the emotional disequilibrium
that comes with the supremacy of a new internal secretion makes them
self-conscious, bashful, retiring, and inimical to play. I am not
inclined to lay much stress on any of these occurrences as an
explanation for the apathy for play shown by Italian children. Jewish
children, who live in countries quite as hot as Italy, and who certainly
mature as early as Italian children, are naturally playful, and not only
playful but inventive of games. If one reads the biographies of some of
the literary Hebrews of America who have set forth in print their
renunciations and their successes, it will be seen that despite their
most unfavorable surroundings the play instinct in childhood--which,
after all, is the imaginative faculty--is often very strong.

Another thing that is very curious in Italy is that children of both
sexes do not play together. It is true that no particular effort is made
to keep them apart when they are very young, but there is no more
unusual sight in Italy than a boy from ten to fourteen with a girl of
the same age, unless it is to see a young man with a young woman who is
not his wife. There is no open and fraternizing relationship between the
sexes. If you say in Italy that a young woman is the _amica_ or friend
of a man, you mean what is signified in French by _chère amie_. In
certain parts of Italy, and particularly in the South, the position of
women in society and in relationship to men savors very much of the
Oriental.

Every one is agreed that play does two things for the young child--it
promotes its physical welfare and it facilitates its budding
imagination. More than this, it contributes materially to its education
and, particularly, it develops its constructive faculties. It teaches
older children and youths who participate in games of skill and control
the principles of give and take, bear and forbear, and it shows them how
to be victors without arrogance and losers without venom. It instils
principles of honesty, favors frankness and directness, and generally
paves the way for successful dealing with their fellows socially,
commercially, and politically in mature life. When one considers the
pains and money that are expended in our own country and in England to
teach young people how to play, it is astonishing how apathetic the
Italians have been toward the matter.

My belief is that Italy is awakening to the fact that play is one of the
most important factors in the development of the people, and if this war
had not come on I should most likely not have had occasion to make these
observations and to draw conclusions from them. I am told that a few
years ago they began to have mixed schools, that is, schools where
children of both sexes are assembled during school hours, and in many
cities there were stadia where sports of all sorts were encouraged and
fostered.

There are many factors that have tended to impede the development of
play in this country and the recognition of its importance, but aside
from that there is something in the Italian temperament or nature that
is antipathic to the play instinct and inimical to sports. Pedagogy has
recognized its importance but it has not succeeded in promoting and
developing it.

I have often wondered whether the suppression of the play instinct
practically to the point of abnegation is not manifest in the energies
and success of a people. Aside from the field of mechanical application
as represented by that in the profession of engineering, I do not know
of any realm in which the Italian of the past three or four generations
has signally distinguished himself. There have been poets, artists,
architects, physicians, priests, statesmen, philosophers, explorers, or
interpreters of life and events whose names have taken permanent places
in the world. I mean to say that in this period there have been many
Italians who have attained eminence and earned immortality, but there
has been no one from whom an epoch dates: no Pasteur, no Deisler, no
Thompson, no Devries, no Stanley, no Edison, no Langley, no Wright, no
Morgan, no Eddy--to enumerate only a few of those that are legitimately
put in the class of supermen.

This paucity of genius may be no more than a coincidence, but it strikes
me, nevertheless, as extraordinary that a country which has enjoyed
freedom as this country has for the past fifty years, has not manifested
the fruits of its liberation from tyranny and oppression such as were
manifested in France after the French Revolution, when once its
devastation had been cured.

If the child is father to the man, it stands to reason that indulgence
and training during childhood will manifest their effect during
maturity, and success in any activity of human life stands in direct
relation to imagination or vision and industry. It likewise follows that
if we neglect to facilitate the development of the former and to develop
the appetite for and form the habit of the latter during the early years
of life, it is too much to expect the display of them in later years. It
is quite possible, it seems to me, that the reputation for lack of
directness in their dealings with the peoples of other nationalities,
their circuitousness in the business affairs of life, their secrecy or
lack of frankness and candor, their ceremoniousness, their failure to
cement a solid friendship with other nations of Europe, may, in some
measure at least, be linked up with the suppression of the play instinct
in childhood and the subservient place which they have given to women.

CHAPTER XVII

"IF A MAN WALKETH IN THE NIGHT, HE STUMBLETH BUT IF HE WALKETH IN THE
DAY HE SEETH THE LIGHT OF THIS WORLD"

My morning walks take me the length of the Janiculum. In the early light
of these autumn days Rome and its settings take on an expression of
seductive resignation due largely to the clouds which rob it of that
glare which is the most trying feature of summer in Rome. The clouds
permit streams of light to filter through, as if from a monstrous
search-light, especially over the Castelli Romani and the Alban Hills.
Ordinarily Monte Cavo is on the horizon line, but to-day, after the sun
had been nearly an hour on its diurnal way, hundreds of parallel bundles
of light were directed perpendicularly upon it, so that another chain of
mountains came into view beyond, and the decaying villa surmounting it
seemed to be in a valley atop of a mountain peak backed by other peaks.
The way from my _villino_ to St. Peter's is past the Garibaldi monument,
and I am well acquainted with the countenances of his generals and his
guard, whose life-size busts in marble flank the monument in long,
parallel rows, constituting an alley leading up to it. If their effigies
do them justice, they were fine-looking, intelligent, and resolute.

It takes me also past the hideous lighthouse which Argentina thrust upon
the Italians, and which has been erected upon a spot from which one has
perhaps the most commanding view of Rome, its near and distant
environment.

This morning I determined that I would spend a half-hour in the Church
of S. Onofrio and refresh my recollections of the frescoes of Baldassare
Peruzzi and of Pinturicchio, and pay a tribute to the memory of the
greatest poet of the late Renaissance, Torquato Tasso. On the side of
the steps that lead down to the shoulder of the hill surmounting St.
Peter's is an oak-tree, long since dead, but securely banded and spliced
and propped by indestructible metal. Here, it is said, Tasso sat and
contemplated, too forlorn and ill further to poetize, during those
months of 1594 while he was awaiting his call to the capitol to be
crowned poet laureate. When the illness to which he succumbed increased
to such extent as to incapacitate him he repaired to S. Onofrio "to
begin my conversation in heaven in this elevated place, and in the
society of these holy fathers." It is strange enough that Tasso is a
very real and living force in Italy to-day. Not only are many of his
poems, and selections from them, read in the schools, but "Jerusalem
Delivered" on the screen has recently had a remarkable success in Rome
and in other cities of Italy.

The Convent of S. Onofrio is now scarcely more than a reminder of what
it was in its golden days. Long before the Italian Government had
abolished the right of monasteries to hold property, and therefore
delivered the death-blow to the parasitical grasp which they had upon
this country, the Ospedale Bambini Gesu had taken possession of a large
part of it and converted it into a work of mercy and of salvation which
finds, I fancy, more favor in the eyes of people to-day than does
conventual life. The church, rather impressive from without and
particularly when approached from below, is small and dainty and has
distinctly a spiritual atmosphere. It is what the Italians call _molto
carina_. When I entered the church there was one solitary female
prostrate before an image. I fancied that she had had a troubled night
and had repaired to this sacrosanct environment early in the morning to
purge herself of her sins and to ask forgiveness. For a long time she
remained in an attitude of profound contrition, and I was curious to see
if, on arising, she displayed in feature or in form any evidences or
manifestations of indulgence in those transgressions which we are taught
are so offensive to the Lord. My vigil was rewarded by the sight of age,
deprivation, and poverty. Had pulchritude or passion ever been a part of
her, all sign of them had passed; had sins of commission ever brought to
her riches or the semblance of riches, she had long since forfeited
them; had her transgressions been translated into fugitive pleasures, no
signs of them remained. Like Tasso, she had repaired there to begin the
conversation she hoped to continue in heaven. It is much more likely,
however, that she had gone to church without definite antecedent thought
or determination. It seems to be as much an act of nature for women in
Italy when they reach a certain age to haunt the churches as it is for
their hair to turn gray. They do it quite as mechanically as they do
their housework. I often doubt that there is any spiritual or emotional
feeling accompanying it whatsoever. I am certain that the recitation of
prayers which were learned in infancy, and which have been repeated
thousands of times without the smallest attention to the significance of
the words, as children recite them, is not associated with any spiritual
alteration, neither humility nor exaltation. It is part of the meagre,
barren daily life of these old women, and they get from it something
which for them constitutes pleasure and satisfaction.

As I sat in contemplation of the frescoes surrounding the high altar,
and which set forth the coronation of the Virgin, the Nativity, the
Flight into Egypt, a middle-aged monk or priest came forward and
volunteered to draw the curtain that more light might fall upon them. He
was incredibly dirty and dishevelled, and he had lost an eye, but he was
gentle and simple and friendly. He told me what he knew about the
frescoes; he bemoaned the evil days upon which the world had fallen, and
he expressed the hope that peace and tranquillity would soon again be
ours; but when I attempted to talk to him about the significance of the
war and the universal awakement to man's rights that would flow from it,
I found that his comments were ejaculatory and that his reflections had
no root in thought or reason. It is incredible that a person so naïve
and so lacking in every display of intelligence, culture, and
perspicacity can be a spiritual teacher or guide. Perhaps it is that
faith alone is necessary that one shall satisfactorily fulfil his duties
as priest.

He called my attention to an oil graphite on the side walls of the
chapel which had been uncovered in recent times. In early days its
artistic merit or value was not appreciated and it had been covered over
with other pastels or paintings thought to be more appropriate or more
fitting. The composition is a figure standing in what seems to be a
square box and on either side a number of closely massed masculine
figures, each one having a different facial expression, one of
astonishment, another of incredulity, another of humility and
satisfaction. It depicted the Resurrection of Christ, my little friend
thought, but when he saw a figure outside the box that resembled Christ,
he thought it must be the resurrection of Lazarus, and then in the most
childlike way he remarked that the figure in the box seemed to be a
female one, and as that didn't seem to fit in with the resurrection of
Lazarus he gave it up. I fancy that he had never read that when Martha
and Mary made their successful appeal Lazarus had been dead four days,
and that after Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, "Father, I thank thee
that thou hast heard me," Lazarus came forth bound hand and foot with
grave-clothes and his face was bound about with a napkin. These
accoutrements of the grave would successfully conceal sex, even from the
eyes of a sacerdotal Sherlock Holmes.

I persuaded him to take me into the convent that I might see Leonardo's
lovely fresco of the Virgin and the Child, and standing before it he
spoke of the sweetness of the mother's expression and of the dignity and
nobility of her pose and carriage in a way that made me forget his
ignorance and his unattractive exterior.

In the northwest chapel of the little church is the grave and monument
of Tasso. There is nothing particularly meritorious about the monument,
and there is nothing even suggestive of poetry. The effigy represents
the poet in the costume of a Spanish cavalier as he appeared at the age
of his greatest activity. The chapel opposite is a jungle of frescoes
depicting scenes in the life of S. Onofrio, who lived like an animal in
the desert for more than half a century, and who, for thus outraging
nature's laws, was brought to Rome to teach others how to live
acceptably in God's eyes. After he had gone to his final reward, which
we trust was the opposite of a desert, the church in its wisdom made him
a saint.

I did not attempt to visualize the desert-dweller or his activities as I
descended the steps that lead from this lovely hill to the Tiber, for I
was soon lost in contemplation of a view with which I was very familiar
but which now presents itself at a different angle, for I had never been
down this well-worn stone staircase. The little street led first past
the fine old Salviati Palace, a vast, massive structure built apparently
to provide a sumptuous _piano nobile_ and a great impressive court. It
has, I suppose, a definite architectural beauty, but to me it looks
merely massive, cumbersome, and overgrown. It reminds of nothing so much
as of a lady whose figure, once worthy of admiration, had become altered
by the adipose that is fatal to beauty. From here it is but a few steps
to the Villa Farnesina, with its priceless possessions from Raphael's
hand, but my way leads me across the rickety iron suspension bridge
immediately in front of the Salviati Palace, to cross which one must pay
a penny. From the middle of this bridge one gets a stunning view of the
Castle of S. Angelo and the Holy Ghost Hospital. The latter, an enormous
Renaissance structure, accommodates upward of five thousand patients. It
looks to-day much as illustrations of it show that it looked five
hundred years ago. In those days it was the last cry in hospitals, but
it is far from that to-day. In fact, as a hospital it leaves much to be
desired. I go there sometimes to visit the library, which has one of the
largest collections of incunabuli in the world. As you look over it from
the end of the Ponte Ferro, the dome of St. Peter's seems as if it were
suspended from the heaven and its marvellous symmetry is most
impressive. When you look at the dome of St. Peter's and the church
together, there is something a little incongruous. I do not attempt to
define it, but it is the same thing that you get when you look at a man
whose hat doesn't fit.

After crossing the Tiber I strike into the heart of the densely
populated city through a succession of narrow streets without sidewalks,
and flanked on either side with never-ending little shops, now and then
crossing a piazza which gives space and light to some massive mediæval
palace. But none of them solicits me to stop until the Palazzo Braschi
comes into view. I have seen its wondrous staircase, with its many
columns of Oriental granite, so often that I would pass it by without a
thought were it not for the brutally hideous figure of Pasquino, who
greets me from his pedestal like an old acquaintance. I realize quite
well that he has been called one of the most beautiful remains of
antique sculpture, and that the expert eye, guided by a knowledge of
Hellenic art supremity, may see charm and wondrousness in it, but I have
bid him good-morning and good-day many times, and, like some old
acquaintances, he does not get nearer my heart as I learn to know him
better. There have been innumerable conjectures as to what the figure
represents. The one most generally accepted is that it represents
Menelaus supporting the dead body of Patroclus after the vile Trojan had
stabbed him in the back while Hector was engaging his attention. You
have such a feeling of pride in Patroclus and the wonderful things that
he did with his Myrmidons that your heart goes out to him. When the
Trojan War was going badly, he was persuaded to take up the direction of
the forces against the enemy, and one cannot help feeling grateful to
Menelaus for having played the good Samaritan to him at the end. But if
this old King of Sparta had made Helen behave better when Paris came to
visit them, she might never have eloped with that hazardous youth after
he had made the memorable decision on Mount Ida, spurning power promised
by Juno, and glory and renown tendered by Minerva, in order that he
might have the fairest woman in the world for wife. But one should not
be too hard on the old king. There is no telling just how far Helen
acted on her own initiative and how far Venus was responsible for the
flight. Still, were it not for this little irregularity in the conduct
of the royal household, we would have been denied a knowledge of the
greatness of Greece and a record of its accomplishments in one of the
greatest poems, which has been a solace and a stimulation to countless
lovers of literature the past two thousand years.

Though I bring no trained eye or accurate information to the discussion
of Pasquino's identity, I am convinced, since seeing the bronze statue
of a boxer which Lanciani unearthed in excavating the Baths of
Constantine in 1885, that this statue is no other than an early marble
setting forth the same subject. To me it is the effigy of a fighting
brute. Whatever his name or his profession may have been, he has become
known the world over as Pasquino, and satires and sarcasms similar to
those which he is supposed to have uttered to the amusement and
edification of the Romans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have
become known as pasquinades all over the world.

Italians like to write stories concerning historic incidents and to
embellish them with a veneer of verisimilitude. They like particularly
to give them a personal note, deprecatory or laudatory. When the
Egyptian obelisk was being forced to a perpendicular position in the
Piazza of St. Peter's, the crowd had been admonished under penalty of
death to be silent. The stillness of the piazza, broken only by the
creaking of the ropes, was suddenly torn asunder by a shout of "Wet the
ropes." Thus the famous obelisk was preserved intact, and the man whose
discernment had accomplished it, instead of having his head cut off, was
allowed to furnish the palms for St. Peter's every Palm Sunday.
Incidentally he was ennobled, and since that time his reward has been
the family's chief asset. In the same way, one of the river gods of the
fountain set up in the middle of the Piazza Navona seems to be drawing a
mantle up over his head while the others, those of the Danube, the
Ganges, and the Rio della Plata, are looking straight ahead. Bernini,
who built the fountain, says that Nile was so shocked by the façade
which Borromini, a contemporary architect, added to the Church of St.
Agnes, which is immediately in front of it, that he had to veil his
face.

The story of Pasquino is that he asked questions concerning the conduct
of the reigning power, which, of course, in those days was the pope, and
made reflections which Marforio, the river god which stood between the
horse-tamers in the Piazza della Quirinale, answered. Pasquino, in
short, became the organ of public opinion, and it was not subject to the
censor, for the authors prudently kept out of sight. His most poisonous
venom and destructive wrath were directed against popes and cardinals.
If he said the things that he is alleged to have said about Alexander VI
and Innocent XI (the holy man who started the Inquisition), it is easy
to understand that one of their successors wished to throw him into the
bottom of the Tiber, the resting-place of countless priceless objects of
art for many centuries. As a matter of fact, however, the stories about
Pasquino to be found in every guide-book are, like many other stories
when run to earth, largely fiction.

Thirty years ago there was published in the _Nuova Antologia_ an article
by Domenico Gnoli which sets forth the real history of Pasquino. When
Cardinal Carraffa went to live in the Braschi Palace he had the statue
set up at one of the corners, and there it has since remained. In those
days religious processions were as common as automobiles and bicycles
are to-day. The priests in them often rested at this corner, and it
became the custom to make up the statue to represent different
personages, and the man who was intrusted with this task happened to be
a professor in the adjacent university. He encouraged his boys to write
epilogues, elegies, and epigrams which they pasted or stuck on the
statue. At first these were purely literary efforts, juvenile flights to
Parnassus, but later they took on a political and social flavor, while
still later they became concerned with the doings of the Curia. These
pasquinades have been collected in book form, and some of the volumes
exist at the present time. The majority, however, have been
lost--perished in flames, destroyed as having no value, or disappeared
in other ways. Thus the statue was initiated as a news-bearer or organ
of public opinion.

Immediately across the road from the statue there was a tailor or barber
shop, and the name of the chief operator was Pasquino. It was in this
shop that the messages stuck on the statue were collected, deciphered,
and discussed, and when the witty tailor died they gave his name to the
statue and thus immortality was thrust upon him. In reality, after the
cessation of the publications, "Carmina quæ ad Pasquillum fuerunt posita
in anno," and the murder of the professor who had encouraged his
students to put forth their youthful efforts, men groaning under the
oppression of their rulers, men big with ideas of what we now call
liberty, men in whom the germs of freedom and equality had been
implanted, saw a fairly safe way of getting their sentiments before the
public, and they utilized Pasquino as a forum from which they could
radiate their ideas and their sentiments. During the entire sixteenth
century these men conveyed to the Borgias and to Julius II and Paul III
and Innocent X and Innocent XI and Pius VI an expression of their
feeling and conviction concerning their conduct, individually and
collectively. Whether these contributions had anything to do with
shaping public opinion and leading up to the great Reformation, it is
impossible to say.

Whatever Pasquino accomplished or didn't accomplish seems not to concern
him, for there he sits tranquilly upon six blocks of volcanic stone,
indifferent to the passing show and to the transpirations of the world.

A few paces beyond the Palazzo Braschi I suddenly come upon one of the
most attractive and alluring piazzas in Rome, the Piazza Navona, or, as
it is sometimes called, the Circo Agonale. By its oblong form, its
seductive symmetry, its elaborate decorations--three beautiful
fountains, the central one surmounted by an Egyptian obelisk which once
stood in the Circus of Maxentius; by its boundaries, which include the
Palazzo Pamfili, the Church of S. Agnese, and the Church of S. Giacomo
of the Spaniards, and innumerable small and large houses--it succeeds in
conveying to the observer, who is susceptible to æsthetic impressions,
sensations which are as purely pleasurable as anything can possibly be.
Were it not for the distinctively Italian architecture one might easily
imagine that he was in the centre of some provincial large city of
France. It has, more than any other public square that I have ever been
in, that quality which we speak of as foreign. No two buildings are
alike, and, mean though many of them are, and especially toward the
northern end, they blend in such a way as to produce a perfect harmony
of color and architectural effect. In olden times they held races here,
and I can imagine how marvellous a sight it must have been with the
palaces and houses gayly decked with flags and drapery, rich rugs
hanging from the window-sills, on which leaned beautiful ladies, frail
and strong, attended solicitously, perhaps watchfully, by cavaliers and
admirers, and the square below filled with the pleasure-loving crowd
whose conduct betrayed nothing else save a desire to be amused and
diverted. During the summer I often sat for a half-hour on my way home
in this square, and, while watching the countless children from the
surrounding tenements in those simple indulgences which they call play,
tried to fancy some of the events that had taken place in the square and
in the palaces and churches bordering it.

It was in the Pamfili Palace, built by Innocent X in 1650 for his
predatory and dissolute sister-in-law, Olympia Malacchimi, that the
fortunes of the Pamfili family began. Here she sold bishoprics and
beneficences, and here she externalized that conduct which brought
infamy on her name. What a story an account of the intimate doings of
that family would make! Their palace in the Corso is one of the most
beautiful Renaissance residences in the world, and their villa on the
Janiculum is an approximation to a rural paradise. All that is left of
the family is a faded, sad, suggestible, middle-aged princess, whose
English appearance and manner betray a lifelong habit of emotional
suppression, and one son who is eking out his miserable days in the
mountains of Switzerland.

Immediately adjacent to the palace is the Church of St. Agnes, built
about the same time and on the spot where the girl whose name it
commemorates was supposed to have had miraculous delivery from
humiliations and outrages similar to those to which the Belgian nuns
were subjected by the Germans. I say "Germans" advisedly, for I am
unable to understand why any one should think for a moment that the term
"Hun," so widely applied to them, carries with it any such obloquy or
opprobrium as the simple name "German." I venture to say that in years
to come, when any one wishes to describe abominations, cruelties,
savageries for which no name is adequate, he will use the term
"Germanic." Then even the most inexperienced in crime and sin will get a
glimmering of what is meant.

It is related that when Agnes was about fourteen years old she was taken
to a lupanalia and there, bereft of all her clothing, became the target
of the word and the conduct of a group of lubricitous monsters.
Overwhelmed with shame, her head fell upon her chest and she prayed.
Immediately her hair took on such miraculous growth that it concealed
her nakedness. But there were other more startling experiences in store
for her. For her rebelliousness and general contumacy she was condemned
to be burned alive. When the flames were about to devour her they
suddenly became possessed of a dual quality, one radiating refreshment
upon her, the other destruction upon her executioners. The lady had many
other experiences which have long since been denied her sex, but it is
popularly believed that she devotes much attention in her heavenly home
to seeing that maidens who request her in a proper frame of mind and
body, which for the latter is twenty-four hours' abstinence from
everything but pure spring water, are provided with husbands. It would
be trivial of me to add that she probably is overworked these days when
so many prospective husbands are at the front, but I have no real
information on the matter, and I sincerely hope that the nubile Italians
have no serious difficulty in finding spouses.

From here my route is to the Corso, which at this early hour is nearly
deserted. There are many streets that I may take: one that leads to the
Pantheon; another that goes past the Palazzo Madama and other
interesting public and private buildings. As a rule I take the latter,
for it leads me to the Via Condotti, which ends in the Piazza di Spagna.
Before the war this piazza was the rendezvous of American tourists. The
vendors of objects of art and of Roman pearls, the antiquarian who had
his wares fabricated around the corner or in the Trastevere, the dealer
in genuine Raphaels and Tintorettos, the rapacious dealers in old books
are all there, but most of them are on their knees in their shops with
half-closed shutters, praying for the war to end so that the gullible
rich Americans may come again. Their prayers are heard and their
supplications will soon be answered. Meanwhile I cast a glance at the
wretched monument erected a half-century ago to commemorate the
promulgation of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, look lovingly
at the semi-sunken boat-shaped fountain just in front of the steps, and
begin slowly to mount the most impressive steps in Rome, which seem to
lead up like heavenly stairs to the massive, double-belfried Church of
Trinità dei Monti, with the graceful Egyptian obelisk in front of it.
Nowadays the steps are not so picturesque as I have often seen them in
peace time, when lovely artists' models, picturesque loafers and the
exponents of the _dolce far niente_ collected on the steps and made, in
conjunction with the flowers and plants that were exhibited there for
sale, an almost unique picture. It is now deserted save for some
hazardous Greek or Italian who attempts to eke out a living by disposing
of flowers that have been camouflaged to look fresh. Nevertheless the
staircase and its environment make an appeal which repeated visits serve
only to increase. From the top of it, in the little square in front of
the church, one gets an attractive, though limited, view of the city and
of Monte Mario, but it is a view that convinces him that he is in a city
quite unlike any other in the world.

A picturesque old woman who sells papers at the bottom of the stairs has
made a regular customer out of me, and I scan the morning news as I
ascend the steps, and by the time I have reached the top I find thoughts
of beauty and of the good old days are being replaced by thoughts of
work and of the war. As I walk across the Pincian Hill I am conscious
that I am big with joy at what the past twenty-four hours have
accomplished at the battle-front, and throbbing with anticipation of
what the following day will bring forth. That it will soon bring
victory, complete and absolute, even the professional warrior is now
forced to admit, and soon we shall bask again in the light of a livable
world.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE AMERICAN EAGLE CHANGES HIS PERCH

The shrieks of the American eagle have been joyous sounds to American
ears since 1776, when we discovered his capacity to render our hymn of
freedom. Heretofore our national bird has been in best voice on his
native soil. When brought to Europe by statesman or hero, by citizen or
delegate, it was found that certain conditions there impaired his
vocality and the flap of his wings. Suddenly in 1918 all this changed.
Conditions were not only favorable--they were ideal. Perched upon a
parapet of Guildhall, sitting majestically on the Eiffel Tower, alight
on the campanile that crowns the Capitoline Hill, his shrieks conveyed a
message to the people of Europe whose ears have awaited it longingly for
centuries, and the flapping of his wings created a current that
stimulated and energized them. Floating majestically through the
empyrean, he was to those human beings, weary of war, of tyranny, and of
privilege, what the dove was to the occupants of the ark--the emblem of
salvation. Nothing could then convince the peoples of Italy that this
harbinger of hope had not been liberated by Woodrow Wilson. I cannot
believe that the American eagle has permanently forsaken the United
States of America. I anticipate hearing there again the familiar scream.
One tolerates him better at home than in Europe, but I must accord the
bird great sapiency in having selected the autumn of 1918 to give the
European people the opportunity to judge of the quality and quantity of
his vocal production.

It is a platitude to say that no prophet or potentate, no king or
conqueror was ever greeted with such spontaneous, whole-hearted, genuine
enthusiasm as President Wilson was greeted in Italy, and, if I may judge
from newspaper accounts, the reception which was offered him there was
not unlike that which he received in England and France. He went to
Italy when its people were incensed by the conduct of the newly fledged
Jugoslavs, and when the press was in the throes of inflammatory polemics
over the fate of the Treaty of London. It was widely known in Italy that
President Wilson was not in sympathy with the Sonninian alleged
imperialistic policies and that he was fully in sympathy with the
Jugoslav aspirations. Nevertheless, the Italians, from royalty to
peasant, welcomed him with a spontaneity and warmth, an enthusiasm and
whole-heartedness, a genuineness and devotion that was as moving as
anything I ever witnessed. The hour of his arrival in Rome was not
definitely known until shortly before he arrived. But despite this
hundreds of people remained in the street all night, and thousands of
them gathered there before sunrise in order that they might not miss the
opportunity of looking upon him whom they firmly believed to be the
apostle of liberty and freedom, the herald of light and brotherly love.
It was not curiosity alone that prompted them to this effort and
sacrifice of comfort. Curiosity undoubtedly entered into it, but the
potent reason for the outpouring that took place that memorable January
was that their presence might convey to our President an expression of
their esteem and an earnest of their appreciation of his efforts.

No American, though he had the heart of a frog and the emotional caliber
of a lizard, could suppress the succession of thrills that mounted from
his bowels to his brain on seeing with what dignity, suavity, and
self-respecting composure their Chief Magistrate comported himself as he
was transported through the Via Nazionale, seated beside the most
democratic and beloved king in the world. Though the American spectator
had spent his time impregnating with venom darts which he believed he
would gladly drive into the President, he had to admit that there was a
man who more than satisfied all of Kipling's "Ifs." When he encountered
him later in the Palazzo del Drago acting as host at the table of his
country's charming ambassadress, or at Montecitorio, where he told the
Solons of Italy of his country's hopes, ideals, aspirations, and
willingness, or in less solemn moments on the Capitoline, when he
received the honorary citizenship of Rome, he knew that his first
impressions were founded in verity and he lent a willing ear to the
screech of the American eagle which revealed itself throughout the
entire Italian press. Every city of Italy clamored for a visit, and
though he spent but a few minutes in Genoa and a few hours in Milan, the
outpouring of the people to welcome him was no less remarkable than it
was in Rome. The tribute which Europe gave Mr. Wilson seemed to depress
many of his countrymen on the other side of the Atlantic. It is an
extraordinary thing that while Europe rocked with his fame America
reeked with his infamy.

After having lived two years in Italy I found many things about the
Italians difficult to understand. After having lived fifty years in the
United States of America I find some things about the Americans beyond
comprehension. Nothing is so enigmatic as their attitude toward Woodrow
Wilson, the man who was accorded higher esteem in Europe than was ever
vouchsafed mortal man, and who gave and has since given earnest of such
accord. From the day he decided to represent our country in the Peace
Conference the papers and magazines began to contain the material from
which could readily be formulated a new hymn of hate. What was the
genesis of this display? What was the cause of this distrust? From
whence did this venom emanate? How could a man whose life was a mirror
of integrity, whose ideals were of the loftiest, and who attempted to
conform his conduct to them excite such contempt? Why should the only
statesman who had revealed the ability to formulate a plan which, put in
operation, led to cessation of hostilities, who was the leader in
formulating the terms of peace, and who insisted, and had his insistence
allowed, that it should incorporate a covenant whose enforcement would
make for perpetual peace, be hated and distrusted, vilified and
traduced, thwarted and misrepresented by so many of his countrymen? What
had he done, by commission or omission, that such treatment should be
accorded him? I propose to attempt to answer these questions and thus to
suggest why he has been a failure as President. I know the replies
usually given to these questions by his depreciators and defamers. "His
nature is so imperious and his temper so tyrannical that he cannot
co-operate with others; he neither solicits advice nor heeds counsel; he
selects his coadjutors, aides, and advisers from those whom he knows he
can dominate; the passport to his favor is flattery, and intimacy with
him is maintained only by the cement of agreement; he neither made
preparation for war when there was ample time for doing so nor did he
wage war until months after repeated _casus belli_; he is hypocritical
in having sought and accomplished election under the slogan 'He kept us
out of war,' and immediately on being elected he 'thrust' the country
into war; he was 'too proud to fight' in 1916, but keen to fight in
1917; he has hebrewphilia and popophobia; he is a socialist masquerading
as a liberal; he is a Bolshevik beneath the mask of a radical. In brief,
he is temperamentally unfit to be President of the United States;
intellectually and morally unfit to represent its people; and withal so
completely under the dominion of an insatiate ambition to be the
greatest man the world has ever known that every kindly human feeling
has been crowded from him."

Intelligent, educated men who have never seen him, who know little of
his career save that he was president of Princeton University and
governor of the State of New Jersey and twice President of the United
States, elected by the Democratic party, hate him as if he were a bitter
personal enemy, malign him as if he had injured their reputation for
honesty and probity, calumniate him as though he were a man without
character, depreciate him as though his career were barren of signal
accomplishment, and distrust his motives and procedures as though he had
once, or many times, betrayed them. Men who are unable to give the
smallest specificity to their dislike of him feel that they add to their
stature by detracting from his accomplishments and defaming him. Not one
of them with whom I have talked has been able to state the facts of his
disagreement and rupture with the trustees of Princeton University. My
understanding was that he insisted that the university should submit to
certain reforms that would make it democratic in reality as well as in
name, and that would enhance its pedagogical usefulness, and that there
should not be a privileged class in the university, viz., members of
exclusive clubs whose portals were opened by money. He maintained that
his training as an educator, his experience as an administrator, his
accomplishment as a student of history and as an interpreter of events,
his experience with men, entitled him to a judgment concerning the needs
of such an institution that should be given a hearing, and he contended
that his recommendations, rather than those of trustees whose training
had been largely in the world of affairs, be put in operation and at
least be given a trial. He had the courage to jeopardize his very bread
and butter, and that of his family, at a time in his life when his
physical forces had reached their zenith rather than sacrifice what he
believed to be a principle. The men who were permitted to take Woodrow
Wilson's measure in that contest had no more idea of his stature than if
they were blind. They would have laughed to scorn the idea that five
years later the people of the United States would select him for their
president. It was in this episode that his repute not to be able to do
team-work with his equals and his inferiors originated. Time has shown
that it isn't only a question of being able to do team-work, he cannot
do his best work in an atmosphere of friction and dissent. It is as
impossible for him to yield a position which he has taken, and which we
will assume he believes to be right, as it is impossible for the magnet
to yield the needle that it has attracted; therefore he adopts the only
course for him--he doesn't enter contests, save golf with his physician.

His cabinet meetings are a farce, so say they who have never attended
one and who have never even spoken to a cabinet member. He selects
pygmies for his cabinet and for his aides in order that they may proffer
him no advice, resent no contradiction or protest indignities to their
offices. This in face of the fact that he and his cabinet and his aides
have conditioned the only miracle of modern times, namely, throwing a
whole country, millions of whose people were adverse to war, into a
bellicose state which was never before witnessed; conditioning and
transporting the men and material resources of that country across the
Atlantic and into the fighting lines at a crucial moment, at a time when
the backs of the Allies were against the wall, according to the
statements of their own authorized spokesmen; who succeeded in
engendering in the composite mind of the American people a determination
to win the war that was more potent than men or weapons; who impregnated
the composite soul of the Allies with a faith that the world would be an
acceptable abode for the common people once the enemy was crushed, that
transcended in its intensity the faith of the Christian martyrs; who
filled the heart of every statesman of the Allied nations with a hope
and belief that there was within him the masterful mind that would
conduct their legions to victory and salvation. If he and his pygmies
accomplished this, I am one who maintains they are myrmidons and giants.
But they didn't do it, his detractors say. The rejoinder to which is: "I
know, a little bird did it!"

If we had entered the war after the sinking of the _Lusitania_, when the
wise men of the West say we should have gone in, countless lives and
inestimable expenditures would have been spared. Where is the man in the
United States of America to-day who has revealed the Jove-like mind that
entitles him to make such sentient statement? When he is found, how can
he possibly know? What delivery of thought, idea, conception, execution
has he ever made that entitles him to be heard, not to say believed? How
can any one possibly know what would have been the result of our
entrance into the war at that time? If any one thing is responsible for
America's efficiency in the war, it is that it had the American people
fused into one man with one mind, determined to win the war. I am sure
that I encountered nothing in the United States in my travel from the
Atlantic to the Pacific and back again in the spring of 1916 that made
me believe that the people of our country wanted war, or that there
could be developed in them at that time a sentiment which would make for
such internal resistance of the people as they displayed in the spring
of 1917 and continued to display until November 11, 1918. I cannot speak
from personal knowledge, for I was not in the United States during the
year of its war efficiency, but I am told that there was never a whisper
of disloyalty or a syllable of disparagement of the President personally
during that time. But many of those who were silent then are strident
now. Their enforced silence has enhanced the carry-power of their
voices, and their clamor prevents the harmony that the world is seeking.
They not only defame Wilson, but they contend that the part we played in
the war has been overestimated. It has been, but not by us. It has been
evaluated by those whom it was our most sacred privilege to aid. They
neither minimize our efforts not underestimate our accomplishment. The
British know that they were steadfast; the French realize that they were
resolute; the Italians appreciate that they were brave. We know it, but
that does not prevent us from realizing the magnitude of the rôle we
played, and the man who was responsible for it is the man to whom the
world, save a political party in the United States, gives thanks and
expresses appreciation. His name is Woodrow Wilson. Americans do not
boast of the part they played in winning the war, but they do encourage
that which is far worse than boasting--lying about it, particularly when
the motive for such perversion of truth is deprecation of their Chief
Executive.

He is an idealist and theorist. He is the kind of idealist who destroyed
the Democratic machine in the State of New Jersey, which had been the
synonym for corruption in politics for a generation; the kind of
idealist who put through the Underwood Tariff Bill, which at one stroke
did more to strangle the unnatural mother of privilege than any measure
in the past twenty years; the kind of idealist who, when the transport
system of the entire country threatened to be hopelessly paralyzed by
reason of the determination of the railway magnates to refuse the
demands of locomotive engineers that their working-day should consist of
eight hours, sent for representatives of the plutocrats and the
proletariats and told what they were to do and when they were to do it,
and the whole civilized world approved. He is the idealist who has done
more to make our government a republican government representative of
the people and not of party bosses than any one in the memory of man. He
is the idealist who is a scholar, a thinker, a statesman, a creator, an
administrator, and a man of vision. More than that, he is an efficiency
expert in the realm of world-ordering. It is to our inestimable
misfortune that his personality has successfully obstacled his projects.

His secretary of war is a failure; his secretary of state is a
figurehead; his secretary of finance is his family, and so on _ad
nauseam_.

I am not a competent judge whether Mr. Baker has been a good secretary
of war or not, but I am sure that he is not so unfit as Simon Cameron
was. No one has said of him: "Cameron is utterly ignorant and regardless
of the course of things and probable result. Selfish and openly
discourteous to the President. Obnoxious to the country. Incapable
either of organizing details or conceiving and executing general plans"
(Nicolay). President Wilson has never had to say of any of his cabinet
what Lincoln said of Seward: "The point and pith of the senators'
complaint was that they charged him, Seward, if not with infidelity,
with indifference, with want of earnestness in the war, with want of
sympathy with the country, and especially with a too great ascendancy
and control of the President and measures of administration. While they
seemed to believe in my honesty, they also appeared to think that when I
had in me any good purpose or intention Seward tried to suck it out of
me unperceived."

So far as I know, no one has characterized President Wilson's mentality
as "painful imbecility," as Stanton characterized Lincoln a few months
before the latter appointed him secretary of war.

He has been accused of not surrounding himself with the ablest men of
his party or of the country, in the conduct of the affairs of the nation
during the period when the country was emerging from the position of
aloofness from world politics which it had maintained from the time
Washington warned of the danger of "entangling foreign alliances." But
it does not convince me that a man is not competent to do the job that
the President has given him because his training has been as a
stockbroker and his activities on the bear side of the market. That is
not the kind of training that one would give his son whom he wished to
see become a statesman, but it occurs to me that the task entrusted to
him may be one which a statesman is not best fitted to handle. It may be
a job that a man with the mentality and training and moral possessions
that he selected could do better than any one else.

What earnest of superior constructive, intellectual powers has any
public man in the United States displayed that justifies
self-constituted critics in saying that the men selected by President
Wilson are not their peers? It is universally admitted that President
Wilson has a more masterful and comprehensive grasp of politics in
America, using that word in its conventional, every-day sense and
meaning, particularly a familiarity with bosses and the "machine," than
any President ever had. No one denies his statesmanship. He is,
therefore, a competent judge of who was best fitted to do the work which
it was necessary to do in order that the programme which he formulated
for the benefit of humanity might be executed, and particularly that the
yoke might be lifted from the necks of the oppressed nations and that
another world calamity in the shape of war might be avoided. His choice
of aides and representatives was not acceptable to men who put party
interests before public interests, who are willing to sacrifice world
weal for worldly advancement, and who lash themselves into a frenzied
state by repetition of the admonitions of Washington or Monroe. It does
not detract from the glory of the father of his country, or from the
lustre of great interpreters of national law, to say that the principles
that they enunciated and the practices that they initiated centuries ago
are not necessarily those that should guide us now. It would be just as
legitimate to say that physicians should follow the teachings of
Hippocrates or Galen, because the one was the father of medicine and the
other its greatest expositor, as it would to say that we must follow
slavishly the teachings of Washington and Monroe.

That the American Peace Commission did not contain men of the mental
caliber of Mr. Root or Mr. Lodge, that the reservoirs of expert
knowledge were not drained and taken to Paris, that our Commission as a
whole was less sophisticated, less perceptive and apperceptive, than
that of Great Britain, let us say, is to be regretted, just as we regret
the effects of some fallacious judgment or specious decision of our
youth. There were ways of offsetting them, however, and in this
particular instance Congress was the way. The President did not go
beyond his prerogative in selecting the Peace Commission. The public
elected him to make these selections, as well as to do other things. If
the people do not want that such selection should be his privilege and
power, they have only to say it at the polls. The Eighteenth Amendment
was not difficult of accomplishment. Perhaps time will show that Mr.
Wilson "guessed right" oftener in the selection of his cabinet than any
predecessor.

Mr. Josephus Daniels was the target of scorn and the butt of ridicule
from the time he went into the cabinet until he began to make
preparations for war, but the rumor has reached me that his efforts were
fairly satisfactory to the hypercritical American public. The
President's critics are jealous of the prodigious powers which an
unauthorized representative of the government has in the affairs of the
country, and they do not understand why, if he is the paragon of virtue
that his position seems to indicate he is, the President did not put him
on the commission. But again I say the President knows his limitations
and the public has only recently discovered them. He may short-circuit
some of them by means of Colonel House. He may find him "great in
counsel and mighty in work," or he may have habituated himself to buy
only gold that he has tried in the fire himself. It is his privilege and
no one can gainsay it.

He is silent and ungetatable. Silence has been considered a sign of
strength in man since the days of Hammurabi, and the greater the man the
more solitary he is. If Mr. Wilson were twice as great, even Mr. Tumulty
would not be allowed to see him!

Wilson has been accused of pilfering his idea of the League of Nations
from the Duc de Sully and from the Abbé of Saint Pierre. Enemies
animated by malice and fired by envy have striven to show that the
famous fourteen statements or principles were his only by the right of
possession or enunciation; that he resurrected the doctrines of Mazzini,
dressed them up and paraded them as his own. It would be difficult to be
patient with such critics if one did not know the history of
epoch-making events in the world's progress. In truth, the public is
resentful that it was not consulted. It is umbraged that it was not
allowed to make suggestions. It is spiteful because it was treated with
contempt. The public manifested the same quality of spleen toward
Lincoln, only the quantity was greater. In brief, the public professes
not to have any confidence in Mr. Wilson's wisdom, and this in face of
the fact that up to date he has displayed more wisdom than all the
Solons in America combined, and I can say this the more unprejudicedly
as a Republican than I could if I were a member of the party that
elected Mr. Wilson.

Mr. Wilson is disliked for emotional, not intellectual, reasons.
Although he has probably done more to engrave the graving upon the stone
that will remove the iniquity of the land than any man who has ever
lived, "we don't like" him. There must be some good reason for this
other than envy, jealousy, and resentment, and I propose to inquire for
these reasons in Mr. Wilson's emotional make-up.

Whether I "like" Mr. Wilson or not does not enter into it. I never knew
Pascal or Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin, and still I am sure I could
make a statement of their qualities and possessions that would elicit
commendation from one who had known them. As a matter of fact, personal
contact with men from whose activities the world dates epochs is not
conducive to personal liking. I cannot fancy liking Rousseau. I am sure
I should not have liked Voltaire. I can even understand why Lincoln was
despised and scoffed at by his contemporaries. I am one of those who
believe Mr. Wilson is a great man, but I am not concerned to convince
others of it. I am concerned alone to explain why he is not beloved of
the people.

The esteem or disesteem in which Mr. Wilson is held in this country is
due to his personality, and this does not seem to me to be enigmatic. He
has the mind of a Jove but the heart of a batrachian. It is to the
former that he owed his rise, it is the latter that conditioned his
fall. If we were not satisfied to have such a man sail our ship of state
in smooth as well as in turbulent seas, in calm and in tornado, we had
opportunity to drop him from the bridge gracefully in 1916. Although his
possessions and deficits were not so universally known then as now,
still they were generally recognized and widely discussed. Instead of
dropping our pilot we re-elected him. This could only be construed by
him as approval of his conduct. When he continued to display his
inherent qualities he excited our ire. We called him names and neither
forgave nor wished to forgive him.

Perhaps no one has ever had the opportunity to fix his position so
indestructibly at the apogee of human accomplishment by permitting
himself kindly indulgences or what is commonly called human feelings as
Woodrow Wilson had. If when Roosevelt sought to raise a regiment or
division to take to France the President had been sympathetic to the
project and had wiped out with a stroke of the pen the obvious
difficulties that stood in the way of such project, it would have
thrilled the people of this country of every color, or every complexion,
political and somatic, as nothing else could possibly do. It would not
have taken from his prestige as commander-in-chief of the army one jot
or tittle, nor would it have interfered in the smallest way with the
disciplinary unity which is the vital spark of the army.

If he had said of General Leonard Wood, "Father, forgive him, for he
kneweth not that which he did," and had the emotional exaltation which
every one has when he forgives an enemy, and given him a command to
which his past performances entitled him, a few soreheads and soulless
pygmies wearing the uniform of the United States Army and their
congressional wire-pullers might have resented it, but the people by and
large would have said: "Our President is a big man: he is magnanimous,
he is a man who walks in the pathway of the Lord, he forgives his
enemies." General Wood would have received the recompense for having
prepared the way for the selective draft that he deserved, for even
though he did it in a tactless and tasteless way, he made a contribution
of incalculable value to the victory of our arms. Had he sent for the
chairman of the committee on foreign affairs and conferred with him on
the selection of the Peace Conference personnel, had he shown some signs
of deference to that committee, had he discussed with them his peace
plan proposals and taken note of their suggestions, modifying his
proposals in accordance with their convictions when to do so did not
yield a fundamental point, we should not have been on the horns of the
dilemma we were for a year following the President's last return from
Paris, and the world would have been spared discomfiture--yea, even
agony.

Mr. Wilson knows the rules of the game, but he does not know how to play
fair. He knows that contests and strife elicit his most deforming
qualities--intolerance, arrogance, and emotional sterility; hence he
hedges himself about in every possible way to avoid them. He knows that
the sure way for him is to play the game alone.

Woodrow Wilson does not love his fellow men. He loves them in the
abstract, but not in the flesh. He is concerned with their fate, their
destiny, their travail en masse, but the predicaments, perplexities, and
prostrations of the individual or groups of individuals make no appeal
to him. He does not refresh his soul by bathing it daily in the milk of
human kindness. He says with his lips that he loves his fellow men, but
there is no accompanying emotional glow, none of the somatic or
spiritual accompaniments which are the normal ancillæ of love's display.
Hence he does not respect their convictions when they are opposed to his
own, he does not value their counsels. His determination to put things
through in the way he has convinced himself they should be put through
is not susceptible to change from influences that originate without his
own mind. He has made many false steps, but none of them so conditioned
the fall from the exalted position the world had given to him as his
determination to go to Paris and represent this country at the Peace
Conference. If one may judge what the verdict of all the voters in this
country would have been, had the question of his going been submitted to
them, from the expressions of opinion of those one encounters in his
daily life, it would be no exaggeration to say that three-fourths of the
voters would say he should not have gone. I think I may say truthfully
that I never encountered a person who approved his decision. It is
possible that his entourage or cabinet and counsellors did not contain a
daring soul who volunteered such advice, but it is incredible that both
they and the President did not sense the judgment of their countrymen as
it was reflected in the newspapers. However, it is likely that he would
have gone had he known that the majority of the voters of this country
were opposed to it.

In contact with people he gives himself the air of listening with
deference and indeed of being beholden to judgment and opinion, but in
reality it is an artifice which he puts off when he returns to the
dispensing centre of the word and of the law just as he puts off his
gloves and his hat. Nothing is so illustrative of this unwillingness to
heed counsel emanating from authority and given wholly for his benefit
as his conduct toward his physician during the trip around the country
in September, 1919. The newspaper representatives who accompanied him
say that he had often severe and protracted headache, was frequently
nervous and irritable, sometimes dizzy, and always looked ill. These
symptoms, conjoined with the fact that for a long time he had high blood
pressure, were danger signals which no physician would dare neglect. It
is legitimate to infer that his physician apprised him and counselled
him accordingly. Despite it Mr. Wilson persisted, until nature exacted
the penalty and by so doing he jeopardized his own life and seriously
disordered the equilibrium of affairs of the country. Indeed, obstinacy
is one of his most maiming characteristics.

The President attempts to mask with facial urbanity and a smile in
verbal contact with people, and with the subjunctive mood in written
contact, his third most deforming defect of character, namely, his
inability to enter into a contest of any sort in which there is strife
without revealing his obsession to win, his emotional frigidity, his
lack of love for his fellow men. These explain why he did not win out to
a larger degree in Paris, and why he did not win out with Congress. When
he attempts to play such game his artificed civility, cordiality,
amiability are so discordant with the real man that they become as
offensive as affectations of manner or speech always are, and instead of
placating the individual toward whom they are manifest, or facilitating
a modus vivendi, they offend and make rapport with him impossible.

Probably nothing would strike Mr. Wilson's intimates as so wholly untrue
as the statement that he is cruel, yet, nevertheless, I feel convinced
that there is much latent cruelty in his make-up, and that every now and
then he is powerless to inhibit it. He was undoubtedly wholly within his
rights in dismissing Mr. Lansing from his cabinet, but the way in which
he did it constitutes refinement of cruelty. He may have had a contempt
for him because he had not insisted on playing first fiddle in Mr.
Wilson's orchestra, the part for which he was engaged, but that did not
justify Mr. Wilson in flaying him publicly because he attempted to keep
the orchestra together and tuned up as it were during Mr. Wilson's
illness.

Selfishness is another conspicuous deforming trait of the President. He
is more selfish than cruel. Undoubtedly his friends can point to many
acts of generosity that deny the allegation. Some of the most selfish
people in the world give freely of their counsel, money, and time.
Selfishness and miserliness are not interchangeable terms. He is the
summation of selfishness because he puts his decisions and
determinations above those of any or all others. It matters not who the
others may be. Until some one comes forward to show that he has ever
been known to yield his judgments and positions to those of others I
must hold to this view. He is ungenerous of sentiment and unfair by
implication. Nothing better exemplifies his ungenerosity than his
refusal to appear before the Senate or a committee of them previous to
his return to Paris after his visit here and say to them that he had
determined to incorporate all their suggestions in the Treaty and in the
Covenant. He did incorporate them, but he did not give the Senate the
satisfaction of telling them that he was going to do so or that the
instrument would be improved by so doing. It has been said of him that
he is the shrewdest politician who has been in the presidential chair in
the memory of man. That is a euphemistic way of saying he knows mob
psychology and individual weakness, but his reputation in this respect
has been injured by his failure to be generous and gracious to Congress.

The receptive side of his nature is neither sensitive nor intuitive, nor
is his reactive side productive or creative. He is merely ratiocinative
and constructive, consciously excogitative and inventive. In other