f the anomalous
social and political situation in Rome: "We Italians are naturally
republicans, and, if it were a question of any other reigning family, we
should have the republic. But we feel that we owe everything, the very
existence of the nation, to the house of Savoy, and we are loyal to it
in our gratitude. Especially we are true to the present king." It is
known, of course, that Menotti Garibaldi continues the republican that
his father always was, but I heard of his saying that, if a republic
were established, Victor Emmanuel III. would be overwhelmingly chosen
the first president. It is the Socialists who hold off unrelentingly
from the monarchy, and not the republicans, as they can be differenced
from them. One of the well-known Roman anomalies is that some members of
the oldest families are or have been Socialists; and such a noble was
reproached because he would not go to thank the king in recognition of
some signal proof of his public spirit and unselfish patriotism. He
owned the generosity of the king's behavior and his claim upon popular
acknowledgment, but he said that he had taught the young men of his
party the duty of ignoring the monarchy, and he could not go counter to
the doctrine he had preached.

If I venture to speak now of a very extraordinary trait of the municipal
situation at Rome, it must be without the least pretence to authority or
to more than such superficial knowledge as the most incurious visitor to
Rome can hardly help having. In the capital of Christendom, where the
head of the Church dwells in a tradition of supremacy hardly less
Italian than Christian, the syndic, or mayor, is a Jew, and not merely a
Jew, but an alien Jew, English by birth and education, a Londoner and an
Oxford man. More yet, he is a Freemason, which in Italy means things
anathema to the Church, and he is a very prominent Freemason. With
reference to the State, his official existence, though not inimical, is
through the fusion of the political parties which elected him hardly
less anomalous. This combination overthrew the late Clerical city
government, and it included Liberals, Republicans, Socialists, and all
the other anti-Clericals. Whatever liberalism or republicanism means,
socialism cannot mean less than the economic solution of regality and
aristocracy in Europe, and in Italy as elsewhere. It does not mean the
old-fashioned revolution; it means simply the effacement of all social
differences by equal indu