elements. Abstemious to a degree
impossible in a more northern climate, the Italian worker in town or
village demands little beyond macaroni, polenta, or chestnuts, with oil
or soup, and wine as the occasional luxury; and thus a woman who works
fourteen or even fifteen hours a day for a lire and a half, and at times
only a lire (20c.), still has enough for absolute needs, and barely
looks beyond.

It is only when the little bundle has ceased to be _bambino_ that she
thinks of a larger life as possible, or wonders why women who work more
hours than men, and often do a man's labor, are paid only half the men's
rate.

In Rome, where these lines are written, the story is the same. There are
few statistics from which one can glean any definite idea of numbers,
or even of occupations. The army swallows all the young men, precisely
as in France; but women slip less readily into responsible positions,
and thus earn in less degree than in either France or Germany.

In the Ghetto swarm the crowds that have filled it for hundreds of
years, and its narrow ways hold every trade known to man's hands, as
well as every form of drudgery which here reaches its climax.

The church has decreed the relieving of poverty as one chief method of
saving rich men's souls, and thus the few attempts made by the English
colony to bring about some reconstruction of methods as well as thought
have met with every possible opposition, till, within recent years, the
necessity of industrial education has become apparent, and Italy has
inaugurated some of the best work in this direction. Beyond Italy there
has been no attempt at experiment. The work at best has been chiefly
from the outside; but whether in this form, or assisted by actual
statistics or the general investigation of others, the conclusion is
always the same, and sums up as the demand for every worker and every
master the resurrection of the old ideal of work; the doing away of
competition as it at present rules, and the substitution of
co-operation, productive as well as distributive; industrial education
for every child, rich or poor; and that and recognition of the interests
of all as a portion of our personal charge and responsibility, which, if
I name it Socialism, will be scouted as a dream of an impossible future,
but which none the less bears that name in its highest interpretation,
and is the one solution for every problem on either side the great sea,
between the eastern and wes