talian shipping companies! Germany has lost her own ships, but she
has a large business executive in the background, the administrative
organization of what was once a great mercantile marine. She has still
a preponderant power in allocating business. The Italian benefit and
the success of Italy's new policy have been reflected in the phenomenal
appreciation of the lira which during the spring of 1921 actually
gained 33 1/2 per cent in value, mounting from 110 to the pound
sterling in January to 73 in May. Such a rise in the value of the
currency naturally helps Italian industry, facilitating the import of
raw materials and coal and oil. In the summer of 1921 Italy became
glutted with coal.

Such progress is not good news in Moscow. The chief external hope of
Moscow must for long have been in Italy. And conversely the chief hope
of the Socialists in Italy must have been in the progress of Moscow's
international ideal. Not that the proletarian leaders of comfortable
Italy realized what they were advocating. They are not such idealists
in Italy as to be ready to commit national suicide for the good of
humanity as a whole, or even for the good of humanity as a class, as a
working class. But, be that as it may, the moral authority waned when
the Russo-British trading treaty was signed. Krassin killed the Third
Internationale. You do not trade with a capitalistic State in order to
destroy it. Moscow began to set up a new bourgeois class, started
shops again, and banks and private trading, and generally speaking,
having buried the devil, dug him up again.

With that, Moscow ceased to inspire the grand international solidarity
of proletariats. There was a set-back in wages over the whole world.
At the same time the strike-weapon tended to fail. May Day, 1921, was
one of the quietest of May Days. In Paris it was a joyous holiday; in
Berlin, though the jewellers ordered new steel screens for their goods,
not a window was broken; in London the gloomy coal strike pursued its
lonely road towards defeat, unsupported by even its own allies of
transport and railroad, far less by an ideal from Moscow. And
bourgeois Western Europe--and Italy not least--breathed afresh.

Rome is a spacious city. One feels that the great houses were built
originally, not on streets, but on chosen spots, and the streets came
to them. The house came to the man, and the street to the house, and
that makes a nobler city than street-contro