ers and push-carts,
footing it into the region of the fashionable hotels. They were all
laden according to their strength, and people who had never done a
stroke of work in their lives were actually carrying their own
hand-bags, rugs, and umbrella-cases. It was terrible.

It was terrible for what it was, and terrible for what it suggested, if
ever that poor dull beast of labor took the bit permanently into its
teeth, or, worse yet, hung back in the breeching and inexorably balked.
What would then become of us others, us ladies and gentlemen who had
never done a stroke of work and never wished to do one? Should we be
forced to the hard necessity of beginning? Could we remain in the
comfortable belief that we gave work, or must we be made to own
distastefully that it had always been given to us? Should we be able to
flatter ourselves with the notion that we had once had dependents
because we had money, or should we realize that we had always been
dependents because of our having money?

These were the hateful doubts which the Roman strike suggested to the
witness, or, at least, one of the witnesses, who has here the pleasure
of unburdening himself upon the reader. Yet there was something amusing
in the situation; there was a joke--that rarest of all things in
Rome--latent in it, which one suspected only from the amiable, the
all-but-smiling behavior of the strikers. There was not the slightest
disorder during the two days that the strike lasted. When it was called
off at a meeting of the unions on Saturday night, one of the seven
Sundays of the Roman week dawned upon an activity at the neighboring
cab-stand no peacefuller and not much gayer than the silence and
solitude of the mornings previous. As for the general effect in the
city, you would hardly have known that particular Sunday from those
which had gone by the names of Friday and Saturday. Throughout Italy
there is now a Sunday-closing law whose effect in a land once of joyous
Sabbaths strikes some such chill to the heart as pierces it in Boston on
that day, or in the farther eastern or western avenues of New York, when
the Family Entrances are religiously locked.

The Italian state has, in fact, so far taken the matter in charge as to
have established a secular holiday, coming once a week, which has almost
disestablished the holidays of the Church, formerly of much more
frequent occurrence. This secular holiday, which every workman has a
right to, he may neithe