nius in applied
science.

Italy is a naturally democratic and peaceable polity, and her present
imperfections will diminish rapidly with the increase of her national
maturity and stability. She will be a sane and healthy element in the
future international order.

In some respects, as in their indifference, sometimes excessive, to
foreign opinion, the French resemble the British, just as, in their
excessive sensitiveness on this point, the Italians resemble the
Americans. This is the contrast between age and youth, between nations
with a continuous tradition of centuries behind them and nations born or
reborn only yesterday.

There remains the larger contrast between the Latins on the one hand and
the Anglo-Saxons on the other. At first sight it is the latter who are
the more realistic and the more practical, the former who are the more
effusive, idealistic and poetical. But, as Mr Norman Douglas admirably
puts it in _South Wind_, "Enclosed within the soft imagination of the
_homo Mediterraneus_ lies a kernel of hard reason. The Northerner's
hardness is on the surface; his core, his inner being, is apt to quaver
in a state of fluid irresponsibility." The comparative method of
approach to the institution of marriage among Latins and among
Anglo-Saxons illustrates this truth. And it serves also, perhaps, for an
example that, in the midst of the terrors of war, the dim project of a
League of Nations, the only hope of the world, first took shape in the
minds of Anglo-Saxon dreamers and not of Latin realists. The Latin often
thinks more clearly, but not always more profoundly, than the
Anglo-Saxon. The currents on the surface are not always the same as the
currents in the deep.

CHAPTER XXXI

ROME IN THE SPRING

I was at Rome in May. Of the many things and persons I saw there, not
much is relevant here. But there is an intoxication and a beauty and a
sense of wonder in Rome in the Spring, as great as I have found at any
time elsewhere. Rome grew upon me, rapidly and ceaselessly, during the
few days that I spent there, and sent me back to the mountains, clothed
with their pinewoods and their graves of much brave youth, uplifted in
heart and purified in spirit.

* * * * *

Early one afternoon in the Piazza Venezia I fell in with two Italian
officers, an Alpino and an Engineer, both wounded and not yet fit to go
back to the Front. We rapidly made friends, and, having drunk beer
tog