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205 36 Rome Again. The Gompers Mission. I Meet One of the Most Remarkable Men in Italy. Upsurging of Old Jealousies and Greeds. OCTOBER 13 I came back from Milan on Friday and have been in a whirl ever since. Merriam164 has gone home to America and the battle between the Embassy and the Committee on Public Information deepens. The Ambassador165 is standing upon this ancient authority. He is one of the most amiable and delightful men, but old and cannot see the new forces of the world marshaling themselves. Gompers and the American Labor Commission have been here, but so far as having any effect upon the labor situation in Italy it was a complete fizzle. Instead of trying to do the thing he came over to do, namely to understand and influence European labor, it has been, in Italy, at least, one grand junket , with official receptions and dinners. Gompers is an excessively vain old man. He was entertained yesterday by the King. In Rome he set the socialist elements—and here labor is socialist—by the ears. I went to one of his meetings , half the audience was made up of soldiers sent in by the government to prevent possible disorder. One of the infuriating qualities of some of my beloved compatriots is to talk down to people upon subjects which their auditors understand far better than they do. Everything in America is better than anything in Europe—so they preach! This morning I got out at 5:30, having been invited to make a flight over Rome in a dirigible flying machine. It was a moist, warm morning with an 164. Charles E. Merriam (1874–1953) was a political scientist from the University of Chicago who headed American propaganda efforts in Rome for the Committee on Public Information from April to September 1918. 165. Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) was a Washington, D.C., attorney and writer who served as U.S. ambassador to Italy from 1913 to 1919. 206 | Reporting on Public Opinion in Great Britain, France, and Italy enervating southern sirocco166 blowing, and we ran out through the sleepy morning mist along the new Appian Way toward Frascati to the aerodrome. As we left Rome the sun was just coming up through the clouds, making a scene of rare beauty. In front of milk shops, women stood in long queues awaiting their day’s supply, soldiers were creeping sleepily out of their barracks , and in the country toiling slowly toward the city were lines of those queer, two-wheeled, one-horse wine carts with the driver perched high on his hooded and padded seat. The aerodrome is an enormous, gray building some two hundred feet long and very tall. I was sure before we arrived—for one could see the bamboos along the way bending to the wind—that the weather was not favorable and upon arrival found that the trip had been given up. But we went through the aerodrome where there were seven tremendous dirigibles ready for use and one on the floor in preparation. We examined the mechanism and asked many questions. One of the machines was being made ready for an early trip to England with a crew of nine men. The dirigible has proved more or less an expensive failure in the war, but they are still maintained for bombing and for patrolling the seas in search of submarines. I was sorry to miss the voyage, but there may be a chance later. We had coffee with the staff and came back through rain squalls—by the old Appian Way, with its glimpses of ancient ruined aqueducts and Roman tombs and thus past the baths of Caracalla into Rome. This afternoon I went to call on one of the most remarkable men in Italy— one of the most scholarly, one of the most torrentially talkative, and certainly one of the vainest—an old man rank with personality. This was Luigi Luzzatti . He was once Prime Minister of Italy and negotiated the first commercial treaty of Italy with Germany—directly with Bismarck. He originated the idea of labor treaties and executed the first of them with France, and he has been a champion of many reforms. I found him in his study, where there are several rooms bulging with disorganized books and pamphlets—books crowding the shelves, sliding off the tables, piled on the floors, and pamphlets literally heaped everywhere, so that when he wanted to find a certain...

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