Arizona republican., 1918-09-13
Twentieth lnstallment Chapter VI (Continued)
We Become Trio and Journey to Italy

OhdfhcI VI NNOltlHucuJ
 We Become Trio and Journey to Italy
 But the war has done one thing to Rome in disputably It has paralysed the tourist business. Rome was the greatest tourist city in the world. But now her boarding houses and her ruins are deserted. Occasionally in the shops one sees that mother and daughter, wistful, eager, half starved for every good thing in life, eXpatriated, living shabbily in the upper regions of some respectable pension, detached from the world about them, uprooted from the world at home, travel jaded, ruin sat ed, picture wise and unbelievably stu pid concerning lifes real interests the mother and daughter who in the old days lived so numerously amid the splendors of Europe, fitting from Rome to Florence, from Florence to Lucerne, from Lucerne to Berlin, and thence to Paris and London, following the seasons like the birds. But today war prices have sent that precious pair home, and let us hope to honest work. It is a comfort to see Rome without their bloodless faces. That much the war has done for democracy at any rate!
 Rome and Kansas City
 And the passing of this relic of old dacincy," the shabby genteel of the earth from Rome-even if the passing is a temporary social phenomenon, has curious symbolic timeliness, com- ing when the working class is rising. It leaves Rome almost as middle class as Kansas City and Los Angeles! For in Rome one feels that the upper class, the ruling class of other centuries, is weaker than it is elsewhere in the world. They tell you flippantly that the king is training his son to run for president. The high caste Romans have an Austrian pride, that "goeth before destruction" For politically their power is sadly on the wane. They are miserably moth-eaten com pared to our own arrogant princes of Wall street or even compared to the dazed dukes and earls of England, who are looking out at the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds about them One feels vaguely that these Italian nobles are passing through rather mean stage of decay. For time dur ing the latter part of the last century and during the first decade of this century, the Italian noblemen tried tc edge into DuSlneSS. Iney lenI lIIelI names to promotion schemes. and the schemes. upon the whole. turned out badly, and the people learned to dis trust all financial schemes under noble patronage; so the nobility is going tC work. A few strong families remain the present royal house of Savoy IS among the strong ones.
 A DucaI Call
 Our business led us to a call on the Duke of Genoa, uncle to the king, who in the kings absence at the front witr his soldiers, was a sort of acting kins on the job in Rome. The automobile took us into the first court of the Royal palace. Now the Royal palace save for a few executive offices has been turned into an army hospita and we saw doctors and nurses dOdg ing in and out of the innumerable cor riders, and smelled iodofoom every where. A major domo, in scarlet, who seemed in the modern disinfected smel of the place like the last guard O mediaevalism, greeted us as we alight- ed from our car: great. powerful sol dier he was. with white and gold or