The same children who were thus early acquainted with hunger have gone to be racked at the mill of labour before they were eight, or even six years of age. We need not wonder that they were stunted and dwarfed in growth, that they were wrinkled, deformed, attenuated, grey, and decrepit before their time; and they have suffered all this hunger and privation through a long agony of years, they and their fathers and mothers before them, while the classes which have held economic and political power have wasted the means so much needed for worthier uses in war and in the preparation for war, in the luxury and extravagance of society and of courts. Nor has this condition of rags, hunger, and privation come to an end. We may see it in the course of a casual walk in almost any quarter of any of the towns of Great Britain to-day. In many countries the democracy assumes a more serious and a menacing form. Among the trade unions of France there is a pronounced distrust in the efficacy of parliamentary action and a predilection for more direct and energetic methods. We see a like tendency in a stronger form in Italy. The new Italy has endeavoured to play a rôle as a great military and naval power, for which she was hardly fitted by her natural resources or her economic development. A large majority of her people suffer all the miseries that flow from extreme ignorance, poverty, and degradation. Strikes, riots, and other tumultuary outbreaks have been put down by the police and the soldiers with a rough hand. The misery of the people of Italy finds expression in a very large emigration. In a single year as many as 270,000 go abroad, chiefly to the countries of Central Europe, for a period of six months, while 350,000 leave the country as permanent emigrants, chiefly to America. We must regard them as driven by poverty and hunger rather than impelled by the spirit of enterprise.