However, at the end of the first day in Rome, a very exciting day, I awakened to the fact that nobody had searched my bags for incriminating documents, that I had talked French all day, and that I hadn’t noticed anybody using the Fascist salute, and, most important, that I had found at every newspaper kiosk all the French and English papers side by side with the Italian. It gave me confidence. As a matter of fact in the four to five months that I was in Italy I did practically what I had planned to do, and nobody paid any attention to me. My mail was never interfered with, so far as I know. That is, none of the dire prophecies of interference to which I had listened at the start came true. I do not mean to say it was always easy to get to the people with whom I wanted to talk; more than once, when I succeeded, I found the person fearful of quotation. I do not mean to say that I found no revolts. Down in Palermo, in corners of Milan and Florence and Turin, as a matter of fact almost everywhere, I ran across bitter critics of the new regime such as I hear every day in this year of 1938 of the President of the United States; but on the whole even good parliamentarians were accepting Mussolini. “He has saved the country,” men told me. “We don’t accept his methods, we don’t believe in dictatorship; but it is better than anarchy.” Making my headquarters at Rome, I went over the country fairly well, particularly the industrial sections. I visited Turin with its hydroelectric developments, its great Fiat factory, its artificial silk, all plants of the first order. I spent some days in Milan, visited the great Pirelli plant, at the moment making underground cables for Chicago. I saw what was left of the cooperatives at Bologna. I climbed into that plucky little independent Republic of San Marino. Mussolini had been there just before I arrived. They were all for him. He worked and made people work. That is what had made San Marino. I went south into Calabria, over into Sicily—always looking for the effects of the new regime on the life of the people. There was no doubt sensible things were going on—redemption of land, extension of water power, amazing efforts at wheat production; and the people were accepting the regime with understanding, realists that they were.