The two visits I paid to South and North America between 1907 and 1909 were the result of a lucky chance, not of a prearranged plan. In 1906, after having been plunged for ten years in the study of Roman history, I had no idea of crossing the Atlantic, much less of writing a book on America and Europe. I had never dreamt that my long researches in the great cemetery of the ancient world might start me suddenly one day along the road which leads to the New World. But destiny willed it so. In November of 1906, by invitation of the Collège de France, I delivered in Paris a course of lectures on the history of Augustus, in which I summarised the fourth and fifth volumes of my _Greatness and Decline of Rome_. There happened to be at Paris at that time a distinguished Argentine, Señor Emilio Mitré, son of that General Mitré who was one of the Republic’s most conspicuous politicians during the second half of the nineteenth century. He himself was a man of importance in the political world, and proprietor of the _Nacion_, which is not only the biggest, most serious, and most authoritative newspaper in Latin America, but one of the leading newspapers of the world. I had contributed to this paper for years, so I called on Mitré in Paris. He came to hear my lectures, and the day before the concluding one, November 29th,—he was due to sail for Buenos Aires on December 1st,—he came to me with a proposal that I should go to Argentina and there deliver some lectures. I accepted, impelled chiefly by curiosity to see that vast and rich country which, for the last ten years, had been so much talked about in Italy, and to which during the last half-century so many Italians had emigrated. I accordingly prepared my lectures, and on June 7, 1907, I sailed from Genoa for Buenos Aires with my wife and little boy. Every European who crosses the Atlantic and can wield his pen with any sort of effect writes his impressions when he gets back. Naturally, therefore, I too had promised several reviews and one publisher to bring back with me a volume of “Impressions of Argentina.” At six P.M. on June 8th, we put in to Barcelona. Directly the steamer came alongside, the Brazilian consul came on board in search of me. He handed me a despatch from Baron di Rio Branco, the Brazilian Minister of Foreign affairs, who invited me in the name of the Brazilian Academy to stop at Rio, and read a paper there. I begged the consul to telegraph to Baron di Rio Branco that I could not stop on my voyage out, as I was expected at Buenos Aires; but that on my return I should be delighted to accept his kind invitation. As the steamer was to put in at Rio, I could arrange matters with him _en route_. As the steamer resumed her journey, and passed out of the Mediterranean into the vast wilderness of the ocean, I busied myself with some books of philosophy which I had brought along, amongst them, some of Buddha’s discourses, which had just been published in an Italian translation.