This Latin quality of not being reticent, of reacting directly and truthfully, had its most dramatic expression in the great general strike of June, which I witnessed in Rome. Disgust and chagrin at the Tripolitan war, a general reaction against militarism, had been slowly accumulating in the working classes, and the smouldering feeling was touched off into a revolutionary explosion by the shooting of two demonstrators at Ancona by the police on the festival day of the Statuto. This was followed in Rome, as in most of the other cities of Italy, by a complete suspension of work. No cars or wagons moved for three days; no shops or stores opened their doors; none of the public services were performed; the only newspaper was a little red “bolletino” which told of the riots of the day before. One did nothing but walk the garbage-littered streets, past the shuttered windows and barricaded doors, and watch the long lines of infantry surrounding the public squares, and the mounted carabinieri holding the Piazza del Popolo, to prevent meetings and demonstrations. The calm spirit of the troops, surrounded by the excited crowds, was admirable. And the overwhelming expression of social solidarity displayed by this suspended city made one realize that here were radical classes that had the courage of their convictions. On the third day, the conservative classes recovered their breath, and I saw the slightly fearful demonstration of shouting youths who moved down the Via del Tritone while great Italian flags swung out from one window after another, greeted with wild hand-clapping from every thronged bourgeois balcony. The next day the darting trolley-cars told the strike was over, but two days later I alighted at the Naples station into a fortress held by Bersaglieri against a mob who had been trying all day to burn the station. The shooting kept us inside until the last rioters were dispersed, and the great protest was over, though it was days before the people of the Romagna, where railroads and telegraphs were cut, were convinced that the monarchy had not fallen and a republic been proclaimed. The government had kept very quiet, except for the floods of oratory that rolled through the Camera; if it had not, there might have been a real revolution, instead of merely the taste and thrill of one.