Curiously enough, as our expatriate learns to understand better this delightful surface freedom, he begins to discern beneath it, in things that have to do not with existence but with life, some very rigid laws--more rigid than any _beneath_ the surface in his own country--recognized unshirked duties. The greatest of these is the accepted burden of the family. In America children early shake themselves free from their parents. More often than not, a grown man’s life is completely cut off from that of his father and mother, especially after his marriage; he frequently lives in another city than that where they live; the whole adventure of bearing and rearing him becomes to them as well as to him almost as though it had not been; not uncommonly he evades the responsibility of giving them a home when they are in need of one in their old age. As for uncles, aunts, and cousins, the average American avoids them with distaste. In Italy and France you get the opposite extreme. Except in the detached, irresponsible and less national aristocracy, family ties are tremendously strong. A family is always closely bound together, even in its obscure ramifications of cousinship. However much its individual members may dislike one another they accept unquestioningly the family duties. Grave financial sacrifices are assumed as a matter of course. In many years of living in Italy I have never yet had servants who did not send the greater part of their wages to their parents, or known a single individual of the bourgeoisie or the provincial aristocracy who would not as a matter of course give up something he really wanted to do with a friend for the sake of something he ought to do for a relation. As for the peasants, no matter how poor, they will support ailing brothers or cousins, and even the wives and children of these, in perpetuity; for among the peasants, who are the most truly Italian of all Italians, the family is law--the only law. This undoubtedly has its defects. The better an American comes to know Italy or France (where the influence of the family is almost equally strong) the more he feels the often disastrous tyranny of this universal obligation. Yet it is more admirable than harmful; for in a world only too full of greed and selfishness it supplies a bed-rock of self-sacrifice, an anchor in something solid and permanent for the individual, and it creates a strong national life, which we Americans, for all our standardization of existence, are without. You have, in short, in Italy and France, the exact opposite to life in America. In the latter country there is unanimity, all but identity, of behaviour in superficial things, with, beneath, no convictions, no obligations, a chaotic emptiness; in the former countries below a surface freedom approximating licence there is a life founded on stern unquestioned laws.