A lesser but quite genuine advantage in living abroad is the wider variety of one’s surroundings. I have lived in half a dozen different cities or villages, besides those in which I have merely sojourned for a short time, and each place had its own special flavour. To respond to the stern austere beauty of the Syracusan plain and then to the blurred softness of Taormina, to the dainty toy-like perfection of Lake Orta and then to the breathless magnificence of Garda, is to draw from every side of one’s nature. But there is also a wider human variety. One can know more kinds of people here (I am writing now of Italy, where I have lived longest) than at home. For example, in America I and all my friends are barred from even superficial acquaintance with men who work with their hands. This, no doubt, is chiefly because America has become an industrial country, and it seems especially hard for members of other classes to know industrial labourers anywhere. But in Italy, except in a few large cities such as Milan and Turin, industrial workers do not form a separate homogeneous class. There is this young man, who is the son of your or some one else’s gardener, or that, who is cousin to the peasant family at the foot of your hill. Besides which, Italy is largely an agricultural country. The peasants are in some ways odd inscrutable people, yet one does, with reservations, get to know those who live near-by--as well, perhaps, as in America one gets to know one’s neighbours, the insurance man, and the banker. (As far as that goes, a peasant’s mind does not seem to me any more inscrutable than a banker’s). But there is still another difference. In America manual labourers are mostly of foreign birth, so that it is doubly hard to get to know them. How _can_ I get in touch with a Finn? His language, his antecedents, his manner of thought, all are strange to me. In the small and delightful town of southern Minnesota where my father lived as a young man, there appears to have been at that time a very agreeable community life. The farmers in the country round about were of one blood with the town-dwellers--chiefly of New England origin, Anglo-Saxons all, save for a slight mixture of Germans; and the professions in the town were recruited from among the sons of farmers. I don’t know whether the townspeople had a feeling of social superiority to the farmers; probably they had. But there was no gulf between them; they were of the same race and understood one another. To-day the townspeople remain principally Anglo-Saxon, but the country round about is farmed by Swedes, Norwegians, and Finns. The townspeople do not understand them nor they the townspeople. And you get the condition that Mr. Sinclair Lewis depicted, if rather too gloomily, in _Main Street_. In his unconvincing portrayals of a Scandinavian servant and a Scandinavian labour agitator one felt him straining, unavailingly, for a comprehension which he lacked the knowledge to attain.