In Italy peasants are of one race with the doctors, lawyers, land-owners, and provincial aristocracy (as distinguished from that of the great historic families in, for instance, Rome, which are cosmopolitan in their way of living, and so mixed in blood through intermarriage with foreigners that they are by now almost as American, English, French, or Austrian as Italian). It is perhaps impossible to know the peasants intimately, but it is not difficult to know them fairly well; and such knowledge adds greatly to one’s experience. I think there are times when all of us feel impatient at knowing none but those who work with their brains and only think about or traffic in the things that other men have grown or built with their hands. This is a feeling easily capable of exaggeration. Carried too far it leads to the foolish belief, not uncommon to-day, that only those who work with their hands and create the physical wealth of the world are of value in it--which, of course, would reduce all life to mere existence. But perpetual contact with the earth does make for sanity and for something not far removed from wisdom. I esteem the Italian peasants, especially those of Tuscany, as highly as any class of men with which I am acquainted. They are calm but alert; they are, I believe, in the main, kindly; they are tenaciously attached to the land; they work indefatigably; they have an infinitely deeper and truer culture than, for example, the supposedly higher class of shopkeepers, and, especially, a serenity approaching fatalism, that leads them to regard all governments with indifference and consider wars in much the same way as they consider earthquake or drought. There is a splendid permanence about them. Acquaintance with them is the best antidote I have found to that desperate apprehension of universal meaningless chaos that every man must so often feel to-day--to what Mr. Bernard Shaw so well expressed when he said it sometimes seemed to him that this world must be a place used by the other planets as an insane asylum. * * * * *