Woe to the foreigner who seeks redress for conduct of this kind, or who is involved in any dispute however righteous his cause. Such cases are brought up in the district courts before magistrates who are appointed to act in each division of the city as conciliators (save the mark!). No solicitor of any standing likes to appear in these courts, they are beneath the dignity of his position, and he will only do so as a favour. An attorney of an inferior order, who is as often as not a layman masquerading as such, can be hired on the spot like a porter to see you through. Your opponent will certainly engage the services of one of these individuals, and when the case comes on to your no small amazement he will rise and make a fluent speech in favour of his client having little or no reference to the events as they occurred. If considered needful, he will also call several false witnesses who will swear entire falsehoods with perfect _sangfroid_. When your solicitor attempts to state your case the attorney on the other side interrupts him with indignant denials, and the conciliator joins in with the most injudicial display of temper. The comedy ends by all three talking at once in loud excited voices, without listening to one another, and the conciliator announces the close of the sitting. He then proceeds to give his verdict which is invariably in favour of the servant, and his socialistic tendencies in this particular are assisted by his not having paid the least attention to the evidence before him. [Illustration: IN VILLA BORGHESE A priest and one of the Austrian Seminarists, whose red dress has bestowed on them the popular nickname of "_boiled prawns_," are here seen conversing in the shade of the villa; the spring sunshine glints through the trees.] CHAPTER VII THE ROMAN PEOPLE I. _The Italians._ There are four great movements which moulded the political intellectual and moral life of other European countries without leaving their impress on Italy. Feudalism and scholasticism took less hold there than in Germany England or France; the spirit of chivalry never touched the Italian, and Puritanism, of course, left him scatheless. Feudalism had little affinity with a people democratic to the core, scholasticism had little attraction for the most open-minded and the least didactic nation on earth, and neither the chivalry of the Frank nor the Puritanism of the Anglo-Saxon awoke echoes in a people whose self-interestedness and lack of the sense of personal responsibility are only equalled by the absence of all illusions, and whose hatred of shams is as radical as their freedom from hypocrisy.