"A wonderful landscape," said Henry to our hosts. "In all the world there is no match for it," said Medill. "It has lain this way for three thousand years, bearing crops year after year!" explained our host. "Signor," said a friend of our host, "they tell me that this land yields seven per cent net." "Yes," replied our host. "I was talking to a man in the agricultural department about it the other day; it really nets seven per cent." "What's this land worth an acre?" This question came from me, who has the Kansas man's seven devil lust to put a price on land. "Well--I don't--" Our host looked at his Italian friends. They gazed, puzzled and bewildered, and consulted one another. The discussion developed a curious situation. No one knew the price of that land. With us, out in the Middle West, a boy learns the probable price of the land in his neighborhood, as soon as he learns the points of the compass. Finally our host explained: "The truth of the matter is that this land never has been sold in the memory of living men. Probably most of it has remained in its present ownership for from three hundred to five hundred years. No one sells land in Italy." And that revealed much; there was the whole program of the agrarian Socialist. The man on the wine-cart asleep, the peasant villages, the rags and the poverty, the hovels that we saw on the rich land and the crumbling aristocracy of Rome, living meanly, striving vainly, bewildered, and bedevilled, trying to make profits out of a dormant tenantry, grinding seven per cent out of the land and yet losing money by it--all these things were the meat of the answer, which recounted the long unbroken line of feudal ownership of the land. Wooden ploughs and oxen, women yoked with beasts of burden, vines and vines planted and replanted through the centuries; no capital to develop the land; insufficient profits to wake up the tenants, master and servant going gradually down in a world where labour and capital, sharing profits equitably, are rising; it was a disheartening problem.