This is the season for resolutions. We registered our resolution when we founded The Mentor Association. We could only re-affirm it now. So, at the turn of the year, instead of a resolution, we offer a promise. We will give during the year of 1914 a full measure of the interesting matter that has made friends for The Mentor in the past--and we will give more. We will add to the wealth of information that we have supplied in the fields of history, art, literature, travel, and science,--and we will broaden our scope so as to include articles that will be helpful as well as instructive. * * * * * We mean to make every number count in value and in interest. Our wish is that each member of our Association shall say, on laying down a number of The Mentor, that he is richer in the knowledge that cultivates or in the information that is helpful, and that he has at all times been interested and entertained. * * * * * May the year of 1914 be one of pleasure, profit and progress to the members of The Mentor Association! [Illustration: THE CAMPAGNA, ROME] _THE RUINS OF ROME_ _The Campagna_ ONE The Roman Campagna was the cradle of a mighty race. How did the little handful of men who founded Rome, and their descendants, become masters of the world? Livy, the great Roman historian, believes it was due to the location of the city of Rome. “Not without reason,” he says, “did gods and men choose this site for Rome: healthy hills, a river equally adapted for inland and maritime trade, the sea not too far distant, … a site in the middle of the Peninsula, made, as it were, on purpose to allow Rome to become the greatest city in the world.” However healthy the climate of the Campagna may have been in those times, today it is about the most unhealthy in the world. It is a district containing a great many closed valleys and depressions in the soil, without outlet for the waters that accumulate. Natural watercourses are impeded: Under the top soil are marl and stiff clay, which hold the water after it has filtered through the soil, and let it ooze out to the lower parts of the country, where it is mixed with rotting vegetable matter. Barriers of hills prevent movement of the air. Malaria runs rampant. But this could not have been so formerly. In the early history of the Campagna towns were scattered over its surface. Later these towns disappeared, and the great estates, worked by crowds of slaves, occupied the land. Then the great villas, whose ruins now strew the ground everywhere in the neighborhood of Rome, were built. The ancient Roman nobility lived in great numbers in the very places now found so deadly. Their summer homes were placed not only on the sea-shore, but all through the country.