The Italians are among the best engineers of the world, and are minded to remove this difficulty by drainage works, as well as by social reorganization now proceeding actively and contributing an element of unrest that makes Italy's recovery from war sacrifices a complex problem. It is, however, a problem that cannot but be solved, and with the redevelopment of Mediterranean trade following the opening of the Suez Canal and the retreat of the Turk from non-Turkish lands, the future of the centrally placed kingdom of Italy should be a bright one. Hydro-electric schemes during the past twenty years have drawn North Italy (Milan) and Switzerland, and to some extent South Germany, together, and Milan has grown in wealth and importance as one of the first-rank cities of Europe with her high-grade industries in the city, thanks to the transmissibility of power by cable. The city's long and powerful artistic tradition is an important factor of her industrial future. Of late these tendencies have been encouraged by the policy of the Western Powers, for it now pays Italy to import from Germany rather than from England, and this redevelopment of mid-European economic relations will help to rehabilitate the value of Italian money if internal social politics permit. The fame of Italian workmen for road and bridge building as well as for cultivation is world wide, and they have spread in considerable numbers both to other European countries and to America. In every case, however, they have found the lands of immigration developed already beyond possibilities of language change, and so the Italian emigrant tends, in the long run, to change his heritage; but in the meantime he sends surplus earnings {37} back home, and these remittances and the money brought in by emigrants returning are an important resource for Italy. It is interesting to contrast French and Italians in this respect; the Frenchman emigrates with the greatest reluctance, but has planted his language very firmly in such places as the St. Lawrence estuary and Mauritius, though political organization there has passed out of his hands. Those emigrations were made when the lands in question were not yet occupied at all by Europeans, and therein lies the difference. The French, Spanish, and Italian peoples of late years have been working to revive the idea of the Mediterranean as a Roman, or rather now a Romance, lake, and have spread their influence along the North African coast, Spain on the Moroccan coast. France into Morocco and Algeria, both France and Italy into Tunisia, and Italy into Tripoli and the Cyrenaica. These are fields of linguistic and cultural as well as administrative expansion, as the French and Italians, at least, appear likely to organize closer settlement and an economic life very different from that which they found.