“Wonderful!” exclaimed Don Riccardo. “I don’t profess to understand it at all. But tell me, Honourable, how it is possible that you, the busiest man in Rome, can find time from your Parliamentary work for--this sort of thing?” “I like the country,” Mario answered, “and this is the part of my work that is recreation.” Going back to Viadetta they rode beside the pasture lands, where herds of cattle browsed. In one field Mario pointed out a black heifer that was frisking alone. “That is the wayward youngster I started after with my lariat the other day,” he said. “She came back this morning. I am grateful to her, Donna Hera. But for that dash for liberty I should not be with you to-day.” She could have told him that her gratitude ought to be more than his, and yet was not so, for the fate the river had offered now seemed kinder than the one in store for her. “I perceive that the heifer soon tired of her liberty,” Donna Beatrice remarked, complacently. “Do you not think, Signor Forza, it would be the same with your common people? Give them what they think they want, and quickly they will be whining for what they had before and which was better for them.” “I suppose they would,” Mario assented, smiling, “if the new condition left them hungry and shelterless, as it did our heifer. She dreamed of freedom, but woke to find that her two stomachs were exceedingly real affairs. So she came home and sold her freedom for a mess of pottage.” “Precisely!” Donna Beatrice exclaimed, triumphantly. “In the practical brute kingdom as well as in the human world dreamers are likely to come to grief.” “That is true,” Mario agreed, “and yet the dreamer’s airy product often becomes a reality. The dream of yesterday is the architect’s plan of to-day on which the builders will be at work to-morrow. There was our great compatriot who dreamed of having the people of Italy pull together under some well-laid plan, and do away with the necessity that drives so many to seek prosperity in foreign lands. That man is dead, but part of his vision lives in the Social Dairy. The farmers whose lot has been bettered by this system of co-operation are stout believers in that dream, you may be sure.” “In what way are the farmers benefited?” Donna Beatrice asked, sceptically. “They get a fair share of the profit of their toil. They send their milk here, and by processes that are moral as well as scientific it is turned first into butter, then into coin of the realm.” “But, Signor Forza,” Donna Beatrice protested, “I call this establishment eminently practical.” “Everyone does now. Nevertheless, it was no more than a theory two years ago--as much a dream then as the Employers’ Liability bill is now.” “Will you interpret this new dream, Honourable?” Don Riccardo asked. “What is the Employers’ Liability bill?” “A Parliamentary measure to oblige the employers of men and women in dangerous work to insure their lives; to take care of them, too, should they meet with injury.”