Mr. Clement sent me a heavenly article about Papa. Not a review, but inspired by Laura’s book.[5] He has views, good ones, that we should interest ourselves in the memorial to S. G. H. If the movement is still-born as I fear, and there is nothing doing, I should like well to tell you Clement’s views. Where do we most belong,--in to-day, yesterday or to-morrow? That is the problem that confronts us all! We owe much to those who are gone, more to those who are living and most, perhaps, to those who will come after! CHAPTER XXIII WASHINGTON IN 1910 Between 1894 and 1910 we lived more in Italy than in America and had the opportunity of observing the amazing developments that were taking place in the country that was, until the World War, the youngest of the Nations. Modern Italy was born in 1870, when France and Germany were too busy cutting each other’s throats to interfere with the realization of that dream of a United Italy that had so long haunted the imagination of poets and patriots. America’s part in the Risorgimento has still to be written; like England, the Great Friend, she played no small rôle in the happy consummation. From the early part of the last century Italian patriots and political exiles were comforted and upheld in the United States. In my mother’s girlhood some of the greatest lived in New York by giving Italian lessons. She and her sisters numbered in their circle of friends Foresti and Albinola, the companions of Silvio Pellico. In Italy Margaret Fuller and other ardent Americans threw themselves and their resources into the struggle that gave the world a free and united Italy. We Americans are bound to Italy by the strongest of all alliances,--sentiment and sympathy. The American colonies in Rome, Florence, and Venice, while not to be compared in size with the “Little Italys” of Boston and New York, have done much to create a mutual good-will. They have fostered a reverence for Italian genius in our own land, and the reaction has been that the Italian immigrants in America have been received with a more intelligent understanding than many others. The marriages between American heiresses and Italian nobles--though it has been the custom to scoff at them--have proved, for the most part, extremely fortunate. The children of these unions show that the American woman can be safely trusted to choose her mate among Italians, to the advantage of both races. About the middle of the nineteenth century Luigi Monti, a young Italian liberal, fleeing for his life, managed to conceal himself on board an American vessel lying in an Italian port. Though he had little English, the lad made the Captain understand that he wished to go to America.