Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER SOBER DAYLIGHT After you have thrilled with the "beauty, richness, variety and humanity of Italian life and realized the greatness of this people down the centuries; after you have met the national failings, analyzed them in their every manifestation and petulantly cursed the race, past, present and future—then and then only, you are in a position to pass deliberate judgment on them. You begin to discover that the object of your delight as well as of your execration is a clearly defined personality, giving to this people a national character which differentiates it sharply from other peoples. Humanity is disappointingly uniform; of the peoples I know the Italians are, despite their quick adaptability to foreign customs, the most personal. Superficially they resemble the French and the Spaniards. Fundamentally they are unlike either. The first problem for a foreigner who is familiar with all the unpleasantness which living in Italy invariably entails, is to explain why, none the less, life in Italy is so inexplicably attractive. Probably the answer to this is to be sought in the lack of constraint. The Italian laws leave private life untouched; they are administered in a spirit of tolerance; there exists outside them no form of social tyranny or social norm to which the individual mustconform on pain of ostracism. Italy, like the "'great city" of Whitman, is a land where "men and women think lightly of the laws.'' The intelligent foreigner arriving from another land experiences annoyance but also a sense of delicious relief. Modern Italians have the virtues of their faults. Now until men have grown up and learned tolerance, democracy will always be a hair shirt. So long as democracy exacts conformity, so long as the collectivity insists on treating the individuals...