CHAPTER IV

EARLY NEW DEAL EXPERIMENTS

CHAPTER V

THE GET-RICH-QUICK ERA

THE ITALIAN peninsula is a natural political unit. The unification so painfully won in the earlier half of the Republic lasted, with interruptions, for a thousand years. It finally dissolved in the anarchy that followed the death of Charlemagne. Not until more than a thousand years later, in the nineteenth century, was Cavour able to start the movement that made Italy again a nation.

CHAPTER VI

THE FARM PROBLEM EMERGES

CHAPTER VII

BIG BUSINESS IN POLITICS

THE POLITICAL machine is familiar to Americans. While it may lead to gross abuses experience shows that some sort of behind-the-scenes organization may be useful to the functioning of democratic institutions. Such an organization may hold diverse elements of the population together and provide continuity of policy through all the shifting personnel of official life.

CHAPTER VIII

THE REPUBLIC COULDN’T STAND PROSPERITY

IT was under the Republic that Rome marched farthest, although its expansion continued into the second century after Christ. When Cæsar came into power the little settlement of shepherds on the Tiber had extended its dominion around the basin of the Mediterranean and over western Europe from Gibraltar to the Rhine. A tremendous job it had been. “It was such a toil,” wrote Virgil, “to found the Roman race.”

CHAPTER IX

DRIFT TO DICTATORSHIP

CHAPTER X

BOOM AND DEPRESSION

CHAPTER XI

PRELUDE TO CRISIS

THE GREAT age of Rome lasted well into the third century. In spite of defects, a great age it had been. How the Empire seemed to a contemporary is told by the Christian writer Tertullian about A.D. 200:

CHAPTER XII

THE TOTALITARIAN STATE

CHAPTER XIII

WARNING SIGNALS