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ETRURIA, which extended along the coast of the Lower Sea from the River Macra on the north to the Tiber on the south. Inland, the Tiber also formed its eastern boundary, dividing it first from Umbria, afterward from the Sabines, and, lastly, from Latium. Its inhabitants were called Etrusci, or Tusci, the latter form being still preserved in the name of _Tuscany_. Besides the Tiber it possesses only one other river of any importance, the Arnus, or Arno, upon which the city of _Florence_ now stands. Of its lakes the most considerable is the Lacus Trasimenus, about thirty-six miles in circumference, celebrated for the great victory which Hannibal there gained over the Romans.

The truth is that national life has to go on, and that very elaborate arrangements are made by statesmen and politicians for its administration. But it is in reality very unimportant. The wisest statesman in the world cannot affect it very much; he can only take advantage of the trend of public opinion. If he outruns it, he is instantly stranded; and perhaps the most he can do is to foresee how people will be thinking some six weeks ahead. But meanwhile the writer is speaking from the soul and to the soul; he is suggesting, inspiring, stimulating; he is presenting thoughts in so beautiful a form that they become desirable and adorable; and what the average man believes to-day is what the idealist has believed half a century before. He must take his chance of fame; and his best hope is to eschew rhetoric, which implies the consciousness of opponents and auditors, and just present his dreams and visions as serenely and beautifully as he can. The statesman has to argue, to strive, to compromise, to convert if he can, to coerce if he cannot. It is a dusty encounter, and he must sacrifice grace and perhaps truth in the onset. He may gain his point, achieve the practicable and the second best; but he is an opportunist and a schemer, and he cannot make life into what he wills, but only into what he can manage. Of course the writer in a way risks more; he may reject the homely, useful task, and yet not have the strength to fit wings to his visions; he may live fruitlessly and die unpraised, with the thought that he has lost two birds in the hand for one which is not even in the bush. He may turn out a mere Don Quixote, helmeted with a barber's basin and tilting against windmills; but he could not choose otherwise, and he has paid a heavier price for his failure than many a man has paid for his success.

The vast subject which I have thus lightly skimmed is not without interest, again, from its human implications. Savages as a rule produce enormous families; but then, the infant mortality in savage tribes is proportionally great. Among civilized races, families are smaller, and deaths in infancy are far less numerous. The higher the class or the natural grade of a stock, the larger as a rule the proportion of children safely reared to the adult age. The goal towards which humanity is slowly moving would thus seem to be one where families in most cases will be relatively small--perhaps not more on an average than three to a household--but where most or all of the children brought into the world will be safely reared to full maturity. This is already becoming the rule in certain favored ranks of European society.

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