Unwanted Progress

In the Borgo of San Marino, eldest and smallest republic, a group of sun-bronzed hillmen gathered, resentful. Theirs is a country without public debt, a tiny, remote upland (surrounded by Italy). There unemployment is unknown because every man either tills his ground or, if he has none to till, emigrates. So it has been in San Marino years without end. No progress, no need of progress, no desire to change the round of peaceful toil which began when St. Marinus fled the persecutions of Diocletian (A. D. 284-305), and founded a colony of refugees which has become the Republic of San Marino.

As the mountain citizens assembled and spoke to one another in low disgruntled voices, progress and a railway were being forced upon their dozing republic.

In the Regent's Palace, on Monte Titano, just above the Borgo, the two Capitani Reggenti (Regents) and the 60 Grand Councilors of San Marino were listening with anxious faces to proposals dictated by Signor Benito Mussolini. He came and saw San Marino (TIME, Aug. 30), and now, it seemed, he would deign to conquer this land of 38 square miles and but 12,027 souls. Armed conquest would, in the circumstances, be absurd; but Signer Mussolini's agents proposed last week the building of a railway which would lead just as surely to the conquest of San Marino--by Italian immigrants.

Generous, the Government at Rome offered to defray the entire expense of building an electric railway from the nearest Italian junction to the frontier of San Marino. Surely, said Il Duce's agents last week, surely the Grand Council would cooperate in this great scheme of progress by appropriating the cost of completing the railway from the frontier straight in to the Borgo? Any other course would be to fly in the face of Providence, to refuse a generous offer, to antagonize the whole teeming sea of Italy above which San Marino rises like a silent islet.

Reluctant, with heavy misgivings, the Grand Councilors of San Marino ratified the railway treaty with Italy.