I do not consider you, men of Trieste, as Italians to whom the whole truth cannot yet be spoken, because I think of you as among the best in the country, and your enthusiasm to-day has confirmed me in my opinion. The event, which had its counterpart in Rome on the 20th September 1870, was a magnificent picture in a poor frame, but upon this I am not going to dwell.
A Comforting Balance. After a lapse of fifty years since the breach of Porta Pia, we must undertake the examination of our consciences. A nation like ours, which had issued from many centuries of disunion, which had barely achieved unity, had not then muscles strong enough to bear the weight of a world policy. A great Italian thinker[[6]] broke this tradition. In fifty years Italy has made marvellous progress. In the first place she has a sure foundation, and that is the vitality of our race. There are nations which every year scan the birth-rates with a certain preoccupation, because, gentlemen, it is just the want of balance in this sphere which produces the great crises—you know to what I allude. But Italy is not thus preoccupied. Italy had twenty-seven million inhabitants in 1870, she has now fifty million; forty million of whom live in the Peninsula, and represent the most homogeneous block in Europe, because, compared with Bohemia, for instance, where five millions of the Czecho race govern seven millions of other races, Italy has only 180,000 German subjects on the Upper Adige and 360,000 Slavs, all the rest forming one compact whole. And besides these forty millions, there are ten millions who have emigrated to all the continents and beyond all the oceans; there are 700,000 Italians in New York alone, another 400,000 in the state of San Paulo, 900,000 in the Argentine and 120,000 in Tunis.
[6]. Francesco Crispi.
National Discipline. It is a pity that foreigners know us so little, but it is still more serious that Italians know Italy so little. If they knew her a little better, they would realise that there are peoples beyond her boundaries who are more retrograde than she is; they would learn, for instance, that Italy possesses the most powerful hydro-electric plant in the world.
Do not speak to me of reactionary forces in Italy. Those who talk to me of a reactionary Government make me laugh, especially if they are immigrants or renegades from Trieste. Because if there is a country in the world where liberty is in danger of degenerating into licence, and where it is the inviolable patrimony of every citizen, it is Italy. There has not yet been seen in our country that which has been seen in France, where, as the result of a political strike, the Republic dissolved the General Confederation of Labour, locked up the leaders and keeps them still in prison. Nor have we seen that which has been witnessed in England, where so-called undesirable elements are sent over to the other side of the Channel; or in the ultra-democratic republic of the United States, where, in one single night, five hundred rebels were seized and sent over the Atlantic. If there is something to say, it is this: it is time to impose an iron discipline upon the individual and upon the masses, because social renovation is one thing—and this we are not against—but the destruction of the country quite another. As long as transformation is spoken of we are all agreed, but when instead it is a question of a leap in the dark, then we put our veto upon it. You will pass, we say, but it will be over our bodies; you will have to overcome our resistance first.
The Greatness of Victory. Now, after this half-century of the life of Italy which I have thus roughly sketched, Trieste is Italian and the tricolour waves over the Brenner. If it were possible to pause one moment to measure the greatness of the event, you would find that the fact of the tricolour on the Brenner is of capital importance, in the history not only of Italy, but also of Europe. The tricolour on the Brenner means that the Germans will no longer descend with impunity upon our lands. Glaciers have now been placed between us and them, and on these glaciers are the magnificent Alpine soldiers who went to the assault of Monte Nero, who were sacrificed at Ortigara, and who have on their flag the motto “No passage this way.” (Loud applause.)
Now it is a most important fact that Trieste has come to Italy after a great victory. If we were not so occupied with the daily material necessities of life and the solution of commonplace and banal problems, we should know how to appreciate all that which took place on the banks of the Piave and at Vittorio Veneto. An Empire was destroyed in an hour, an Empire which had outlasted a century, an Empire in which necessity had developed a superfine art of government which consisted in the eternal “Divide et impera,” according to the wisdom of Budapest and Vienna. This Empire had an army, a traditional policy, a bureaucracy, and had bound all its citizens together in a universal suffrage. This Empire, which seemed so powerful and invincible, fell before the bayonets of the Italian people.
The Italian Risorgimento is only a struggle between a people and a State, between the Italian people on one side and the Hapsburg State on the other, between the live forces of the future and the dead past. It was inevitable that, having passed the Mincio in 1859, and the Upper Adige in 1866, we had, in 1915, to pass the Isonzo and get beyond; it was so far inevitable that the neutralists themselves have had to acknowledge that Italy could not, under pain of death, and what is worse, dishonour, have remained neutral.
This vindication of our intervention is the fact which gives us the greatest satisfaction. And what does it matter if I read in a gloomy and pessimistic book that the acquisition of Trento, Trieste and Fiume still represents a deficit in the balance of the war? This way of arguing is ridiculous. In the first place, historical events cannot be regulated like a page of book-keeping with receipts and payments, debit and credit. It is impossible to make out an estimate of historical facts and expect it to agree with the final balance.
All this is the result of a melancholy philosophy which was widespread over Italy after the war. But let us hope it will soon pass to leave room for a little optimism and pride. This after-war period is certainly critical; I fully recognise the fact. But who can expect that a gigantic crisis like that of five years of a world-war will be settled at once, that the world will return to its previous tranquil state in less than two years? The crisis is not limited to Trieste, Milan or Italy, it is world-wide and is not yet over.