The railway strike was protracted up to January twenty-ninth, and all the time diplomatic discussions were bringing us to disastrous compromises in our foreign policy. About this time, into the aridity of the disputes of classes there was thrust an event colored with highest idealism. It was arranged that the suffering children of Fiume should be brought to Milan. They had been enduring the hardships of a blockaded town, without economic resources; they were at the mercy of their own distress. Already the children of Vienna, the sons of our enemies, had obtained in Milan kind treatment. Was it not admissible that there should be found love and pity for the Italian infants of Quarnero? The episode of kindness, brought about by the Fascists with the consent of the Fiume command, resounded throughout Italy. Great manifestations of joy greeted these children at every junction or way station of their journey. The censors of the press, however, prevented us from writing of the triumphal journey of these children. It was all part and parcel of a programme systematically to slander our spirit, which always stamped the political handicraft of Nitti, like an ugly hall-mark on a leaden spoon.
This man, in order to justify his vile and inept diplomacy, dared to deliver in the chamber a speech on the Fiume question with a friendly intonation toward the Slavians, at the very time that Wilson was pressing his even stranger project to create of Fiume and Zara two isolated, detached, aborted free cities under the control and the authority of the League of Nations!
On the next day, February eighth, my newspaper bore on the first page the following head-line: “The Abominable Speech of H. E. Cagoia—The Snail.” By this surname Gabriele d’Annunzio had stamped F. S. Nitti and the term had become popular. Following the head-line was a short editorial of mine, entitled “Miserable.” In it, after having set forth again in a few words the painful history of the negotiations in Paris, I concluded:
The truth is that Nitti is preparing to go back again. He goes to Paris in order to give away his shirt. Before the stubborn Juglo-Slavian irreconcilableness our Cagoia knows nothing better than to wail, weep and—yield. The whole tone of his speech is vile, dreadfully vile. Not in vanquished Germany, nor in Austria, has there been so vile a Minister as Nitti. If there had been one, he could not have lasted. This one is the Minister of runaways, of autolesionists; he is the Minister of Modigliani, the man of peace at any price. By trying to remember continually that the objectives of Italy were Trento and Triest, Cagoia offers arms to the Jugoslavian resistance.
The peace of 1866, in comparison, is a masterpiece with that offered by His Indecency. On his next journey to Paris, Cagoia will make another renunciation. Zara? Valona? Who knows? Quite likely. It is not impossible that he will yield Gorizia too. Perhaps also Monfalcone. And why not the line of Tagliamento? Maybe only by this price can we hope for the friendship of Jugo-Slavia!
Before such infamy we feel that it would be preferable to be citizens of the Germany of Noske than subjects of the Italy of Cagoia.
We have before us days of dolor and shame; worse than those of Caporetto, worse than those of Abba Carima!
We will recover our strength, but first there is some one who will be forced to pay.
The domestic policies and the foreign policies pursued by the government of that time did not fail to provoke some stiff discussions among those newspapers that were reflecting the varied tendencies of national life. The Stampa, at the head of which was Senator Frassati, who some time later was to be selected as ambassador to Berlin, was one of my targets. I violently attacked it because of the programme it adopted. It gave itself airs as if it would be the redeemer of our fatherland. It is necessary to remember that Senator Frassati had been against the entrance of Italy into the World War. He always stood apart during the most bleeding and tragic periods of Italian life. Consequently, he was the least capable of taking a pose as redeemer of our fatherland at the time when peace was to be concluded with the enemies after the victorious end of our war.
The Corriere della Sera, representing and interpreting the thought of a great flow of so-called liberal public opinion, was defending arbitration for Fiume and Dalmatia, proposed by Wilson and supported by the prose of Albertini, who followed a pernicious policy inspired by Salvemini and Nitti. The Avanti, the red publication, availed itself of all these polemics and of the slanders against me to libel me in general before the whole of public opinion. And all this campaign, vain and ineffectual, was even supported by the press of the Popular party. But more important, it was employed against the raising of Fascism and against the war victory.