A group of senators, at the head of whom was the Generalissimo Diaz, presented the following motion:
The senate regrets the methods of government which, by tolerating a want of discipline destructive of the state’s power, diminishes the glorious victory of our arms and the admirable resistance of our people. It threatens any co-operative work for the prosperity of the unified fatherland and the peaceful attainment of every civil progress. These are methods opposite to Italian tradition, and they have culminated in the violent repression of a patriotic manifestation on May twenty-fourth with the arbitrary arrest of Dalmatians and Fiumeans, guests of Rome.
Among the signatures, with the name of Diaz, were to be seen the names of the Senator Attilio Hortis, a celebrated historian, of Admiral Thaon de Revel, and of many personalities of high Italian culture. The signers were sixty-four, among whom were the four vice-presidents of the senate.
The motion, in addition to its hint to awake Italian tradition, had strength and vigor, and disdain for the outrage done to the Italian war victory. The leader of that disdain, before all others, was Armando Diaz. The generalissimo bore about him the glory of Vittorio Veneto. He saw from day to day that his fine and lofty idealism as soldier and chieftain was fading away.
The Nitti government—part and parcel of a decadent party and futile parliamentary system—the Nitti government, bearing the stamp of mere pandering for favor and burned with the brand of politicians scrambling for power without regard for the nation and without brave idealism—fell ingloriously for the third time.
Giolitti came back.
After so many humiliations and oscillations, parliament and the political system had revealed itself as an assembly wholly unworthy to control or guide the destinies of a people. At the third fall of Nitti, Giolitti, of whom it may be said that he made the premiership a profession, came back upon the scene. His return gave some of us the impression that he was a kind of a receiver in bankruptcy for so-called self-government.
Justice requires our recognition of a great rectitude in the private life of Giolitti; we cannot say so much for his rectitude in his political character. He was a dissolver. He never gave evidence of believing in the deep idealistic springs and streams of Italian life. As a creature of the bureaucracy, he trusted the whole Italian problem to the vicissitudes of democratic and parliamentary pretense and artificiality. Thus, owing to his temperament, he held off during the war. Soon after the victory he returned to the political scene like a man who had to wind up a business. That business he was liquidating had been certainly the most bloody and yet no doubt the most magnificent and, in idealism, the most successful in our history as a united people.
The disclosed purposes of the Giolitti ministry as to domestic policy were good. After the most unhappy Nittian mire, public opinion was induced to accept new pilots without hostility. Foreign agents, provoking elements, supported also by some domestic political compromises, were inciting the Albanian population against us. This noble land, which is but twelve hours distant from Bari, and which had always absorbed an influx of our civilization, this land in which some sparks of modern civil life had gleamed only because of the influence we exercised there—all at once revolted against our garrison. We had been at Valona with sanitary missions since 1908, and since 1914 we had had military there. We had built there the city, the hospital, the magnificent roads which were a refuge for the Serbian army, routed in 1916. In Albania we had sacrificed millions of lire and had devoted thousands of soldiers to maintain her in efficiency and to give the little state a future and a well-ordered existence.
I knew and urged that it was useless to expect any decided Albanian policy from Giolitti. The domestic situation, which continued troubled, deprived him of energy or mind to devote to foreign policy. At that time the Honorable Sforza was Minister of Foreign Affairs; that was quite enough to accomplish the last vandalism in the Adriatic question. Meanwhile our military garrison was obliged to quit Valona, owing to the ineptitude of our government.