The Southern Question Confronts the Country.
Congressional resolutions and government promises. The burden on the Southern press. Great discontent among the people. Résumé of the past thirty years of conditions. Riots in 1893. Agrarian and mining crises. The Church’s tenths, the great landed estates renting system and the confiscated demesnial properties. Heavy usuries and peasants’ land contracts. Economic-social revival. Appeal to Southern deputies. Restoration’s era.
We must not grow weary of repeating it!
One of the most urgent and yet most difficult problems which the government and parliament have been called upon and are obliged and bound promptly to solve in the present course of our national life is the question of the condition of southern Italy. In order that such a mighty and intricate matter may be properly adjusted, verily must it be known to its every limit and studied through its every cause.
It is the task of the press, and particularly of the Southern press, to associate its endeavors with noble and unselfish intention, to direct with exactitude the current of public sentiment in the country, so that it shall force the government to efficacious measures and precautions. These may be obtained through some financial sacrifice and reduction of useless expenditures in the state budgets.
The state cannot entrench itself behind financial difficulties when a question that is not regional arises, for there are those to devise ways out of the difficulty.
The deficit of many millions could in no manner continue to enfeeble the state budget if a preference were given to the productive works, and the national economic conditions would certainly be revived.
In parliamentary sessions, debates on the Southern question have at all times been closed with vague votes and presidential assurances, the latter filled with so many pretty promises for the improvement of these our generous and forgotten regions.
They are promises which will doubtless continue to remain unfulfilled, just as the preceding mass of assurances delivered by administrations, leaders, and ministers. Meantime the South is waiting and will continue to wait for those prompt reforms and vigorous measures which would assist greatly in raising the economic status, and for the future disclose a horizon bright and clear. It is anxious to be lifted from that condition of humbled inferiority into which the guilty carelessness of its rulers have thrust it.
Just a little has been done, comparatively nothing, directly to the advantage of our population, harassed as it has been by the different forms of commercial and industrial crises and vexed with all kinds of local and fiscal taxes, yet they ever know how to keep high and unchanging the Unitarian sentiment of the nation.