Critical Studies

by Ouida

Commerce, from being beneficent, is fast becoming a curse. It usurps and absorbs all place and all energy. Its objects are allowed to push out of existence all higher aims; armies and navies exist only to protect it; and an English Premier was not ashamed at a Lord Mayor's banquet to declare that this was their unique aim: to conquer fresh fields for trading, and protect the trader in his invasion of the rights of others. His Secretary of State for the Colonies and his Chancellor of the Exchequer have, still more recently, repeated after him this singularly ignoble view of a nation's duty, and of a soldier's and sailor's obligation.

The Secretary of the Colonies, indeed, rising to unwonted enthusiasm, added that all the greatness of Great Britain lies in its commerce. No doubt this may be a fact; but it is not an ennobling fact; and it is one which is the parent of gross sins, and the enemy of high ideals; in the name of commerce, murder, theft, and torture are all legalised, and the most brutal egotism deified; it can be at best only a material greatness which is thus consolidated.

To measure the virtue of a nation by its commerce alone is like measuring the virtue of a man solely by the amount of his income. This manner of estimation is one common in the world, but it can never be considered a high standard. However, this excuse of the prior and dominant claims of commerce which may be put forward in the case of Great Britain for the sacrifice to it of all other interests cannot be alleged by Italy except in some districts of the north. What requires protection in five-sixths of Italy, and only suffers extinction through fiscal pressure, is small commerce: personal arts, crafts, and trades, which flourished so happily in past times, and would still live in fair peace and comfort were they not stoned out of existence by a merciless taxation, direct and indirect. These neither disfigure nor offend the beautiful and venerable little towns in which they dwell; the smith has his anvil under a Lombard arch, the apothecary keeps his ointments and simples in old majolica vases, the barber's pole slants under a shrine of the Renascence, the cloth-seller piles his bales against the sculpture of a Seicento wall, the seedsman's sacks show the shining berries in their gaping mouths behind the iron scroll-work of mediæval kneeling-windows. It is not they who have hurt their birthplaces. It is the English syndicate, the Jew syndicate, the German money-changer, the American tram-contractor, the foreign electric company, the foreign co-operative store-keeper, who have no end but their own gain, and who tempt to shameful acts those native to the soil, in whose hands lie the fate of these historic, and late happy, places.

Ferrero has, concerning this, a true and touching passage which is much worthier of him than his views regarding Lombardy and the factories. He says, in a recent able article on the 'Miseria e Richezza in Italia':—

'The tendencies of new commercial life, in its immense enterprises, is to send money and movement into a very few amongst the cities of Italy, the others live content with their small traffic and trade; though trembling when the fleet well-springs of their small fortunes are menaced or run dry. Many of these towns were in other days rich, and still preserve the evidences of their splendid past in sumptuous palaces, spacious squares, monumental churches; a sense of venerable years, of profound repose lie on them; yet a sad and cruel tragedy often passes between these walls; beneath the magnificent palaces of the Renascence and the beautiful mediæval Lombard churches, the populace perishes slowly of hunger. The small ancient industries disappear, crushed out by the victorious rivalry of the great tradesmen of the north. The ruin of these small industries and of these individual crafts began some decades ago; but it was much less cruelly felt then than it is now, and the sole recourse or solace now left to it is in revolt. A revolt to which the Government only replies by fixed bayonets, and a duty on corn, which is a crime.'

Ferrero, as a political economist is bound to do, considers that no means should be taken to artificially sustain ancient methods of work and trade, but he says with entire truth that to artificially depress and deplete them is on the part of the State an abominable act. To wear out the temper and patience of the populace with harassing edicts; to drive to desperation those who are cheerful and contented in an honestly supported poverty; to starve them by artificially raised food-prices, and by gate-taxes, which ruin the small trader, the modest householder, and the rural vendor alike; to render it, by a monstrous taxation, impossible for small industries to exist; to levy income-tax (focatico) on the poorest labourer—this is the terrible error, the inexcusable cruelty, of which the actual, and every preceding, Italian Cabinet is, and has been, guilty. If there be revolution in the air, who can wonder? The granaries are guarded by battalions, whilst millions are thrown away on bad statues to Savoy princes. These are facts which it is not necessary for a man to know his A B C to read. But they are the primer which is daily placed before the eyes of the many various peoples of Italy from the Col de Tenda to Cape Sorano; and these peoples are of rare intelligence even where wholly illiterate: often, indeed, most intelligent where most illiterate.

There were, not many years ago, a great measure of mirth and contentment in all the minor cities of Italy, and in the small towns and the big walled villages; much harmless merry-making and pastime, much simple and neighbourly pleasure, much enjoyment of that 'ben' di Dio,' the blessed air and sunshine. Most of it has been killed now; starved out, strangled by regulations and penalties and imposts, and a fiendish fiscal tyranny; dead like the poor slaughtered forgotten conscripts in Africa.

But this opens out a political question, and it is not of politics that these pages treat, but of art and its outrage: above all, of such outrage in Venice; since the President of her Academy did me, of late, the honour to say to me, 'Non può Lei far nulla per salvare la nostra povera Venezia?' Alas! how powerless are all our forces against the ever-rising tide of modern barbarism!

A precious intaglio of exquisite workmanship is being broken up and pulverised under our eyes; and no one cares.

I know a wide plain, intersected by many streams, and lying full in the light of the west; these streams are filled from August to October with millions of white water-lilies.