Views and Opinions

by Ouida

The brothers Di Gesù, herdsmen, accustomed to sleep in a building where many other persons slept also, were sentenced to a year and a half of prison because an old rusty gun, quite useless, was found in a cupboard, although there was no evidence whatever that they owned, or knew of its existence.

These are a few typical instances of sentences passed by the hundred, and tens of hundreds, at the present hour in the unhappy kingdom of Italy. Everyone suspected however slightly, accused however indirectly, is arrested and removed from sight. Oftentimes, as in Molinari’s case, the sentence embraces periods of solitary confinement, that infernal mental torture under which the strongest intellect gives way. What is the rest of Europe about that it views unmoved such suffering and such tyranny as this? Let it be remembered that the vast majority of these prisoners have no crime at all on their consciences. Molinari, sentenced in his youth to twenty-three years of prison, has committed no sin except that of being a Socialist. The term Anarchist is constantly used by the tribunals to describe men who are merely guilty of such opinions as are held by your Fabian Society in England.

There has been no actual coup d’état, but there has been what is worse, because less tangible, than a coup d’état, namely, the insidious and secretive alteration of a constitutional Government into a despotic one, the unauthorised and illegitimate suppression of free discussion and of lawful measures, and the substitution for them of arbitrary methods and secret-police investigation. The change has been quite as great as that which was wrought in Paris by the canon of the Tenth of December, but it has been made by means more criminal, because less open and as yet unavowed. The King of Italy, having mounted the throne under an engagement to hold inviolate the Constitution, has violated it as violently as Louis Napoleon his oath to the French Republic; but he has done so more insidiously and less courageously, having never dared to announce to his people his intention to do so. His decree postponing the assembling of the Chambers because ‘public discussion would be prejudicial’ was a virtual declaration that parliamentary government was at an end, but the fact was covered by an euphemism. In like manner, Crispi has said that he will ‘ask’ for irresponsible powers to be given him, but he defers the day of asking, and ad interim takes those powers and uses them as he chooses. The Italian Chambers are to be allowed to meet, but it is intimated to them that unless they vote for the ‘full powers’ they will be dissolved, and a more obedient Parliament elected under the military law of the existing reign of terror. ‘La camera sapra quelle che si deve sapere,’ Crispi stated the other day; that is, he will tell them as much as he chooses them to know. The amount of the financial deficit is to be put before the Chambers as one half only of what it really is. If there be any exposure made, or hostility shown, he has his weapon ready to his hand in dissolution. A new chamber elected under his docile prefects and his serried bayonets will not fail to be the humble spaniel he requires. If the present deputies, when the decree proroguing their assembly was proclaimed, had all met in Rome, and, without distinction of party or group, had insisted on the opening of Parliament, and compelled the monarch to keep his engagement to the Constitution, it is possible that both he and his minister would have submitted. But Italian deputies are poor creatures, and the few men of mark and strength who are amongst them are swamped under the weight of the invertebrate numbers. Hence we are scandalised by the spectacle of a whole body of the elected representatives of a nation being muzzled and set aside, and their discussion of opinion and action declared prejudicial to the interests of their country. It would be simpler and more candid to sweep away Parliament and Senate altogether than to make of them a mere mechanical dummy, pushed aside as useless lumber whenever there is any agitation or danger before their country. Umberto of Savoia would hesitate to proclaim himself an absolute sovereign, but de facto, though not de jure, he has made himself one. The text of the Treaty of the Triplice has never been made known to the country. Rumours have been heard that there are private riders attached to it which personally bind the House of Savoy to the House of Hohenzollern, and cause the otherwise inexplicable, and in every event culpable, obstinacy of the Italian sovereign in insisting on the inviolability of the military cadres. Be this as it may, the engagements of the treaty are kept a profound secret, and such secrecy is probably one of the clauses. Now, if the will and signature of one man suffice to pledge a nation in the dark to the most perilous obligations none can predict the issue, what is this except an absolute monarchy? What pretence can there still be of a constitutional Government?

Let the English nation figure to itself their Queen binding them secretly to the most onerous engagements which might cause in the end the total exhaustion and even extinction of their country, and they will then comprehend what Italians are enduring, and have long endured, from the secret pact of their sovereign, of which they have no means to measure the dangers or the responsibilities, although the burden and terror of these lie upon them. It is only by means of the military gag that the sovereign can keep mute the popular anxiety, curiosity and alarm.

The only reforms which would be of the slightest practical use would be the abolition of the hated gate-tax, and salt-tax,[^[H]] and the reduction of the military and naval expenditure. There is no ministry of any party who dares propose these, the only possible, alleviations of the national suffering.

The formation of the Kingdom of Italy has been aggrandisement, gain and rejoicing to the Piedmontese and Lombard States, but it has been only oppression, loss and pain to the country south of the Appenines. Even in the Veneto, if the gauge of felicity be prosperity, the province must miserably regret the issue of its longed-for liberation. ‘Piû gran’ miseria non c’è sulla terra che n’ l’è la nostra,’ says a gondolier of Venice to me in this ninety-fourth year of the century. The magnificent and hardy race of gondoliers is slowly and wretchedly perishing, under the grinding wheels of communal extortion, and the ignoble rivalry of the dirty steamboats and the electric launches. But there is greater misery still than theirs, such misery as makes the worst hell of Dante’s heaven by comparison—the misery of the children in Sicily, little white slaves sold for a hundred, or a hundred and fifty francs each, to brutal blows, smarting wounds, incessant labour, and absolutely hopeless bondage.

Court-martial is substituted for civil law at the mere will of the monarch and his minister. There has been nothing in the recent events which can justify the establishment of it, and its abominable and irresponsible decrees, in which the torture of solitary confinement so largely figures. Local dissensions and jealousies find vent in accusations and condemnations, and the barbarity of the soldier and the gendarme to the civilian is regarded as a virtue and rewarded. What can be said of a Government which confounds the political writer with the brigand of the hills, the peaceful doctrinaire with the savage assassin, the harmless peasant with the poisoner or strangler, and chains them all together, and pushes them all together into prison-cells, fœtid, pestilent, wretched, already overcrowded? What will be done with all these thousands? What will be made of all this loss and waste of life? Miserable as is the existence of Italian felons, they must eat something, however scanty. The cost to the country of their useless, stagnant, fettered lives will be immense, whilst their own anguish will be unspeakable. Many of them, I repeat, are guilty of no offence whatever except of desiring a republic, or professing Socialist doctrines. I have no personal leaning towards Socialism, and regard it as unworkable, and believe that it would be pernicious if it could be brought to realisation. But it is no crime to be a Socialist. Socialism is an opinion, a doctrine, a creed, an idea; and those who hold it have every right to make a propaganda when they can. It is monstrous that, at the pleasure of a monarch or a minister, an idea can be treated as a capital crime. The young advocate Molinari is guilty of nothing except of inculcating revolutionary doctrines. What sin is this? It is one shared by Gautama and Christ.

Maxime du Camp has just died, a member of the Academy of France. He was once one of the Thousand of Marsala. What is now bringing intellectual and gifted youths to the felon’s dock in Italy is precisely such a creed as drove the late Academician to enrol himself under Garibaldi. Who shall affirm that there may not be in these young men, thus infamously judged and sentenced to-day, such brilliant intelligence and critical acumen as have made Maxime du Camp the admired of all who can appreciate scholarship, style, perception and true philanthropy, whether they may or may not agree with his arguments or endorse his deductions?

It would be impossible for any generous or unselfish nature not to burn with indignation before the poverty entailed on Italy by military madness, and the suffering caused to the poor and harmless by the fiscal and municipal tyrannies and the hired spies and extortioners of the Government.[^[I]] Jules Simon said the other day that pity is the mark of great souls. In Italy it is considered the mark of the malefactor. A young nobleman of the Lunigiana, Count Lazzoni, has now a price set upon his head because he has espoused and taught the doctrines of Mazzini. He was rich, gifted, fortunate; his family insisted that he should give up either his doctrines or themselves, and, with themselves, his estates and title. He chose to abandon the last, not without great personal affliction, because he was tenderly attached to his relatives. This young hero is now being hunted by soldiery, and when found will be tried by court-martial under the convenient charge of ‘exciting to class-hatreds.’ Yet what are such young men as these but the very salt and savour of a country? It is not they who are the criminals, but the egotists who dance and dine, and gamble and smoke, and bow at the Quirinale, and the Vatican, and pay court to the favourites of the hour, and care nothing what ruin hangs over their country, nor what suffering is entailed on their countrymen, so long as they get a rosette for their buttonhole, or rear the favourite for a race in their stables. They are the true criminals; not the youths, like Molinari and Lazzoni, not the men like De Felice and Barbato, who think and feel and dare.

Why are not the young Princes of the House of Savoy amongst the suffering peasantry of Sicily, seeing with their own eyes, hearing with their own ears, doing something to aid, to mitigate, to console, instead of spending their lives in leading cotillons, driving tandem, trying on new uniforms, and shooting in all seasons of the year? Why do they not go and live for a month in the sulphur-mines, carry the creels of sulphur on their bare backs, and feel the stinging smart of it in their blinded eyes and dried-up throats and excoriated lips? They would then, at least, know something of how a portion of their people live and die. It would be more useful than dressing up in plumes and armour to amuse William of Prussia.