Lockroy, in writing to the French newspaper L’Eclair, says that Italy is served well by her public servants, and possesses unlimited resources and marvellous genius. In what way is she well served by her public servants? She is stripped bare by all who pretend to serve her, and everyone who enters her service, high and low, seeks only to advantage and enrich himself. Corruption, like dry-rot in a tree, permeates the whole public organisation of Italy, from the highest to the lowest official. All the municipalities are rotten and rapacious. Nothing is done without mancia; or, as it is called further East, backsheesh. The law courts are swarming hotbeds of bribery and perjury.
Her natural resources may be great, but they are so burdened by impost and tax, so strained, fettered, prematurely harvested and spent, that they are exhausted ere they are ripe. Of her genius there is but little fruit in these days; there is no originality in modern Italian talent; in art, literature, science, architecture, all is imitation, and imitation of an ignoble model; the national sense of beauty, once so universal, so intense, is dead; the national grace and gaiety are dying; the accursed, withering, dwarfing, deforming spirit of modernity has passed like a blast over the country and made it barren.
In the people there are still beauty of form and attitude, charm and elegance of manner, infinite patience, infinite forbearance, infinite potentialities of excellence as of evil. But they need a saviour, a guide, a friend; they need a Marcus Aurelius, a Nizahualcoytl, a St Louis, a Duke Frederic of Montefeltro, a ruler who would love them, who would raise them, who would give them food bodily and mental, and lead them in the paths of peace and loveliness. Instead of such, what have they? Men who set their wretched ambition on the approving nod of a Margrave of Brandenburg; who deem it greatness to turn a whole starving peasantry into a vast ill-ordered, ill-equipped, and ill-fed army; who, for pomp, parade, and windy boast seize the last coin, the last crust, the last shirt; who find a paltry ideal in an American machine-room, an elevated railway, and an electric gun; and who deem an ignoble vassalage to the German Emperor meet honour and glory for that Italy which was empress of the earth and goddess of the arts when the German was a forest-brute, a hairy boor, a scarce human Caliban of northern lands.
As events have moved within the last few weeks it is wholly within the bonds of possibility, even of probability, that if the Crown and its chief counsellor see greater danger to themselves threaten them in the coming year, they may appeal for armed help to their ally, who is almost their suzerain, and a fence of Prussian bayonets may be placed around the Quirinale and the House of Assembly. Who shall say that the secret and personal treaty does not provide for such protection?
So far as a public opinion can be said to exist in Italy (for in a French or English sense of the words it does not as yet exist), it is stirring to deep uneasiness and indignation at the subserviency of the tribunals to the ferocity of the Government in what is compared to the Bloody Assize of the English Jeffreys. It is becoming every day more and more alarmed at the absolutism of a King, all criticism of whose acts is made penal, yet whose personal interference and obstruction is every day becoming more obvious, more galling, and more mischievous. A new place of deportation for the condemned of Massa-Carrara is being prepared on the pestilential shore of the Southern Maremma. This new ergastolo may prove not only a tomb for those confined in it; but it may very possibly become a pit in which the Italian monarchy will be buried. If the next election should return, as it may do, two hundred of the Extreme Left, ‘l’uomo fatale’ may be the cause of a revolution as terrible as that of 1789.
Foreign speakers and writers of the present hour predict the success of Crispi. What is meant by the word? What success is there possible? The enforced acceptance of additional taxation? The placing of the last straw which breaks the camel’s back? The quietude which in the body politic, as in the physical body, follows on drainage of the blood and frequently presages the faintness of death? The reduction of parliamentary representation to a mere comedy and formula? The passive endurance of martial tyranny by a frightened nation, whose terror is passed off as acquiescence? The increase of debt, the enlargement of prisons, the paralysis of the public press?
These are the only things which can be meant by the success of Francesco Crispi, or can be embodied in it.
He is the brummagen Sylla of an age of sham, but he has all the desire of Sylla to slay his enemies and to rule alone.
In this sense, but only in this sense, he may succeed. Around the sham Sylla, as around the real Sylla, there may be laid waste a desolated and silent country, in which widows will mourn their dead, and fatherless children weep for hunger under burning roofs. Such triumph as this he may obtain. Italy has seen many triumph thus, and has paid for their triumph with her tears and with her blood.
March 1894.