The World Decision

by Robert Herrick

The Italian situation was a difficult one, obviously. Public opinion had been perplexed. There were the classes I have just mentioned, by interest and temperament either pro-German or honestly neutral. There was the radical mob that the year before had temporarily turned Italy into republics. There was the unreliable South. And the hard-ground peasants who feared, justly, heavier taxes and the further hardships of war. And there were the millions of honest but undecided Italians who hated Teutonism and all its deeds, who were intelligent enough to realize the exposed situation of Italy, who felt the call of blood for the "unredeemed," and the vaguer but none the less powerful call of civilization from their northern kin—above all who responded to the fervid historical idealism of the poet voicing the longing of their souls to become once more the mighty nation they had been. These were the people whose change of hearts and minds surprised Giolitti and the Germans.

What had been going on in those hearts of the plain people all these months of the great war, Giolitti could not understand. It was another Italy from the one he had charmed that rose at his prudent advice and threw the bitter word "traditore" in his teeth and howled him out of Rome. Traitor, yes! traitor to the loftier, bolder, finer longings of their hearts to take their stand at all cost with their natural allies in this last titanic struggle with the barbarians. It was this sort of public that spoke in the piazza and whose voice prevailed.

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The diplomat deals too exclusively with conventional persons, with the sophisticated. The politician deals too exclusively with the successful, with the commercial and exploiting classes. Giolitti's associations were of this class. Like any other bourgeoisie of finance and trade, "big business" in Italy was on the side of the big German battalions, who at this juncture were winning victories. Italy was peculiarly under the influence of German and Austrian finance. One of its leading lending banks—the Banca Commerciale—was a German concern. Most of its newer developments had been accomplished with German capital, were run by German engineers, equipped with German machines. Germany has bitterly reproached her former ally for the "ingratitude" of siding against the people who had brought her prosperity. Gratitude and ingratitude in business transactions are meaningless terms. The lender gets his profit as well as the borrower, usually before the borrower. If Italy has needed German capital, Germany has needed the Italian markets and Italian industries for her capital. The Germans surely have used Italy as their commercial colony. Italy bought her bathtubs, her electric machines, her coal, and her engines from Germany. For the past generation the German commercial traveler has been as common in Italy as the German tourist. In fact, was there ever a German tourist who was not in some sense a commercial agent for the Fatherland?

To the international financier all this is simply intelligible—a matter of mutually desirable exchange. No debtor nation should feel aggrieved with a creditor nation: rather it should rejoice that it has attracted the services of foreign capital. Is the international economist right in his reasoning? Why does the delusion persist among plain people that the creditor is not always a benefactor? It is a very old and persistent delusion, so strong in the Middle Ages that interest was considered illegal and the despised Jews were the only people who dared finance the world. Abstractly the economists are undoubtedly right, yet I am fain to believe that the popular notion has some ground of truth in it too. Obviously, according to modern notions a country rich in natural resources, but poor in capital, inherited savings, must borrow money to "develop" itself. But granting for the moment that material exploitation of a country is as desirable as our modern notions assume it to be, even then there are reasons for grave suspicion of foreign lenders. Take abused Mexico. Its woes are in good part traceable to the pernicious influence upon its domestic politics of the foreign capital which its riches have attracted. One might instance the United States as an example of beneficial exploitation by foreign capital, but with us it must be remembered the lender has had neither industrial nor political power. We have always been strong enough to manage our affairs ourselves and satisfy our creditors with their interest—if need be with their principal. We have drawn on the European horde as upon an international bank, but we have absolutely controlled the disposition of the moneys borrowed. A weak country can hardly do that. Mexico could not. It had to suffer the foreign exploiter, with his selfish intrigues, in person. Italy has never been as weak as Mexico: it has maintained its own government, its own civilization. But the increasing amount of foreign investment, the increasing number of foreign "interests" in Italy, has been evident to every Italian. The hotels, the factories, the shops all testify patently to the presence of the stranger within the gates looking after his own interests, breeding his money on Italian soil.

But why not? the dispassionate internationalist may ask. Why should not the Italian hotels be in the hands of Austrians, Germans, and Swiss; the new electrical developments be installed and run by Germans; the shops for tourists and Italians be owned by foreigners? There we cross the unconscious instinct of nationality, which cannot be ignored. Assuming that there is something precious, to be guarded as a chief treasure in the instinct of nationality, as I assume, there are grave dangers in too much friendly commercial "infiltration" from the outside. The indirect influences of commercial exploitation with foreign capital are the insidious, the dangerous ones. The dislike of the foreign trader, the foreign creditor, may voice itself crudely as mere envy, know-nothingism, but it has a healthy root in national self-preservation. For an Italian the German article should be undesirable, especially if its possession means accepting the German and his way of life along with his goods. The small merchant and the peasant express their resentments of foreign competition rawly, no doubt. Consciously it is half envy of the more efficient stranger. Unconsciously they are voicing the deep traditions of their ancestors, vindicating their race ideals, cherishing what is most enduring in themselves. They would not see their country given over to the stranger, whose life is not their life.

One unpleasant aspect of the commercial invasion of Italy by the Teuton was his liking to live there, and consequently the amount of real estate which he was collecting on the Latin peninsula—so much that the lovely environs of Naples were fast becoming a German principality! These invaders were not traders, nor workers, but capitalists and exploiters. The process is known now as "infiltration." The German had filtered into Italy in every possible way, was supplanting its own native life with the Teutonic thing, as it had in France so largely. Italy could well profit from that experience of its sister nation. The Germans who filtered into French life, commercial, industrial, social, were German first and last. When the crisis came they turned from their adopted land, where they had lived on terms of cordial hospitality for ten, twenty, thirty years, and took themselves back to Germany, in many cases to reappear as the invader at the head of armed troops. The experience of France proved that the peaceful German resident was a German all the years of his life, not a loyal, vital factor in his adopted country—too often something of a spy as well. Therefore Italy might well be disturbed over the presence of so much Teutonic "infiltration" in her own beloved land. And why should Germany call her ungrateful when she sought to rid herself of her unwelcome creditors? German capital had made its five per cent on its investments, and better: it should not expect to absorb the life of the nation also.

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In every debtor nation there must be an element which profits directly from the creditor relation. It assumes, naturally, the aspects of "progress," and consists of the richer trading class and bankers, sustainers of politicians. Such, I take it, were the followers of Giolitti, and such was Giolitti himself, a sincere admirer of Teutonic success and believer in the economic help which Germany could render to his kind of Italian. Such men as Giolitti are easily impressed by evidences of German superiority: they identify progress with the rapid introduction of German plumbing, German hotel-keeping, German electric devices, German banks. All these, they believe, help a "backward country" to come forward. They do not understand the finer spiritual risks that such material benefits may involve. They are not as sensitive as the humble peasant, as simpler citizens, to the gradual sapping of the precious national roots, of the internal debasement that may be going on through the process of "infiltration." They are too prosperous, too cosmopolitan to feel losses in national individuality. They realize merely the better hotels, the better railways, the improved plumbing in their country. Their souls are already half-Teutonized.

In his dignified answer to the German Chancellor's vulgar attack on him in the Reichstag, Salandra referred to the long history of the Italian people, who "were civilized and leaders of the world" when the Teuton hordes were still savage. It was the spirit of that ancient civilization which did not consist primarily of industrial development that stirred in the souls of true Italians and made them scorn the advice of the Teutonized politician. He was "traditore" to all that nobler Italians hold dear—to the Latin tradition.