The World Decision

by Robert Herrick

Then the decision was made, and after the Salandra Ministry, in whom the people had confidence, had returned to power, the ministry that had broken with Austria and refused her grudging compromises, the piazza purred like doves and listened to long patriotic speeches from "representative citizens." No soldiers were needed to keep order in these immense gatherings. For all were citizens, then, piazza and palace alike in the face of war.

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One easily understands the German Chancellor's scorn over any irregular expression of public opinion, his disgust that the loose public in the streets dares to vent any emotion or will other than that suggested to it by a strong government, above all daring to voice it passionately. In a nation such as Germany, where the franchise is so hedged about that even those who have it cannot effectively express their wills, where political opinion is supplied from a central fount of authority, where the nation goes into war at the command of the Kaiser and his military advisers, where a war of "defense" and all other national interests are controlled by the "high commandment," consisting at the most of forty or fifty men, while the remaining sixty-five millions of the people are obedient puppets, nourished on falsehoods, where the popular emotion can be turned on like an electric current at the order of the "high commandment,"—now against this enemy, now against that one,—first hate of English, then hate of Italians, now hate of Americans—it is natural that a high government functionary should despise all popular effervescence and misread its manifestations as merely the meretricious, bought noise of the mob, quickly roused in the Southern temperament and badly controlled by a weak, and probably corrupt, government. The elements in the piazza have no power in the close organization of Germany, no political expression whatever: all good citizens are instructed by a carefully controlled press how to think and feel and speak. To my thinking it is rather to the glory of the Latin temperament that it cannot be throttled and guided like the more docile Teuton nature, that when it feels vividly it will express itself, and that it can feel vividly, unselfishly in international concerns. The Latin cannot be made to march in blind obedience into the jaws of death. The piazza merely shouted what Italy had come to feel, that Teutonic domination would be intolerable, that at all cost the Austro-German ambitions must be checked, and the Latin tradition vindicated and made to endure. It was proved by the marvelous content, the fervid unanimity of patriotism that spread over Italy, once the great decision had been made.

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Since those full May weeks the world has had an example of what no doubt the Imperial Chancellor considers the suitable method of dealing with popular sentiment. The sympathies of Greeks and Rumanians have been, since the opening of the war, with the allied nations, yet their Teutonized sovereigns have kept both countries from declaring themselves in favor of the Allies. The King of Greece has stretched the constitution to preserve a distasteful neutrality, which, if it were not for the failure of the Allies to make impressive gains in the first year of the war, would have doubtless cost him his crown. The Balkan States are near enough the actual theater of war to suffer acutely from fear, and a natural timidity worked upon by many German agents, more successfully than Prince von Bülow, has thus far kept the people of Rumania and Greece passive in a false neutrality. Bulgaria is a fine example of the perfect working of the German method. The piazza certainly had no hand in the intrigues of King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. The representatives of his people urged him to maintain at least neutrality, not to put the nation at war with its blood kin, against its best interest. But the thing had all been "arranged" between the German King of Bulgaria and the German Government through "negotiation." Germany had been successful in buying the coöperation of Bulgaria as it tried to buy Italy's neutrality, at the expense of Austria. There were other factors in the case of Bulgaria that worked to the German advantage, but the method is clear. Not the voice of the piazza, but the secret agreement of "responsible government," in other words, the control of despotic, German rulers. Italy may well be proud that she has a sovereign who faithfully interprets his responsibility of rule in a constitutional state and executes the will of his people—who listens also to the voice of the piazza, not merely to the arguments of the foreign diplomat. And Italy may also be proud that the piazza spoke at a dark hour in the Allies' cause, if not the darkest, when German arms were prevailing in the East; if the dangers of German conquest were not as close to Italy as with the Balkan States, they were not remote, as German threats too plainly showed.

The Venezelos-Zaimis situation was impossible in Italy, though the circumstances were almost parallel, with Salandra and Giolitti. The piazza knew the deep Biblical truth, "He who is not for me is against me," and execrated the professed neutralista Giolitti. But the Greeks, it seems, are more easily managed by a "strong" government and a German king. The end, however, is not yet in sight. It remains to be seen whether the path of prudent passivity is the safe one, even selfishly.

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Why, after all, should we feel so apologetic for the voice of the piazza? All popular government, even in the limited form of a constitutional monarchy such as Italy, is a rough, uncertain affair. "The House of Savoy rules by executing the will of the Italian people." Good! But how is that popular will to be determined? Not, surely, by taking a poll of the five hundred-odd Deputies of the Italian Parliament elected two years before the world was upset by the Teuton desire to rule. Those Deputies were chosen, as we Americans know only too well how, by mean intrigues of party machines, by clever manipulation of trained politicians like Giovanni Giolitti, who by their control of appointed servants—the prefects of the provinces—can throw the elections as they will, can even disfranchise unfriendly elements of the population. Manhood suffrage is not a precise, a scientific method of getting at public opinion. It is possibly the least accurate method of gauging the will of a people. Something other than the poll is needed to resolve the will of a nation. And when that will is determined it makes little odds what instrumentality expresses it. Even the Giolittian Deputies, when brought to the urn for a secret vote on the Salandra measures a week after the lively expression of popular will in the piazza, voted—secretly—against their neutral leader, in favor of war! They had been converted by the voice of the piazza—by other things also in all likelihood. If their votes had been taken ten days before, when Giolitti first arrived in Rome, the result would have been far different: as Salandra and his colleagues knew. In the end the Italian Parliament merely registered the will of the people, both men and women, which expressed itself, as it always must, in diverse ways, through the press, by the voice of the piazza, in public and private discussion, flightily, weightily, passionately, timidly.

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Will, individual or collective, is a mysterious force. What enters into that act of decision which results in will is never wholly apparent, from the least to the gravest matters. And no scheme of government, which admits the right of the individual citizen, plain and exalted alike, to be heard and obeyed, has discovered a perfect way of polling this collective will of the nation. Our electoral representative method and majority vote is surely rough, though better than the Bulgarian way. That right to vote, for which our women are so eagerly striving, as thinking men realize only too well, is an empty privilege. The will of a people is inaccurately registered, not made, by the vote. The voice of the piazza when deep enough and strong enough is as good as any other way, perhaps, of determining the collective will of a nation in a crisis; surely far better than the secret way of Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Further, the reason of the piazza on any vital fundamental matter, such as war, which means life or death, is as sure as your intelligence or mine, possibly surer, because the piazza, having less to lose or gain, feels and believes and acts more simply, basically. The Roman piazza, the people of Italy, reacted to the crime against Belgium, to the atrocities committed on priests and women and children, to the murders of the Lusitania,—all deeds of that ancient enemy whose barbarism had now reappeared, after centuries, under an intellectual and sophisticated mask with a blasphemous perversion of religious sanction. They reacted also, it might be, to their own sense of personal danger from an unprotected frontier dividing them from this unscrupulous enemy, to the wrongs of some thousands of Italians condemned to live under Austrian rule and fight her battles against their friends. They responded also to the glory of Garibaldi's Thousand, who had liberated their fathers from foreign domination and made a nation out of Italy, and they responded to the great past of their people from whom the essential elements of what men know to-day as civilization has spread over the world. All these emotions were hidden in that one cry,—"Out with the barbarians!"