The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II

by William James Stillman

The following year was marked by the accession of Crispi to the direction of the government of Italy. So many fables have accumulated regarding Crispi, and such bitterness of prejudice against him even in England, that as one of the very few disinterested witnesses of his conduct from that day until his second fall after Adowah, and supposed to be in his confidence, I am disposed to put briefly on record my impressions of him. His popularity at that date (1887) was incontestably greater than that of any other Italian statesman, but the animosity entertained for him by the Radicals was intense, owing to his most vigorous repression of all anti-dynastic tendencies, and the bitterer for his having once been himself a Radical leader; but, what was at first sight inexplicable, the hostility to him of the Conservatives was scarcely less bitter than that of the Republicans,—the former because he had once been a Republican, and the latter because he had ceased to be one. The leading chiefs of groups among the politicians were afraid of him on account of his strength, and the court had the most cordial hatred of him, partly because he had never tried to conciliate it or to conceal his distrust of it, and partly because Signora Crispi was an object of aversion to all the society of Rome. This aversion was intensified by the fact that, as the wife of a member of the order of the Annunciata, she was entitled to precedence over all the Italian nobility not so honored.

A Knight of the Annunciata is technically the cousin of the King, and at the receptions of the Queen, Signora Crispi, who was really an antipathetic person, had her seat in the royal circle, where she sat as completely ignored by all present as if she were a statue of Aversion. I am convinced that the larger part of the animosity shown for Crispi by the better classes in Rome was due to her. One of Crispi's oldest and most constant friends told me of a visit he once made to his house with General——, one of the Mille of Marsala, when, as they left the house, the general said mournfully, "Poor Crispi, he has not a friend in the world." "Nonsense, he has thousands," replied the other. "No," returned the general, "if he had one he would kill that woman." In the latter part of Crispi's first ministry we were on friendly terms, though our first intercourse was anything but kindly; but I avoided going needlessly to his house to the end of my term of residence in Rome, except when the service demanded it, because I did not like to meet his wife.

Crispi and I were never intimate, and the supposed confidence between us never extended beyond the communication of political matter which he thought should be made public, and which could be made public without violation of official secrecy. He had far too high an estimate of his position as the head of the government of one of the powers of Europe to enter into intimacy with a correspondent of even the "Times," a journal of which, nevertheless, he always spoke with the respect due another power. "It is not merely a journal, but a great public institution," he said, and he treated me as the agent of that power; but intimacy in any other sense there never was. Crispi had, to a degree I never knew in any other Italian minister, the sense of the dignity of his position, which, to those who did not read the man thoroughly, seemed arrogance, and made him many enemies. He had an invincible antipathy to newspaper correspondents, but at the outset of our acquaintance I made him understand that even if he did not see fit to treat me with cordiality, he should not treat the "Times" with disrespect. He had two secretaries, Alberto Pisani Dossi, one of the most noble Italian natures I ever knew, and Edmond Mayor, a Swiss, naturalized in Italy, and an admirable diplomat, now in its service, an honest, faithful child of the mountain republic; and both these became and remain my excellent friends, and, as they were permitted, they kept me informed of the matters which it was for the advantage of the "Times" to know; but until near the end of the first term of Crispi's premiership we never came nearer than that to being friends. I found his manner intolerable, as, no doubt, other journalists did, and, as the relations of the journalists to the man in office are in Italy generally corrupt, Crispi's aversion to them and their ways accounted easily for the very general and violent hostility between him and the press.

The tone of the journals in Italy has very little to do with public opinion. All the world knows that, with the exception of two or three dailies, the Italian papers are the organs of purely personal interests, ambitions, and opinions,—not even of parties, which do not exist except in the form of fossil fragments; and when a journal emits an opinion or formulates a policy, everybody knows that it is the opinion or policy of the man who has a dominant or entire control of its columns. Crispi had his own journal, "La Riforma," which frankly and entirely expressed his views, and he paid no attention to the others. I happened to be on the way to the Foreign Office the day after Crispi assumed the reins of government, and by the way fell in with the foreign editor of one of the journals of the Left, exulting in the accession of a minister of his old party. He said to me, "I will wager you, Stillman, that in six weeks we are recognized as official,"—which meant subsidized. He had his audience first, and it was short, but within the fortnight his paper was one of the most violent opponents of the ministry. I had my audience, and in five minutes I turned my back on the premier and walked out of the office, and never put my foot in it again until, many weeks after, some trouble on the African frontier between English and Italian officers brought me a request from Crispi to come and receive a communication.

I finally conquered his respect by showing him that I was the sincere friend of Italy, and our relations became confidential as far as his very rigorous sense of his official limitations permitted, but not a line beyond. I have seen in his hands the copy of the treaty of Triple Alliance, but I never drew from him the faintest hint of its provisions except that it was purely defensive and contained no stipulation for any aggressive movement under any circumstances. I learned them from other sources, and, with the changes of ministries and the diversities of their policies, foreign as well as domestic, there is no doubt that all the powers are fully informed of the details of the treaty. But personal intimacy, in the sense of that friendship which obtains amongst equals, could never have existed between us. Crispi is extremely reticent and reserved in his personal relations and has very few intimate friends, and those, so far as I know, entirely amongst the faithful few who were his intimates in the days of insurrection and conspiracy; but I know him as well as any one out of that circle, and I know him to be an absolutely honest and patriotic statesman, the first of Italy since Cavour. It is my opinion, too, that he is the ablest man not only in Italy but in Europe, since the death of Bismarck. In 1893 he was urged to assume the dictatorship, and the King in the general panic was willing to accord it, but Crispi refused, saying, "I am an old man with few years to live, but I will not give my countrymen an example of unconstitutional government."

But Italian politics are only the wrangle of personal ambitions and of faction intrigues. The Chamber is a legislative anarchy from which a few honest and patriotic men occasionally emerge as ministers through a chance combination, to disappear again with the first tumult, and the influence of the chief of the state was never such as to guide it out of the chaos. King Humbert, one of the truest gentlemen and most courteous sovereigns that ever sat on the throne of any country, never made an effort to defend the prerogatives of the crown, and accepted with the same bonhomie every ministerial combination proposed to him, whether it comprised dangerous elements or not. At no time did he attempt to exert the enormous influence which the crown possesses in Italy for the maintenance of a consistent policy, internal or foreign. Lord Saville told me that, when Crispi came to power in 1887, he asked the King if he was a safe head of the government, and the King replied that it was better to have him with them than against them, for at that time Crispi was regarded by all Conservatives as the devil of Italian politics. But in the following years Crispi's profound—even exaggerated—reverence for the King, and his masterly administration of the government, had laid all the apprehensions of the sovereign at rest, and gained for him the widest popularity ever possessed, in my knowledge of Italian affairs, by any minister. The King said to me that he had the most absolute confidence in his devotion, integrity, and abilities. Yet, when in 1891 an artificial crisis in the Chamber gave Crispi his first defeat on a question of so little constitutional import that his successors adopted his measure and passed it, the King accepted with the same equanimity a ministry composed of the most discordant elements, ignoring all the constitutional proprieties. At a later epoch, that of 1893, when Crispi saved Italy from menacing chaos, the King repeated to me his expression of confidence in Crispi and his very low opinion of his only possible alternative, Rudiní, but in the succeeding crisis accepted Rudiní with the same cheerfulness he had shown when Crispi saved the position in 1893.

Nothing could exceed the devotion of the King to his subjects and their personal welfare, but he allowed the ship of state to drift into the breakers because he would not maintain the highest prerogative of the crown, that of insisting on a ministry which possessed and deserved his confidence. Knowing, as he did, that parliamentary government in Italy had become a mere farce and the derision of the country, he never attempted to insist on exercising any influence on the composition of the ministry, which represented his authority as well as the popular will, and in 1896 he yielded the dissolution of the Chamber to the pressure of a court favorite against the advice of all his constitutional advisers. Personally I was a warm admirer of the man, but I regard his reign as a long disaster to the kingdom of Italy, the greater because his personal qualities gave him such a hold on the population that he might safely have assumed any initiative beneficial to the state. He might have abolished the Chamber—he allowed it to abolish him.

The return of the summer heats bringing on a recurrence of the malady acquired at Athens, I was obliged to leave Italy for the summer and I returned to England. On my arrival the "Times" manager proposed to me a trip to America in quest of evidence connected with the Parnell case. A professional detective sent out some time before had failed to get hold of the threads of the question, and MacDonald, thinking that as an American I might succeed where the professional had failed, desired me to try my luck. Of the general history of that case the public has long ago learned all that it cares to know. I had nothing to do with that and am not here concerned with it; but I had a curious and interesting experience in my visit, the object of which was the obtaining of documents that would confirm the connection of Mr. Parnell with secret and illegal acts in Ireland, with which the Irish conspirators in America were probably connected, it being hoped that some of the latter might be induced to give up documents in confirmation.

I had warned MacDonald that the published facsimile of a letter purporting to have been written by Parnell in connection with the Phoenix Park murders was not what he supposed it to be, and that the theory that it had been written by Parnell's secretary and signed by Parnell was erroneous. It was clear to me that it had been written and signed by the same hand and by the same pen. I had once gone through a complicated case of forgery with Chabot, the great expert in handwriting, in the course of which I became greatly interested in the man. We had become friends and he had taught me all that could be taught of his profession, so that I had some capacity to form a judgment on the matter. MacDonald replied that they were certain of their facts, and that they should maintain that position. There was ample personal evidence that a letter of the import of that produced in facsimile in the "Times" had been sent by Parnell to Sheridan, who was implicated in the Phoenix Park murders, and that this letter had been seen by many persons supposed to be in the councils of the Irish party! and it is probable that Pigott had seen it and bargained for its delivery to some party on behalf of the "Times." He was probably deluded in this expectation, and, not to fail in his promise, reproduced it from memory and with the aid of the handwriting of Parnell's secretary and an old signature of Parnell, and delivered it as the original. Confirmation of this hypothesis is given by the fact that Parnell dared not bring his suit against the "Times" until the forged letter had been shown in court in the course of the connected case of O'Donnell, and was seen by him not to be the original. That was safe in the custody of Sheridan, who had taken it to America and kept it in hiding from both parties. It was the special object of my mission.

The English detective who had preceded me had the naïveté to apply to the chief of the New York detective police, an Irishman, for assistance, and was handed over to pretended colleagues who were really agents of the Irish organization, and so completely duped by them as to be induced to send a supposed detective (who was one of themselves) to Mexico, where he was assured that Sheridan had gone, and led to undertake various operations which were simply contrivances to make him lose his time and his money.