If there were any free speech or free action in matters political
permitted in what is known as Free Italy, it would be at once
interesting and useful to ask of its Government under what _régime_ they
govern? Is it under a constitutional monarchy, a dictatorship, a
military despotism, or what? The reply would probably be that it is
still a constitutional monarchy with popular parliamentary
representation. But the counter reply would be: Then why are all the
restraints limiting a constitutional sovereign broken through and all
the privileges appertaining to, and creating the purpose of,
parliamentary representation violated or ignored? When the king of a
constitutional Italy violated the Constitution in refusing the
Zanardelli Cabinet because it did not promise acquiescence in his own
views, the country should have protested, and insisted on the Zanardelli
Cabinet being placed in power for the sake of the constitutional
principle therein involved. It was the first step towards absolutism. If
it had been promptly stopped and punished there would have been no more
similar steps. It was allowed to pass unchastised, and the result has
been that every succeeding week which has since passed has seen worse
and continual violations of the Constitution and the Code.
‘_L’uomo fatale_,’ as the Italian people call Crispi, was summoned to
rule, and the result has been, what everyone cognisant of his character
knew would be inevitable, namely, the abolition of all liberties and
safeguards of the body politic, and the substitution of secret,
irresponsible, and absolutely despotic, tribunals, and secret agencies,
worked by the will of one man. The revolutionary movement has been
crushed by military force with a brutality and injustice which, were the
scene Russia or Austria, would cause monster meetings of indignation in
London. Led by _The Times_, _The Post_, and other journals, English
opinion is deaf and blind to the tyrannies which it would be the first
to denounce in any other nation. English opinion does not choose to
understand, and does not desire to be forced to understand, that Italy
is at the present time as completely ruled by an unscrupulous despotism,
and by sheer use of the sabre and musket, as is Poland at this hour, or
as Austrian Venetia was earlier in the century; and that Italy presents
the same spectacle of prisoners, purely political, being hustled through
the towns manacled by handcuffs and chained to one another by a long
iron fetter; lawyers, landowners, merchants, editors, men of education,
probity and honourable life being yoked with the common criminal and the
hired bravo. It is difficult to comprehend how and why this shameful
outrage upon decency and liberty is viewed with indifference by the rest
of Europe. That it may give pleasure to the foes of Italy is easily
understood; but how can it fail to give pain and alarm to her friends?
How is it that unanimous protest and unanimous censure do not arise from
all those who profess to recognise the necessity of freedom for national
well-being?
The extreme gravity of the fact that the Italian sovereign chooses and
caresses a minister who is permitted to set aside at will all ordinary
provisions and protections of the law, does not appear to excite any
astonishment or apprehension outside Italy. In Italy itself the people
are paralysed with fear; the steel is at their throats, and the army,
which they have been ruined to construct and maintain, crushes them into
silence and exhaustion.
Let the English people picture to themselves what would have been the
verdict of Europe if England had dealt with Ireland as Sicily has been
dealt with; let them imagine Lord Wolseley acting like General Morra;
let them imagine a cordon drawn around the whole island, ingress and
egress forbidden under pain of arrest, telegrams destroyed, approaching
vessels fired upon, the whole population forcibly disarmed, no news—save
such as might be garbled by superior order—permitted to be despatched
from the interior to the world at large, thousands of men thrust into
prison on suspicion whilst their families starved, absolute secrecy,
absolute darkness and mystery covering irresponsible despotism; let the
English public imagine such a state as this in Ireland, and then ask
themselves what would be the verdict of Europe and America upon it.
Sicily contains two millions of persons, and this vast number has been
given over to the absolute will of a single brutal soldier, who is
screened by ministerial protection from any ray of that daylight of
publicity which is the only guarantee for the equity of public men.
We are told that the island is pacified. So is a garotted and
blindfolded creature pacified; so is a murdered corpse pacified. The
most merciless reprisals have followed on the attempts of the peasantry
to save themselves from the grinding extortions of their usurers and the
pitiless taxation of their communes; and the reign of terror which has
been established is called tranquillity. The same boast of ‘peace when
there is no peace’ is made in the Lunigiana.
There is not even the gloss of affected legality in the countless
arrests which have filled to overflowing the prisons of Italy. The
charges by which these arrests are excused are so wide that they are a
net into which all fish, big and little, may be swept. The imputation of
‘inciting to hatred between the classes’ is so vague that it may include
almost any expression of social or political opinion. It is an
accusation under which almost every great writer, thinker or philosopher
would be liable to arrest, and under which Jesus Christ and Jean Jacques
Rousseau, Garibaldi and John Milton, Washington and Brahma, Tolstoï and
St Paul would be all alike condemned as criminals.
Equally vague is the companion accusation of inciting to civil war. As I
pointed out in my article of last month, Italy owes her present
existence entirely to civil war. Civil war may be a dread calamity, but
it may be also an heroic remedy for ills far greater than itself. What
is called authority in Italy is so corrupt in itself that it cannot
command the respect of men, and has no title to demand their obedience.
The creator itself of civil war and disturbance, such authority becomes
ridiculous when draping itself in the toga of an intangible dignity.
Moreover, it is now incarnated in the person of a single unscrupulous
opportunist. Why should the nation respect either his name or his
measures? The King of Italy, always servilely copying Germany, has
decreed the name and measures of the lawyer Crispi sacred, as Germany
has sent to prison many writers and printers for having expressed
opinions hostile to the acts or speeches of German public men. Under the
state called _piccolo stato d’assedio_ military tribunals judge civil
offences, or what are considered offences, and pass sentences of
imprisonment varying in duration from six months to thirty years. The
infamous sentence of twenty-three years’ imprisonment, of which three
are to be passed in solitary confinement, passed on the young advocate
Molinari, for what is really no more than an offence of opinions, has
forced a cry of surprise and disgust even from the German press. The
monstrous iniquity of this condemnation has made even the blind and
timid worm of Italian public feeling turn writhing under the iron heel
which is crushing it, and this individual sentence is to be carried for
appeal into the civil courts, where it is fervently to be hoped it may
be altered if not cancelled.[G] Hundreds of brutal sentences have been
passed for which there is no hope or chance of appeal, and vast numbers
of men, in the flower of youth or the prime of manhood, are being flung
into the hell of Italian prisons, there to be left to rot away in unseen
and unpitied suffering, till death releases them or insanity seizes
them. Insanity comes quickly in such torture as Italian prison-life is
to its victims.
-----
Footnote G:
It was not cancelled, and Molinari is now in the _ergustolo_ of
Oneglia.
-----
A journal called _L’Italia del Popolo_ contained a spirited and eloquent
article proving that Crispi was neither courageous nor honest, as a
Socialist deputy had in a moment of flattery called him: this perfectly
legitimate and temperate article caused the confiscation of the paper!
‘If Crispi be Almighty God, let us know it!’ said the _Secolo_ of Milan,
a courageous and well-written daily newspaper which has itself been
frequently confiscated for telling the truth.
As specimens of other sentences passed in the month of February of the
present year, take the following examples:
In Siena the proprietor of the journal _Martinello del Calle_ was
condemned to thirty-five days of prison for having called the deputy
Piccarti ‘violent and grotesque.’
The journal _Italia del Popolo_ was seized because it contained
quotations from the Memoirs of Kossuth.
The _Secolo_ of Milan was seized for protesting against the condemnation
to _twenty years’_ imprisonment of the soldier Lombardino, although he
had completely proved his innocence of the offence attributed to him.
The barber, Vittorio Catani, having been heard, in the Piazza S. Spirito
of Florence, to say that the revolts in Sicily were due to hunger and
distress, was condemned to three months’ imprisonment and fifty francs
fine.
At San Giuseppe, in Sicily, an old peasant surrendered one gun;
confessed to having a better one, and showed where he had put it; he was
sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.
A day-labourer, Stefano Grosso, went to visit his father who was dying;
a revolver being found in the cottage, during his visit, he was
condemned to six months of prison for owning it, although there was no
proof of his ownership.
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.
-----
Footnote H:
To such an extent is the espionage on the salt-tax carried that a poor
man living on the seashore is not allowed to take up more than one
pail of sea-water to his house in one day lest he should expose the
water to the heat of the sun and use the few salt crystals which its
evaporation would leave at the bottom of the pail.
-----
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.
-----
Footnote I:
The taxes of the Government amounted to four hundred millions odd in
1873; in 1893 they amount to over eight hundred millions.
-----
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.
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._