_The Spirit of Italy_
We cannot close more fittingly than by quoting Mr. Sidney Low's highly
informing comments on the spirit of Italy:[2]
"Of all the belligerent nations I have seen, Italy seems to me the
most tranquil, contented and serenely confident. She has endured heavy
losses and is called upon to make great sacrifices, but her people
have counted the cost and they pay it resolutely, cheerfully, almost,
one would say, gaily. They have no love for war and on this one they
entered with hesitating and doubtful steps, but now, I think, they
feel, not only that it was necessary and right, but that it will give
them some things which were wanting in the years of peace. War is a
monstrous evil; but from its furnace of pain and suffering Italy, with
other nations, may emerge hardened and tempered. She will gain a larger
unity and that not merely by annexing the unredeemed territory. The
war has gone far to obliterate that division of classes and localities
which was the inheritance of her troubled past. The common effort and
the common burden have crowned the edifice which the makers of Italy
built up in the nineteenth century....
"What Italy needs is security, sufficient to develop to the full her
economic resources and her national individuality; and that she intends
to obtain. She is resolved to be independent of external patronage,
protection and supervision of any kind, and to enjoy all the rights,
privileges, ambitions, which belong to the greater nations of the
earth. She believes herself capable of excelling, not merely in art,
science, letters, philosophy, laws, but in production, manufacturing,
commerce, the exploitation of waste and backward lands. She is not
content that her people, so intelligent, so industrious, so capable,
should be packed off year by year in shoals to form the ill-paid labor
helots of wealthier communities; she prefers that they should be kept
at home to develop the riches and intensified vitality of their own
land. She has watched the rise of Germany from poverty and weakness
to strength and industrial magnificence; and she believes that the
Latin capacity for organization, invention, scientific adaptation and
enterprise, is not inferior to the Teutonic. She thinks she can do
many of the things that Germany has done, and some things which Germany
will never do; and she means to try. It is for the great free nations,
with which she is now associated, to survey her effort with sympathetic
eyes, and extend to it all the aid and encouragement in their power."
[2] From "Italy in the War"
[Illustration: WOMAN LETTER CARRIER, ROME