This religious and idealistic manner of looking at life, so
characteristic of the _Risorgimento_, prevails even beyond the heroic
age of the revolution and the establishment of the Kingdom. It
survives down through Ricasoli, Lanza, Sella and Minghetti, down, that
is, to the occupation of Rome and the systemization of our national
finances. The parliamentary overturn of 1876, indeed, marks not the
end, but rather an interruption, on the road that Italy had been
following since the beginning of the century. The outlook then
changed, and not by the capriciousness or weakness of men, but by a
necessity of history which it would be idiotic in our day to deplore.
At that time the fall of the Right, which had ruled continuously
between 1861 and 1876, seemed to most people the real conquest of
freedom.
To be sure the Right cannot be accused of too great scruple in
respecting the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution; but the real
truth was that the Right conceived liberty in a sense directly
opposite to the notions of the Left. The Left moved from the
individual to the State: the Right moved from the State to the
individual. The men of the left thought of "the people" as merely the
agglomerate of the citizens composing it. They therefore made the
individual the center and the point of departure of all the rights and
prerogatives which a régime of freedom was bound to respect.
The men of the Right, on the contrary, were firmly set in the notion
that no freedom can be conceived except within the State, that freedom
can have no important content apart from a solid régime of law
indisputably sovereign over the activities and the interests of
individuals. For the Right there could be no individual freedom not
reconcilable with the authority of the State. In their eyes the
general interest was always paramount over private interests. The law,
therefore, should have absolute efficacy and embrace the whole life of
the people.
This conception of the Right was evidently sound; but it involved
great dangers when applied without regard to the motives which
provoked it. Unless we are careful, too much law leads to stasis and
therefore to the annihilation of the life which it is the State's
function to regulate but which the State cannot suppress. The State
may easily become a form indifferent to its content--something
extraneous to the substance it would regulate. If the law comes upon
the individual from without, if the individual is not absorbed in the
life of the State, the individual feels the law and the State as
limitations on his activity, as chains which will eventually strangle
him unless he can break them down.
This was just the feeling of the men of '76. The country needed a
breath of air. Its moral, economic, and social forces demanded the
right to develop without interference from a law which took no account
of them. This was the historical reason for the overturn of that year;
and with the transference of power from Right to Left begins the
period of growth and development in our nation: economic growth in
industry, commerce, railroads, agriculture; intellectual growth in
science, education. The nation had received its form from above. It
had now to struggle to its new level, giving to a State which already
had its constitution, its administrative and political organization,
its army and its finance, a living content of forces springing from
individual initiative prompted by interests which the _Risorgimento_,
absorbed in its great ideals, had either neglected or altogether
disregarded.
The accomplishment of this constitutes the credit side of the balance
sheet of King Humbert I. It was the error of King Humbert's greatest
minister, Francesco Crispi, not to have understood his age. Crispi
strove vigorously to restore the authority and the prestige of the
State as against an individualism gone rampant, to reassert religious
ideals as against triumphant materialism. He fell, therefore, before
the assaults of so-called democracy.
Crispi was wrong. That was not the moment for re-hoisting the
time-honored banner of idealism. At that time there could be no talk
of wars, of national dignity, of competition with the Great Powers; no
talk of setting limits to personal liberties in the interests of the
abstract entity called "State." The word "God," which Crispi sometimes
used, was singularly out of place. It was a question rather of
bringing the popular classes to prosperity, self-consciousness,
participation in political life. Campaigns against illiteracy, all
kinds of social legislation, the elimination of the clergy from the
public schools, which must be secular and anti-clerical! During this
period Freemasonry became solidly established in the bureaucracy, the
army, the judiciary. The central power of the State was weakened and
made subservient to the fleeting variations of popular will as
reflected in a suffrage absolved from all control from above. The
growth of big industry favored the rise of a socialism of Marxian
stamp as a new kind of moral and political education for our
proletariat. The conception of humanity was not indeed lost from view:
but such moral restraints as were placed on the free individual were
all based on the feeling that each man must instinctively seek his own
well-being and defend it. This was the very conception which Mazzini
had fought in socialism, though he rightly saw that it was not
peculiar to socialism alone, but belonged to any political theory,
whether liberal, democratic, or anti-socialistic, which urges men
toward the exaction of rights rather than to the fulfillment of
duties.
From 1876 till the Great War, accordingly, we had an Italy that was
materialistic and anti-Mazzinian, though an Italy far superior to the
Italy of and before Mazzini's time. All our culture, whether in the
natural or the moral sciences, in letters or in the arts, was
dominated by a crude positivism, which conceived of the reality in
which we live as something given, something ready-made, and which
therefore limits and conditions human activity quite apart from
so-called arbitrary and illusory demands of morality. Everybody wanted
"facts," "positive facts." Everybody laughed at "metaphysical dreams,"
at impalpable realities. The truth was there before the eyes of men.
They had only to open their eyes to see it. The Beautiful itself could
only be the mirror of the Truth present before us in Nature.
Patriotism, like all the other virtues based on a religious attitude
of mind, and which can be mentioned only when people have the courage
to talk in earnest, became a rhetorical theme on which it was rather
bad taste to touch.
This period, which anyone born during the last half of the past
century can well remember, might be called the demo-socialistic phase
of the modern Italian State. It was the period which elaborated the
characteristically democratic attitude of mind on a basis of personal
freedom, and which resulted in the establishment of socialism as the
primary and controlling force in the State. It was a period of growth
and of prosperity during which the moral forces developed during the
_Risorgimento_ were crowded into the background or off the stage.