ITALIAN POLITICS
In the reorganization of the office consequent on the entry of a new
manager, I was offered the choice between the posts of Athens and
Rome. Personally I should have preferred Athens, but I had recently
established my family at Rome, and the serious objection to a family
residence at Athens in the want of any refuge from the heats of the
intense summer of that city at a practicable distance from it, was
an insuperable obstacle to my accepting it. The succession of Lord
Dufferin to the Embassy at Rome, and the friendly personal relations
which his large-hearted nature established between the Embassy and the
correspondentship, made the position highly agreeable. He was of all
the diplomats I have ever known the one who best understood how
to treat a correspondent. He took my measure as correspondent and
accepted me _pro tanto_ into his confidence. He used to say, "I tell
you whatever information there is, because I know that then you will
not telegraph what ought not to be telegraphed, while if you find it
out for yourself I have no right to restrain you."
In 1890 the negotiations between England and Italy in reference to the
occupation of Kassala by the latter, culminated in the congress of
Naples, where Crispi met Sir Evelyn Baring (now Lord Cromer), for the
discussion of the conditions. Until that time my relations with Crispi
had been such as he generally maintained with journalists, viz., a
distant civility, but in my case attended by confidential relations
with his two secretaries. I attended the congress, and was admitted
by both Dufferin and Baring to such confidential knowledge of the
negotiations as was possible. From Crispi's private secretary I
learned his views, and, knowing the opinions on both sides, I was able
to remove certain prejudices on the part of Crispi and so smooth the
difficulties which his suspicious nature raised. Unfortunately there
was one misapprehension on his part of which I became aware too late,
namely, that Sir Evelyn Baring was hostile to Italians in Egypt and
predisposed to combat Crispi's conditions. This was due to sheer
misrepresentation on the part of the Italian delegates, who were both
Anglophobes; and the conviction on the part of Crispi that he must
fight Baring as an enemy led to protracted and obstinate contest of
each point in the conditions, till finally, just as agreement had been
arrived at, a dispatch from Lord Salisbury ordered the withdrawal from
the negotiations, and the convention fell through, to Crispi's great
annoyance. His total miscomprehension of the large-hearted and
generous ruler of Egypt was a misfortune to Italy and to Crispi, but
the defect was in his temperament--a morbid tendency to suspicion of
strangers characteristic of the man and in the roots of his Albanian
nature. Crispi was not a judge of men--had he been he would have
avoided the friends who ruined his political career, and made friends
who would have strengthened his position. The efforts I had made to
remove misunderstandings satisfied Crispi that I was really
friendly to Italy and established more cordial relations between us
thenceforward. In acknowledgment of his mistaken treatment of me he
conferred on me the cross of commander of the Crown of Italy.
A little later the combination was formed in the Chamber to overthrow
the ministry. I had some time before befriended Monsignor X., the
victim of an outrageous act of injustice on the part of the French
government, and of accessory indifference on the part of the Vatican,
and he had repaid me by valuable information from the Vatican from
time to time. When this ministerial crisis was in progress, Monsignor
X. came to me one evening to tell me that the chiefs of the factions
in opposition were in conference with agents of the Vatican to support
them in the overthrow of Crispi. The Vatican promised to release
Catholics from the _non expedit_ in case of the fall of the ministry
and the necessity of going to the country in a general election. The
ministerial combination which accepted this pact with the immitigable
enemy of the unity of Italy, whose sole motive for hostility to Crispi
was the latter's invincible antagonism to the temporal power and
the immixtion of the Church in civil affairs, comprised a leading
Republican and Radical, Nicotera, and Rudiní, the chief of the
ultra-Conservative group, beside members of various groups of
intervening shades of politics. Knowing little of the rottenness of
the politics of Italy at that time I was amazed by the information of
Monsignor X., and went at once to the Palazzo Braschi to inform Crispi
and ascertain if there was positive confirmation of the information. I
asked him to use his means of intelligence at the Vatican, which was
always sure, and so well informed that Cardinal Hohenlohe told me one
day that Crispi knew better what was passing at the Vatican than the
cardinals did. On inquiry he discovered that my news was true, and
for the first time he understood the full meaning of the combination
against him.
That the King should have accepted Crispi's resignation under the
circumstances (the adverse vote in the Chamber, being a surprise vote
involving no question of policy, and, as all knew, the result of a
secret combination--a conspiracy, in fact) was a grave mistake on
the part of His Majesty, and opened the way to all the confusion
and parliamentary anarchy which has followed, and which to-day is
increasing and menaces the stability of the throne and the unity of
Italy. The government of Crispi had been most successful, his attitude
in the Bulgarian affair had rendered an important service to the
cause of European peace, as was acknowledged by Lord Salisbury in a
published dispatch, and he had strengthened the ties between England
and Italy; he had maintained perfect order, and had effected economies
in the national expenditure to the amount of 140,500,000 lire a year,
besides suppressing some annoying taxes and without imposing any new
one, and when he fell gold was practically at par and the financial
position solid as it had not been since 1860. He had decided on
the reform of the banking system, which would have prevented the
catastrophe that fell on the succeeding ministry, and the rotten banks
and the corrupt element in the Chamber which was in their pay were
the leading element in the combination against him. Under these
circumstances the King's duty was to support a minister who had at the
grave crisis of the death of Victor Emmanuel saved the dynasty from
a serious danger, who was universally known to be the only Italian
statesman whose nerve was equal to any sudden emergency, and of whose
devotion, as the King personally assured me later, he was absolutely
certain. That no reason for the crisis existed was shown by the fact
that the succeeding ministry adopted the identical measure on which
Crispi was defeated. But the King (whose death has occurred while I am
revising these chapters) showed on many occasions that, though loyal
to his constitutional obligation so far as deference to parliamentary
forms is concerned, he never had the nerve to assume a responsible
attitude or maintain the authority of the throne; and, while he was
ready to abdicate if popular opinion demanded it, he was unable to
withstand a factious and revolutionary movement as his father had
done, by calling to his support the statesmen who could maintain order
when menaced. His form of constitutionality was perfectly adapted to
a country where the Conservative forces were supreme and the
institutions solid; but in a half-consolidated monarchy, attacked from
within and without by dissolvent influences as is Italy at present, he
was a cause of weakness to good government. And Rudiní assured me when
I went to pay the formal visit of congratulation on his accession to
power, that the King had said that he was in the position of the young
Emperor of Germany when he threw off the yoke of Bismarck--he was
tired of Crispi's strong hand. The King later denied the statement
in an audience he gave me, but I am afraid that Rudiní was, for a
novelty, nearer the truth.
Rudiní as minister of foreign affairs began with a blunder which might
well have been fatal. When the murder of the Italian prisoners at New
Orleans took place, he determined to show his energy and patriotic
spirit, and he telegraphed to the Italian minister at Washington to
demand of the federal government the immediate bringing to justice of
the murderers under the alternative of sending the Italian fleet to
New Orleans. This amazing display of ignorance of the situation and
of geography appeared in the Roman journals of the next morning. As I
knew enough of the temper of my countrymen to foresee that this demand
was certain to end in war or a humiliating result to Italy, I jumped
into a cab and drove over to the ministry of public instruction, the
titular of which, Professor Villari, was an old friend of our life
in Florence, and begged him to go at once to Rudiní and urge the
countermanding of the telegram of the previous night, for, as the
federal government had no jurisdiction in the case, it could not
comply, and the imperious demand of the Italian government, intended
for home consumption and as demonstration of the high spirit of the
ministry, was certain to be peremptorily responded to, while the
menace of sending the ironclad fleet to New Orleans was absurd and
impossible of execution as the Mississippi did not admit ships of
their draft, to say nothing of the defenses of the river and the
certainty of war if the ultimatum were pushed. Vlllari at once took
a cab and drove to the house of the minister, and we never heard
anything more of the matter.
The presence (which nothing but the amorphous state of Italian
politics could explain), in that scratch ministry, of Villari, one
of the most devoted, honest and patriotic of living Italians and for
years one of my best friends in Italy, secured my support of the
ministry until their financial measures came on, and I was obliged
to expose their specious character in the "Times," when our friendly
relations ceased temporarily. Political opponents in Italy are more
likely to meet with seconds than at a friendly dinner party, as used
to be the case in the days of Minghetti and Sella, and this passionate
personal antagonism for purely political motives which influences all
political and social intercourse in Italy is one of the gravest causes
of political decline.
Amongst the notable men whose friendship I gained at this period of my
service was Von Keudall, the German ambassador, one of the most human
diplomatists whose acquaintance I have ever made. Like Dufferin,
he measured exactly the distance to which a correspondent could
be treated confidentially, without encouraging him to presume on
cordiality. Introduced to him by Sir John Saville Lumley, I was
treated as one of the diplomatic body, with the confidence which is
so important to a journalist, and as long as he remained in Rome our
relations were of the most cordial and unceremonious. Wishing to make
me a confidential communication one day and the coast not being clear,
he asked me, in the presence of others, if I had ever seen the view
from the tower of the embassy, and, as of course I had not, he invited
me to come and see it, and we had our conversation on the platform
of the lookout with all Rome and the Campagna spread out before us,
beyond the reach of others' hearing. Von Keudall was a power in Rome,
and no ambassador of any government in my time had the influence at
court that he had.
During the period of Von Keudall's residence Lord Rosebery came
to Rome, in an interval of being in opposition, and, as the late
Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and probably a future occupant of the
same post, it was important that in a brief stay he should see all
the important people in the capital. Lady Rosebery, who was the most
assiduous and intelligent manager possible of her husband's interests,
had sent for me to ascertain who were the people whom he should know
in order to learn the true condition of affairs in Italy. Chief
amongst them I put Von Keudall, but, as Lord Rosebery did not know
him, and the custom of Rome is that the newcomer makes the first call,
Lady Rosebery was in a quandary, her ideas of the position of her
husband not consenting that he should make the first call on an
ambassador. At the last moment, for he was to leave Rome the midnight
following, she begged me to tell her how the acquaintance could be
made, without derogation of Lord Rosebery's position between two
portfolios. "Give me his card," I replied, "and I will manage it." I
had intended to ask Von Keudall for some information, and I made my
visit, finding him engaged with a dispatch, and as I wrote a message
on the business on which I had come, I added that Lord Rosebery was at
the Hôtel de Rome and was leaving that night, and left his lordship's
card with mine. When I got back to the hotel I found Von Keudall's
carriage at the door and him closeted with Lord Rosebery. And
certainly no man could then have told the English statesman the state
of things in Italy so well as the large-hearted German ambassador,
who enjoyed the confidence of every element in Italian politics as a
sincere friend of the country. He was recalled later on account of a
pique of Herbert Bismarck, whose untimely meddling with public affairs
had, I believe, more to do with his father's fall than any act of the
Prince. As an eminent German statesman put it, in a conversation not
long after the recall of Von Keudall, "a Bismarck dynasty could not be
tolerated." Von Keudall was succeeded by his antithesis, a nullity in
court and country of whom even his fellow diplomats could say nothing
in praise.
The Rudiní ministry had no long life and merited no more, while that
of Giolitti, which followed, ended in scandal and disaster. The
Minister of Foreign Affairs, Brin, with whom alone I had had to do,
was an honest, able, and patriotic man, and my relations with him
were always excellent. The fall of that ministry coincided with the
culmination of the financial and political disorders which were the
direct consequence of the overthrow of Crispi and the demoralization
which ensued. From the beginning of the financial embarrassment which
came to its crisis during the term of Rudiní's government, I had
devoted much attention to the financial situation and had predicted
the crash when no one else foresaw it. But for Villari I should
have been expelled from Italy on account of my letters exposing the
situation, which created such a sensation that Rothschild wrote to a
financial authority in Rome to inquire what truth there was in them,
receiving naturally such assurances as only hid the trouble. But when
the crash came people said, "How did you know? What a prophet you
were!" etc., etc. Tanlongo, the director of the Banca Romana, which
led off in the crash, threatened the "Times" with a libel suit,
and accompanied the threat by offers to me of personal "commercial
facilitations" to drop the subject. The _argumentum ad hominem_ did
not weigh, but it was desired in the office to avoid legal troubles
and I was advised to keep a more moderate tone. The disaster came so
soon after, however, that I got all the credit, and maintained abroad
the prestige of a greater authority in Italian finance than I perhaps
deserved.
It is true that honesty and courage are two things that a
correspondent has no right to boast of, for honest editing and
management presupposes them in him, and a conspicuous want of either
cuts his career very short unless he is uncommonly clever; but as the
result of my personal experience I may say that, having campaigned
with many English colleagues, I have found them to be almost
universally men of thorough honesty and unflinching courage.
Personality aside, I think I may be permitted to say so much of a
profession of whose real character and besetting temptations no one
can know so much as one of themselves, and of whom the general public
knows very little.
The financial authority which thus accrued to me became of not
unimportant influence a little later when the second scratch ministry
broke up under the financial depression, with gold at 16 premium, the
scandals of the bank affair oozing into publicity, and insurrection
breaking out in Sicily and Tuscany, with movements pending in the
Romagna, where the spring had come late and so saved the country
from a great disaster. It became so clear to even the most benighted
partisan that a strong hand at the Palazzo Braschi was imperiously
necessary, that even the strongest Conservatives submitted in silence
to the call for Crispi which came from all parts of Italy, and no
section of the Chamber except the extreme Left, who were the prime
movers in the insurrectionary movement, raised the least objection to
the old Sicilian's return to the position from which the most corrupt
and ignoble intrigues had driven him hardly three years before, years
of discredit and steady demoralization.
The disgraceful struggle for office then grown characteristic of
Italian parliamentary politics now assumed the most shameful form
that I have ever known. The general sentiment of the country was that
Crispi should be given dictatorial powers, and one of the Venetian
deputies, an ultra-Conservative, coming fresh from an audience with
the King, said to me that Crispi ought to be made dictator and that
the King had professed his readiness to confer that power on him; and
the chiefs of all the factions that had been engaged in the conspiracy
for his downfall in 1891 were among the most eager to enter his
ministry, when the King finally gave him the call to form one, after
having combined in the most desperate intrigues to effect some other
combination. In the anteroom of the minister designate all the
political world, personally or by deputy, was represented except the
friends of the insurrection, who fought him by every device. I met
there a Roman deputy who was one of the amphibious politicians that
breed freely in Italian politics, who gave his right hand to Crispi
and his left to Rudiní, and who, under the impression that I had great
personal influence with the old man, begged me to urge him to offer
the portfolio of Foreign Affairs to Rudiní. In fact, my defense of
Crispi in the "Times" in 1891 and the fulfillment of my predictions of
his inevitable and necessary return to office, at a moment when there
was no one in Italy who did not consider his career at an end, gave
me a purely fanciful importance as a counselor in the crisis and as
having great weight with the minister.
The obsequiousness of the leading politicians at that juncture must
have given Crispi a savage satisfaction for the contumely he had had
to suffer in 1891, and there is no kind of question in my mind that,
if he had then insisted as a _sine qua non_ on a dictatorship, he
would have had it with the almost universal approbation of Italians
out of office and the acquiesence of those who hoped to be in it.
Cavalotti, his most implacable opponent and personal enemy in
disguise, in a session of the Chamber made a passionate appeal to him
to avoid Sonnino and take a ministry of one color, i.e. the Left,
promising his entire devotion on such a concession. The hostility was
sullen and masked, but purely parliamentary; the country at large
would have been delighted to see the old man sweep the parliament out
of existence, and I am convinced that he might then have played the
rôle of Cromwell and received the support of nine tenths of all
Italians. The Chamber had become nauseous to the nation.
I was cool enough to see that the key of the position was finance, for
I knew that Crispi would make short work with the insurrection, and I
knew also the full value of all the possible ministers of finance
in the country, and their influence abroad. When I saw that the
constitution of the cabinet really hung on the disposition of that
portfolio, I did not hesitate to say to Crispi that, while I could not
pretend to any judgment as to the formation of the ministry at large,
I could assure him that if there was to be a rehabilitation of the
financial position of Italy abroad by his ministry, it could only be
by the appointment of Sonnino to the Treasury. I said to him in so
many words that Sonnino was as necessary to the restoration of the
credit of the financial situation as he himself was to that of order.
The pressure in the Chamber was very great to induce him to take the
finance minister from the Left and so move toward the constitution
of the government in accordance with the color of the majority, and
Crispi was urged that way by most of his oldest and most faithful
adherents, either unconscious of or indifferent to the influence of
financial opinion through Europe on the stability or success of the
ministry. I could see that he was hesitating and that the idea
of reconstituting parties, which had always been one of his most
cherished and important schemes, was very present with him, but I
think that the conviction of the necessity of the restoration of the
confidence of the financial publics of Europe finally prevailed
with him, for he decided to offer the Treasury to Sonnino, to whose
measures he subsequently gave the most thorough and loyal support,
though some of them were the reverse of popular and not of possible
effectuation without his earnest support. It is possible that my
advice turned the balance in his mind, but it is, with one later
exception, the only instance in which I ever ventured to advise him as
to a political line of conduct, though I was generally credited with a
good deal of meddling.
The conduct of the Italian factions and politicians during the two
years of the second ministry of Crispi, the internecine war of
intrigues to which the King lent a negative but effectual assent, and
which ended in the disaster of Adowah, showed me that the Italian
commonwealth is incurably infected with political caries, and that,
though the state may endure, even as a constitutional monarchy, for
years, the restoration of civic vitality to it is only to be hoped for
under the condition of a moral renovation, to which the Roman Catholic
Church is an unsurmountable obstacle, because the Church itself
has become infected with the disease of the state,--the passion of
personal power, carried to the fever point of utter disregard of the
general good. The liberty which the extreme party in Italian politics
agitates for is only license, and, with the exception of a few amiable
and impracticable enthusiasts in the extreme Left and a few honest
and patriotic conservators of the larger liberties towards the Right,
there are nothing but self-seekers and corrupt politicians in the
state. During the years of my residence in Italy, the strengthening
conviction of these facts has dampened my early enthusiasms for its
political progress and my faith in its future, and, retiring at the
limits of effective service from a position into which I had entered
with sympathy, I buried all my illusions of a great Italian future as
I had those of a healthy Greek future. My profound conviction is that
until a great moral reform shall break out and awaken the ruling
classes, and especially the Church, to the recognition of the
necessity of a vital, growing morality to the health of a state,
there will be no new Italy. The idle dreamers who hope to cure the
commonweal by revolution and the establishment of a republic will
find, if their dream come true, that to a state demoralized in its
great masses, more liberty can only mean quicker ruin. The court
itself is so corrupted by the vices and immoralities which always
beset courts, that it does not rally to itself the small class of
devoted patriots who cannot yet resign themselves to despair, and who
find in a change of persons the possibility of a revival which they
hope for rather than anticipate, while it offends every day more and
more deeply the equally small class of honest and patriotic reformers
of the Radical side in politics. The mortally morbid condition of
public feeling is shown, not in the fact that the Hon. X. or Y. is
an immoral man, but in that he is not in the least discredited by
well-known immoralities which would banish a man from public life in
England or America, and compared with which those with which Crispi
was charged were trivial.
One cannot pronounce the same judgment on Greece and Italy. The decay
in Greece is economic and civic, poverty of resource and resources on
one side, and on the other invincible insubordination, refusal in the
individual to submit to discipline or sacrifice, the conceit of a dead
and forgotten superiority which makes progress or docility impossible.
The measure of apparent renovation in Athens and some other points is
owing to the influence and benefactions of the Greeks who have lived
and prospered in other lands, where their natural mental activity has
borne fruit, but the normal progress of the nation is so slight that
it has no chance in the race of races now being run in the Balkans.
But the Greeks are preserved from a moral decay like that which
threatens Italy by the domestic morality, due in part to temperament,
but in part also to the influence of the clergy, who, if not scholars
and wise theologians, are generally men of pure domestic morality and
leaders of the common people. The Orthodox Church is national, lives
with and for the people, has no political ambitions, and cannot
endanger the state.
In Italy the danger is other. The Roman Church has long ceased to be a
distinctly religious institution; it has become a great human machine
organized, disciplined like an army, for a war of shadows and
formalities, but now employed in the conquest of political influence,
a kingdom absolutely of this world. It is as much a foreign body in
Italy (or France) as if it were the Russian Church; it has no part
or lot in the well-being of the Italian people, and, so far as the
central power of it is concerned, the Vatican and its councils, its
only purpose is to acquire political influence for its own political
aggrandizement, to the exclusion from its field of operations of
all other creeds. For the attainment of this end it works with the
single-eyedness which Christ recommended for other ends, to the
neglect of all pressure on the people in the direction of common
morality. The Pope, in the present case an amiable, excellent
ecclesiastic, is only one part of this machine, and through him it
speaks, saying, practically, to the Italian people, "Be what you
please, do what you please; only in all things which we command obey
us,"--obedience to the prescriptions of rites and ceremonies being,
so far as my observation during my years of residence in Italy goes,
considered as of far greater importance than the observance of the
laws of sexual morality, veracity, or common honesty. The rule of
conduct of the parochial clergy has appeared to me to be to keep their
influence over their flocks in purely ecclesiastical matters, and run
no risk of straining that influence by interfering with their personal
morality, or by making Christianity the difficult rule of life which
it is in Puritan countries.
I have no hostility to Roman doctrine or dogma, for the distinction I
make between the different forms of anthropomorphic religion is only
one of degree, and I have so many personal friends amongst Roman
Catholics in whom I see the fire of pure and living spirituality
glowing through the forms and superstitions of their creed that I
cannot join in that indiscriminate denunciation which is common
amongst Protestants. My experience in these matters has taught me that
to certain natures the anthropomorphic forms of religion are a Jacob's
ladder to that spiritual life which is the end of religion. Nor can I
see that a little more or a little less of the credulity which is, in
all human minds, mingled with pure faith in the Divine, can make a
vital difference in the character of the religion, whatever it may
make in the creed. The most earnest man is hampered by an heredity of
credence that makes the conception of the Supreme Being a matter of
an intellectual struggle which is to some minds insuperable, and to
deprive such of the symbols which lead to a final comprehension of the
truth is no service to humanity or truth. The suppression of the Roman
Catholic religion in Italy, if possible, would be only to leave its
place vacant for unreason and anarchy, for the intellectual status of
the common people does not admit of a more abstract belief. For that
evil influence, however, which a recent writer has designated as
Curialism, which to-day has its seat at the Vatican, and whose aim
and end are the absolute antagonism of all pure religion, I have no
respect, and only the feeling due to unmitigated evil. It is a deadly
political malady, malefic in proportion to its influence on the
people; and, I fear, until Italy is freed from it, no progress or
healthy political life or morality is possible.
For myself, the study of the system and a comparison of its relations
with other religions completed that evolution of my religious ideal
which I regard as the principal outcome of my life. The Roman Catholic
religion is to me the _reductio ad absurdum_ of all anthropomorphic
religions, and such a study of it as was there possible drove me to a
logical conclusion on the whole matter, not by a sudden revulsion,
but as the gradual and normal growth of a rational evolution of
my conceptions of the spiritual life, starting from that stage of
emancipation which my residence at Cambridge and the intercourse with
the liberal thinkers there had brought me to; the influence of Norton,
Lowell, Agassiz, and Emerson especially. In this liberation I am
aware of no sudden break in my belief from its crude acceptance of
miraculous conversion and eternal damnation for the unconverted, but a
slow opening of my eyes to larger truths. If any individual influence
other than those I have named came in, it would have been the reading
of Swedenborg, which gave me a comprehension of what spiritual life
was and must be; but Swedenborg himself had never been emancipated
from the anthropomorphic conception of Deity. He was a seer, not a
philosopher. Emancipation from ignorance will never be complete, and
ignorance and even superstition have their divine uses as infancy has.
Once the idea of evolution as the law of life is accepted, the logical
conclusion is the reign of law and the rejection of all miraculous
interposition, and the perception of this fact by the clever schemers
at the Vatican underlies the implacable hostility they show to science
and evolution. If they could, they would have burned Darwin as they
burned Giordano Bruno. They are, and they must ever be, as the
condition of keeping up the existence and power of the Vatican and its
peculiar institutions, the enemies of mental emancipation. It is not
ignorance which is the enemy of wisdom, but the passion of domination.
The Roman Catholic Church with its hypothetical succession of Peter
will exist forever, because the necessity of seeing through forms and
of obedience to authority will endure as long as humanity endures, for
certain orders of mind and certain temperaments; but the political
problem of the existence of the Vatican in a free and united Italy,
progressive and maintaining her place amongst the European powers,
is one the solution of which I shall await with great interest, not
regarding the triumph of the Vatican as possible according to its
hopes, but not sure that the internecine struggle may not end in the
ruin of both contestants, since the Italians have not the courage or
the patriotism to accept the only safe measure, formal and complete
suppression of all civic privileges for the Pope and his bishops--the
relegation of religion to a place outside the organization of
government.