Strenuous Italy : solving a perilous problem

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Preface

THE dynamics of Mussolini have focused the attention of the world upon Italy, partly because of the Duce’s commanding personality, but more particularly because, from the first, he has faced national difficulties frankly and courageously, with faith and determination. Fascism has been considered abroad too exclusively as a political phenomenon, whereas, in reality, its origins and its successes have been primarily and fundamentally social and economic; it was created to meet a national crisis and its mission has been at once defensive and constructive.

The grave Italian question which to-day presses for an answer was born of past success. For a time its existence was hidden from the general view by prosperity, but though prosperity continues and Italy still goes forward, changes in international conditions have begun to bring the problem to light in all the breadth of its significance. The issue extends beyond Italy’s frontiers.

It must be kept in mind that Italy is not a new country with vast undeveloped resources. Her soil was under cultivation long before the birth of

Vill PREFACE

Christ and it has continued to be under cultivation for the sustenance of its inhabitants in every Anno Domini that has succeeded. Furthermore, in the present conditions of this twentieth century there are each day a thousand more Italians to be fed, and if possible employed, within the narrow boundaries of the peninsula than there were on the day previous.

Italy’s problem demands the urgent attention of every Italian, fascist or non-fascist; its solution is of interest above all to labor, but also to citizens of all other classes, and there is no thinking man of any country or nationality who should not wish sincerely to see Italy successfully overcome the difficulties which confront her, in the belief that in so doing she will continue to work for the peace and the welfare of the world. The Fascist Government is applying to the situation the remedies which are available, and as the outcome is of far-reaching international import, it believes that it has a right to count upon international collaboration.

This study is the outgrowth of an address which was prepared for delivery before one of Italy’s universities and which expanded beyond the proportions of a conference. The writer during more than twenty years of residence in Rome has been occu-

PREFACE Ix pied with the history and politics of Modern Italy, and since 1918, when as a collaborator for Colonel House’s Committee of Inquiry he prepared official memoranda upon Italy’s claims for the use of members of the American Peace Commission of the Paris Peace Conference, his attention has been particularly directed to the great question of to-day. As will be seen, the chapters of this volume are based upon facts and carefully collated statistics, and are not inspired by sentiment. Some impressive statistics have been quoted, with the conviction that they are more graphic than descriptive, and because they present the essence of the problem; they have been humanized, so to speak, as far as possible. In dealing with many phases of Italian life, comparisons with earlier years have been made, for both the ideal and the practical achievements of Italy’s recent past constitute the best guarantee of the country’s future. | he FIG aye i) ee : {3 i

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AppENDIx: Source Materials INDEX .

Contents

. Toe Great AWAKENING: From Cavour to Mussolini

. ELOQUENT FIGURES: Health Redencen . BLOTTING OUT THE CURSE OF ILLITERACY: Education of the Masses _

. INDUSTRIAL RENAISSANCE: ‘White Coal’ to wee

Chapter I The Great Awakening

From Cavour To Musso.uint Cavour, seconded by a little band of statesmen and soldiers whose rare ability and superb daring the world is only now beginning to understand, achieved in the last century what previous centuries had been unable to bring about — the unification of Italy. These men won their fight for freedom and achieved their glorious purpose in the face of seemingly insurmountable difficulties both foreign and domestic, after decades of stubborn struggle and truly heroic sacrifice. At the beginning, the masses in the various oppressed States into which, since the fall of the Roman Empire, the peninsula of Italy had been divided, but dimly understood, if they understood at all, the great advance in public welfare for which their leaders were laboring. Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Victor Emmanuel II, Ricasoli, Gioberti, Manin, and the others recall our Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, and Hamilton more vividly than any other group of foreign statesmen and patriots. They recall them, not in their individual personalities, but in their group traits of integrity, patriotic vision, daring and sacrifice, and in the heavy chances which made against their success. From a number of separate, autocratically governed States, with -interests in part apparently conflicting and with ingrained jealousies, they created a nation which they and their successors welded into homogeneous unity.

It was in 1859 and 1860 that the Italian people, whose contribution to civilization through the centuries had been second to that of no nation of Europe, threw off the yoke of foreign oppression and local misgovernment, in spite of the brutal opposition of powerful neighbors, and became a free and independent State. It was not yet, however, a complete nation, since Venice, Rome, Trent, Trieste, Fiume and their territory were still outside the boundaries of the mother country; nevertheless, approximately twenty-two million Italians had been united as one people, and Italy had come into being with international status as a nation. Its geniuses, its heroes, were now its own; Cavour was now not only a Piedmontese, but an Italian, not only as before an Italian by race, but an Italian citizen; Manzoni was no longer an unwilling Austrian subject of Lombardy, but an Italian; Garibaldi, who fought the battles of liberty in Two Worlds could now call Italy his country. So, equally, the men of the past — Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Columbus and their fellows now stood forth as the forefathers of a new nation. They had always been considered Italians, rather than Tuscans, Umbrians; Genovese, and the word ‘Italian,’ which had been applied to them, proved that tacitly the world had long admitted Italy’s right to nationality, a right the exercise of which Austria and other European neighbors had unjustly prevented. And we must remember that had it not been for Cavour and Victor Emmanuel II and the others, Marconi might have been to-day a Bolognese, Italian only by race — Mussolini a provincial citizen of the Romagna — Victor Emmanuel [II king of valiant little Piedmont. King Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini would then have had to do what the great men of sixty-seven years ago did for them, namely, unite Italy.

But the King and Mussolini to-day have their own great problem pressing for solution, a problem forced upon them by the laws of Nature, a problem of progress and expansion created by past successes and by ut STRENUOUS ITALY sound, healthy development, a problem which in its eravity and its bearing upon the weal of Europe is as important as any faced by Cavour and his Re Galantuomo.

At the time of unification Italy was in a state of backwardness that few, either of her present-day admirers or of her critics seem to realize. The rulers of the seven States into which the peninsula was divided prior to 1859 were, for the most part, afraid to encourage, or even to permit, progress among their peoples. Most of them knew that their rule depended not upon the will of the governed, but upon the support of foreign bayonets. It did not seem to them to be to their advantage that their subjects should think deeply for themselves, or that wealth should be widely distributed, or that railways, potent means of unifying material interests of the peninsula, should be constructed. Austria ruled the Lombardo- Venetian provinces and enjoyed a hegemony of influence in the greater part of Italy. She knew that a subject people supports foreign domination more patiently and reacts less violently, if it can be made to feel material and mental inferiority. Emperor Francis I is quoted as having declared at Lubiana that what he wanted was to have obedient subjects, not intelligent citizens. It was manifestly to the interest of the German provinces of the Empire to export their own manufactures into Italy, rather than to allow the development of prosperous industries south of the Alps. Nor were industries of political advantage to an autocratic, foreign government, for factories necessitate the agglomeration of labor, and impregnate the working men with a sense of their common interests, while capitalism creates leadership. Therefore the factories of Brescia, Bergamo, Pavia, and other cities of Northern Italy which had grown up during the French Régime were allowed to languish, or to disappear altogether; Milan was sacrificed to Vienna and Prague, and Venice to Trieste. It was against the middle class that Austria particularly directed her discriminating hostility. The Lombardo-Venetian provinces were considered to be little more than Austrian colonies, to be exploited economically for the benefit of the rest of the Empire, for from the outset it had become evident that it would be impossible to denationalize the Italians of these provinces and make them into Austrians. The Austrian occupation of their territory, maintained with heavy garrisons, could not be other than a foreign domination — and temporary.

The kings of Naples took pride in their army and in their marine, but built few roads and did little to encourage industry, while the state of education in their kingdom was more deplorable than in any other part of Italy. In the Papal States, Gregory XVI refused to permit the holding of scientific congresses and forbade his subjects to attend them elsewhere. He fought stubbornly all projects for railway construction; for him convents and churches were the public utilities of principal interest. Throughout Italy during the first sixty years of the last century economic and social conditions were for the most part of the same backward character, though most backward in the South, and least so in liberal little Piedmont particularly during the last decade of the period, when the enlightened government of Cavour labored for both economic and political progress. Furthermore, it should be borne in mind that even had the attitude of the bad governments been different, trade throughout the peninsula must have remained pitiably backward, with the labyrinth of customs barriers, with confused currencies and with conflicting economic and social legislation all militating against progress. Unification alone could furnish the remedy, by destroying the economic checks and routing the despots.

Still another factor that had made against Italy’s development had been the deviation of the world’s

THE GREAT AWAKENING i principal highways of commerce from the Mediterranean, whose classic shores no longer held Europe’s greatest centers of production and consumption. Until the opening of the Suez Canal the Mediterranean had long suffered commercial abandonment as a closed sea which a great portion of the world’s shipping never entered, and Italy had thus been cut off from the main currents of international trade.

And so it was that while the other great countries of Europe, rich in the natural wealth of raw materials, enjoying political independence and allowing their citizens sufficient liberty for them to produce an efficient class of bankers, manufacturers, and tradesmen, were able to develop great basic industries, amass capital, construct networks of roads and railways, and open out wide markets for their products, Italy, without iron mines, without coal mines, without capital, languishing under the petty rule of her despots, without social and economic liberty, without captains of industry, remained far in the rear of the world’s great movement of social and industrial progress.

And when finally the dawn of a Modern Italy came, as has been said, in 1859 and 1860, through the achievement of national independence and unity, and when, with the new political systematization of the peninsula, artificial internal frontiers had been abolished, and unification of currency and of legislation had been made possible, and the liberty of the | individual citizen had been secured, it was clear that only a beginning had been made and that the work of regeneration which confronted the statesmen of New Italy was of colossal magnitude. In rearing the national edifice of a modern state, building would of necessity have to begin from the foundations, and be tenaciously carried on for decades with unlimited patience and sacrifice.

The first census of Italy was taken on December 31, 1861, and in 1863 the regular compilation of statistics was begun. The following are some of the general conditions that were revealed.

Of the twenty-two million inhabitants living within the frontiers of Italy as then constituted, seventeen million, or seventy-eight per cent were found to be illiterate, that is, unable to either read or write; of those who had passed the age of five, seventy-five per cent were illiterate. It had, of course, long been realized in Italy that educational conditions were bad, but such figures as these sounded a note of alarm — and caused humiliation to a race that had produced Dante Alighieri!

Another dark revelation came in the statistics of public health. The death-rate in 1863 was 30.9 to the thousand, a fantastically high mortality for a country occupying the place which Italy was now called upon to take in the family of civilized nations. England’s death-rate in this period was 22.8, that of France, 22.9.

In 1861, Italy had only 2094 kilometers of railroads, as compared with the 10,000 kilometers and more operating in France, and the 17,430 kilometers of Great Britain. Italy’s mileage measured less than 93 kilometers to every 100,000 inhabitants, while France had over 25 kilometers and Great Britain had well over 50 kilometers.

Nor was the showing for telegraph lines more comforting. The national territory, which then extended over 250,000 square kilometers, was served by less than 12,000 kilometers of telegraphs. Yet this was the country where science was about to produce Galileo Ferraris and Guglielmo Marconi.

Communications in many parts of the peninsula were hampered for lack of good roads. But the people were the descendants of the old Romans, who used to boast that all the highways of the world converged here, leading to the golden milestone of the Forum. Port facilities were also defective, and the mercantile marine, which still clung to the traditions of the sailing vessel, left the country largely dependent upon foreign shipping for the imports from distant lands necessary to the economic life of the nation. Cavour’s “Compagnia Transatlantica,’ the transportation company which had been formed to connect Italy by steamer with the Americas, had failed.

But the most serious conditions of all were those of state finance. When the budgets of the seven States into which Italy had previously been divided were combined, it was found that government receipts were but a little over half the government expenditures. This was true of the successive national budgets from 1862 to 1865. In 1866, on account of the war against Austria which terminated with the incorporation of Venice and the Veneto into the Kingdom of Italy, government receipts were considerably less than half the expenditures. It was under such conditions of state finance as these that the statesmen of United Italy were called upon to rehabilitate the country, by multiplying schools for the illiterate, renovating sanitation and hygiene, and appropriating hitherto unheard-of amounts for public works. The deficits consequent upon such expenditures could be met only by a succession of heavy loans. They were met, and as a consequence the public debt existing in 1860 had trebled in 1867, and quadrupled in 1876. Interest upon the public debt already constituted one quarter of the entire national expenditure in 1864, and rose to one third of the national expenditure in 1876.

Furthermore, in order to carry forward the programme of redeeming Venice and Rome, which still remained outside the boundaries of Italy, it was necessary to maintain a large army and navy, the cost of which amounted to one quarter of the national expenditure. This cost of armaments combined with the interest on the public debt amounted to three fifths of the whole national expenditure, two fifths only remaining for the ordinary requirements of government administration, including the crying needs of education, hygiene, and public works.

Cavour had declared: ‘Taxes must increase, but the capacity of the country to meet taxation must at the same time increase through the stimulus given to production and the accumulation of riches.’ The principle was sound, but it was difficult for the Italians, seventy-five per cent of them illiterate, who had hoped to arrive at the millennium through unification, to recognize the Messiah in the tax-gatherer.

To complete this exposition of the Italian statesman’s problems in 1861, it should be stated that no

Great Power on the continent of Europe viewed the unity of Italy with real favor. All saw in her a future rival in the international combinations of the balance of power.

Many Italians had foreseen the herculean task of reconstruction imposed by the appalling national conditions which we have delineated, but there was never a moment of hesitation. The master builder of unity, Cavour, died just as the process of regeneration was being initiated, in June, 1861, but the work went on. Year after year parliaments met to effect new economies and to levy fresh taxes. Pessimists croaked. Italian consols dropped to 35, but there was no repudiation either of principal or of interest; the Italian treasury never failed to meet its obligations. The courageous, tenacious, self-sacrificing conduct of the leaders and of the people of Italy in facing the well-nigh impossible situation, offers material for as stirring an economic epic as has ever been written. Our purpose here is only to sketch it in outline, as presenting irrefutable evidence of great qualities in Italian character, and as furnishing secure information upon which to base conclusions as to what may be expected of Italy in the future, and as to what Italy has a right to expect from the world.

If we wish to know how the present-day problem which confronts Mussolini and his men originated and how it is going to be met, we must look back to see how national obstacles have been overcome in the past and seek to understand the processes of the remarkable development which has made Italy a factor that cannot be disregarded in the march of the world’s progress. We shall see that there is irony in the laws of Nature. We shall see that had Italy been a weak country, had her leaders been less courageous, less far-seeing, had her contributions to world progress been less marked, had she shown less national vitality, there would have been no great problem for her to solve to-day. Her present difficulties are born of past success, of sacrifice, and in studying them we shall glimpse the inspiring possibilities of future growth — of further contributions to civilization on her part. We shall see that her present strong government is no freak of fortune or of personal ambition, but has come into being to meet a grave national situation; the existence of such a government is for her an economic necessity and an international necessity that can be proved by mathematical processes. Italy cannot afford the luxury of socialistic, communistic experiment.

Mussolini’s National Government has shown that it is not afraid to face frankly, in all its gravity, the present-day problem — which is the primary interest of the pages that follow. The Government’s methods may be approved in foreign countries, or they may be criticized, but its enlightened policy stands forth as aiming toward a high and noble goal and as inspired by sound statesmanship and sincere patriotism. The renewed vigor of the Italian people and their further awakening came with the great victory of the World War, which widened the vision alike of tradesman and of peasant, taught them to demand a higher standard of living, revealed to them the reality of their power as a nation, taught them that their mission lay also beyond their own frontiers. A sleeping Italy is a country of the past. The Italy of the second quarter of the twentieth century is a country keenly alive to the grave difficulties which confront it and to the urgent needs of its people. And Italians look upon the solution of their problem and upon the satisfaction of their needs as being as inevitable as the law of Nature which has created them is inexorable.

Chapter II Eloquent Figures Health Redemption

Or the arduous problems already solved by Italy since 1861, that of public health, though it was the last to receive attention from the Government and people, has brought the most impressive results. While obstacles created by the other great problems, particularly by that of finance, were in large part responsible for the delay in hygienic reform, it may also be questioned whether at the outset Italy’s rulers fully understood the universal truth enunciated by Disraeli before the House of Commons: that public health is the foundation upon which rests the happiness of the people and the power of the State; and that to assure the vitality and the physical vigor of the race is the first care of a statesman.

It is difficult for those who know the Italy of the twentieth century, to realize the deplorable conditions of hygiene and sanitation that prevailed at the date of unification and during the two decades following. Sanitary laws existed on the statute books;

in substance they were the old laws promulgated in Piedmont in 1847, which, with some revision, had been extended to the other parts of the new kingdom when these, one after another, had been annexed. As a whole these laws had not kept abreast of the proeress of scientific hygiene, and were so incomplete and imperfect as to be entirely inadequate for the needs of the country. In almost all of the towns and villages drainage was neglected; in a great many of them drinking-water was impure; infectious diseases were able to spread constantly, with great facility, almost unchecked, among the people. Yet the Italians vaunted their ancestors, the old Romans who built cloacee which still function and which have been studied and admired by the sanitary engineers of all the great cities of Europe; the old Roman also built those remarkable aqueducts which give character to the Roman Campagna, and some of which continue to-day to bring pure water to the Eternal City.

Centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire Italy led the way in charity among the countries of the Continent, and many of its medieval hospitals and orphanages are still in use. Santa Maria Nuova, the principal hospital in Florence, was founded by the father of Dante’s Beatrice. The Foundling and Children’s Hospital of the Innocenti, which Brunelleschi designed and Andrea Della Robbia decorated, won the highest honors at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. But, notwithstanding these noble traditions, ‘the hospitals of United Italy under the government of Cavour’s immediate successors long remained insufficient in number and deficient in organization. Furthermore, pharmaceutical service and domiciliary medical aid were far from sufficient in many parts of the peninsula, particularly in rural districts and in the South.

It was not to be wondered at that while such conditions continued, the average death-rate should cling close to the old figure of 30 to the thousand; in 1880 it registered 30.8, and the average for the years 1872-80 was 29.6. Contrast this with the death-rate at the present time, and we shall see how Italy has solved the problem of public health in forty-five years. The death-rate in 1926 was 16.8. This means that mortality, compared with the nine-year average of a half-century ago, has fallen 12.8 to the thousand. Apply this figure to the population of Italy as existing on December 31, 1926, which was 40,420,000, and we find that improvements in sanitation and hygiene over conditions prevailing in 1880 are saving more than 517,000 lives annually.

How has this prodigious result been obtained?

With unification the country had won constitutional government and the people, through their chosen representatives in parliament, now made the laws. Therefore, if reforms, which are usually expensive, were to be brought about, an awakening of public opinion to the absolute necessity of reform was the first step. The awakening to the cause of public health came through a terrible calamity, the deadly epidemic of cholera which raged throughout the peninsula in 1884 and 1885, and lingered on during the two years following. No proper organization existed to prevent the dreaded scourge from entering the country, and when the disease broke out, the struggle against it lacked unity, alike of direction and of method. The death-toll was shockingly heavy and the whole country was in mourning. King Humbert exposed himself with courageous abnegation in visiting and consoling those stricken with the plague, class distinctions became fused in the crucible of universal suffering, and it was now evident to all, from the King to the masses, that something must be done to save public health in the future. Many voices had long been raised in its behalf, but had it not been for the hard lesson taught by this tragic scourge of cholera, which marked a veritable eclipse in the life of the people, their appeal would have continued still unheard for many years.

The lesson proved even more efficacious than could have been anticipated and the calamity, cruel as it was, turned out to be a blessing in disguise to the © survivors and their descendants. On December 28, 1888, a new sanitary law was passed that served to revolutionize completely conditions of public health. It is the same law that, with some modifications, regulates sanitation in Italy to-day. The primary feature of the reform consisted in the substitution of scientists and experts for the bureaucratic laymen who had previously controlled the supervision of ' hygiene. Municipalities were compelled by the statute to provide for the hygienic welfare of their citizens, and the Government made clear that it recognized the sacred duty of the State to safeguard public health.

In the twenty-five years following the ravage of the cholera, three thousand aqueducts were constructed. The towns spent a billion lire on hygiene besides one hundred and fifty million on water supplies, and the national Government spent another one hundred and fifty million in reclaiming unhealthy marsh lands. While infant mortality declined rapidly owing to the serious attention given to child welfare, deaths of the adult population were also greatly reduced through scientific food inspection, inspection of dwellinghouses, schools, and slaughter-houses, regulation of cemeteries, and through the extension of free medical, obstetrical and pharmaceutical service for the poor. By law no town could be without a doctor, paid by the town itself. In the twenty-one years, 1888- 1908, mortality from infectious diseases dropped from 6.19 per thousand to 2.76. Deaths from typhoid fever declined sixty-six per cent, from malaria sixty-eight per cent, from diphtheria seventy-seven per cent, from smallpox ninety-seven per cent. The efficiency of the reformed sanitary organization of the country was tested in 1901, when the pest appeared, but was prevented from spreading. A little later the cholera came, but this time it was stamped out without becoming actually an epidemic.

As has been indicated, the most notable progress under the new sanitary legislation was made in the first twenty years, but it has been carried much further in recent years. In the improvement of water supplies the latest and greatest achievement has been the construction of the immense aqueduct of the four arid provinces of the Puglie, which, when finished in all its ramifications to the length of one thousand, six hundred and sixty kilometers, will bring water to over two million people. Since work upon it was begun in 1897, four hundred million lire have been spent, while appropriations of two hundred and seventy million more have been made, to carry construction forward to 1934. A part of the aqueduct is already operating, and upon completion the entire system will furnish drinking-water to the amount of two cubic meters per second, distributed throughout the Puglie, and four cubic meters of water for irrigation and hydro-electric plants.

Construction on this, and in all categories of public works has been speeded up by the present Government, and all these contribute, directly or indirectly, to the betterment of public health. From having been, in spite of its skies and its climate, one of the most unhealthy countries of Europe, Italy has risen in hygiene to the level of the other powers, as is shown by the comparative figures of mortality in England and on the Continent; the average death-rate of England from 1921-23 was 12.13’to the thousand, that of Germany 14.10, that of Italy 17.21, that of France 17.40, that of Hungary 20.05. In 1926, as we have said, in Italy it was only 16.8.

While Italian mortality has thus been rapidly declining, the birth-rate has declined much more moderately. The Italian people have been, and are, more prolific than the peoples of the other great stable nations of Europe. For the five years 1861-65, the average birth-rate was 39.1 to the thousand, while in Germany it was 36.8, in England 35.7, in France 25.5. For the four years 1920-23, in Italy it was 29.91, in Germany 23, in England 20.83, in France 19.80. While these figures show that a marked decrease in natality during the last half-century has been a phenomenon common to all the more progressive countries of Europe, they show that it has been much less accentuated in Italy than in Germany and in England; in France, as is well known, the decrease has brought about conditions that are a menace to the demographic future of the nation.