Part 3 (2/2)
The Balkan States are near enough the actual theater of war to suffer acutely from fear, and a natural timidity worked upon by many German agents, more successfully than Prince von Bulow, has thus far kept the people of Rumania and Greece pa.s.sive in a false neutrality. Bulgaria is a fine example of the perfect working of the German method. The piazza certainly had no hand in the intrigues of King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. The representatives of his people urged him to maintain at least neutrality, not to put the nation at war with its blood kin, against its best interest. But the thing had all been ”arranged”
between the German King of Bulgaria and the German Government through ”negotiation.” Germany had been successful in buying the cooperation of Bulgaria as it tried to buy Italy's neutrality, at the expense of Austria. There were other factors in the case of Bulgaria that worked to the German advantage, but the method is clear. Not the voice of the piazza, but the secret agreement of ”responsible government,” in other words, the control of despotic, German rulers. Italy may well be proud that she has a sovereign who faithfully interprets his responsibility of rule in a const.i.tutional state and executes the will of his people--who listens also to the voice of the piazza, not merely to the arguments of the foreign diplomat. And Italy may also be proud that the piazza spoke at a dark hour in the Allies' cause, if not the darkest, when German arms were prevailing in the East; if the dangers of German conquest were not as close to Italy as with the Balkan States, they were not remote, as German threats too plainly showed.
The Venezelos-Zaimis situation was impossible in Italy, though the circ.u.mstances were almost parallel, with Salandra and Giolitti. The piazza knew the deep Biblical truth, ”He who is not for me is against me,” and execrated the professed _neutralista_ Giolitti. But the Greeks, it seems, are more easily managed by a ”strong” government and a German king. The end, however, is not yet in sight. It remains to be seen whether the path of prudent pa.s.sivity is the safe one, even selfishly.
Why, after all, should we feel so apologetic for the voice of the piazza?
All popular government, even in the limited form of a const.i.tutional monarchy such as Italy, is a rough, uncertain affair. ”The House of Savoy rules by executing the will of the Italian people.” Good! But how is that popular will to be determined? Not, surely, by taking a poll of the five hundred-odd Deputies of the Italian Parliament elected two years before the world was upset by the Teuton desire to rule. Those Deputies were chosen, as we Americans know only too well how, by mean intrigues of party machines, by clever manipulation of trained politicians like Giovanni Giolitti, who by their control of appointed servants--the prefects of the provinces--can throw the elections as they will, can even disfranchise unfriendly elements of the population. Manhood suffrage is not a precise, a scientific method of getting at public opinion. It is possibly the least accurate method of gauging the will of a people. Something other than the poll is needed to resolve the will of a nation. And when that will is determined it makes little odds what instrumentality expresses it. Even the Giolittian Deputies, when brought to the urn for a secret vote on the Salandra measures a week after the lively expression of popular will in the piazza, voted--secretly--against their neutral leader, in favor of war! They had been converted by the voice of the piazza--by other things also in all likelihood. If their votes had been taken ten days before, when Giolitti first arrived in Rome, the result would have been far different: as Salandra and his colleagues knew. In the end the Italian Parliament merely registered the will of the people, both men and women, which expressed itself, as it always must, in diverse ways, through the press, by the voice of the piazza, in public and private discussion, flightily, weightily, pa.s.sionately, timidly.
Will, individual or collective, is a mysterious force. What enters into that act of decision which results in will is never wholly apparent, from the least to the gravest matters. And no scheme of government, which admits the right of the individual citizen, plain and exalted alike, to be heard and obeyed, has discovered a perfect way of polling this collective will of the nation. Our electoral representative method and majority vote is surely rough, though better than the Bulgarian way. That right to vote, for which our women are so eagerly striving, as thinking men realize only too well, is an empty privilege. The will of a people is inaccurately registered, not made, by the vote. The voice of the piazza when deep enough and strong enough is as good as any other way, perhaps, of determining the collective will of a nation in a crisis; surely far better than the secret way of Ferdinand of Bulgaria. Further, the reason of the piazza on any vital fundamental matter, such as war, which means life or death, is as sure as your intelligence or mine, possibly surer, because the piazza, having less to lose or gain, feels and believes and acts more simply, basically. The Roman piazza, the people of Italy, reacted to the crime against Belgium, to the atrocities committed on priests and women and children, to the murders of the Lusitania,--all deeds of that ancient enemy whose barbarism had now reappeared, after centuries, under an intellectual and sophisticated mask with a blasphemous perversion of religious sanction. They reacted also, it might be, to their own sense of personal danger from an unprotected frontier dividing them from this unscrupulous enemy, to the wrongs of some thousands of Italians condemned to live under Austrian rule and fight her battles against their friends. They responded also to the glory of Garibaldi's Thousand, who had liberated their fathers from foreign domination and made a nation out of Italy, and they responded to the great past of their people from whom the essential elements of what men know to-day as civilization has spread over the world. All these emotions were hidden in that one cry,--”Out with the barbarians!”
The voice of the piazza, with its simple unanimity, its childlike psychology, came nearer to expressing the soul of Italy than the German Chancellor can comprehend, than any sophisticated diplomat, who has a.s.sociated only with ”thinking” and ”leading” people, can believe. The Latin soul of Italy which cursed its politician and thrilled at the words of its poet! That soul of a people which is greater than any individual, which somehow expresses itself more authoritatively through the simple people who must suffer for their faiths than through the intellectuals and the protected members of a society....
”_Viva Italia!_” the tanned conscript leaning from the car window at Subiaco shouted back to his friends and home. And the old men and girls left in the fields raised their hats as the train pa.s.sed and shouted in reply,--”_Viva Italia!_” It was not English gold, nor the desire for Trent and Trieste, that brought that cry to the boy's lips!
V
_Italy Decides_
Whatever one may think of the piazza voice, whether the disposition is to sneer with the German or to trust with the democrat in its spontaneous expression, it is a matter of history now that Italy's decision had been made before the question came to a vote in the Chamber of Deputies, a fortnight or more before the reluctant amba.s.sadors of the ex-Alliance backed into their waiting trains and departed homeward across the Alps.
It is a significant fact of personal psychology that the crisis of a decision takes place before action results to calm the disturbed mind. So it was with Italy. Her decision had really been taken when the Lusitania sank, when the politician, in face of this fresh outrage, advised the safer course of neutrality, which would amount to a connivance with her former a.s.sociates in their predatory programme. _Traditore!_ meant but one thing--a betrayal of the nation's soul. In the light of more recent events, since Italy entered the war, there are probably many Italians who secretly wish that the safer counsel had prevailed, that, like Greece and Rumania, Italy had ”preserved a benevolent neutrality” in the great war, even possibly that she had concluded to make her bed in the Teutonic camp.
If the world is to be Teutonized, they would argue, why put one's head in the wolf's jaw! There are prudent people of that stripe in every nation, but since the end of May they have kept silence in Italy. And it should be forever remembered to her honor that Italy made her decision in face of Teutonic successes. If the military situation did not look so black for the Allies at the end of May as it does this December, it looked black enough with the crumbling Russian resistance before Mackensen's phalanx.
Neuve Chapelle had been a costly and empty victory. There had been no successful drive in Champagne and Artois to encourage those who bet only on winning cards. There were heavy clouds in the east, merely a sad silence along the western wall. It was long past Easter, when England had boastfully expected to open the Dardanelles and the truth was beginning to appear that Constantinople might never be reached by the allied operations in Gallipoli. Italy threw in her lot with the Allies in a dark hour, if not the darkest.
The great decision which had lain in solution in the hearts of the people was evoked by events and made vocal by the flaming words of D'Annunzio, interpreted by a faithful king, who resisted the temptation to dethrone himself by calling Germany's hired man to power, and finally registered by the Deputies at Montecitorio on May 19. It was virtually made, I say, the tumultuous week that came on the resignation of the Salandra Government. What followed the return of the ministry to power was merely automatic, as peaceful as any day's routine. Parliament was called to meet on Wednesday, the 19th. The Sunday afternoon before, the piazza, and the palace and all other elements of Roman citizens.h.i.+p met in a great gathering of content and consecration at the foot of the Pincian Hill in the Piazza del Popolo, again the day after in the Campidolgio above the Forum. How fortunate a people are to have such hallowed places of meeting, steeped in a.s.sociations of great events!
It was a warm, brilliant, sunny day, that Sunday, and in the afternoon every one in Rome, it seemed, was as near the Piazza del Popolo as he could get. The meeting was addressed by a number of well-known Romans of varied political affiliations. But the high note of all the speeches was a fervid patriotism and harmony. Rome was calm, believing that it had chosen n.o.bly if not wisely. On the Campidolgio, D'Annunzio again sounded the tocsin of the heroic Thousand, and lauded the army which had been belittled by the followers of Giolitti. Already the troops were leaving Rome.... Then Parliament opened. The meeting of the Deputies if memorable was short. The square and streets about Montecitorio had been carefully cleared and held empty by cordons of troops. There was to be no shouting, no demonstration within hearing of Parliament. Long before midday the Chamber was crowded with all the notables who could gain admission. The proceedings were extremely brief, formal. All knew that the die had been cast: what remained was for the army to accomplish. The Premier Salandra made a brief statement summarizing the diplomatic efforts that his Government had undertaken to reach a satisfactory understanding with Austria, the record of which could be followed in the ”Green Book,”
which was then given to the public. He informed the Chamber, what was generally known, that the Triple Alliance had already been denounced on the 5th of May, and he offered a ”project of law,” which was tantamount to a vote of confidence in the Government and which also gave the King and his ministers power to make war and to govern the country during the period of war without the intervention of Parliament. It thus authorized both the past acts of the Salandra Ministry and its future course. The measure, undebated, was voted on secretly. And it is significant that of more than five hundred Deputies present only seventy-two voted in the negative. Of these seventy-two who voted against the Government, some were out-and-out _neutralistas_, and some few were Socialists who had the courage of their convictions. The great majority of the Giolittians must have voted for war. Had they seen a great light since the piazza raised its voice, since their leader had fallen from his high place?
Possibly they had never been with Giolitti on this vital national question. At least, the fact ill.u.s.trates how representative government does roughly perform the will of its people when that will is clear enough and pa.s.sionate enough: the will registers itself even through unwilling instruments.
After the vote had been taken, the Chamber adjourned, and when the following day the Senate ratified, unanimously, the action of the Chamber of Deputies, Parliament was dissolved. Many of the members enlisted and went to the front. Since the end of May Italy has been autocratically governed. The decrees of the King and his ministers are law--an efficient method of governing a country at war, avoiding those legislative intrigues that latterly have threatened the concord of France.
It is noteworthy that the Italian Senate voted unanimously for war.
The Senate is not an elective body. It is composed of dignitaries, old, conservative men from the successful cla.s.ses of the nation, who are not easily swayed by the emotions of the piazza. From this unrepresentative body might have been expected a show of resistance to the Government's measure, if, as Giolitti and the German party a.s.serted, there was a serious sentiment in the country in favor of neutrality which had been howled down by the mobs. It is inconceivable that such a body could have been completely cowed by rioting in the streets. The unanimous vote of the Italian Senators is sufficient refutation of the Bethmann-Hollweg slur.
As I crossed the Piazza Colonna the morning Parliament opened, my attention was caught by a small crowd before a billboard. First one, then another pa.s.ser-by stopped, read something affixed there, and, smiling or laughing, pa.s.sed on his way. In the center of the board was a small black-bordered sheet of paper, with all the mourning emblems, precisely resembling those mortuary announcements which Latin countries employ. It read: ”Giovanni Giolitti, this day taken to himself by the Devil, lamented by his faithful friends”; and there followed a list of noted Giolittians, some of whom even then were voting for war with Austria. A bit of Roman ribaldry, specimen of that ebullition of the piazza disdained by the German Chancellor; nevertheless, it must have bit through the hide of the politician, who for the sake of his safety was not among the Deputies voting at Montecitorio. Later I read in a Paris newspaper that Giolitti was to spend the summer as far away from the disturbance of war as he could get, in the Pyrenees, but it was rumored in Paris that the French Government, having intimated to its new ally that it did not wish to harbor Giolitti, the Italian politician was forced to remain at home. I believe that once since the ”Caro Carlo”
letter he has spoken to his countrymen, a patriotic interview in which he announced that he had been converted to the necessity of the war with Austria! Thus even the politician comes to see light. But Giovanni Giolitti, as the black-bordered card said, is dead politically.
With the votes of Parliament the Roman part in the drama, the civil part, was ended. Rome began to empty fast of soldiers, officers, officials. The scene had s.h.i.+fted to the north, where the hearts of all Italians were centered. There was a singular calm in the city. One other memorable meeting should be recorded, on the Sat.u.r.day afternoon following the Parliamentary decision. If popular manifestations count for anything, the dense throng in the Campidolgio and later the same afternoon before the Quirinal Palace demonstrated the enthusiasm with which the certainty of war with Austria was accepted.
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