Part 3 (1/2)
Nevertheless I found discussion ranging about firstly what the Banca Commerciale essentially _was_, secondly what it might _become_, thirdly what it might _do_, and fourthly what, if anything, had to be done to it.
It is a novelty to an English mind to find banking thus mixed up with politics, but it is not a novelty in Italy. All over Venetia there are agricultural banks which are said to be ”clerical.” I grappled with this mystery. ”How are they clerical?” I asked Captain Pirelli. ”Do they lend money on bad security to clerical voters, and on no terms whatever to anti-clericals?” He was quite of my way of thinking. ”_Pecunia non olet_,” he said; ”I have never yet smelt a clerical fifty lira note.”...
But on the other hand Italy is very close to Germany; she wants easy money for development, cheap coal, a market for various products. The case against the Germans--this case in which the Banca Commerciale Italiana appears, I am convinced unjustly, as a suspect--is that they have turned this natural and proper interchange with Italy into the acquisition of German power. That they have not been merely easy traders, but patriotic agents. It is alleged that they used their early ”pull” in Italian banking to favour German enterprises and German political influence against the development of native Italian business; that their merchants are not bona-fide individuals, but members of a nationalist conspiracy to gain economic controls. The German is a patriotic monomaniac. He is not a man but a limb, the wors.h.i.+pper of a national effigy, the digit of an insanely proud and greedy Germania, and here are the natural consequences.
The case of the individual Italian compactly is this: ”We do not like the Austrians and Germans. These Imperialisms look always over the Alps.
Whatever increases German influence here threatens Italian life. The German is a German first and a human being afterwards.... But on the other hand England seems commercially indifferent to us and France has been economically hostile...”
”After all,” I said presently, after reflection, ”in that matter of _Pecunia non olet_; there used to be fusses about European loans in China. And one of the favourite themes of British fiction and drama before the war was the unfortunate position of the girl who accepted a loan from the wicked man to pay her debts at bridge.”
”Italy,” said Captain Pirelli, ”isn't a girl. And she hasn't been playing bridge.”
I incline on the whole to his point of view. Money is facile cosmopolitan stuff. I think that any bank that settles down in Italy is going to be slowly and steadily naturalised Italian, it will become more and more Italian until it is wholly Italian. I would trust Italy to make and keep the Banca Commerciale Italiana Italian. I believe the Italian brain is a better brain than the German article. But still I heard people talking of the implicated organisation as if it were engaged in the most insidious duplicities. ”Wait for only a year or so after the war,” said one English authority to me, ”and the mask will be off and it will be frankly a 'Deutsche Bank' once more.” They a.s.sure me that then German enterprises will be favoured again, Italian and Allied enterprises blockaded and embarra.s.sed, the good understanding of Italians and English poisoned, entirely through this organisation....
The reasonable uncommercial man would like to reject all this last sort of talk as ”suspicion mania.” So far as the Banca Commerciale Italiana goes, I at least find that easy enough; I quote that instance simply because it is a case where suspicion has been dispelled, but in regard to a score of other business veins it is not so easy to dispel suspicion. This war has been a shock to reasonable men the whole world over. They have been forced to realise that after all a great number of Germans have been engaged in a crack-brained conspiracy against the non-German world; that in a great number of cases when one does business with a German the business does not end with the individual German. We hated to believe that a business could be tainted by German partners or German a.s.sociations. If now we err on the side of over-suspicion, it is the German's little weakness for patriotic disingenuousness that is most to blame....
But anyhow I do not think there is much good in a kind of witch-smelling among Italian enterprises to find the hidden German. Certain things are necessary for Italian prosperity and Italy must get them. The Italians want intelligent and helpful capital. They want a helpful France.
They want bituminous coal for metallurgical purposes. They want cheap s.h.i.+pping. The French too want metallurgical coal. It is more important for civilisation, for the general goodwill of the Allies and for Great Britain that these needs should be supplied than that individual British money-owners or s.h.i.+p-owners should remain sluggishly rich by insisting upon high security or high freights. The control of British coal-mining and s.h.i.+pping is in the national interests--for international interests--rather than for the creation of that particularly pa.s.sive, obstructive, and wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere profiteer, is as urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France and Italy and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the well-being of the common man in Britain.
3
I left my military guide at Verona on Sat.u.r.day afternoon and reached Milan in time to dine outside Salvini's in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, with an Italian fellow story-writer. The place was as full as ever; we had to wait for a table. It is notable that there were still great numbers of young men not in uniform in Milan and Turin and Vicenza and Verona; there was no effect anywhere of a depletion of men. The whole crowded place was smouldering with excitement. The diners looked about them as they talked, some talked loudly and seemed to be expressing sentiments. Newspaper vendors appeared at the intersection of the arcades, uttering ambiguous cries, and did a brisk business of flitting white sheets among the little tables.
”To-night,” said my companion, ”I think we shall declare war upon Germany. The decision is being made.”
I asked intelligently why this had not been done before. I forget the precise explanation he gave. A young soldier in uniform, who had been dining at an adjacent table and whom I had not recognised before as a writer I had met some years previously in London, suddenly joined in our conversation, with a slightly different explanation. I had been carrying on a conversation in slightly ungainly French, but now I relapsed into English.
But indeed the matter of that declaration of war is as plain as daylight; the Italian national consciousness has not at first that direct sense of the German danger that exists in the minds of the three northern Allies. To the Italian the traditional enemy is Austria, and this war is not primarily a war for any other end than the emanc.i.p.ation of Italy. Moreover we have to remember that for years there has been serious commercial friction between France and Italy, and considerable mutual elbowing in North Africa. Both Frenchmen and Italians are resolute to remedy this now, but the restoration of really friendly and trustful relations is not to be done in a day. It has been an extraordinary misfortune for Great Britain that instead of boldly taking over her s.h.i.+pping from its private owners and using it all, regardless of their profit, in the interests of herself and her allies, her government has permitted so much of it as military and naval needs have not requisitioned to continue to ply for gain, which the government itself has shared by a tax on war profits. The Anglophobe elements in Italian public life have made the utmost of this folly or laxity in relation more particularly to the consequent dearness of coal in Italy.
They have carried on an amazingly effective campaign in which this British slackness with the individual profiteer, is represented as if it were the deliberate greed of the British state. This certainly contributed very much to fortify Italy's disinclination to slam the door on the German connection.
I did my best to make it clear to my two friends that so far from England exploiting Italy, I myself suffered in exactly the same way as any Italian, through the extraordinary liberties of our s.h.i.+pping interest. ”I pay as well as you do,” I said; ”the s.h.i.+ppers' blockade of Great Britain is more effective than the submarines'. My food, my coal, my petrol are all restricted in the sacred name of private property.
You see, capital in England has. .h.i.therto been not an exploitation but a hold-up. We are learning differently now.... And anyhow, Mr. Runciman has been here and given Italy a.s.surances....”
In the train to Modane this old story recurred again. It is imperative that English readers should understand clearly how thoroughly these little matters have been _worked_ by the enemy.
Some slight civilities led to a conversation that revealed the Italian lady in the corner as an Irishwoman married to an Italian, and also brought out the latent English of a very charming elderly lady opposite to her. She had heard a speech, a wonderful speech from a railway train, by ”the Lord Runciman.” He had said the most beautiful things about Italy.
I did my best to echo these beautiful things.
Then the Irishwoman remarked that Mr. Runciman had not satisfied everybody. She and her husband had met a minister--I found afterwards he was one of the members of the late Giolotti government--who had been talking very loudly and scornfully of the bargain Italy was making with England. I a.s.sured her that the desire of England was simply to give Italy all that she needed.
”But,” said the husband casually, ”Mr. Runciman is a s.h.i.+powner.”
I explained that he was nothing of the sort. It was true that he came of a s.h.i.+powning family--and perhaps inherited a slight tendency to see things from a s.h.i.+powning point of view--but in England we did not suspect a man on such a score as that.