FASCIST ITALY
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sta,—Some weeks ago you generously allowed " Vita Nuova " to make an apology for Fascism on the basis of a booklet published by Captain Harold Goad. This gentleman is, I understand, the Director of the British Institute in Florence. It would be interesting, therefore, to hear him explain away the latest Fascist outrage, affecting as it does an English- woman who was for many years Reader in English at that Institute.
This lady, an expectant mother, has been arrested, and is now being kept under a close guard in a prison hospital, her sole crime being, apparently, that she is the wife of Signor Carlo Rosselli, one of three deportees who have recently escaped to Paris from their island prison in Lipari.
Signor Rosselli was formerly Professor of Economics at the University of Genoa. Two years ago he was removed from his post and sent to the Italian Siberia as a punishment for rendering assistance to the aged statesman, Signor Turati, who has also escaped from the clutches of that regime which is appropriately termed by the Manchester Guardian " organized lynch law."
It may be alleged that Signor Mussolini's order for the arrest of Signora Rosselli is intended to secure her from molestation by Blackshirt hooligans. Her father in an interview with the Press last week, however, reveals that she has already suffered abominably under what every lover of justice and civilization must call a regime of tyranny. Signor Rosselli's brother has also now, for no reason what- soever, been deported to another convenient island, Ustica. This is indeed, as Signor Rosselli says, the revenge of a Savage.
Sir, the usual retort to those who criticize Fascist ideas and methods is " Mind your own business." This is, I submit, emphatically our business. There are many other instances of " unpleasantness " relating to those who have had Italian citizenship thrust upon them, and it is high time that our official representatives in Italy were made to realize that their attitude of complaisance is not representative of all Englishmen who, like myself, have
LIVED IN FASCIST ITALY.
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