BOOKS.

THE NEW ITALY.*

IT was well said by a hero of the Risorgimento, to know whom was a liberal education, " L'Italia fatta, chi farA ora gli Italiani ?" New light on Massimo d'Azeglio's question is furnished by this book, which will confirm its leading author's repute as a writer who, as far as his Mazzinian sympathies permit, is a reliable expert in Italian topics. Thanks to individual inquiries, and to information supplied from authoritative native sources, Italy To-day has a thorough- ness seldom found in English researches of this character. And, whether the writers are guillotining Crispi or Di Rudini,'. or describing the steel works of Terni, or the mosquito which carries life to the malaria microbe, their style is always trenchant and clear. The political chapters are full of disheartening pictures of "misgovernment and corruption and political apathy," which, however, need not prevent the lovers of Italy from hoping against hope. The peasant or artisan votes as his landlord or employer commands, while the owner of mortgaged property obeys the orders of the batik which holds his title-deeds. In Naples the elections are managed by the agency of the Gomorra, to which system the Government of the day gives its support, because it thus keeps the majority of the constituencies for its own floral. nees. Personal influence is rampant everywhere; " Govern- mental pressure and private bribery reach monstrous propor- tions." Prefects who will not work for Ministerial candidates are dismissed or suspended; electors suspected of anti-official sentiments have been imprisoned on false charges on the eve of the poll; syndics, school-teachers, railway and municipal employes, and the like are terrorised by various means: "policemen are stationed at the polling-booth to shut out opposition voters;" the registers are tampered with, par ardre du mufti, to an incredible extent, witness the case of Catania, where "five thousand electors out of nine thousand.'

• Italy To-day. By Bolton Xing and Themes Okey. London : Nisbet and

with University professors and lawyers amongst them, were once removed at a single swoop." A year ago the Prefect of Corleone sent the police to warn the peasants that unless the Ministerialist candidate was returned they would be all arrested, after which free licenses to carry firearms were given

"to a Mafia gang of notorious criminals" that they might

terrorise the electors. To influence the suffrage in certain localities, the Government will hang out the bait of a railway, or of new barracks or waterworks, or a distribution of ribbons: while a single constituency is said to have been bought for

£8,000. When a Deputy is convicted of "extreme philan- thropy," i.e., of wholesale corruption, the Chamber will frequently allow him to retain his seat. Grievous to us, who

have witnessed the dignified battles of Cavour and Brofferio in the old Parliament of Turin, is the fact that the physical appearance of the House elected by the "sheer power of unscrupulous wealth" is in tune with its moral nature : "nothing strikes an observer more than the unimposing and undignified bearing of the Deputies." Last year a prominent personage stated "that more than half the Chamber were directly or indirectly in the pay of the Government " : the ordinary Member is poor, and he expects "some help from Government in return for clean or dirty work." Furthermore, the Treasury winks at contracts which practically defraud the public, and allows tariffs of bounties to be interpreted so as

to favour its friends. Last year "a notorious job was per- petrated in the interest of the big shipping companies" to the tune of £1,600,000! The resources of proyincial corruption are

inexhaustible : charities are manipulated for party ends, and communal chests are jobbed in the interest of the local magnate. Meanwhile, the coast-guards are arresting or firing

at poor women who try to evade the salt excise by drawing sea water wherewith to cook their polenta.

Non sic fortis Etruria crevit ! True, our authors would say ; but behind such whining parodists of the great figures of the risorgimento and the ccmsorteria as the "old and exhausted" Prime Minister of the "Constitutional Left," Zanardelli, his " smirched " colleague, Giolitti, and the reactionary Sonnino of the decreto-legge,--behind these men is "a re- juvenated nation, instinct with the qualities that make a great people." One of Messrs. King and Okey's personal equations has shown them the signs of a new departure which they call

"the master-fact of Italian politics to-day." The movement that is to give the dreams of Petrarch and Filicaja their realisation is, we read, Socialism. Stimulated by persecution and by their own lofty ideals, the Socialists are rapidly gaining ground, and theirs is the only Italian party which "stands boldly for purity in public life." When we are told that the "Extreme Left," with its component Socialist, Re- publican, and Radical groups, will perhaps "lift the country to a new level," we cannot but think of the gusts of brute ferocity by which the members of that triple alliance have more than once turned the Chamber into a bear-pit. The assertion that the said coalition is "moderate to excess" is well illustrated by the recent anti-monarchical declaration of its Radical. members, of their censure of their leader, Signor Sacchi, for being present at a Parliamentary reception at the

Quirinal after the birth of the Princess Yolanda- As to " the " Camorra, the book is hardly up to date. In Naples

each man has his price; almost every transaction of the city

life is governed by its appropriate "ring," which is called "a" Camorra. But the murderous old conclave with the prefix " the " is about as dead as the Lazzaroni.

Our volume vivisects that renegade Mazzinian, the ex- Premier Crispi, in a series of lyrical diatribes, which boycott his protest against the costly act of Megalomania, called by one of its authors "picking up the keys of the Mediterranean in the Red Sea." Of Italian feeling towards Great Britain the authors say :—

"The old sentimental attachment to the England of Palmerston and Gladstone and Victoria is dying out. For thirty years past it has been the policy of the English Government to use Italy for its own purposes, and our recent attitude in particular has, in spite of the Alliance, left a good deal of soreness. The Italians reproach US that we pushed them into the African fiasco, that we gave them little for holding Kassala to facilitate our 'advance up the Nile; they complain that the Anglo-French agreement on the North African Hinterland has bartered away their dormant claims to Tripoli, which would be valueless with- out the trade routes to the interior. And, far more serious than these minor causes of friction, there is a very strong resentment against our South African policy, especially in its later develop- ments. The Liberals and Democrats criticise it bitterly. The official classes, while they do not wish to see an ally lose prestige, protest that their sympathies are with the Boers."

The chapters on the material condition of Italy, which are crammed with the appropriate facts and figures, are an eloquent but painful record of illiteracy, destitution, and crush- ing " topsy-turvy " taxation. "Education is the gloomiest chapter in Italian social history " ; some advance has been made, but, Portugal excepted, Italy has still "the sad primacy of illiteracy in Western Europe,"—for teaching boys and

girls of the lower class over ten years of age there is "in the greater part of the country no provision." What with poverty, the Customs duties, and the dazio COMUTILO, the majority

of the people are "on half-rations." At the bottom of the ladder is the Sicilian, who lives with his donkeys, pigs, and children in a one-roomed windowless, floorless cottage. Close to the gates of Rome malaria-stricken labourers from the Abruzzi, with their diet of maize and carrion meat, are

sleeping in caves or doorless huts of straw. But, in spite of these lacrymw reruns, the general outlook has improved. The standard of life has risen. The old rural squalor is

disappearing, clothes are cheaper, shoes are now generally worn, the women are beginning to ape the fashions of the towns, while under the influence of savings banks, co-opera-

tive dairies, the Consorzi agrari, travelling lecturers, and similar, agricultural methods have taken a new departure. Giving full chapter and verse, the authors conclude that "Italy is at the commencement of a remarkable industrial expansion." Unless they are mistaking hopes for realities, the kingdom will soon be a serious "competitor in the international market in all kinds of yarns and

textiles, in electrical machinery, in motor engines and boilers, perhaps in chemicals and furniture." Equally bright is the glimpse of the Greater Italy which the poverty- stricken peasants and artisans of the South are building up in Brazil and the Argentine Republic, whereby a century hence Italian will be, next to English and Russian, "the most widely spoken of the Aryan tongues."

As befits the country of Galvani and Volta, the new Italy has distanced the rest oi Europe in the main applications of electricity to industrial uses. We wish that besides giving figures which put us English to shame, the authors had men- tioned the work of Marconi and other Italians in telegraphy and polyphase current. They say nothing of such painters as Segan.tini, and are dumb as to the much-debated music of Mascagni, Puccini, and the other representatives of the new Wagner-and-water school. Their survey of intellectual progress stops at poetry and fiction. They admit that "good sea-legs are needed to brave a course of D'Armunzio," but in our opinion they overrate the artistic powers of that devotee of "aphrodisiac frenzy." Indigestible for us is the notion that Fogazzaro's "subtle power of psychological analysis"

places Daniele Cortis and the Piccolo Hondo above "Old Mortality" and the Promessi Sposi, the more so as his strength

lies, we think, in detailed objective portraiture of incidents.. and persons.