" THE ITALIANS OF TO-DAY." [To THE EDITOR OP THE
".8rEcvAron.-] SIR,—Will you allow me space for a few comments—not in any sense of a protestant nature—on the review published in your issue of the 13th inst., of my little book " The Italians of To-day " ?
Your reviewer complains that I do not in that book answer such questions as "How the Italians came to embark in the present war after the disastrous Abyssinian campaign P Why the Italian nation approves of this war after opposing the previous one ? and How did that war influence this " The last of these three questions would appear to me to lie completely outside the scope of my book, and to belong exclusively to military matters. I was only concerned, in writing " The Italians of To-day," with the calumnies on Italian soldiers and Italian humanity; and, in a secondary degree, with the unjust charges made against the Italian Government by certain English journals of having com- mitted an act of unprovoked aggression in making war on Turkey.
The remaining two questions, answers to which your reviewer criticises me for not supplying, would seem to me to answer themselves. The Italian campaign in Abyssinia was a campaign undertaken for motives which, whatever else they may have been, were certainly not national motives, and which had neither the sympathy nor the approval of the nation behind them. The reasons which led Crispi to embark on that war your reviewer no doubt knows as well as I do. Some of them may well be consigned to oblivion. But apart from political considerations, of which at that period the Italian man-in-the-street had but small knowledge—for if he had too much he was likely to find himself removed to a dcnnicilio coatto !—what did an Ethiopian protectorate and colonies on the Red Sea mean to the average Italian ? Practically nothing; though speculators and farabutti of all kinds did their best to persuade him to further their enterprise. The Italians were much too shrewd to be taken in by their Government of that day, or to pretend to regard as a national war a campaign hastily entered upon for reasons none too creditable to the country. But in Italian eyes the Red Sea is one thing and the Mediterranean is quite another 1 It had long been recognized by all thinking Italians that the moment would inevitably come when Italy must be sovereign mistress over the Tripolitania, or become practically a quantite negligeable in the Mediterranean. Tunis had been snatched from them, and for three years Italian subjects and Italian enterprise in Tripoli had been outraged, hampered, and molested at every turn by the Turkish administrators. While the names of Eritrea and Massua conveyed little or nothing to the average Italian, Tunis and Tripoli were as household words to him ; and the Turks, their usual shortsightedness, played into the hands of the Italian ambi- tion by a perpetual system of maltreatment of Italian colonists and attempted suffocation of Italian commerce. These, then, are some of the many answers which might be given to the first two questions your reviewer has asked in connexion with my little volume. Between the two wars there could be no possible comparison, either as to their origin, their motives, their conduct, or their popularity. I do not think that it is an exaggeration to say that, in the fifteen years which have elapsed since the Abyssinian cam- paign, a new Italy and a new race of Italians have arisen—the people, no doubt, of whom Massimo d'Azeglio was dreaming ! Your reviewer rebukes me for taking asertions for proofs. I think that throughout the present trouble with Turkey, Italy has followed up her assertions by very practical proofs of her ability to make them good. In any case, I would point out that the official documents, and the word of honour of Italian soldiers, surgeons, nurses, and priests upon which I relied for my assertions in " The Italians of To-day " are surely more worthy of credence than the reports emanating from Turkish official sources, which, in nearly every instance where they have described an engagement or an episode connected with the war, have proved to be utterly false.—I am, Sir, &c., Tripalle, Crespina, Provincia di Pisa.
RICHARD BACOT.
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