Just Before the Deluge
By CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS
GUCH.TF.M0 FERRERO, the great Roman his, torian, writing shortly after the Fascists had come to power in Italy, analysed the tactics of Giolitti, the last of the great manceuvrers of the failing parliamentary regime. 'Thirty million men,' Ferrero wrote, 'governed by thirty persons for the benefit of three hundred thousand families; so might the democracy be defined of which Signor Giolitti was the head and lord. The Senate a nonentity, the Chamber apathetic, the revolu- tion tamed in the antechambers of the Ministers, the Ministries formed en famille from among friends and clients, the country's attention distracted from public affairs by the claims of the day's work, except for an occasional wave of hysterical fury over some scandal of halfpence, some wretched prosecu- tion, or other such trivialities; such was Italy from 1904 to 1914. It is difficult to imagine public affairs at the mercy of a smaller num- ber of persons or a group more immune from opposition; an oligarchy efficiently disguised under the most democratic forms of popular government.
'This invisible oligarchy governed easily, unhated and unadmired, and successfully exacted the obedience of a people ignorant of its very existence, because in concealing itself it had succeeded in leaving the country under the illusion of self-government and at the same time saving it all the cares and per- plexities of government; because it was mild, good-natured, indulgent, a master of the art of leaving everybody moderately satisfied; not too punctilious in regard to its prestige and always ready to sacrifice a little of it for a little extension of power; convinced that Man is half angel, half devil, and that to govern him it is necessary now and then to give the devil in him a little run.
'All the actual forces of 'government were occult, and therefore invulnerable, or vir- tually so; the visible authorities, with the exception of the head of the Government, had no part in the direction of affairs, and so could be abandoned without danger to the indignation and derision of the people, which in ill-treating them enjoyed the illusion of
sovereignty and so gave more docile obedi- ence; feeling itself free and master of its destinies because every now and then, without serious public loss, it could give free rein to the anarchical instincts always latent, and to some of these evil passions which represent the civic rights of the Devil in the community.
'The period was one of greater prosperity than had ever before gladdened the human race. . . . The State did nothing very great to its credit, but neither did it do any very great harm; every year it spent more, but, thanks to the increasing wealth, without in- creasing taxes; it satisfied its prot4ds and the dominant oligarchy without exhausting the masses; it was governing in actual fact without control, but it was not abusing its semi-absolute power too much. The press was altogether free, but it never dealt with any question of importance. . . .
'This mediocrity both disgusted and satis- fied the public, which abused it every day but would have been in despair if it had disappeared, since the only trouble it cost was a journey every three or four years to the polling booth to mark a ballot paper. . . . The pity of it was that in the fifteen years that this Government lasted every class in the country, imagining that it was governing instead of being governed, entirely lost the sense of what representative government and democracy are.'
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