MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NIGOLSON
COUNT SFORZA, Foreign Minister of the Italian Republic, left England on Saturday after what seems to have been a most successful visit. In the official statement published by the Foreign Office on the day of his departure it was stated that the visit had served " to emphasise and strengthen the renewed bonds of tradi- tional friendship between the two countries." Mr. Bevin and Count Sforza had, so it was asserted, " found themselves in close agreement in their discussion of international affairs in general." The Italian Foreign Minister, it is true, has not been able to obtain from this country those large shipments of coal of which Italian industry stands in dire need ; all he could obtain—or indeed can have expected to obtain—was a statement that our export of coal would be resumed after April next. But he did secure from Mr. Bevin a promise that the old Commercial Treaty of 1883 would be revised and brought up to date ; that the Anglo-Italian economic committee would be given an authority and scope similar to that so usefully enjoyed by the Anglo-French economic committee ; and that Italy should her- self dispose of those warships which under the treaty should have been handed over. These are substantial gains. What will delight the large migratory section of the British people is that visas between the two countries are before long to be abolished. This is fully in accordance with Mr. Bevin's statement to the Labour Conference when he announced that the aim of his policy was to create such conditions as would enable him to go to Victoria Station and take a ticket for any place he liked. It is a sound policy, and if Mr. Bevin could in fact achieve or create such conditions, it would mean that all our political and financial anxieties were things of the past: travellers' cheques and mutual confidence would flow unimpeded from Calais to Omsk.
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Among the heads of agreement divulged by the Foreign Office there is in addition a provision that an Anglo-Italian civil aviation agreement should be negotiated to cover air services between the two countries. If this provision be read in conjunction with that about the visas, then it does indeed appear that the Anglo-Italian economic committee, as well as the Anglo-French economic committee, will devise means by which the British tourist can visit both Italy and France. Switzerland, in her turn, will be obliged to follow suit ; and in this manner the Wanderlust of the migratory Briton and the claustrophobia which has of late assailed him will once again be satisfied and dissolved. For Italy the continued influx of British tourists is something more than an economic advantage ; such tourists represent something more important than a statistical cate- gory of invisible exports ; they really do create a wide basis of sympathy and understanding between the two countries. The tourists who for three hundred years and more have flocked to Italy from these islands may, it is true, have derived a sentimental im- pression, by which the charm of the Italian climate and scene is fused into a respectful admiration for Italian art and architecture. But the fact remains that Italy has been able, as no other country has been able, to amass in this country a large capital of sympathy and affection, which has been deep and wide enough to survive the iniquities of Italian politicians, from Crispi to Ciano, and to keep alive the ardent respect inspired in Great Britain by the struggles of the Risorgimento. It would indeed be unfortunate if that long interchange were to be permanently interrupted.
* * * * It is an easy thing to deride, and thereby to underestimate, the British tourist who returns from a visit tb Italy with that honey- moon feeling which remains as an emotional aura. We smile at the spinster who keeps upon her mantelshelf a model of the tower at Pisa or uses as her bookmark a strip of vellum decorated with the arms and lilies of Florence. Yet in fact these constant visits did bring the ordinary British citizen into at least some contact with the Italian people and did enable him to realise that, although the Italian professional classes might be disagreeable and the politicians unworthy, the Italian peasants and workmen were human beings of great quality and charm. I look forward to the day when our Government will realise that the benefits and pleasures of foreign travel should not be confined only to the upper and middle classes, and when they introduce tours for workers, on the lines of the "Kraft durch Freude " system, which was one at least of the more humane devices which the Nazis evolved. Such visits might provide the British public with some conception of the historical, economic and regional difficulties by which Italy is hampered and induce a less thoughtless contempt for the foreign policy which since 187o successive Italian Governments have pursued. The urge to play the part of a Great Power which has during the last seventy years led Italian policy into such unfortunate deviations did not arise from any natural tendency towards expansion so much as from the sad illusion that United Italy was the inheritor of Rome. The conditions of her unity and the nature of her own resources did not enable her to assert her position independently ; she was obliged, such being her ambition, to adopt a parasitic policy and to attach herself, now to one group of stronger Powers, and now to another. Her desire for glorification was for a short period exploited and inflamed by the ambitions of Mussolini ; and all that ended squalidly when he was hanged by the feet from a petrol station at Milan: Sejanus ducitur unto.
* * Count Sforza possesses many qualities which should enable him to break with the unfortunate traditions of the past. I have said some sharp and ungraceful things about Count Sforza, and I am glad to retract them ; there is poetic justice in the fact that this dis- tinguished victim of Fascism should now be given the opportunity to recast the foreign policy of his country upon liberal lines. My criticisms of Count Sforza were based not merely upon his conduct on his return to Italy, but upon the fact that it was he who in 192o " denounced" the Tittoni-Venizelos Treaty regarding the Dodecanese, and who also concealed from the Italian Chamber the secret clauses of the Treaty of Rapallo. "There are," he announced to the Italian Senate on December r7th, 1920, " no secret conventions at Rapallo nor any understanding which has not been published." When he made this announcement he had already entered into a secret undertaking with M. Trumbic that Porto Baros and the Delta should be regarded as part of the Yugoslav area of Susak. Excusing himself ten years later for this terminological inexactitude, he ex- plained that the undertakings given " were only binding on the Cabinet in power. My successors could have repudiated them." This was in truth a strange interpretation of the doctrine of the continuity of foreign policy and one which appeared shocking at the time. But all this is very much past history ; we no longer need disturb ourselves about the question of Fiume. Nor, when one con- siders the appalling difficulties with which he was confronted at the time, and the brave integrity with which he thereafter refused to submit to Fascism, need these forgotten incidents diminish our con- fidence in the sincerity of his present purposes. The old tradition of Anglo-Italian friendship has been re-established: the great work that Count Carrandini did during his few months in London has born fruit.
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Count Sforza is a humanist and a patrician ; it was these qualities which enabled him so perfectly to understand a man such as A. J. Balfour. "With men like Balfour," he wrote, "patriotism always took the form of an extreme horror of national boasting ; of a loyal love of peace ; of a certain slowness to take offence (which is the best form of pride) ; of a certain readiness to compromise ; and, above all, of an instinctive and sure knowledge that their Britain had in the last resort the power to enforce their claims." In this acute and truthful analysis Count Sforza has defined the qualities needed in a liberal statesman and a good European. It is these quali- ties which have enabled him to make so welcome a success of his visit to London.
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