l t ! etem· the tide," was the reply of the King's Carablnieri to the solicitations or protests of the authorities, who were surprised and scandalised to find passivity, and often help in the perpetration of crimes, on the part of the Corps whose business it was to prevent them. Thus were methodically destroyed Co-operative Societi.es, Institutes, and Centres of Proletarian Organisation, representing values of ruillions of lire: all the patient work of half a century in educating and uplifting the working classes was scattered; while the impunity secretly guaranteed to the authors of the massacres waR spreading in waves of terror over public opinion-such was the name openly given to them later with monstrous boastfulness-as a prelu.de to the gagging and effective f::lavery which were to come. In this way were committed thousands of murders, almost as a festival and orgiastic celebration of their absolute impunity; conscientious judges w,•re intimidated by threats; the brutality of the human beast of the darkest periods of his, tory reappeared stronger than ever, nourished by ·the cowardice of vile mercenaries armed to the teeth, pitted against individuals despoiled of their arms, and of civil protection: fathers, sons, husbands, brothers slaughtered in the presence of their dear ones, sometimes in the night, and in circumstances such that the recollection of them alone brings a startled shudder of horror. Impudence and loss of moral sense reached such a point as to pass off as martyrs the criminal aggressors who fell in the punitive expeditions, at the hands of those who did not consent to give up their life without resistance. The unlimited number of such a list of so-styled martyrs is the proof of the magnitude of the reaction. The march on Rome was executed under the shelter of a military prounciamento of some generals who joined the Duke of Aosta. It was such that the King of Italy, to avoid the disintegration latent in the army, and the possibility of being unseated, BibliotecaGino Bianco was constrained to call to office Mussolini, who, under-,the wing of the Press, bought over by the gold or French masonry, was fanning the !lame of dissension in the Royal household. The full price was exacted: the power once in his hands, the tragedy already in full development was replaced by the tragic farce. The famous consensus of the whole of the nation did not exist and never had existed. The lists of candidates for the subsequent elections, prepared by Mussolini, were catalogues of servants and tools devoted to him by previous pact, and the elections were imposed, revolver in hand, with bludgeon and castor oil. Thus was the consensus attained! ! ! Crime calls forth crime. Right Honorable Sir, yon have here a great and noble figure, on whom all An;tralia looks with just pride and vibrant veneration, as a symbol and personification of living honesty, kindness, universal human charity, the Honorable William Maloney, the little doctor as he is called by his admiring people; weli then, Sir, saving a difference of age, such was in Italy our friend, the multi-millionaire Giacomo Matteotti, who gave out with full· hands for the Italian proletariat the treasures of his n1ind, and of his heart, his eloquence, his wealth! Being warned a few moments before his last speech in the Chamber of Deputies, a speech which was. monumental in its denunciation of the infamous methods by which the elections were imposed on a civilised people, he said: "Now I am going to pronounce my own funeral oration!" His conscience did not falter, nor could it have been swayed in any way; and so he was done away with, by order of the assassin who now speaks in the name of a people bf forty-two million souls! His speech finished, the assassin rose from the Government bench, where he was sitting, and said: "That man must speak no more!" And thus it was. (A minute's silence In memory of the Great Martyr!)
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