Several have been killed, hundreds beaten and imprisoned, to prevent flowers being carried to the martyr's tomb, or any doing of· homage to bis memory! For centuries Italy and the world will look on him as on the purest fountain of light, in all the sublimity that there is in the supreme sacrifice or life for an ideal cause! "Kill me; but you will never kill the idea which is in me! 11 he cried, while he was being beaten down by the assassins of the Glorious Duce! With the attempts on the Sacred Person of the Glorious l)uce, the Italian political situation became W•orse and worse: terror is the vital atmosphtre ot the regime! With the suppression of all Opposition newspapers, in the absolute absence of control by public opinion, all the most fragrant flowers of tyranny have burst into bloom, as if by magic-espionage, deletion imposed as a duty, every door-keeper turned into a spy by Government compulsion, as in Russia under the ·Czar, political and criminal parasitism raised to the Nth power, corruption in all its unmasked or covert manifestations, supine obedience to the arbitrary ruling of the hierarchy, and sycophancy, have made possible an epoch W3iCh the humor of the Italian people, never forgotten even in the darkest hours of its history, has called that of the political suf. ,ci<les, a euphemism used to indicate the clandestine executions, by the Fascist Cheka, of political opponents, held or wanted to be such by the petty satrap of this or that town, and laconically announced in the Fascist ,:, newspapers, the only ones in existence, as "suicides." 'sir, history does not take us by surprise, and with ample intellectual width of vision, true though it may be that all humanity moves on fatally through errors and horrors, the suffering of the social body in order to reach a state of public health can be explained; and from a Machiavellian or cynical point of view, putting .i-side modern politico-Social concepBiolioteca Gino B anco 5 tlon as to the sovereignty of the / people and representative systems, even the despot can be justified: not the brigand, But the despot must be in a position to assure a minim um of existence to his own subjects, according to the requiNments of the times. It is a great people, Sir, that is dying, stifled and in inanition, by the work of a bandit who by a coup de main, unexpectedly •helped by circumstances, has seized the reins of government, and will not give them up again, except, as he himself proclaimed, through a sea of blood! Italy is now, politically, one great prison; economically, it is a squalid dwelling.place in which bare existence has become a crucial problem; financially it is henceforth a semicolony of Wall Street; the cost of living is greater than that of almost all the other countries of the earth; and wages and salaries scarcely a fifth of those received in Australia; the burden of taxation is so heavy an'd unbearable that it is collapsing under its own weight; the working classe;:; struggling against~ chronic unemployment; and the middle classes, constrained to live at the last extremities, having lost, by the recent threefold reductions, by Ministerial decree, of wages and salaries, the necessary power of acquisition, have cau8ed a permanent and serious economic crisis, evident not only in the excessive numlier of bankruptcies every day, but in the general ruin caused by the failures of public banks; the arts are decaying; oratory is buried; the most laudable energies, the noblest and most independent souls, the flower of the nation's intelligence and culture is languishing in prisons and in confinement to domicile; attempts on the tyrant's life succeed each other with siginficant frequency, . , . ·Naught but hypocrisy, naught but lying, trickery, naught but asthmatical rhetoric of the lowest quality: battles, naught but battles, with the purpose, already frustrated, of keeping the public spirit under confinuous pressure: the battle ,for the lira, '
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