ITALY AND HER FINANCES.
WHY is Italy so poor ? Her land is among the most productive in the world, and her climate on the whole is healthy and temperate. In other words, it is never too hot or too cold for the work of agriculture to pro- ceed in most parts of the Peninsula, and you have literally only to tickle the soil with a hoe to make it laugh with a harvest. Again, the Italians are excellent workmen, and there are a good many of the arts in which they hold a monopoly. If you want men to cut marble well, to lay mosaic or ornamental cemented floors, or to do strong and at the same time elegant mason's work, you cannot do better than employ Italians. Go where you will, in Switzerland, Austria, and the south of France, you will be certain to find. Italians at work on the buildings. Then, too, the majority of the Italian population is both hard-working and thrifty. There may be a good deal of dreaminess and listlessness in the South ; but in Venetia and Lombardy the people slave at their work, and make small economies as if they were Frenchmen. Again, Italy is a country already splendidly equipped with the plant of civilisation, and is not, say, like Russia, slowly getting into a state of cultivation. Look at the buildings in Italy. The housing of the people, both in town and country, is already done, and done net only substantially, but magnificently. The repairs of Italy must be a hundredth part of the repairs of England, where the climate and a natural incapacity for building so as to last make rebuilding and repairing perpetual. Take the means of transport, again. But for the lack of rail- ways in the south, there is no country better provided with cheap internal transport. Outside Milan you may see roads, canals, steam tramways, and railways all in operation, and all running parallel to each other, and in many other parts of Lombardy and Venetia you may see an equal embarras de richesees in the way of transport. How, then, comes it that Italy is admittedly the poor country of Europe, and that, though she has achieved a great position politically, and takes rank without question as one of the great Powers, her finances are a source of perpetual anxiety to her statesmen and to her friends and well-wishers throughout the world?
How difficult it is for Italy to make both ends meet, and how great is the importance attached to the fiscal question by her statesmen, is shown by the speech which the Italian Premier, Signor Giolitti, made on Wednesday at a banquet at Dronero, in Piedmont. The speech was not professedly a financial one, but rather a general declaration of policy ; yet it turned almost entirely on the means which ought to be adopted to husband the resources of Italy. Incidentally, Signor Giolitti answered our question as to the cause of Italian poverty. It looks as if he attributed Italy's poverty in a great measure to the lack of private initiative on the part of the Italian people. We are inclined to agree with him. Italy was in the past too much governed, either for good or ill. In Naples and Sicily the tyranny of Bomba and his predecessors utterly destroyed the power of initiative. If to lift your hand to help yourself, and to be busy, self-reliant, and independent, is to be per as suspect, and probably leads to your ruin, you very soon lose the desire or the power to initiate, and instead wait to see what the Government will do. It was the same in the well-governed Grand Duchies, People in Tuscany were so well looked after, " patted down, and coddled, that they lost the use of their mental sinews. There has, of course, been a great reaction from this timidity and lack of push since the unification of Italy, and a large section of the community now seem as energetic as if they were Frenchmen or Germans. But though the visible population may seem energetic and capable of working out their own salvation, the invisible population, which is twenty times more numerous, is still utterly incapable of making strong or decided movements on its own account. It is capable of working, and does work bard at its appointed toil, but it has not yet felt that touch of hopeful energy which is the true philosopher's stone, and turns all things to gold. The great mass of the Italian population goes on its way, not sad—the people are naturally joyous—but with the belief that nothing much beyond daily sustenance is to be got out of work. Their delight is in fireworks and the sunshine and a feeta, not in getting on and "making things hum" in business. In a word, Italy is like a man who has been paralysed and has partially recovered. The brain is quite active, and the arms have their full vigour, but the lower limbs still move with difficulty and uncertainty. Ultimately, no doubt, the legs and the rest of the body will recover as completely as the arms ; but till they do the man is weak. Closely allied to this lack of initiative and energy in commercial and industrial matters, as we have said, the true sources of wealth, is to be reckoned the depletion of stored-up capital from which Italy suffered till, say, thirty years ago. People in the old days felt it was not worth while to accumulate money in a State where the arbitrary will of the Prince could prevail either to confiscate it outright, to make it impossible to enjoy it, or to destroy it by some mistaken act of policy. In the case, too, of the provinces and States held by the foreigner, men felt that by accumulating they were only enriching their enemies, and giving them, through the lever of taxation, increased power. It was not patriotic to fat the calf for the butcher. Besides, the low tone of morality which spread over Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought with it a sodden carelessness as to everything except the pleasure of the moment. It happened, therefore, that while in countries like England, France, and Holland, and even Switzerland, capital was steadily accumulating, in Italy it was till within quite recent times as steadily dwindling away. There was, we should imagine, very much more realised wealth in the country in 1680 than there was in 1830. The depletion of capital bas, no doubt, stopped, and money is again being saved, and, as Signor Giolitti noted, used to buy back the debt, up till now almost entirely held by foreigners. The process is, however, a very slow one. Italy, therefore, is in the position of a man who has had to borrow money to improve his estate. People in that situation cannot help being worse off than those who can use their own capital to benefit the land.
The common explanation of Italy's poverty is, of course, that she spends too much on her army and navy ; but it is not a sufficient one. This expenditure is not nearly so unproductive as it sounds. The army has become the national school of Italy, and is deliberately used to improve the young men. The soldiers are educated and taught trades, they are well fed—at any rate, by the Italian standard—and they are sent back to the villages with a far better chance of getting on in the world than if they had not been enlisted. As an improving machine the Italian army is an extraordinary success. The expenditure on public works is far more open to criticism. If the Government were to determine not to spend another lira in this direction, but were to insist that what was needed must be done by private enterprise, they would, we believe, be conferring a great benefit on Italy. For a time there might be an entire cessation of railway building ; but ultimately private adventurers would step in, and with the added advantage that the railways would be made where they were really wanted (i.e., where they would pay), and not where most political pressure was exerted. On the whole, we are not inclined to take a pessimistic view even about Italian finance. The country is poor, but poor for reasons which are satisfactory because they are transient. Once allow the generation born of parents who have never been anything but sons and daughters of a free Italy to get to work, and the world will see a great deal more elasticity in Italian finance. ''hat, and a generation more of petty savings, and Italy will begin to see her way, and to realise that her splendid climate, her rich soil, her magni- ficent sea-front, and her central position place her natu- rally among the rich nations of the world. In the four- teenth and fifteenth centuries Italy was emphatically the land of wealth, and this she will be again if she survives or escapes, as we trust and believe she will, foreign war and broil domestic.
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