MATTEOTTI.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19104, 13 September 1927, Page 9

MATTEOTTI.

MEMORIAL UNVEILED IN BRUSSELS. (BY CABLE—PRESS ASSOCIATION—COPYRIGHT). (AUSTRALIAN AND N.Z CABUi ASSOCIATION! BRUSSELS, September 11. At the unveiling of a memorial to Signor Matteotti, Mr Arthur Henderson, M.P., declared that it was a symbol of homage to international Socialism, to the ideals of liberty and democracy. Signor Matteotti had realised that Fascism was a denial of the principles of political liberty and democratic right, banishing, torturing, destroying and slaying the bodies of men; but it was unable to kill the free spirit of reason or to annul the law. Fascism and Bolshevism together had spread ruin, desolation, and death. Signor Matteotti had used the weapons of reason and goodwill, which alone would ultimately prevail agajnst tyranny. [Giacomo* Matteotti, a wealthy Socialist member of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, was killed on June 11th, 1924, in a motor-car in the wild region of the Campagna Romana, north of Rome. He had been seized and abducted the same afternoon in the open street a few hundred yards from his own door. Two months later his body was found and five Fascists were tried for the crime, being defended by Farinacci, Secretary-General of the Fascist Party. Two were acquitted, and the other three were found to have "committed homicide, but unintentionally, for cause, With relative complicity and with extenuating circumstances." The extenuating circumstances consisted of the jury'sdecision that Matteotti's physical insistence was below normal arid that the blows which killed him would not have killed an ordinary man. The convicted men were sentenced to five years 11 months' imprisonment, four years being deducted under an amnesty proclaimed by the King, and another 20 months for the time the accused spent in gaol.]