ITALY’S MORAL SICKNESS

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LIV, Issue LIV, 21 August 1920, Page 8

ITALY’S MORAL SICKNESS

“A much graver difficulty for Italian statesmanship than any momentary fcill in the wrestling ring is the post-war moral sickness which rages in Italy as in the rest of Europe*.” says the Manchester Guardian." i ‘As everywhere else, there is throughout Italy disappointment. Like the people of every other country, victorious or vanquished, the Italians are saying, ‘We are half ruined, and what have we got for it 1 ?’ That is the worst of a great struggle to avert a great evil. You stave off the evil, and then find that you are exhausted, and that the mere absence of the averted evil does not go on making you positively happy any more than does your present freedom from last year’s toothache. Jlnd m Italy, for special reasons, . the sickness of disillusion is particularly depressing and souring . “A great many Italians hoped for impossibilities from tho war - for gains of territory winch coul I not have been given in full to Ita y without our stultifying w/uit many of us had for 50 years been saying in severe condemnation of Germany’s seizure of Alsace-Lorraine I taly, again, had very heavy casu- ; alties in the war, with rather less of the consolatory satisfactions of signal victory than her allies. | And, now that peace has come, she is more wholly dependent than they ,upon foreign imports of some of the chief essentials of industrial reconstruction -- coal, iron, and steel—-and she has to buy them with a' coin which was roughly, worth tenpence of our money before the war and is now worth about threepence. “So deep is the general bitterness of disappointment ; hat the Government feels it unsafe to add to the forces of discontent a host of demobilise!.! officers, ’ apd so keeps them on the pay-roll, to the country’s further impoverishment If any Premier can carry Ita A through the next five years without a revolution, get the army and ! navy down to a proper peace establishment, the ordinary law everywhere enforced, industry set on its feet again, and public interest diverted from fantastic dreams of territorial acquisition io the sober joys of solvency and national comradeship in the day’s i work of peace, he will be a strong man and a statesman fit to rank with Cavour.