OUR ROMAN LETTER

New Zealand Tablet, 13 January 1921, Page 21

OUR ROMAN LETTER

.By Scottus Alter.

The death of the Lord Mayor of Cork has produced here, as elsewhere, strong feelings of sympathy and indignation. The Tempo and the Oorriere cl'ltalia comment briefly, but forcibly, upon the news, while the. Trib una gives a detailed account of the Lord Mayor's career. In this, indeed, they are but following the press and public opinion not merely in Italy but all over Europe, especially in France and Spain. In Barcelona, for instance, the Catalan newspapers for a week or more devoted their foremost columns to the heroic "Alcade" of Cork, while the shops closed in sign of mourning and crowds expressed a burning indignation of which, we believe, the windows of the British Consulate there bear the marks. The Corriere d'ltalia for October 26 -writes:—"An untiring champion of the independence of his country, his wish has been to sacrifice his life for her 'in testimony to his faith; and this sacrifice may well be equivalent for England to a very crushing defeat." Even previous to this Irish events had been attracting considerable attention. They were, naturally, all considered under the light of the British Premier's defence of "reprisals" some time ago—"that unfortunate defence of the reprisals," wrote the Messaggero Meridiaho for October 13, "to justify which even the most faithful friends of the Government are' embarrassed." Another pronouncement of Mr. Lloyd George which has attracted some attention is his economic objection to Irish independence: "Would the workman in England be ready to pay eight shillings for a pound of tobacco when the laborer in Ireland would only pay sixpence?" The force of the objection is appreciated by Italians at a time when they,, suffering from the decreasing value of the lira, are disposed to attribute to Great Britain a policy of baulking all efforts for their financial or industrial better-' ment on the part of her Allies and proteges, though it harmonises poorly with the refrain that Ireland stands to lose by separating from Great Britain. Many Italian papers continue to draw, largely at any rate, their Irish news from London sources. The accuracy is of such a degree as would naturally be expected as the result of such a process, a good specimen being the statement, repeated more than once in such papers as the Osservatore . Romano, Corriere Italia, and Tribuna, that the [Capuchin] confessor of the Lord Mayor of Cork was a Dominican friar. The amount of credence, however, which they give to some of these sources may be judged from the comment of the Messaggero Meridiano for October 24 on the official- version of some events in Dublin: "This morning an official communication announced that such rumors must be considered contrary to the truth. There is question only—always according to the official version—of unimportant incidents without serious consequences. This appears worthy of .little consideration, and is this evening the 'subject of much comment." it The Tempo for October 18-has a London letter on 'the woes of Albion" which deals chiefly . with Egyptian and Irish independence. - "English ministerial policy," writes this special correspondent, "is at present certainly not a matter of sailing ' in tranquil waters, and the Cabinet of Lloyd George is Seriously shaken on the foundations of its heterogeneous coalition . From right : and from i left, never perhaps as today, criticisms and threats, sharp- and excited, - are raised against it. : On two -points in particular large circles of public opinion, and Authoritative representatives of the daily press reproach the Government with having followed a line of conduct gravely prejudicial to the health^ and vitality of the imperial organism—on the Egyptian difficulty and on the Irish one. /,,.,, s . -:>.,. • t :, i /\ —...... ■,,,... , .':'■' He then proceeds to" criticise the English attitude towards Egypt, a and, in particular the recent schemes for giving ;i Egypt a nominal "independence." "In truth," he writes, "the scheme for the future government of Egypt which has been, not officially,^ made public, has been described very arbitrarily as a treaty or an accord. In reality it represents up to the pre-

sent nothing but a series of suggestions, put together in a cycle of conversations which have taken place between Lord Milner'and Zaglul pascia, which must be submitted in order to be put in force to the examination and approval both of the British Cabinet and of the Egyptian Government." "The remembrance," he remarks further on, "of the recent Egyptian uprisings has not, died out on the Thames, and Albion is become particularly sensible to all the menaces of secession which rise up along the borders of her vast empire."

"But," the letter proceeds, "it is not only the unknown quantity of the Egyptian arrangements which keeps London political spheres in a state of alarm. The Irish difficulty, that age-long, gangrenous sore of the internal and foreign. policy of Albion, has now reached in these last few weeks an exceptional gravity. To the anxiety caused by the powerful and all-embracing organisation of Sinn Fein to the scandal raised by the attitude of the Government when confronted with the hunger-strike of the Lord Mayor of Cork ; finally to the impression created by the verdict of the Society of Nations, which has declared .the question of Ireland to be of an international character; there is added just now the astonishment caused even among the conservative classes themselves, the backers of strong policies in the island of St. Patrick, by the cruel and destructive abandonment of discipline which has spread among the ranks of the British police, dislocated to d'o service in Ireland. An old law, an anachronistic piece of ruins . from the time of the penal laws, authorises this police to perpetrate the most savage reprisals, in the villages where there have been political coups whose authors they have failed to capture. Fallen into disuse practically, this law has been suddenly exhumed by the Irish police. They in virtue of it have abandoned themselves in various parts of Ireland to showy destroying* of fixed and movable property, to avenge, so they say, the victims of Sinn Fein."

The Gorriere d'ltalia, 'too, has recently devoted much attention to the sufferings of Ireland, especially to the pronouncement of the Irish bishops, and to the heroin deaths of the Lord Mayor of Cork and of the young lad of eighteen, Kevin Barry.

The municipal. elections in Rome took place on October 31. As is usually the case when such events occur in Rome, the walls of the. city were decorated with many-colored manifestoes, enshrining a literature ranging from essays on the state of Russia to verses in Romanesque dialect and sallies of Trastevere wit. The parties, whose graceful compliments to one another were thus set side by side, were four in number:—A union of bourgeois parties containing a very largo proportion of Freemasons; the Official Socialists ; the Popular Party, and the Republicans. The result of the elections is a victory for the Union, the Socialists obtaining the minority, the Popular Party coming third, and the 'Republicans last. On the whole the result seems to have been somewhat unexpected. Previously some had hoped that the Popular Party would win by a small majority, while most casual observers expected perhaps the victory of the Official Socialists. The result thus leaves the Popular Party in a weaker position in Rome than that which it occupied previous to the elections; The leaders of the party, however, seem in no way moved to abandon their "intransigeant" position, or to adopt in Rome the policy advocated some time ago by the Osscrvatorc Romano to its few readers of a blocco of the Catholic forces with various "liberal" parties now huddled together before the advance of socialism. They claim that the lesson of'the elections is the necessity of fighting for the proportional system in future elections, and that a defeat such as they have suffered is better than the doubtful company which would be theirs in a coalition with the soi-disant "parties of order." With the elections in the large centres the municipal and other local government elections throughout Italy come to a close. Their result is little/ different from that of the parliamentary elections last year. It shows a preponderance of socialists in many provinces

of Northern and Central Italy, a"preponderance of the Popular Party in other provinces of the same*regions, and a complete preponderance of liberals in the South. The results at Rome and in some other places may be regarded as showing somewhat of a re-awakening in the liberal or bourgeois parties, though its importance need not be exaggerated, A noteworthy symptom, however, is the lessening of the number of well-to-do people who abstain from voting because unwilling to suffer the irksomeness and inconvenience attendant on it—a factor -which, contributed to the success on the present occasion of the union of liberals.

The Socialists have, of the various parties, had the most striking success: The results of their success will not be entirely clear until it can be seen how far their opposition to the central Government, and their proposal to disregard its laws, will be carried in their administration of the communes.

The victories of the liberals are mainly in the South and in the islands, where the results frequently depend far less" on political ideals than on local influence and personal following. At Turin, Brescia, Venice, and a few other cities, the victory has 'been won by a coalition of Liberals with the Popular Party. The most striking victories of the Popular Party have been in the provinces of Brescia, Bergamo, Treviso, Vicenza, Verona, Udine (all in Northern Italy), and, in a lesser measure, in Milan, Genoa, Alessandria, Venice, Cremona,' Ancona, Parma, Piacenza, Lucca,, and others fin Northern and Central Italy).