Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/64

 52 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

1. A sound budget probably one of the most solid of Europe showing a constant and increasing surplus of receipts, due to revenue and not to debts.

2. A steady improvement of the currency, due chiefly to an increase in the metallic reserve held by both the state and the banks in guarantee of their circulating paper.

As a result of these two facts we have :

3. A continuous rise in the value of the state bonds on the foreign markets.

4. A constant diminution in the rate of exchange, Italian paper having a greater buying power than heretofore and gradu- ally approaching par.

III.

Encouraging as they may seem, the facts just mentioned can acquire a deep significance only when viewed in the light of the economic condition of the country. The public budget is not a dead arithmetical expression. Behind its figures there is the whirl of national life, and finance is, in reality, the outcome of national economy. Now, what are the economic conditions of Italy ?

The esteemed foreigner, to whom reference has already been made, will probably shrug his shoulders at the question. He considers Italy an insignificant quantity in the economic life of the world. There seems to be, in his mind, a dissonance between the two words : Italy and industry. At best, the only concession that he is willing to make is that Italy might be an agricultural country, nothing else. Let us at the very outset do away with this oft-repeated assertion. To maintain that Italy can never be other than an agricultural country, and that she has to draw her resources exclusively from agriculture, is paramount to the assumption that the country is incapable of taking its share in the industrial movement of our time, and that, by a sort of miracle, Italy can escape the crises, the diseases, the vicissitudes of weather, the competition that so seriously disturb agricultural conditions in western Europe. It is a well-ascertained fact that, in spite of the most energetic action of capital and fertilizers, and in spite of all the improved methods and processes of modern