Page:Cesare Battisti and the Trentino.djvu/13

 Italian public life, he would soon have attained one of the highest posts. But all this he disdained, preferring to remain in his little Trentino that nature had made a guardian of northern Italy, and therefore must be defended at all costs. He was attached to his country and was like one of those majestic pines that thrive only in the soil where they are born and cannot be uprooted without dying.

All his activities were carried on in the Trentino up to the beginning of the war. Wearisome work, mostly obscure, difficult, hardly understood, often opposed by the public, which allowed itself to be won, little by little, by this great fighter. It was only recently, just before the war, that Battisti became probably the most universally beloved man in Trentino, particularly by the young men, who saw in him the esthetic embodiment of the ideal of their youth and of the highest spirit of their country.

He entered Trentino public life as a socialist. Who was not a socialist in Italy between the years 1893 and 1898? That was the heroic period of Italian socialism, preached from the chair by, agitated by and  — at that time brothers more than friends — at meetings, in the press and in Parliament.

The socialist ideal of that time did not take the form of an ideal of class; it was more a very high human principle supposed to be capable of transforming mankind for the common good. Such a socialist was Battisti, and the great task he had set himself was to convert the mass of Trentino laborers and peasants to socialism as he understood it.

This stand on his part, however, quite new for our country, immediately provoked the opposition of the clerical party for obvious reasons, and also caused some preoccupations in the old liberal national party, which feared that the theoretical internationalism preached by the socialists might weaken the national sentiments of the masses. For a time it really seemed as if the apprehensions of the liberals and nationalists were justified. But two or three years' experience sufficed for Page eleven