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1870–1902] currency, and, eventually, fiscal reform. The long-promised abolition of the grist tax was not explicitly mentioned, opposition to the railway redemption contracts was transformed into approval, and the vaunted reduction of taxation replaced by lip-service to the Conservative deity of financial equilibrium. The railway redemption contracts were in fact immediately voted by parliament, with a clause pledging the government to legislate in favour of farming out the railways to private companies.

Nicotera, minister of the interior, began his administration of home affairs by a sweeping change in the personnel of the prefects, sub-prefects and public prosecutors, but found himself obliged to incur the wrath of his supporters by prohibiting Radical meetings likely to endanger public order, and by enunciating administrative principles which would have befitted an inveterate Conservative. In regard to the Church, he instructed the prefects strictly to prevent infraction of the law against religious orders. At the same time the cabinet, as a whole, brought in a Clerical Abuses Bill, threatening with severe punishment priests guilty of disturbing the peace of families, of opposing the laws of the state, or of fomenting disorder. Depretis, for his part, was compelled to declare impracticable the immediate abolition of the grist tax, and to frame a bill for the increase of revenue, acts which caused the secession of some sixty Radicals and Republicans from the ministerial majority, and gave the signal for an agitation against the premier similar to that which he himself had formerly undertaken against the Right. The first general election under the Left (November 1876) had yielded the cabinet the overwhelming majority of 421 Ministerialists against 87 Conservatives, but the very size of the majority rendered it unmanageable. The Clerical Abuses Bill provoked further dissensions: Nicotera was severely affected by revelations concerning his political past; Zanardelli refused to sanction the construction of a railway in Calabria in which Nicotera was interested; and Depretis saw fit to compensate the supporters of his bill for the increase of revenue by decorating at one stroke sixty ministerial deputies with the Order of the Crown of Italy. A further derogation from the ideal of democratic austerity was committed by adding £80,000 per annum to the king’s civil list (14th May 1877) and by burdening the state exchequer with royal household pensions amounting to £20,000 a year. The civil list, which the law of the 10th of August 1862 had fixed at £650,000 a year, but which had been voluntarily reduced by the king to £530,000 in 1864, and to £490,000 in 1867, was thus raised to £570,000 a year. Almost the only respect in which the Left could boast a decided improvement over the administration of the Right was the energy displayed by Nicotera in combating brigandage and the mafia in Calabria and Sicily. Successes achieved in those provinces failed, however, to save Nicotera from the wrath of the Chamber, and on the 14th of December 1877 a cabinet crisis arose over a question concerning the secrecy of telegraphic correspondence. Depretis thereupon reconstructed his administration, excluding Nicotera, Melegari and Zanardelli, placing Crispi at the home office, entrusting Magliani with finance, and himself assuming the direction of foreign affairs.

In regard to foreign affairs, the début of the Left as a governing party was scarcely more satisfactory than its home policy. Since the war of 1866 the Left had advocated an Italo-Prussian alliance in opposition to the Francophil tendencies of the Right. On more than one occasion

Bismarck had maintained direct relations with the chiefs of the Left, and had in 1870 worked to prevent a Franco-Italian alliance by encouraging the “party of action” to press for the occupation of Rome. Besides, the Left stood for anti-clericalism and for the retention by the State of means of coercing the Church, in opposition to the men of the Right, who, with the exception of Sella, favoured Cavour’s ideal of “a free Church in a free State,” and the consequent abandonment of state control over ecclesiastical government. Upon the outbreak of the Prussian Kulturkampf the Left had pressed the Right to introduce an Italian counterpart to the Prussian May laws, especially as the attitude of Thiers and the hostility of the French Clericals obviated the need for sparing French susceptibilities. Visconti-Venosta and Minghetti, partly from aversion to a Jacobin policy, and partly from a conviction that Bismarck sooner or later would undertake his Gang nach Canossa, regardless of any tacit engagement he might have assumed towards Italy, had wisely declined to be drawn into any infraction of the Law of Guarantees. It was, however, expected that the chiefs of the Left, upon attaining office, would turn resolutely towards Prussia in search of a guarantee against the Clerical menace embodied in the régime of Marshal Macmahon. On the contrary, Depretis and Melegari, both of whom were imbued with French Liberal doctrines, adopted towards the Republic an attitude so deferential as to arouse suspicion in Vienna and Berlin. Depretis recalled Nigra from Paris and replaced him by General Cialdini, whose ardent plea for Italian intervention in favour of France in 1870, and whose comradeship with Marshal Macmahon in 1859, would, it was supposed, render him persona gratissima to the French government. This calculation was falsified by events. Incensed by the elevation to the rank of embassies of the Italian legation in Paris and the French legation to the Quirinal, and by the introduction of the Italian bill against clerical abuses, the French Clerical party not only attacked Italy and her representative, General Cialdini, in the Chamber of Deputies, but promoted a monster petition against the Italian bill. Even the coup d’état of the 16th of May 1877 (when Macmahon dismissed the Jules Simon cabinet for opposing the Clerical petition) hardly availed to change the attitude of Depretis. As a precaution against an eventual French attempt to restore the temporal power, orders were hurriedly given to complete the defences of Rome, but in other respects the Italian government maintained its subservient attitude. Yet at that moment the adoption of a clear line of policy, in accord with the central powers, might have saved Italy from the loss of prestige entailed by her bearing in regard to the Russo-Turkish War and the Austrian acquisition of Bosnia, and might have prevented the disappointment subsequently occasioned by the outcome of the Congress of Berlin. In the hope of inducing the European powers to “compensate” Italy for the increase of Austrian influence on the Adriatic, Crispi undertook in the autumn of 1877, with the approval of the king, and in spite of the half-disguised opposition of Depretis, a semi-official mission to Paris, Berlin, London and Vienna. The mission appears not to have been an unqualified success, though Crispi afterwards affirmed in the Chamber (4th March 1886) that Depretis might in 1877 “have harnessed fortune to the Italian chariot.” Depretis, anxious only to avoid “a policy of adventure,” let slip whatever opportunity may have presented itself, and neglected even to deal energetically with the impotent but mischievous Italian agitation for a “rectification” of the Italo-Austrian frontier. He greeted the treaty of San Stefano (3rd March 1878) with undisguised relief, and by the mouth of the king, congratulated Italy (7th March 1878) on having maintained with the powers friendly and cordial relations “free from suspicious precautions,” and upon having secured for herself “that most precious of alliances, the alliance of the future”—a phrase of which the empty rhetoric was to be bitterly demonstrated by the Berlin Congress and the French occupation of Tunisia.

The entry of Crispi into the Depretis cabinet (December 1877) placed at the ministry of the interior a strong hand and sure eye at a moment when they were about to become imperatively necessary. Crispi was the only man of truly statesmanlike calibre in the ranks of the Left. Formerly a friend

and disciple of Mazzini, with whom he had broken on the question of the monarchical form of government which Crispi believed indispensable to the unification of Italy, he had afterwards been one of Garibaldi’s most efficient coadjutors and an active member of the “party of action.” Passionate, not always scrupulous in his choice and use of political weapons, intensely patriotic, loyal with a loyalty based rather on reason than sentiment, quick-witted, prompt in action, determined and pertinacious, he possessed in eminent degree many qualities lacking in other