Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/10

 clear visibility what is going on in the Peninsula; near because of my yearly visits, now repeated for one-fifth of a century, to the land of my birth.

Allow me to make use of that two-sidedness in explaining to you Nordics how the peculiar conditions of Italy affect the practical applications of a political ideal in which we all theoretically believe—liberty. To the average person in this audience that word recalls the days when you first learned to love and revere that ideal, which became also the marvelous foundation of your political power. Every high school boy or girl has written essays on it; or has indulged in oratorical flourishes proclaiming before the rest of the class his undying love for liberty, later on trying to the best of his knowledge and ability to square up his views with the use of the ballot, practical application of liberty as organized by and for the American people, who learned to revere that ideal especially through an Anglo-Saxon tradition. But we of Italy do not go back to Runnymede, do not go back to the year 1215, to King John or Magna Carta. We have, alas, as the very mainspring supporting the foundation of our constitution, the hall of the Jeu de Paume in Versailles in which on the 20th of June, 1789 a group of Frenchmen, very much displeased with the then existing régime, announced those declarations of the Rights of Man which have gone down into history as a marvelous assembling of rules more beautiful than practical.

The Latin peoples of the earth established upon that foundation a very great number of republics both in Europe and in the various countries to the south of us here, many of which cannot square up with the ideal that should be the ideal of real liberty.

You who have to struggle at election time with the problem of two and a quarter political parties do not know the joy of having twelve constantly conflicting political parties, the representatives of which are elected by not more than 40 per cent of the voting masses—and that list of possible voters in itself includes only a very small percentage of the entire population of Italy. So that beginning by eliminating the large masses denied the right to vote, (which have hitherto included, among other things, 50 per cent of the population of Italy, as it consisted of women who were not granted the suffrage), by further eliminating that 60 per cent of possible voters who never were willing to avail themselves of the privilege that was given them, we arrive at an infinitesimal percentage of the population which subdivided itself into twelve political parties, finally turning the entire country over to one of those twelve groups. Do you wonder that when we are discussing Italian liberty I beg you not to visualize that buxom lassie who presides over the destinies of New York, and casts a deep shadow upon Ellis Island and some light upon the rest of New York