Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/12

 of the governmental forces, which had put Italy in a condition of inability to rule herself, let alone to carry on honest, fair, responsible intercourse with other nations of the earth. That kind of disintegration is proven by the fact that the Fascist government has found two million more tax-payers. When you find two million more tax-payers out of a population of forty-one or forty-two million people, something is rotten in the state of Denmark. It means that there are people who by political pull or otherwise are able to get away for a long time from fulfilling that national obligation of every individual. Or, if you wish further proof of governmental disintegration, study the workings of the sympathy strikes which preceded Fascismo. In my own quiet, law-abiding native city of Florence, for an entire summer, we did not know from one moment to the next what would be done. Out of sheer sympathy with somebody who somewhere in Sardinia or Bascilicata had been treated badly or complained that he was treated badly by the government, we were left today one hour without water supply, the next day one hour without electricity, and the next day one hour without gas; the next day the strike hit the white wings, and the next the trolley lines that tied the various suburbs of Florence to the central part of the city. And the disintegration was thorough, the government helpless; no possibility of ever getting the police to interfere.

The so-called Royal Guard that had been established by the government preceding the Fascist government was given officers' uniforms and very good pay, but standing orders not to intervene. The Italian flag could not be shown from public buildings for months at a time. It had to be flown from the central courtyard of public buildings on festive days.

You saw it here on the Italian Consulate because it was protected by the New York police. You saw it flying from the Italian Embassy in Washington because it was America that was protecting it, but in Italy it could not be seen. My two brothers and myself have suffered the indignity of being told, as officers of Italy—and I am no militarist; I do not boast by any means of anything that was done by us in wartime, as merely a result of obeying orders and nothing else—not to go out in the evening except in civilian clothes because our government could not protect us if we went out wearing our uniforms. Soldiers again and again were attacked in the streets for being guilty of answering an unescapable call to compulsory military service. But the rabble had ceased to be logical. Down with the Signori! The factories hoisted red flags; true, nobody could run them; but they were free. There was disintegration from beginning to end.

The entire Fiume adventure, take it as you will, showed eight thousand soldiers who were not present in their barracks when their names were called, and whose absence was not noticed by the people who were calling the roll every night: I do not call that Bolshevism; I call that absolute anarchy. No one had any power to rule anybody else.