Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/16

 I prefer to insist on my previously expressed viewpoint that Mussolini represented, from the very beginning of his access to power, a fighter of the first magnitude, fighting for all sorts of ideas and against all sorts of people, with a courage, with a daring, which I doubt whether he could have had had he not been prevented by his youthful enthusiasm from realizing how tremendous were the odds against him. He found barriers on all sides, within and without the country, and he started wondering what could be done with that terrific budget which presented—well, I have to bring out at least that one figure—which presented a deficit of 15,500,000,000 lire. Now, for a poor country to have such a colossal, such an incredible deficit as that, would have staggered a politician of the old type, a diplomat of the type with the fine Italian hand. This bull in a China shop, if we are to call him such, went headlong into the situation, and whether we like it or not, he has brought Italy out of that. Granting that here and there there may have been some boosting of results, announcements perhaps a bit premature of a surplus which, however, has come, the deficit is over. Italy is able to face the future with confidence, and she is facing first of all, her international obligations.

Kindly tell me, now that two installments of Italy's debt to the United States have already been paid, and one has been paid to the British Empire—kindly tell me what other leader, what other government of Italy would have been able, in four years, to put Italy on such a basis as to meet her international obligation to you?

But the balance sheet of Italy is permanently and notoriously a sad one, and even eliminating statistics, for we are agreed on that, we find that Mussolini was confronted with terrific sources of constant weakness. The wheat of Italy—Italy being a tremendous consumer of wheat—could not be brought out of the soil fast enough to support a people which feeds especially on bread and on spaghetti and other forms of Italian paste. Also, coal does not exist in Italy, and it might be said now and here that our friends beyond the Alps have been very careful indeed to see that all possible sources of raw materials and fields for normal Italian expansion, some of which had been promised to us under the Treaty of London, were ultimately denied us. Gold cannot be found in Italy or in any of her colonies. It might have been secured by Italy in indirect ways, if the Allies had been broad enough to give to Italy even one square mile out of the nine German colonies which they so kindly appropriated in the guise of mandates at the end of the war. But the Allies became very, very Biblical at that time, and they quoted that well-known sentence—"To those that have it shall be given, and from those that have not it shall be taken away." Therefore they distributed those mandates with no regard to the country that is so sadly in need of expansion of a healthy kind, but on the contrary to the countries that already have enormous colonial empires. Then of course they went about saying it was a heavy responsibility,