Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/17

 and Italy should call herself blessed that she had not been cursed with such big burdens; burdens which overcrowded Italy is perfectly willing to shoulder today, if you can only persuade the countries who accepted the colonial inheritance of Germany to disgorge.

But, since that was an impossibility, and Mussolini knows perfectly well what the possibilities and impossibilities are, I prefer to speak of his three battles to strengthen Italy's economic defenses: the battle for wheat, the battle for coal, the battle for gold.

Italy needs every year 65,000,000,000 quintels of wheat, and that cannot be gotten out of Italy's soil as yet. 45,000,000,000 was what she usually got. Immediately Mussolini saw that there were still territories in Italy which were not producing as they should, places that had been overlooked by agriculture, malarial regions, or perhaps the feuds of a few political leaders that managed for the sake of their peace of mind, to keep in a state of agricultural misdevelopment or undevelopment regions that might just as well produce wheat. And although all odds were against Italy, for the climate had been most unfavorable last year, instead of 45,000,000,000, already 55,000,000,000 was raised last year, and we expect in a couple of years the battle of wheat to be such that Italy will no longer need to buy wheat on the Chicago market or on the markets of Argentina or of Canada.

Next is coal. Italy cannot get real coal; but she has white coal, that is, the possibilities of those wonderful waterfalls of the Alps, and to a certain extent, to a minor extent, of the Apennines, yielding the motive power for trains and factories, for engines of all kinds.

Very little had been done with these before the days of Fascism, and there is an obvious reason. The initial cost of the electrification of industry is very great. The Government, in many cases, must directly or indirectly, pay the cost, and what government wishes to undergo the heavy responsibility of digging deep into its own treasury in order that the new government which will follow only a few days afterwards will reap or begin to reap the harvest while the sowing has been done by its predecessor?

Now Mussolini, insisting on a stability that had been unheard of before, has been able to harness the waterfalls of the Alps, and when you come now from France or from Switzerland and get into Italy, the first thing you notice at the frontier is the replacing by an electric engine of the steam engine that brought you there.

And smoothly do those trains run; no longer the absurd delays that existed before. But I shall not insist on it, for it is one of the chief tricks of the enemies of Fascism to appear magnanimous by granting that Italy has one good thing now, and that is trains arriving on time, since Mussolini has gone into power. It is a great joy, however, to find that at least now you can travel without finding that your neighbor takes out