Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/20

 My time is up. But let me say in closing that it will only be when Mussolini is no longer in power that we shall be able to understand the real moral and political stature of that man. Only then we shall clearly see that he built himself, as invisibly as the great poet of old, a monument more enduring than any metal that has ever been created for the instrumentalities of war or peace. [Applause.]

I wonder if without taking sides in this discussion, I could, on the basis of what someone whispered to me, confirm something that the last speaker said. It was a lady. She said she knew that at least some of the statistics of Professor Roselli were correct, because she and a friend of hers were not fined twenty, but were fined forty lire for insulting the plush in an Italian train.

Coming back to the question of time, since Professor Roselli was so insistent about time, Professor Salvemini took three minutes less than his thirty minutes while Professor Roselli took five minutes more than his thirty minutes. So it seems to me fair that we give to Professor Salvemini the five or seven minutes which he didn't take.

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is unfortunately true that Italy is a poor country. You have so many motor cars; we have so few motor cars. But I don't think we must give up our liberty in order to buy motor cars. I don't think that Mussolini will grant a motor car to every five Italians.

We were poor people sixty years ago after so many centuries of despotism. We were poor, much poorer than today, and yet we had our progress under the free institutions. We were able to pay all our debts. Every year our treasury paid its debts, and we were able during the fifteen years preceding the war to balance our budget always with a surplus. During those sixty years of free institutions we built up all our railway system and we built a great many new roads and developed our schools, and Mussolini had not yet arrived!

When Mussolini came to power, he did not find a deficit of 15,000,000,000 lire, but a deficit of only 5,000,000,000 lire. The Minister for Treasury in the Mussolini Cabinet, Signor Tangorra, in his statement to the Chamber in November, 1922, some weeks after the march on Rome stated clearly that the deficit for the following year was 5,000,000,000 lire. The preceding cabinets had reduced the deficit from 15,000,000,000 to 5,000,000,000. The Fascist government continued the struggle which the preceding governments had already carried out with great success. This is the truth.

Mussolini is building up in Italy a great system of electric plants. Ladies and gentlemen, on the eve of the Great War, Italy produced 2,000,000,000 kilowatt hours. In 1922, on the eve of the march on Rome it