Page:Gaetano Salvemini and Bruno Roselli - Italy under Fascism (1927).djvu/28

 Italy's past and the men of the past—only to remember that that past must never come back again.

Professor Salvemini rises to a point of personal privilege in reference to the last point made by Count di Revel.

Ladies and Gentlemen: If you take that book and you count the names, you will find that they are until the end of October, 1922—I don't say after because the list is not complete and it would not be fair to take in account this section of the book. If you take that book, you will find that the number of Fascisti killed by anti-Fascists is 350. If you take the number of the anti-Fascists killed by Fascists, you find it is double the Fascist dead. If Count di Revel is able to show that I am wrong in this point, I pledge myself to leave the United States at once.

I must add something else. All the murderers of the Fascisti have been tried and sentenced to heavy penalties. But when anti-Fascists are killed, the murderers usually remain persons unknown, and when they are tried, they are acquitted, and after they are sentenced, they are pardoned. A murderer, in my opinion, is always a murderer, whether he is a Fascist or an anti-Fascist. This is a point which Count di Revel found very, very convenient to forget.

As regards my responsibility during the Great War, I take all my responsibliities. I accepted the war, and I said at the beginning of August that Italy had to stand in war side by side with the Entente when the friends of Count di Revel and the Nationalists were preaching the war side by side with the Germans.

In accepting the war, I said, "The war will be a big affair, a big enterprise," when the Nationalist friends of Count di Revel were saying that the war will finish in six months. I said, "As the war is a big enterprise, we must try to get all our friends with us, and we must make an effort to dismember Austria." The Nationalists were for keeping Austria alive.

Bissolati and I were saying, "Dalmatia is a Slav country; we must abandon Dalmatia to the South Slavs, but Trieste and Fiume are Italian cities and we must have them." This was our program, and we maintained our program in spite of the insults and of the calumnies of the friends of Count di Revel. If our program had been followed, Italy would not have appeared during the Peace Conference as a beggar, and as a country which was against all her friends in war and awaited the moment to become the friend of her old enemies. Italy would have stood on the side of justice and would have had justice for herself and justice for all.

Someone was suggesting a reply to the personal parts of Professor Salvemini's retort to Count di Revel, and I said I thought since we had had it from both sides, we might come back now to the question of Fascism. Once you get started on the other line, it is difficult to tell where you will stop.