To Be Sure, They
Have A Right To Expect Much, For They Have Done Wonders With A Country
Which, Without
Great natural resources except of heart and brain,
entered bankrupt into its national existence, and has now grown
financially to
The dimensions of its vast treasury building, with a
paper currency at par and of equal validity with French and English
money. If the industrial conditions in Italy were so bad as we
compassionate outsiders have been taught to suppose, this financial
change is one of the most important events accomplished in Europe since
the great era of the racial unifications began. No one will pretend that
there have not been great errors of administration in Italy, but
apparently the Italians have known how to learn wisdom from their folly.
There has been a great deal of industrial adversity; the cost of living
has advanced; the taxes are very heavy, and the burdens are unequally
adjusted; many speculators have been ruined, and much honestly invested
money has been lost. But wages have increased with the prices and rents
and taxes, and in a country where every ounce of coal that drives a
wheel of production or transportation has to be brought a thousand miles
manufactures and railroads have been multiplied.
The state has now taken over the roads and has added their cost to that
of its expensive army and navy, but no reasonable witness can doubt that
the Italians will be equal to this as well as their other national
undertakings. These in Rome are peculiarly difficult and onerous,
because they must be commensurate with the scale of antiquity. In a city
surviving amid the colossal ruins of the past it would be grotesque to
build anything of the modest modern dimensions such as would satisfy the
eye in other capitals. The Palace of Finance, at a time when Italian
paper was at a discount almost equal to that of American paper during
the Civil War, had to be prophetic of the present solvency in size. The
yet-unfinished Palace of Justice (one dare not recognize its beauty
above one's breath) must be planned so huge that the highest story had
to be left off if the foundations were to support the superstructure;
the memorial of Victor Emmanuel II. must be of a vastness in keeping
with the monuments of imperial Rome, some of which it will partly
obscure. Yet as the nation has grown in strength under burdens and
duties, it will doubtless prove adequate to the colossal architectural
enterprises of its capital. Private speculation in Rome brought disaster
twenty-five years ago, but now the city has overflowed with new life the
edifices that long stood like empty sepulchres, and public enterprises
cannot finally fail; otherwise we should not be digging the Panama Canal
or be trying to keep the New York streets in repair. We may confide in
the ability of the Italians to carry out their undertakings and to pay
the cost out of their own pockets.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 120 of 186
Words from 62401 to 62902
of 97259
