lp4guld

ures to divide the great landed estates among the peasants. Lawswere passed recognizing the principle of collective bargaining and ofcollective contracts between employers and workers. The liberalsshook hands with themselves at the appearance of a new deal inItaly.Of course all this brought a resumption of the spending andborrowing policies. The following is a table of the postwar yearlydeficits:1919-20 11,494,000,000 Lire1920—21 20,955,000,000 "1921—22 17,169,000,000 **Thus in the single year of 1921-22 the deficit was five billiongreater than the accumulated deficits of the old prewar spendersover a period of fifty years. By 1922 the national debt had risen to9 2,64 3,000,000 lire—six times the whole prewar debt and 50 percent greater than the debt as the war ended.It should be said, of course, that all these huge sums were notspent on ordinary welfare projects and that a great part of themrepresented outlays arising out of the war directly and still anotherpart rising indirectly from the war. Thus the government had torebuild the devastated areas of northern Italy. It restored 163,000dwellings, 346 town halls, 255 hospitals, I,I$6 schools, 1,000churches, and an immense amount of roads, railways, drainage andirrigation works, etc., including the restoration to farmers of 450,000head of cattle. These alone cost eight billion lire. However, the effectupon the government and the society was the same, no matter whatcauses lay behind the expenditures. Whether useful or not, these vastborrowings enabled the government to spend fabulous sums to providework and increase income. 1x Under the Axe of Fascism, by Dr. Gaetano Salvemini, Viking Press, New York, 1936.Dr. Salvemini is supported in his contention that the war caused most of these expendituresby Mr. Constantine McGuire in his Italy's International Financial Position, as well as bySignor di Stefani, Mussolini's Finance Minister, who said that "the budgets of the last fewyears do not result solely from the discrepancy between current revenue and currentexpenditures, but from the fact that the deficits are swelled by many exceptional itemsdependent on the war. These, instead of being acknowledged in budgets of their own years,weighed down the balance sheets of succeeding years." That is to say, many of the itemsof expenditure did not represent expenditure at all in those years but in preceding years.We shall have to conclude, therefore, that these budgetary figures give a somewhat cxag-4*