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tion of economic laws and out of certain human characteristics—
savings, debt, the idiosyncrasies of money, the habits of income on
one hand and the presence of so many hostile interests among
human groups on the other. This is no place to examine these laws.
We must be content with the fact that they exist. And the operation
of these laws was producing in Italy much the same effects
they were producing everywhere else. In Italy, however, the impact
of these laws was greater because Italy herself was a poorer country.
She was behindhand in the development of a modern industrial
society. Her agricultural system was antiquated. The peasant
proprietors' holdings were too small. The share croppers were
shamelessly exploited. The illiterate peasant farm worker was
cheated, starved, and underpaid.
In other words, the rulers of the new nation, from first to last,
faced the problem of the modern capitalist state, growing ever
sharper and more critical, of utilizing its powers to ensure its people
a decent share of -the necessities of life. It faced also the problem
of protecting its more fortunate citizens from the adversities of
recurring depressions. The problem was no different from that of
other countries. It was merely more pressing because Italy was
poorer and the diseases of the system had eaten more deeply into
her vitals.
The condition of Italy was, in a sense, no worse as the century
ended than it was before Italian unity was established. Indeed in
many respects it was better. What had changed was the people.
Now they expected their government to do something about it. The
people, whatever the degree of social sluggishness in the south, were
becoming more literate. The old population, which, as Mr. Borgese
observes, had lived through twenty centuries of servitude and
misery, restrained by their civil servants and soothed by their religious
teachers, had been willing to surrender to the hard fate of
inescapable poverty because it was accepted as their lot in the
natural and supernatural order of things. But this was no longer
true. Two thirds of the people were illiterate in 1871. Less than
half were illiterate in 1900. And this number rapidly declined in
the succeeding years. The schoolhouse was doing its work, as it was
everywhere in the world. And so was the newspaper. The Italians
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