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for imperialism. For eighteen years, while the chief European powers
and some of the smaller ones—Teuton, Saxon, Latin, and Slav—had
struggled over territories in Africa and Asia, Italian statesmen still
talked eloquently of the rights of man and of small peoples. They
were preoccupied with their internal difficulties—the battle against
poverty, crisis, and debt. These were Italy's real enemies, not the
Lion of Judah in Abyssinia. What, then, could be more insupportable
than to ascribe the rise of imperialist ambitions in Italy to
peculiar characteristics of the Italian character when there was
nothing either peculiar or unique about them save their sluggishness?
Every country in Europe had been practicing the dark art for
many years. Italy was the last to feel the contagion.
A more rational explanation is to be found in the fact that imperialism
became a realizable policy against the background of
economic distress, the spending of money, the resistance of the
people to spending and debt. When the economy-minded conservatives
began to object to "wasting the public money on schools and
roads and subsidies to farmers," the practical politician who did
not dare make an end of spending and borrowing found militarism
and its inevitable companion suitable and feasible forms of activity
to be substituted for a peacetime works-project administration. The
easy opportunity for this policy in all European countries arrived
when Africa was opened by explorers and Asia by traders and
naval officers—two vast continents, one filled with treasure and the
other with customers.
England, France, Germany, the Dutch, and little Belgium, and
even feeble Spain sent their ambassadors of good will on warships
and opened the era of new imperialism. The behavior of these
countries calls for no unique diagnosis. When Italy belatedly took
her place at the counter we need not explain her behavior by motives
more fantastic than those which moved her fellow marauders.
The example of her neighbors furnished her statesmen, struggling
with insoluble budget and labor and social problems, turning more
and more to militarism as a form of spending, with a happy suggestion
for escape. They mixed and offered to their perplexed and
impatient people this glamorous opiate—this magnificent drug.
They are not written down as wicked men for this in other coun-
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