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internal troubles. He provided a pretext for enlarging the army
and borrowing more money. Then came the disastrous climax of
war upon Menelek at Adowa, where 4,600 officers and men were
wiped out. The tragic collapse of this tawdry spectacle in imperialism
brought the Italians, who did not really like it from the start,
to their senses. People poured into the streets crying, "Down with
Crispi!" "Away with Africa!" Parliament repudiated him. He died
at the age of eighty still hated and ostracized by his people. Crispi
had gotten the Italians whipped and himself cast out, and for the
moment they turned away from the colonial dream. But he had
planted in the minds and hearts of the Italians the first seeds of
colonialism, buried for the moment under what Borgese called "a
deep furrow of frustration." For fifteen years their minds remained
poisoned by the humiliation at Adowa, and the Italian imperialist
had now in his possession that potent emotion called revanche.
Adowa became a symbol of Italy's lost honor.
VTI · The Incredible Synthesis
WE COME NOW to a fact of central importance. What I have been
trying to say thus far is that out of the condition of Italian society
sprang certain streams of opinion and of desire that governments
acted on and that people accepted or at least surrendered to with
little resistance, even though they may not have approved or even
understood them. Bewildered statesmen turned to government debt
as a device for creating purchasing power. No one approved it in
principle. But there was no effective resistance because people demanded
the fruits it brought. Another was the ever-growing reliance
on social-welfare measures to mitigate the privations of the
indigent, the unemployed, the sick, the aged. The instruments of
debt and spending became standard equipment of politicians. And
this need for spending opened the door to an easy surrender to the
elements most interested in militarism and its handmaiden, imperialism.
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