army, the judiciary. The central power of the State was weakened and
made subservient to the fleeting variations of popular will as
reflected in a suffrage absolved from all control from above. The
growth of big industry favored the rise of a socialism of Marxian
stamp as a new kind of moral and political education for our
proletariat. The conception of humanity was not indeed lost from view:
but such moral restraints as were placed on the free individual were
all based on the feeling that each man must instinctively seek his own
well-being and defend it. This was the very conception which Mazzini
had fought in socialism, though he rightly saw that it was not
peculiar to socialism alone, but belonged to any political theory,
whether liberal, democratic, or anti-socialistic, which urges men
toward the exaction of rights rather than to the fulfillment of
duties.

From 1876 till the Great War, accordingly, we had an Italy that was
materialistic and anti-Mazzinian, though an Italy far superior to the
Italy of and before Mazzini's time. All our culture, whether in the
natural or the moral sciences, in letters or in the arts, was
dominated by a crude positivism, which conceived of the reality in
which we live as something given, something ready-made, and which
therefore limits and conditions human activity quite apart from
so-called arbitrary and illusory demands of morality. Everybody wanted
"facts," "positive facts." Everybody laughed at "metaphysical dreams,"
at impalpable realities. The truth was there before the eyes of men.
They had only to open their eyes to see it. The Beautiful itself could
only be the mirror of the Truth present before us in Nature.
Patriotism, like all the other virtues based on a religious attitude
of mind, and which can be mentioned only when people have the courage
to talk in earnest, became a rhetorical theme on which it was rather