its leader in a man of unfailing political intuition, and master as
well of the political mechanism of the country, a man sceptical of all
high-sounding words, impatient of complicated concepts, ironical,
cold, hard-headed, practical--what Mazzini would have called a "shrewd
materialist." In the persons, indeed, of Mazzini and Giolitti, we may
find a picture of the two aspects of pre-war Italy, of that
irreconcilable duality which paralyzed the vitality of the country and
which the Great War was to solve.


V

The effect of the war seemed at first to be quite in an opposite
sense--to mark the beginning of a general _débâcle_ of the Italian
State and of the moral forces that must underlie any State. If
entrance into the war had been a triumph of ideal Italy over
materialistic Italy, the advent of peace seemed to give ample
justification to the Neutralists who had represented the latter. After
the Armistice our Allies turned their backs upon us. Our victory
assumed all the aspects of a defeat. A defeatist psychology, as they
say, took possession of the Italian people and expressed itself in
hatred of the war, of those responsible for the war, even of our army
which had won our war. An anarchical spirit of dissolution rose
against all authority. The ganglia of our economic life seemed struck
with mortal disease. Labor ran riot in strike after strike. The very
bureaucracy seemed to align itself against the State. The measure of
our spiritual dispersion was the return to power of Giolitti--the
execrated Neutralist--who for five years had been held up as the
exponent of an Italy which had died with the war.