being a considerable number of religious, who yearn to put into practice
the concrete exhortations of the Evangelists. They are really carried
forward by that ethical wave which has swept over Western Europe and
America during the past generation, and has resulted in "slumming,"
in practical social service, in all kinds of efforts to improve the
material and moral condition of the poor, quite irrespective of
sectarian or even Christian initiative. This great movement began,
indeed, outside of the churches, among men and women who felt grievously
the misery of their fellow-creatures and their own obligation to do what
they could to relieve it. From them, it has reached the churches, and,
last of all, the Catholic Church in Italy. No doubt the spread of
Socialism, with its superficial resemblance to some of the features of
primitive Christianity, has somewhat modified the character of this
ethical movement; so far, in fact, that the Italian Christian Democrats
have been confounded, by persons with only a blurred sense of outlines,
with the Socialists themselves. Whatever they may become, however,
they now profess views in regard to property which separate them by an
unbridgeable chasm from the Socialists.

In their zeal for their fellow-men, and especially for the poor
and down-trodden classes, they find the old agencies of charity
insufficient. To visit the sick, to comfort the dying, to dole out broth
at the convent gate, is well, but it offers no remedy for the cause
behind poverty and blind remediable suffering. Only through better
laws, strictly administered, can effectual help come. So the Christian
Democrats deemed it indispensable that they should be free to influence
legislation. At this point, however, the stubborn prohibition of the
Vatican confronted them. Since 1870, when the Italians entered Rome and
established there the capital of United Italy, the Vatican had forbidden
faithful Catholics to take part, either as electors or as candidates, in