Amongst the maladies of the brain known in this day is one which is called the mania of grandeur. It seems to me that not only individuals, but entire nations, are possessed by it. It is perilous and contagious. Italy has already been inoculated by its virus.
There is also everywhere a fatal tendency to open the door of Italy to every foreign syndicate, and every foreign speculation, which puts forward a prospectus or launches shares on the market. The preponderance of Jews is enormous as owners of ground rents and estates in Italy; the chief part of Italian cities and towns is owned by Jews; and the greater number of the industries of all kinds in the country are in the hands of foreigners, like the newly-projected mining enterprise in Elba. If these mines be worth the working, why does not Italy work them herself, and take all the profits?
These facts are not due to any immovability; but to a dangerously lax tendency to run into foreign roads. The Italian Faust is only too susceptible to the invitations of the foreign Mephistopheles.
On the other hand a very marked inclination in the Italian is towards the modern forms of co-operation and communism. This tendency is not due in any way to the influence of the past, but to that mixture of jealousy and envy, of hatred of the rich, and detestation of labour, and of humble ways and of poor means, which is as general in Italy as it is everywhere else in our time, and which is the modern translation of the old classic clamour for Panem et Circenses. Is it towards this already popular communism that Professor Sergi would direct the Italian nation? The direction is already taken, and does not need his propulsion. If there be one thing more certain than another in the Italy of to-day it is the preference of a large proportion of the people for different forms of socialism and collectivism; and the persecution these doctrines receive lends them a dangerous force. At the same time as it persecutes them, the State, with strange self-stultification, recognises and grants one of the largest and most insolent of socialistic and communistic demands, _i.e._, that for the expropriation of private land in the Agro Romano, and in the various latifundi in Sicily and elsewhere; and thus opens the door either to a most high-handed and unjust spoliation, or to an agrarian civil war in a not distant future.