The liberty which the extreme party in Italian politics
agitates for is only license, and, with the exception of a few amiable
and impracticable enthusiasts in the extreme Left and a few honest
and patriotic conservators of the larger liberties towards the Right,
there are nothing but self-seekers and corrupt politicians in the
state. During the years of my residence in Italy, the strengthening
conviction of these facts has dampened my early enthusiasms for its
political progress and my faith in its future, and, retiring at the
limits of effective service from a position into which I had entered
with sympathy, I buried all my illusions of a great Italian future as
I had those of a healthy Greek future. My profound conviction is that
until a great moral reform shall break out and awaken the ruling
classes, and especially the Church, to the recognition of the
necessity of a vital, growing morality to the health of a state,
there will be no new Italy. The idle dreamers who hope to cure the
commonweal by revolution and the establishment of a republic will
find, if their dream come true, that to a state demoralized in its
great masses, more liberty can only mean quicker ruin. The court
itself is so corrupted by the vices and immoralities which always
beset courts, that it does not rally to itself the small class of
devoted patriots who cannot yet resign themselves to despair, and who
find in a change of persons the possibility of a revival which they
hope for rather than anticipate, while it offends every day more and
more deeply the equally small class of honest and patriotic reformers
of the Radical side in politics.
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