Kingdom of Italy - North and South
In dealing with Italian governmental problems, it should be borne in mind at the outset that the kingdom had been very suddenly created by the consolidation within eleven years (1859-1870) of eight formerly distinct states, and that, thanks largely to the intense nationalism of the Italian people and to the patriotic policy of Cavour, the resulting kingdom in 1871 was not a federation but a single state. Italy thus furnished a unique instance of a union of different states without a federal government. In its centralization Italy approximated to France and Great Britain rather than to Germany or the United States.
Now while this centralization of political institutions was a laudable achievement of national patriotism, it made it incumbent upon the central government to equalize taxation and expenditure throughout the entire peninsula and at tne same time to bring the different regions to the same level of education and economic well-being. Here was a most serious difficulty. Between northern Italy - the fertile valley of the Po and the prosperous district of Piedmont - and that part of southern Italy which had suffered for centuries under the paralyzing despotism of the Sicilian Bourbons, the most startling discrepancies were at once evident. In the North, there were railways and all manner of internal between improvements, a wealthy bourgeoisie, cities with large North and industrial populations, and a relatively high percentage of literacy.
In the South, on the other hand, there were few modern public works, comparatively little industry, prevalence of brigandage, and an ignorant peasantry of whose adult males not one in ten could read or write. The economic unification of Italy thus presented an even more perplexing problem than had the political unification of the peninsula and one to which Italian statesmen devoted a good deal of attention between 1870 and 1914.
Taxes steadily rose to a height greater per capita than in any other country of contemporary Europe. Not only did the taxes increase the misery and poverty of the working classes but they called forth repeated complaints from more well-to-do taxpayers of the North that the sums collected were being expended disproportionately and too lavishly upon the South. On the other hand, Sicilian politicians protested that the public offices were being monopolized by Northerners who too often diverted the public funds into their own private pockets, with the result that the South was not particularly better off under the House of Savoy than it had been under the Bourbons.
Italy was still chiefly an agricultural nation. In 1913 over a third of her population were agricultural laborers. Yet in agriculture Italy was remarkably backward. In Naples and Sicily, whither the land reforms of the French Revolution had never thoroughly penetrated, the soil was still held largely by great landowners, whose miserable peasantry, hopeless and helpless, toiled in diminishing numbers on soil scourged by the mysterious pellagra and malarial fever, ravaged by untamed watercourses, or periodically desolated by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In northern Italy the large estates had been broken up into small holdings, on which thrifty and hard-working farmers, with the aid of the cooperative societies, rural credit banks, and improved methods of tillage, were gradually but perceptibly bettering their lot. Yet over all the agricultural classes of Italy fell the shadow of taxation - taxation for militarism, for imperialism, for education, for public improvements, - taxation far heavier than was to be found in any other country of Europe.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
