principles of constitutional parliamentary and,
eventually, democratic government. The ordinary
voter could scarcely be aroused in defence of par-
liament which seemed to assemble only for the
benefit of politicians and special-interest groups.
On the other hand, the particular conditions
of recently united Italy have to be taken into
account. It had a strong tradition of local loyal-
ties. Central government was regarded as an alien
force. The difficulty of building bridges between
the political oligarchy of those who ruled and the
mass of the people was great. Outside Piedmont
there was little tradition of constitutional parlia-
mentary government of any sort. At the time of
unification three-quarters of the population could
neither read nor write. The poverty of southern
and central Italy was in great contrast to the
progress of the north. And the enmity of the
papacy, which had lost its temporal dominion,
meant that Catholics obedient to the Pope were
alienated from the state and would not participate
in elections. In a country so rent by faction and
regional rivalry as well as so backward, it can be
argued that the firm establishment of unity and
the solid progress achieved represented, in them-
selves, a notable success. The franchise was
extended, and illiteracy greatly reduced so that by
1911 almost two-thirds of the population could
read and write; in the south the proportion of
literate to illiterate was reversed.
Politics cannot be divorced from society and
poverty. Compared to France and Britain, Italy
was a poor country; the greater part of Italy, espe-
cially the south, was caught in the poverty trap of
a backward agrarian economy. A larger propor-
tion of the population remained dependent on
agriculture right down to the First World War
than in any other Western European country,
including France. Some agricultural progress was
achieved as landowners and peasants turned to
exporting olive oil, fruit and wine, but protection
against the influx of low-cost wheat from the
Americas benefited principally the great landown-
ers of the south, while high food costs bore most
heavily on the poorest landless labourers. The
masses of the south were exploited in the inter-
ests of the north. Deforestation, exhaustion of the
soil and soil erosion, taxation and overpopulation
forced some of the peasantry to emigrate in search
of a less harsh life elsewhere in Europe or across
the Atlantic. During every year of the 1890s, on
average 280,000 people left Italy, rather more
than half this number to go overseas; this human
stream rose to 600,000 a year in the first decade
of the twentieth century and reached 873,000 in
1913, by which time about two-thirds went over-
seas, principally to the US. No European state
suffered so great an exodus of its population in
the early twentieth century. By 1927, the Italian
government calculated there were more than 9
million Italians living abroad, where they formed
concentrated communities: among them, half a
million in New York, 3.5 million in the US as a
whole, 1.5 million in the Argentine and 1.5
million in Brazil.
The alliance between northern industry and the
large, and frequently absentee, landowners grow-
ing wheat in the south impoverished the mass of
the peasantry: protected by a high tariff, these
landowners were able to farm large tracts of land
inefficiently and wastefully without penalty; unlike
in France, no class of peasant proprietors, each
with his own plot of land, would emerge. Almost
half the peasants had no land at all; many more
held land inadequate even for bare subsistence.
By the turn of the century, there was a growing
recognition that there was a ‘southern question’
and that the policies of united Italy had been
devised to suit the conditions of the north; special
state intervention would be necessary to help the
south. In December 1903 Giolitti, when prime
minister, expressed the will of the government to
act: ‘To raise the economic conditions of the
southern provinces is not only a political necessity,
but a national duty’, he declared in parliament.
Genuine efforts were made by legislation to stim-
ulate industrial development in the Naples region,
to improve agriculture and reform taxation, build
railways and roads, improve the supply of clean
water and, above all, to wage a successful cam-
paign against the scourge of malaria. But too little
was done to improve the wealth of the peasants
and to increase peasant proprietorship; the middle
class was small and, in the absence of industry,
mainly confined to administration and the profes-
sions. Government help on the economic front