the respect due another power.  “It is not merely a journal, but a great public institution,” he said, and he treated me as the agent of that power; but intimacy in any other sense there never was.  Crispi had, to a degree I never knew in any other Italian minister, the sense of the dignity of his position, which, to those who did not read the man thoroughly, seemed arrogance, and made him many enemies.  He had an invincible antipathy to newspaper correspondents, but at the outset of our acquaintance I made him understand that even if he did not see fit to treat me with cordiality, he should not treat the “Times” with disrespect.  He had two secretaries, Alberto Pisani Dossi, one of the most noble Italian natures I ever knew, and Edmond Mayor, a Swiss, naturalized in Italy, and an admirable diplomat, now in its service, an honest, faithful child of the mountain republic; and both these became and remain my excellent friends, and, as they were permitted, they kept me informed of the matters which it was for the advantage of the “Times” to know; but until near the end of the first term of Crispi’s premiership we never came nearer than that to being friends.  I found his manner intolerable, as, no doubt, other journalists did, and, as the relations of the journalists to the man in office are in Italy generally corrupt, Crispi’s aversion to them and their ways accounted easily for the very general and violent hostility between him and the press.

The tone of the journals in Italy has very little to do with public opinion.  All the world knows that, with the exception of two or three dailies, the Italian papers are the organs of purely personal interests, ambitions, and opinions,—­not even of parties, which do not exist except in the form of fossil fragments; and when a journal emits an opinion or formulates a policy, everybody knows that it is the opinion or policy of the man who has a dominant or entire control of its columns.  Crispi had his own journal, “La Riforma,” which frankly and entirely expressed his views, and he paid no attention to the others.  I happened to be on the way to the Foreign Office the day after Crispi assumed the reins of government, and by the way fell in with the foreign editor of one of the journals of the Left, exulting in the accession of a minister of his old party.  He said to me, “I will wager you, Stillman, that in six weeks we are recognized as official,”—­which meant subsidized.  He had his audience first, and it was short, but within the fortnight his paper was one of the most violent opponents of the ministry.  I had my audience, and in five minutes I turned my back on the premier and walked out of the office, and never put my foot in it again until, many weeks after, some trouble on the African frontier between English and Italian officers brought me a request from Crispi to come and receive a communication.