This was just the feeling of the men of ’76.  The country needed a breath of air.  Its moral, economic, and social forces demanded the right to develop without interference from a law which took no account of them.  This was the historical reason for the overturn of that year; and with the transference of power from Right to Left begins the period of growth and development in our nation:  economic growth in industry, commerce, railroads, agriculture; intellectual growth in science, education.  The nation had received its form from above.  It had now to struggle to its new level, giving to a State which already had its constitution, its administrative and political organization, its army and its finance, a living content of forces springing from individual initiative prompted by interests which the Risorgimento, absorbed in its great ideals, had either neglected or altogether disregarded.

The accomplishment of this constitutes the credit side of the balance sheet of King Humbert I. It was the error of King Humbert’s greatest minister, Francesco Crispi, not to have understood his age.  Crispi strove vigorously to restore the authority and the prestige of the State as against an individualism gone rampant, to reassert religious ideals as against triumphant materialism.  He fell, therefore, before the assaults of so-called democracy.

Crispi was wrong.  That was not the moment for re-hoisting the time-honored banner of idealism.  At that time there could be no talk of wars, of national dignity, of competition with the Great Powers; no talk of setting limits to personal liberties in the interests of the abstract entity called “State.”  The word “God,” which Crispi sometimes used, was singularly out of place.  It was a question rather of bringing the popular classes to prosperity, self-consciousness, participation in political life.  Campaigns against illiteracy, all kinds of social legislation, the elimination of the clergy from the public schools, which must be secular and anti-clerical!  During this period Freemasonry became solidly established in the bureaucracy, the army, the judiciary.  The central power of the State was weakened and made subservient to the fleeting variations of popular will as reflected in a suffrage absolved from all control from above.  The growth of big industry favored the rise of a socialism of Marxian stamp as a new kind of moral and political education for our proletariat.  The conception of humanity was not indeed lost from view:  but such moral restraints as were placed on the free individual were all based on the feeling that each man must instinctively seek his own well-being and defend it.  This was the very conception which Mazzini had fought in socialism, though he rightly saw that it was not peculiar to socialism alone, but belonged to any political theory, whether liberal, democratic, or anti-socialistic, which urges men toward the exaction of rights rather than to the fulfillment of duties.