It is a novelty to an English mind to find banking thus mixed up with politics, but it is not a novelty in Italy.  All over Venetia there are agricultural banks which are said to be “clerical.”  I grappled with this mystery.  “How are they clerical?” I asked Captain Pirelli.  “Do they lend money on bad security to clerical voters, and on no terms whatever to anti-clericals?” He was quite of my way of thinking. “Pecunia non olet,” he said; “I have never yet smelt a clerical fifty lira note."...  But on the other hand Italy is very close to Germany; she wants easy money for development, cheap coal, a market for various products.  The case against the Germans—­this case in which the Banca Commerciale Italiana appears, I am convinced unjustly, as a suspect—­is that they have turned this natural and proper interchange with Italy into the acquisition of German power.  That they have not been merely easy traders, but patriotic agents.  It is alleged that they used their early “pull” in Italian banking to favour German enterprises and German political influence against the development of native Italian business; that their merchants are not bona-fide individuals, but members of a nationalist conspiracy to gain economic controls.  The German is a patriotic monomaniac.  He is not a man but a limb, the worshipper of a national effigy, the digit of an insanely proud and greedy Germania, and here are the natural consequences.

The case of the individual Italian compactly is this:  “We do not like the Austrians and Germans.  These Imperialisms look always over the Alps.  Whatever increases German influence here threatens Italian life.  The German is a German first and a human being afterwards....  But on the other hand England seems commercially indifferent to us and France has been economically hostile...”

“After all,” I said presently, after reflection, “in that matter of Pecunia non olet; there used to be fusses about European loans in China.  And one of the favourite themes of British fiction and drama before the war was the unfortunate position of the girl who accepted a loan from the wicked man to pay her debts at bridge.”

“Italy,” said Captain Pirelli, “isn’t a girl.  And she hasn’t been playing bridge.”

I incline on the whole to his point of view.  Money is facile cosmopolitan stuff.  I think that any bank that settles down in Italy is going to be slowly and steadily naturalised Italian, it will become more and more Italian until it is wholly Italian.  I would trust Italy to make and keep the Banca Commerciale Italiana Italian.  I believe the Italian brain is a better brain than the German article.  But still I heard people talking of the implicated organisation as if it were engaged in the most insidious duplicities.  “Wait for only a year or so after the war,” said one English authority to me, “and the mask will be off and it will be frankly a ‘Deutsche Bank’ once more.”  They assure me that then German enterprises will be favoured again, Italian and Allied enterprises blockaded and embarrassed, the good understanding of Italians and English poisoned, entirely through this organisation....