Italy's Ruin

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 15, 9 April 1903, Page 2

Italy's Ruin

' New Italy ' has eaten heavily of the Pope and is \ery sick of its meal. Under the new regime the country has been brought to a state of misery and ruin which are probably without a parallel in tha Europe of to-day. Curiously enough, the confiscation of church and monastic property has greatly contributed to the misery of the country by ousting great numbers of farmers and small proprietois and ci eating those big estates such as we in New Zealand are busy breaking up. The people are fleeing from the country in vast and increasing numbers — in the Neapolitan provinces at the rate of 20 per 1000 of the population annually — ' Forced from their homes, a melancholy train, To traverse climes beyond the Western main.' * Baron Sonnino, a member of the Italian Parliament, who has made a special and exhaustive study of the subject, summed up the situation in Italy as follows in the course of a recent speech at Naples :—: — ' Agriculture is perishing ; the country is being depopulated, losing the most healthy and vigorous of its laborers ; property is being crushed under the cruel weight of its fiscal burdens, imposed both by the State and local taxation, and under the burden of its own debts ; that portion of the rural population which does not seek exile, plunges into deeper misery every day ; local factions wage their fruitless warfare, mutually bandvjng accusations of lesponsibility for the common loss , and in the midst of the general discontent, sometimes actively rebellious, sometimes crushed and resigned, the only thing which swells and prospers is the blood-sucking octopus of usury.'