Francesco Saverio Nitti

“ All the violences against Germany were, until the day before yesterday, an effect of hatred; to-day they derive from dread. Moral ideas have for nations a still greater value than wealth. France had until the other day the prestige of her democratic institutions. All of us who detested the Hohenzollern dynasty and the insolent fatuity of William II loved France, heir of the bourgeois revolution and champion of democracy. So, when the War came, all the democracies felt a lively pang: the crushing of France meant the crushing of democracy and liberty. ”

“ No one can honestly guarantee the territorial integrity of Poland as it stands at present. If a new-risen Russia, a renewed Germany, and an unextinguished Austria desire in the future a revision of the treaties they will be making a most reasonable demand to which no civilized country may make objection. It is indeed Clauses 5 and 10 which have deprived the constitution of the League of Nations of all moral credit, which have transformed it into an instrument of oppression for the victors, which have caused the just and profound disapproval of the most enlightened men of the American Senate. ”

“ Why is Europe still in such a state of economic disorder? Because the confusion of moral ideas persists. In many countries nerves are still as tense as a bowstring, and the language of hatred still prevails. For some countries, as for some social groups, war has not yet ceased to be. One hears now in the countries of the victors the same arguments used as were current coin in Germany before the War and during the first phases of the War; only now and then, more as a question of habit than because they are truly felt, we hear the words justice, peace, and democracy. ”

“ Now, the treaties which have been made are, from the moral point of view, immeasurably worse than any consummated in former days, in that they carry Europe back to a phase of civilization which was thought to be over and done with centuries ago. They are a danger too. For as everyone who takes vengeance does so in a degree greater than the damage suffered, if one supposes for a moment that the conquered of to-day may be the conquerors of to-morrow, to what lengths of violence, degradation and barbarism may not Europe be dragged? ”

“ If the condition of the conquered is sufficiently serious the situation of the peoples most favoured by the Entente in Europe—Poland and Greece, who have obtained the greatest and most unjust increases in territory, having given for a diversity of reasons extremely little during the War—is certainly not less so. Each of these countries are suffocating under the weight of the concessions, and seek in vain a way of salvation from the burdens which they are not able to support, and from the mania of conquest which are the fruits of exaltation and error. ”

“ It is an illusion to suppose that Great Britain, France and Italy can form an agreement to regulate the new State or new States that will arise in Russia. There are too many tendencies and diverse interests. Germany, too, will reconstruct herself after a series of sorrows and privations, and no one can say how the Germans will behave. Unless a policy of peace and social renovation be shaped and followed, our sons will witness scenes much more terrible than those which have horrified our generation and upset our minds even more than our interests. ”

“ Austria, Germany, Italy, France are not different phenomena, but different manifestations and phases of the same phenomenon.
Before the War Europe, in spite of her great sub-divisions, represented a living economic whole. To-day there are not only victors and vanquished, but currents of hate, ferments of violence, a hungering after conquests, an unscrupulous cornering of raw materials carried out brutally and almost ostentatiously in the name of the rights of victory: a situation which renders production, let alone its development and increase, utterly impossible. ”

“ To hold one man responsible for the whole War and to bring him to trial, his enemies acting as judge and jury, would have been such a monstrous travesty of justice as to provoke a moral revolt throughout the world. On the other hand it was also a moral monstrosity, which would have deprived the Treaty of Versailles of every shred of dignity. If the one responsible for the War is the Kaiser, why does the Entente demand of the German people such enormous indemnities, unprecedented in history? ”

“ For a long time I myself have looked upon the Germans with the profoundest hatred. When I think of all the persons of my race dead in the War, when I look back upon the fifteen months of anguish when my first-born son was a prisoner of war in Germany, I am quite able to understand the state of mind of those who made the peace and the mental condition in which it was made. ”

“ For the first time in civilized Europe, not during the War, when everything was permissible in the supreme interests of defence, but now that the War is over, the Entente Powers, though maintaining armies more numerous than ever, for which the vanquished must pay, have occupied German territories, inhabited by the most cultured, progressive and technically advanced populations in the world, as an insult and a slight, with coloured troops, men from darkest and most barbarous Africa, to act as defenders of the rights of civilization and to maintain the law and order of democracy. ”

“ A few years before the World War started one of the leading European statesmen told me that there was everything to be feared for the future of Europe where some three hundred millions, the inhabitants of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, about two-thirds of the whole continent, were governed in an almost irresponsible manner by a man without will or intelligence, the Tsar of Russia; a madman without a spark of genius, the German Kaiser, and an obstinate old man hedged in by his ambition, the Emperor of Austria-Hungary. ”

“ A war which has for its object the conquest of political or religious liberty cannot be condemned even by the most confirmed pacificist.
Taken as a whole, the wars fought in the nineteenth century, wars of nationality, of independence, of unity, even colonial wars, were of a character far less odious than that of the great conflict which has devastated Europe and upset the economic conditions of the world. It has not only been the greatest war in history, but in its consequences it threatens to prove the worst war which has ravaged Europe in modern times. ”

“ France, notwithstanding the new territories, after her war losses, has probably no more inhabitants than in 1914. In her almost tormented anxiety to destroy Germany we see her dread for the future—more indeed than mere hatred. To occupy with numerous troops the left bank of the Rhine and the bridgeheads is an act of vengeance; but in the vengeance there is also anxiety. There are many in France who think that neither now nor after fifteen years must the territory of the vanquished be abandoned. And so France maintains in effective force too large an army and nourishes too great a rancour. ”

“ All wish to live upon the State, and production, organized autocratically and bureaucratically, every day dries up and withers a bit more.
To those who read the collection of laws issued by the Bolshevik government many institutions appear not only reasonable, but also full of interest and justice. Also many laws of the absolute governments of past regimes appear intelligent and noble. But the law has not in itself any power of creation; it regulates relations, does not create them. It can even take away wealth from some and give it to others, but cannot create the wealth. ”

“ Amongst many in France there is the old conception of Napoleon I, who considered the whole of European politics from an erroneous point of view, that of a lasting French hegemony in Europe, when the lasting hegemony of peoples is no longer possible. In the sad solitude of his exile at Saint Helena, Napoleon I said that not to have created a powerful Poland keystone of the roof of the European edifice, not to have destroyed Prussia, and to have been mistaken in regard to Russia, were the three great errors of his life. ”

“ When it will be possible to examine carefully the diplomatic documents of the War, and time will allow us to judge them calmly, it will be seen that Russia's attitude was the real and underlying cause of the world-conflict. She alone promoted and kept alive the agitations in Serbia and of the Slavs in Austria; she alone in Germany's eyes represented the peril of the future. Germany has never believed in a French danger. She knew very well that France, single handed, could never have withstood Germany, numerically so much her superior. ”

“ I have always thought that the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is the dictatorship of ignorance and incapacity, would necessarily lead to disaster, and that hunger and death would follow violence. There are for the peoples great errors which must be carried out in the very effort to benefit civilization. Our propaganda would have served nothing without the reality of ruin. Only the death by hunger of millions of men in communist Russia will convince the working masses in Europe and America that the experiment of Russia is not to be followed ”

“ We should only remember our dead in so far as their memory may prevent future generations from being saddened by other war victims. The voices of those whom we have lost should reach us as voices praying for the return of that civilization which shall render massacres impossible, or shall at least diminish the violence and ferocity of war.
Just as the growing dissolution of Europe is a common danger, so is the renewal of the bonds of solidarity a common need. ”

“ It is impossible that a collective madness such as that which has had possession of Russia for three years could be produced on the spur of the moment; the regime of autocracy contained in itself the germs of Bolshevism and violence. Bolshevism cannot properly be judged by Western notions; it is not a revolutionary movement of the people; it is, as I have said before, the religious fanaticism of the Eastern Orthodox rising from the dead body of Tsarist despotism. Bolshevism, centralizing and bureaucratic, follows the same lines as the imperial policy of almost every Tsar. ”

“ If Germany had not had to pay any indemnity and had not lost her colonies and mercantile marine we should have been confronted with the absurd paradox that the victorious nations would have issued from the War worn out, with their territories destroyed, and with a huge foreign debt; Germany would have had her territory quite intact, her industries ready to begin work again, herself anxious to start again her productive force, and in addition with no foreign debt, consequently ample credit abroad. ”

“ Germany has accustomed us in history to the most remarkable surprises. A century and a half ago she was considered as a pacificist nation without national spirit. She has since then become a warlike country with the most pronounced national spirit. Early in the seventeenth century there were in Germany more than one hundred territories and independent States. There was no true national conscience, and not even the violence of the Napoleonic wars, a century after, sufficed to awaken it. ”

“ The United States threw into the balance the weight of its enormous economic and technical resources, besides its enormous resources in men. Although its dead only amount to fifty thousand, the United States built up such a formidable human reserve as to deprive Germany of all hopes of victory. The announcement of America's entry in the War immediately crushed all Germany's power of resistance. Germany felt that the struggle was no longer limited to Europe, and that every effort was vain. ”

“ Germany oppressed does not mean Germany subjected. Every year France becomes numerically weaker, Germany stronger. The horrors of war will be forgotten and the maintenance of peace will depend on the creation of a situation which makes life possible, does not cause exasperation to come into public feeling or into the just claims of Germans desirous of independence. Injustice in the hour of triumph will never be pardoned, can never be atoned. ”

“ Germany had enough coal but not enough iron, and the Press of the iron industry trumpeted forth loud notes of war. After the conclusion of peace, when France, through a series of wholly unexpected events, saw Germany prostrate at her feet and without an army, the same phenomenon took place. The iron industry tends to affirm itself in France; she has the iron and now she wants coal. Should she succeed in getting it, German production would be doomed. To deprive Germany of Upper Silesia would mean killing production after having disorganized it at the very roots of its development. ”

“ If what is happening injured Germany only, it would be more possible to explain it, if not to justify it. But, on the contrary, Germany's fall, which is also the decadence of Europe, profoundly disturbs not only the European continent, but many other producing countries. Though the United States and Great Britain partially escape the effect, they too feel the influence of it, not only in their political serenity, but in the market of goods and values. ”

“ It is the proof, if any were necessary, that the form of communist production is not only harmful but not even lasting. The economists say that it is absurd, but, given the collective madness which has attacked some people, nothing is absurd beyond hoping in the rapid recovery of the most excited nations.
If any country could be the scene of a communist experiment it was Russia. Imperial Russia represented the most vast continuative territory which a State ever occupied in all history's records of vast empires. ”

“ The United States and Great Britain have no longer any treaty of alliance of guarantee with France. The Anglo-Saxons, conquerors of the War and the peace, have drawn themselves aside. Italy has no alliance and cannot have any. No Italian politician could pledge his country, and Parliament only desires that Italy follow a democratic, peaceful policy, maintaining herself in Europe as a force for equilibrium and life. ”

“ Having successfully weathered the most terrible financial crises, and having healed in half a century the wounds of two great wars which she had lost, Austria-Hungary lived in the effort of holding together Germans, Magyars, Slavs and Italians without their flying at each others' throats. Time will show how the effort of Austria-Hungary has not been lost for civilization. ”

“ History has proved that a peace which has been hailed by a victorious nation as a triumph of diplomatic skill and statesmanship, even of moderation, in the long run has proved itself to be short-sighted and charged with danger to the victor. The peace of 1871 was believed by Germany to ensure not only her security but her permanent supremacy. The facts have shown exactly the contrary. France itself has demonstrated that those who say you can make Germany so feeble that she will never be able to hit back are utterly wrong. ”

“ Now all the democratic races of the world look at France with an eye of diffidence—some, indeed, with rancour; others with hate. France has comported herself much more crudely toward Germany than a victorious Germany would have comported herself toward France. In the case of Russia, she has followed purely plutocratic tendencies. She has on foot the largest army in the world in front of a helpless Germany. She sends coloured troops to occupy the most cultured and progressive cities of Germany, abusing the fruits of victory. ”

“ Never did the Press of my country, or the greater part of it, criticize with more violence a proposal which I considered to be both wise and prudent. I am glad to state that I was right, and that, maybe through the uncertainties and the lessons of those who had spread the illusions, the Italian Socialists returned from Russia were bound to recognize that the communist experiment was the complete ruin of the Russian people. No conservative propaganda could have been more efficacious than the vision of the truth. ”