Commerce, from being beneficent, is fast becoming a curse. It usurps and absorbs all place and all energy. Its objects are allowed to push out of existence all higher aims; armies and navies exist only to protect it; and an English Premier was not ashamed at a Lord Mayor's banquet to declare that this was their unique aim: to conquer fresh fields for trading, and protect the trader in his invasion of the rights of others. His Secretary of State for the Colonies and his Chancellor of the Exchequer have, still more recently, repeated after him this singularly ignoble view of a nation's duty, and of a soldier's and sailor's obligation. The Secretary of the Colonies, indeed, rising to unwonted enthusiasm, added that all the greatness of Great Britain lies in its commerce. No doubt this may be a fact; but it is not an ennobling fact; and it is one which is the parent of gross sins, and the enemy of high ideals; in the name of commerce, murder, theft, and torture are all legalised, and the most brutal egotism deified; it can be at best only a material greatness which is thus consolidated. To measure the virtue of a nation by its commerce alone is like measuring the virtue of a man solely by the amount of his income. This manner of estimation is one common in the world, but it can never be considered a high standard. However, this excuse of the prior and dominant claims of commerce which may be put forward in the case of Great Britain for the sacrifice to it of all other interests cannot be alleged by Italy except in some districts of the north. What requires protection in five-sixths of Italy, and only suffers extinction through fiscal pressure, is small commerce: personal arts, crafts, and trades, which flourished so happily in past times, and would still live in fair peace and comfort were they not stoned out of existence by a merciless taxation, direct and indirect. These neither disfigure nor offend the beautiful and venerable little towns in which they dwell; the smith has his anvil under a Lombard arch, the apothecary keeps his ointments and simples in old majolica vases, the barber's pole slants under a shrine of the Renascence, the cloth-seller piles his bales against the sculpture of a Seicento wall, the seedsman's sacks show the shining berries in their gaping mouths behind the iron scroll-work of mediæval kneeling-windows. It is not they who have hurt their birthplaces. It is the English syndicate, the Jew syndicate, the German money-changer, the American tram-contractor, the foreign electric company, the foreign co-operative store-keeper, who have no end but their own gain, and who tempt to shameful acts those native to the soil, in whose hands lie the fate of these historic, and late happy, places. Ferrero has, concerning this, a true and touching passage which is much worthier of him than his views regarding Lombardy and the factories. He says, in a recent able article on the 'Miseria e Richezza in Italia':--