_Taxation and the Discipline of the Italian Population._ The sight which to-day the nation offers is satisfactory, because the Government exercises a stern and, if you like to say so, a cruel policy. It is compelled to dismiss by thousands its officials, judges, officers, railway men, dock-workers; and each dismissal represents a cause of trouble, of distress, of unrest to thousands of families. The Government has been compelled to levy taxes which unavoidably hit large sections of the population. The Italian people are disciplined, silent and calm, they work and know that there is a Government which governs, and know, above all, that if this Government hits cruelly certain sections of the Italian people, it does not do so out of caprice, but from the supreme necessity of national order. _The Government is One._ Above this mass of people there are the restless groups of practising politicians. We must speak plainly. In Italy there were several Governments which, before the present one, always trembled before the journalist, the banker, the grand master of Freemasonry, before the head of the Popular Party, who remains more or less in the background,—(Applause.)—and it was enough for one of these ministers _in partibus_ to knock at the door of the Government, for the Government to be struck by sudden paralysis. Well, all this is over! Many men gave themselves airs with the old Governments; those I have not received, but have reduced them to tears. (Assent.) For the Government is one. It knows no other Government outside its own and watches attentively, because one must not sleep when one governs, one must not neglect facts, one must keep before one’s eyes all the panorama, notice all the composition and decomposition, the changes of parties and of men. Sometimes it is necessary, as a tactical measure, to be circumspect; but political strategy, at least mine, is intransigent and absolute.