The financial authority which thus accrued to me became of not unimportant influence a little later when the second scratch ministry broke up under the financial depression, with gold at 16 premium, the scandals of the bank affair oozing into publicity, and insurrection breaking out in Sicily and Tuscany, with movements pending in the Romagna, where the spring had come late and so saved the country from a great disaster. It became so clear to even the most benighted partisan that a strong hand at the Palazzo Braschi was imperiously necessary, that even the strongest Conservatives submitted in silence to the call for Crispi which came from all parts of Italy, and no section of the Chamber except the extreme Left, who were the prime movers in the insurrectionary movement, raised the least objection to the old Sicilian's return to the position from which the most corrupt and ignoble intrigues had driven him hardly three years before, years of discredit and steady demoralization. The disgraceful struggle for office then grown characteristic of Italian parliamentary politics now assumed the most shameful form that I have ever known. The general sentiment of the country was that Crispi should be given dictatorial powers, and one of the Venetian deputies, an ultra-Conservative, coming fresh from an audience with the King, said to me that Crispi ought to be made dictator and that the King had professed his readiness to confer that power on him; and the chiefs of all the factions that had been engaged in the conspiracy for his downfall in 1891 were among the most eager to enter his ministry, when the King finally gave him the call to form one, after having combined in the most desperate intrigues to effect some other combination. In the anteroom of the minister designate all the political world, personally or by deputy, was represented except the friends of the insurrection, who fought him by every device. I met there a Roman deputy who was one of the amphibious politicians that breed freely in Italian politics, who gave his right hand to Crispi and his left to Rudiní, and who, under the impression that I had great personal influence with the old man, begged me to urge him to offer the portfolio of Foreign Affairs to Rudiní. In fact, my defense of Crispi in the "Times" in 1891 and the fulfillment of my predictions of his inevitable and necessary return to office, at a moment when there was no one in Italy who did not consider his career at an end, gave me a purely fanciful importance as a counselor in the crisis and as having great weight with the minister.