A new electoral system was introduced, whereby the people voted for programmes and parties rather than directly for individual candidates. This, it was hoped, would render corruption more difficult by enclosing the individual within the framework of the list, and it was also hoped that there would be less violence than usual. As a matter of fact there probably was a diminution with respect to these two practices, but only because of the large number of abstentions--merely 29 per cent. voted in Rome, 38 per cent. in Naples, and in Turin scarcely more. The people were tired of the excessive complexity and dissimulation of Italian politics. There was a good deal of violence--in Milan, Florence, Bologna and Sicily the riots were sometimes fatal--and with such an electorate, more extensive than heretofore, so that symbols had often to be used instead of the printed word, it was to be expected that there would not be an atmosphere of even relatively calm discussion. At Naples 132 candidates struggled for eleven seats--their meetings were indescribable. And it may be thought that in such conditions the victorious parties would not necessarily reflect the wishes of the country. The Nationalists were dispersed, the Giolittians were routed--the Socialists increased from 40 to 156, and the Catholics from 30 to 101. Gabriele d'Annunzio had been the Socialists' chief elector. THEIR WISH FOR RIEKA, DEAD OR ALIVE There was now a fair hope that the Government would be in a position to solve the Adriatic problem. The Italian delegates in Paris had suggested that, in the independent buffer State, Rieka should have a separate municipal status, and that a narrow strip of land should join the buffer State to Italy. On December 9, a memorandum was signed by the representatives of Great Britain and America, which was the best compromise which anyone had yet proposed. The strip was dismissed as being "counter to every known consideration of geography, economics and territorial convenience." [Nevertheless this very dangerous expedient of the strip, after having been thus roundly rejected by the Allies, formed a part of the Treaty of Rapallo in November 1920--the Yugoslavs had most generously given way rather than leave this exasperating Adriatic problem still unsolved.] Rieka with her environment was to be a _corpus separatum_--and this was the chief point which made the proposals inacceptable to Italy. That Socialist group which is represented by the _Avanti_ seemed to be the only one whose attitude was not intransigeant. The question of Rieka, it argued, was not isolated, but should be considered as one of the numerous questions of Italian foreign politics. It laughed at those who every moment cry "Our Fiume," because there are in the town many people who speak Italian. Other groups of Socialists had altered very much from the day when the three delegates--Labriola, Raimundo and Cappa--spoke of the Adriatic at the Congress which Kerensky summoned to Petrograd.