final success of their enterprise was more likely to be ensured by an intelligent interpretation of tradition than by the application of exotic doctrines that did not fit any of the historical characteristics of the country. The same singleness of vision was to prove blinding in regard to several other points; but it will be enough to state here that the fact that the men who had sacrificed themselves to the cause of unity had all been gentlemen, led those in power to consider the higher classes as exclusively constituting the nation they had brought into being. The rest were politically non-existent; and in the haste to develop the commercial and industrial possibilities of the country a good deal too much was done to enthrone capital and invite thereby the advent of Socialism. Finally, another cause of trouble—indeed, another consequence of the same lack of political tradition and education—was the impossibility of forming proper party organisations. Who was Left—and who was Right? Discrimination was impossible. Parties, like all historical organisms, are called into being and developed according to, and in consequence of, the political development of the country. In Italy they had to be produced, planned and organised all at once, by the mere empirical decisions of men, who, whatever their ability, or the loftiness of their ideals, could not avoid the arbitrariness and the errors to which the best individual men are subject, limited as their views are by their personal feelings or ambitions. Therefore, what happened was this: some followers of Mazzini who had joined the Liberals in the struggle for liberty, stood out as republicans; some who had followed Garibaldi and who had for ten years longed to take Rome from the Pope, became anti-clerical democrats; the rest were not to be clearly distinguished from one another because a man who was a staunch monarchist may have been in the same time anti-Catholic if he was a Freemason, whilst another might have had strong democratic tendencies and yet stand for tradition. The best instance of this may have been Crispi: he belonged to the Left, and certainly often acted and felt like a man of the Right.