Such confusion was to reach its climax when, after 1866 and 1870, it was understood that the king and the government, having obtained the Veneto from Austria, had given up the intention of adding Trento and Trieste to the kingdom. Then the extreme Left joined irredentism to its anti-Catholic activity. They went on speaking of the ethnographic right that such provinces had to claim themselves as Italian, and they artfully bound their anti-religious campaign to a programme that sounded highly idealistic. No wonder that the different governments that succeeded each other should lose their time fighting the ghost of financial bankruptcy. One thing only can be brought against them, and it is that though all men of great culture they did not understand how unhistorical were their actions. They should have known that their conception of State and citizen, their idea of what is the function of the government, had been taken ready made from other countries and lazily accepted without any proper study of its antecedents. Some were Anglophile, some under their new Germanophilism hid the most perfect assimilation of French doctrines taken in their easiest and, therefore, most abstract formulas. None took liberty for what the word had meant of actual and positive political conquest to the average Englishman of the seventeenth century; they did not even take it for what it had meant of practical improvement to the Frenchman of the eighteenth century; they took it as a rhetorical figure with an abstract concept behind it, as soon as it ceased to mean independence from foreign rule. They termed themselves Liberals, however, and when they came to be ministers of a Liberal government they professed sometime a very curious notion of what such a government should be; Cairoli put it down in three words, _reprimere non prevenire_; an excellent motto perhaps, when the citizens are used to the exercise of their duties and rights, but soon proved to be dangerous in a country where traditions had been trampled upon during half a century. In less than a decade Italy was the prey of anarchy, for in 1878, the same Cairoli, had to defend the king’s life in Naples at the risk of his own, and in Florence and Pisa bombs were thrown against the crowds rejoicing over the king’s narrow escape. The Liberals looked at the way legislation worked in France and in England, but, like all followers of Illuminism, they took it for granted that there existed a certain kind of animal which was the same wherever and whenever you find Man, and they looked at the application of the system, not at its origin, not at its philosophical and political antecedents; in short, they did not see that it was brought about by the whole history of the countries in which it flourished, and they believed that it would work wherever men lived together in nations. CHAPTER III NATIONALISM AND SOCIALISM