The ideal of the Risorgimento had been realised, and as the new leaders _had no new ideals_ they had nothing further to realise; they were bodies without souls, with nothing that might give them a chance to display the gifts with which nature had so largely endowed them. Materialists in philosophy they strove to make the country more and more materialist, fighting religion under the names of clericalism and obscurantism. Obviously what kept the various governments of Italy from having a dignified foreign policy was that the country was in a state bordering on anarchy. One cause of this was lack of experts in all the political classes, devoid, as the best men were, of personal or traditional experience to help in the application of their imported legislation; but the main cause was undoubtedly the amorphous state of the working classes. If man is to be called a political animal, the labourers of Italy were not men fifty years ago. They did not care what happened and did not think they had anything to say in the matter: they were politically unconscious. Not that they were stupid: their art, their songs, their traditions attest the contrary. Their political unconsciousness, far from making things easier, rendered a good Liberal government very nearly impossible; for apathy and indifference in the lower class, while it may be very well under an absolute monarchy of the patriarchal type, under a Liberal constitution is apt to prove a curse. First, the lower middle class kept drawing men from the people, and these men, with the natural gift of adaptation the Italian shows to a greater degree than the slower northern races, rose too quickly and too quickly became conscious of their plebian force and of the opportunities offered to them by the difficulties under which the government was working. Among these men and among the crowds of half-intellectuals employed by the State in the innumerable offices created by the centralising administration, in the national schools, in the railways, post services and so on, the members of Parliament, who belonged to the Left, recruited their votes. How quickly these electors realised that their chances of getting all the political importance in their hands rested on the extension of the franchise need not be emphasised. The dates are eloquent, Rome became the capital of Italy in 1870, in 1882 the franchise is extended, and immediately a workman, Maffi, and a pure Socialist, Andrea Costa, are elected.