After these elections one had the impression of watching the systematic extinction of the flickering flame that had signalised the coming to light of the new national conscience. One must have spent those years in Italy, have actually lived the life of the Italians, felt all their actual experiences and at the same time have had a good historical and intellectual grounding in all that concerns the country, to understand fully the tragedy of it. They seemed to precipitate themselves from the soaring heights of national conscience to the lowest and vilest egotism. Material well-being was again the order of the day and not yours or theirs or the children’s, but _mine_. Beyond that nothing. Reality was again atomistic and the atoms constitutive of it were absolutely irrelatives. Nobody seemed to reflect; all were acting and behaving like children. Truly it is the subjectiveness of the period that must be taken as its characteristic. They seemed to move each in his own world. Even financially they seemed to have reached an unbridled licence. The constant principles that regulate economic relations which form the basis of society were disregarded. Objective reality was ignored just as it is ignored by children and to a certain degree by artists. They had the economic deficit constantly on their lips—but never had such spendthrift way of living been displayed in their country—and they seemed to overlook the moral deficit betrayed by such an atomistic subjectiveness. Consider the factories. It is evidently a high rate of production that will ensure the interests of both labour and capital. Well, the workmen, or women, set themselves to get higher wages as they have done in most countries, but in the north and centre of Italy they did it with such a childish and, therefore, savage and lawless will that the works had to be shut in many instances and were not reopened until the advent of Fascism. So that it can be said that by not taking into consideration the actual production as a whole, and the owner’s interest, they reduced their legitimate desire for a better life to the destructive whims of children and ruined their own interest. The schools reflected the same destructive state of mind. That which makes the school is surely not the building; the children are not pupils if they do not learn, and neither is the master a teacher except inasmuch as he does actually teach. Discipline having slackened to such a degree that it bordered on anarchy the pupils had one fixed idea to do no work, and a great many of the teachers—not all indeed, for the teaching body has always counted in Italy a number of first-rate men—had the same purpose. Teaching and learning were reduced to a ghostly shadow by the reduction of schools to a subjective purpose by both parties. The professors saw in their function the title it gave them to their stipend and the pupils attended school just for the degree or the promotion to which such attendance entitled them.