I!
THE DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION OF 1919
ITALY, which had only been a united nation for fifty
years, was dealt a terrible blow by the war. She was
left with 680,000 dead,1 half a million disabled, and
more than a million wounded. Lacking a great accumula-
tion of reserves, she had to import everything : coal, oil,
rubber, leather, raw materials for textiles, and a proportion
of minerals and foodstuffs.
On the other hand, there had been no great national ideal
to support this effort or transfigure these sacrifices. The
government's c sacred egoism' had been fundamentally
neither egoistic nor sacred. Begun and carried on like a
civil war, the war left a legacy of violent passions and
insatiable hates. The day of victory brought no relaxation,
and the defeats of 1916 and 1917 were only sparsely and
belatedly avenged by the victory of Piave.
To no other country did demobilization bring such
difficult problems. The traditional outlet of emigration,
through which, in 1913, had passed about 900,000 workers,
chiefly landless peasants, had become more and more
restricted. What was to be done with those returning from
the front, and how long could the wartime factories keep on
the million hands who worked there? The change from
war industry to peace industry is notoriously hard. How, in
the midst of general disorder, persistent upheavals, and
growing hunger, could the way be found back to a world
trade already wrecked and impoverished, and guarded
by ruthless competitors who were better prepared and better
equipped ?
Everyone faced the future, though, with a heart full of
1 The figure given by fascist statisticians, M. Pierre Renouvin, in his work,
La Crlse Buropdemw et la Grande Guerre, puts it at 460,000.
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