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A chair of Albanian literature at San Demetrio, instituted in 1849 but suppressed after three years, was conferred on him in 1892 by the historian and minister Pasquale Villari; for a considerable time, too, he was director of the communal school at Corigliano, where, with characteristic energy, he set up a printing press; violent journalistic campaigns succeeded one another; in 1896 he arranged for the first congress of Albanian language in that town, which brought together delegates from every part of Italy and elicited a warm telegram of felicitation from the minister Francesco Crispi, himself an Albanian.
The accomplishment of this constitutes the credit side of the balance sheet of King Humbert I. It was the error of King Humbert's greatest minister, Francesco Crispi, not to have understood his age. Crispi strove vigorously to restore the authority and the prestige of the State as against an individualism gone rampant, to reassert religious ideals as against triumphant materialism.
Civic courage in Italy is so low that any grave military or civil disaster, no matter on whom should fall the responsibility, entails a change of ministry, and in this case even the King abandoned Crispi, though the chief responsibility for the disastrous result of the campaign rested on himself. Humbert always retreated before any popular commotion.
At a later epoch, that of 1893, when Crispi saved Italy from menacing chaos, the King repeated to me his expression of confidence in Crispi and his very low opinion of his only possible alternative, Rudiní, but in the succeeding crisis accepted Rudiní with the same cheerfulness he had shown when Crispi saved the position in 1893.
The severe defeat at Adowa in 1896, the disgrace of Baratieri, the destruction of his army, and the fall of the Crispi Cabinet rudely dispelled the African ambitions of Italy. Kassala became an encumbrance. Nor was that all.
The pressure in the Chamber was very great to induce him to take the finance minister from the Left and so move toward the constitution of the government in accordance with the color of the majority, and Crispi was urged that way by most of his oldest and most faithful adherents, either unconscious of or indifferent to the influence of financial opinion through Europe on the stability or success of the ministry.
Those who saw the sea of murderous pale faces, and heard the deep cry, 'Death to Crispi, go howling and echoing through the city can guess what that must have been a thousand years ago, and many another night since then, when the Romans were roused and there was a smell of blood in the air.
The word "God," which Crispi sometimes used, was singularly out of place. It was a question rather of bringing the popular classes to prosperity, self-consciousness, participation in political life. Campaigns against illiteracy, all kinds of social legislation, the elimination of the clergy from the public schools, which must be secular and anti-clerical!
Up to that time the Triple Alliance had been a defensive league, except when the exuberant impulses of Kaiser William forced it into provocative courses; and then the provocations generally stopped at telegrams and orations. But in and after 1905 the Triple Alliance forsook the watchwords of Bismarck, Andrassy and Crispi. Expansion at the cost of rivals became the dominant aim.
By strict diet and an activity limited to the hours of the early morning and afternoon I weathered the summer, but each return of the heats during the succeeding six years brought me a relapse, so that on the whole I paid a long penalty for my participation in Greek politics. The following year was marked by the accession of Crispi to the direction of the government of Italy.
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