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Crispi is extremely reticent and reserved in his personal relations and has very few intimate friends, and those, so far as I know, entirely amongst the faithful few who were his intimates in the days of insurrection and conspiracy; but I know him as well as any one out of that circle, and I know him to be an absolutely honest and patriotic statesman, the first of Italy since Cavour.
He then made the most unqualified declarations that he was opposed to all extension of operations, and that he did not ask for a man or a lira more than had been accorded to him by Crispi. Baratieri was a Garibaldian general, a daring and brilliant commander of a brigade at most, without a proper military education, but with some experience.
Crispi had his own journal, "La Riforma," which frankly and entirely expressed his views, and he paid no attention to the others. I happened to be on the way to the Foreign Office the day after Crispi assumed the reins of government, and by the way fell in with the foreign editor of one of the journals of the Left, exulting in the accession of a minister of his old party.
Bismarck professed the greatest friendship for Crispi, and gave Crispi to understand that he approved of Italy's aspirations on the Adriatic and in Tunis. The next year, however, at the Berlin Congress, Italy's interests were ignored, and finally, in 1882, France seized Tunis, to the great indignation of the Italians.
The Pope and Crispi! waves, both of them, on a sea of life that gave them birth 'with equal mind'; and that 'with equal mind' will sweep them both to its own goal not theirs! ... No there are plenty of dangers ahead.... Socialism is serious; Sicily is serious; the economic difficulties are serious; the House of Savoy will have a rough task, perhaps, to ride the seas that may come.
It is now known that Signor Crispi would have appealed to Parliament to rescind the exclusion from the Florentine cemetery, if the motive for doing so had been less promptly removed. Mr. Browning's own country had indeed opened a way for the reunion of the husband and wife.
It has been the habit of the Italians since the disaster to throw the blame for it on Crispi, but I, who was always opposed to the undertaking, can testify that at the outbreak of war, and especially after the brilliant if slight victories won by the Italian troops in Africa, Crispi would have been defeated in the Chamber if he had proposed withdrawing.
And then a natural turn of thought, or a suggestion from one of the group surrounding him, brought him to the scandals connected with the Abyssinian campaign to the charges of incompetence and corruption which every Radical paper was now hurling against the Crispi government.
But, on examining the dusty cartoons of the old book-stall, the police discovered nothing except a prodigious quantity of grotesque verses directed against the Piedmontese and the French, against the Germans and the Triple Alliance, against the Italian republicans and the ministers, against Cavour and Signor Crispi, against the University of Rome and the Inquisition, against the monks and the capitalists!
But this tiny ripple of interest faded out in seventy-two hours, and the reporter-cubs proceeded variously to interest the public in the Alaskan husky dog that was half a bear, in the question whether or not Crispi Angelotti was guilty of having cut the carcass of Giuseppe Bartholdi into small portions and thrown it into the bay in a grain-sack off Fisherman's Wharf, and in the overt designs of Japan upon Hawaii, the Philippines, and the Pacific Coast of North America.
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