Ponderable Quote from The Making of Italy by Patrick Keyes O’Clery

Written in 1892, this passage from The Making of Italy by Patrick Keyes O’Clery offers a contemporary Catholic critique of post-unification Italy, exposing the social and economic costs hidden beneath liberal slogans of “freedom.” O’Clery’s account captures how dispossession, militarization, taxation, and emigration defined the lived reality of Italians—especially in the South—under the new national regime.

"Besides making the soldiers live at free quarters on the people, another expedient was the more ordinary one of selling their lands and goods. Year after year these were thrown on the market in such numbers as to bring very low prices, while the unfortunate owners left the country:— year after year the tide of emigration from Italy has increased. But the Italian is told he is free. It is true he is still subject to arbitrary arrest, to imprisonment in which he waits wearily for trial, and to domiciliary visits; it is true that the press is liable to State prosecutions and suppression, and that "order" is guaranteed by an active gendarmerie, who are not over-scrupulous in their proceedings. The Italian will say he had all this under some at least of the old governments. But the Government of United Italy gives him more than this. He no longer sees the monastery looking down upon his village, but he has the secularist school, he can travel by railway (though it is true he sometimes looks in vain for a good road to it), he has the privilege of spending some years in barracks under the law of compulsory military service; instead of the various metallic coinages of the old States, he has one uniform currency of dirty paper, and as the value of this paper fluctuates, and it would be difficult to state prices both in coin and paper, the shopkeepers are saved the trouble by there being scarcely as much as a franc piece in circulation. Finally, the free Italian has the advantage of paying a tax on everything he touches or possesses. It is lamentable that in some parts of Italy all these advantages were not always appreciated as they should be. The Sicilians especially behaved badly. They had an unpleasant habit of shooting the tax-collector, and taking to the hills as brigands, where the bersaglieri hopelessly attempted to hunt them down." (pp. 366-367)