temization of our national
finances. The parliamentary overturn of 1876, indeed, marks not the
end, but rather an interruption, on the road that Italy had been
following since the beginning of the century. The outlook then
changed, and not by the capriciousness or weakness of men, but by a
necessity of history which it would be idiotic in our day to deplore.
At that time the fall of the Right, which had ruled continuously
between 1861 and 1876, seemed to most people the real conquest of
freedom.

To be sure the Right cannot be accused of too great scruple in
respecting the liberties guaranteed by our Constitution; but the real
truth was that the Right conceived liberty in a sense directly
opposite to the notions of the Left. The Left moved from the
individual to the State: the Right moved from the State to the
individual. The men of the left thought of "the people" as merely the
agglomerate of the citizens composing it. They therefore made the
individual the center and the point of departure of all the rights and
prerogatives which a regime of freedom was bound to respect.

The men of the Right, on the contrary, were firmly set in the notion
that no freedom can be conceived except within the State, that freedom
can have no important content apart from a solid regime of law
indisputably sovereign over the activities and the interests of
individuals. For the Right there could be no individual freedom not
reconcilable with the authority of the State. In their eyes the
general interest was always paramount over private interests. The law,
therefore, should have absolute efficacy and embrace the whole life of
the people.

This conception of the Right was evidently sound; but it involved
great dangers when applied without regard to the motives which
provoked it. Unless we are careful, too much law leads to stasis and
therefore to the annihilation of the life which it is the State's
function to regulate but which the State cannot suppress. The State
may easily become a form indifferent to its content--something
extraneous to the substance it would regulate. If the law comes upon
the individual from without, if the individual is not absorbed in the
life of the State, the individual feels the law and the State as
limitations on his activity, as chains which will eventually strangle
him unless he can break them down.

This was just the feeling of the men of '76. The country needed a
breath of air. Its moral, economic, and s