March 8, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
13 
Italy's Industrial Effort 
By Lewis R. Freeman 
A NYONE who has seen much of the activities 
/% of the ItaHan in the countries — notably the 
/ % United States and Argentina — to which he has 
/ m pmipratpfT in thp greatest numbers, will not need 
to be told of his aptitude for and his skill in industrial 
labour ; but one who has not visited Northern Italy in 
the last five years — and especially since the outbreak 
oi the war — will have little conception of the extent 
to which these innate but largely latent faculties have 
been developing into an asset of great present value and 
incalculable future promise. 
Great as have been the things — both moral and 
material — that the war has accomplished for France, 
England, and most of the other belligerents, it is 
doubtful if any one of these nations owes, and will 
continue to owe, more to the galvanic quickening 
of Armageddon than Italy. Engrossed with the war 
itself,.' few even among the Italians themselves are 
yet more than dimly conscious of the signiiicance 
of what has already come to pass within the borders of 
their covmtry, just as somein England have hardly begun 
more than to sense the fact that the war has made of that 
of Britain an Empire in fact where it was only one in 
name before. I leave for those who have given the 
political and socia.1 phases more study than 1 have to 
write of the way in -which the war — by bringing together 
lier sons of the Southern and Central and Northern 
provinces to fight for a common cause in such mraibers 
as Italians have never fought before — is completing the 
unification begun a half century ago, and confine my- 
self to tracing briefiy the way in which the war and 
the war's demands are awakening Italy to a dawning 
realisation of her hitherto unguessed industrial poten- 
tialities and laying the foundation of a development that 
, bids fair to place her in the front rank of the manufac- 
turing nations of the world. 
A Strong Man Just Beginning 
Italy to-day is like a strong man just beginning to 
become conscious of his strength. She finds herself 
performing with ease tasks which she has never, even in 
her wildest dreams, pictured herself as capable of per- 
forming, and her gratification at these achievements is 
irradiated by a dawning consciousness of the power 
to do still greater things in the future. The war has 
revealed to Italy her unsuspected reserves of power ; 
shown her how these may be utilised to staunch the 
flow of emigration that has been sapping her energies 
so steadily for years ; shown her, in short, how, from 
being one of the poorest countries of Europe (with a 
population about equal to that of France, Italy's national 
wealth is estimated at only one-fifth of France), she may 
go from strength to strength until, on a per capita basis 
at least, she may rank amongst the richest. 
The rapid increase in wealtlr of France, Great Britain, 
Germany, and the United States have been very largely 
due to modern industrial development, jand Italy's 
failure to keep pace with them is due to two very diverse 
causes — the lack of iron and coal, on the one hand, and, 
on the other, the fact that her artisan and labouring 
classes, though m many respects the quickest-minded 
and quickest-handed workers in the world, have been so 
influenced by the love of the beautiful inherited from 
their Roman and Florentine- and Venetian progenitors 
that they have been reluctant to engage in the fab- 
rication of things in which beauty was subordinated to 
usefulness. 
. As a consequence Italy; while England, France and 
Germany were amassing wealth through their industrial 
activities, had continued to devote the best of her energies 
to art and agriculture, and because only a limited num- 
ber of her rapidly increasing population could be sup- 
ported in this way, an ever mounting number of the 
surplus was forced to cross the seas every year to find 
in North or South America the livelihood that the con- 
ditions in their own country made so difficxilt for them. 
The few million lira that these emigrants sent back to their 
native land annually was but an inconsiderable fraction 
of the direct loss occasioned by the fact that their energies , 
were being expended abroad. There were more ItaUans 
in New York than in Rome ; almost as many in Buenos 
Aires as in Turin ; and it was the United States and Argen- 
tina that were benefiting by their effort, not tlieir native 
Italy. That country was like a sound, healthy man, 
with vigorous heart-action, who is prevented from coming 
cO his full strength through allowing his best blood to be 
transfused to quicken the life in the bodies of others. 
Yet all the wliile Italy had the remedy for her troubles 
in her own hands, only needing the initiative to apply it. 
Iron, indeed, she lacked — probably will always be more 
or less short of — but the Alps and .the Appenines hold 
inexhaustible supplies of " white coal " — available 
through hydro-electric development — that could be util- 
ised both more efficiently and more cheaply than the black 
coal that she ha d been importing at such increased ex- 
pense and difiiculty from abroad ; while the centuries of 
specialised hand and brain-training behind her artisans and 
artists gave her a class with a physical and mental equip- 
ment for modern indjistrial achievement scarcely equalled 
by that of any other nation in the world. The fact that 
in the northern provinces, where the foundations of a great 
industrial development were being laid in the decade 
j^revious to the war, emigration had already been con- 
siderably reduced as a consequence of the remunerative 
employment provided at home for the men who must 
otherwise have crossed the seas to find it, was earnest of 
what that same development extended to other parts of the 
country might accompHsh. The lesson was there for 
those to read wh6 could, but it needed the blaze of 
Armageddon to reveal it to the eyes of even the Italians 
themselves. ' 
Italy has done many creditable and a number of re- 
markable things in mobilising her resources in men and 
material for war, but her one most notable achievement — ■ 
when the difficulties to be contended with are considered — 
is the response of her industries to the needs of what 
has really been a series of more or less unexpected 
emergencies. Almost no one in France or England 
has any conception of what Italy has done in this respect ; 
which is hardly surprising when one finds that even 
Italian manufacturers themselves-^all of whom have their 
hands and minds full devising new means of meeting new 
demands — hardly appear to understand how remarkable 
is the work they have done and are continuing to do 
with such conspicuous success. Indeed, it was an officer 
attached to one of the Alhed military missions who first 
cahed my attention to the fine way in which Italian 
industry has risen to a great occasion. - 
An Interview 
" It is quite absurd," he said, " to speak of Italy's 
having had the advantage of nearly a year's preparation 
before she entered the war. As a matter of fact, things 
were in such a chaos pohtically during all of the nine 
months in which the Government was trying to shake 
itself sufficiently clear of the shackles of German in- 
trigue to make the plunge, that almost nothing was done 
in, the way of military preparation. So far as land fighting 
was concerned, Italy entered the war less prepared than 
was France, almost as unprepared as was England. 
She had the guns and munitions to see her through the 
first sharp opening actions, which were carried out so 
brilliantly ; after that she was just about where France 
and England were at the end of September, 1914. 
" From the middle of 1915, Italy has had either to 
manufacture or import practically everything with wliich 
she had waged the struggle, and the way in which her 
talent for organisation, invention and improvisation 
have enabled her to produce so much and bring so -little 
from abroad must rank as one of the finest achievements 
of the war. France and England came gallantly to her 
aid during the remainder of 1915 with such guns and 
munitions as they could spare and .transport, but long 
before that year had come to an end the Italians had 
