Читать книгу Fields, Factories, and Workshops. Or, Industry Combined with Agriculture and Brain Work with Manual Work онлайн

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The same industrial progress extends over the southern peninsulas. Who would have spoken in 1859 about Italian manufactures? And yet—the Turin Exhibition of 1884 has shown it—Italy ranks already among the manufacturing countries. “You see everywhere a considerable industrial and commercial effort made,” wrote a French economist to the Temps. “Italy aspires to go on without foreign produce. The patriotic watchword is, Italy all by herself. It inspires the whole mass of producers. There is not a single manufacturer or tradesman who, even in the most trifling circumstances, does not do his best to emancipate himself from foreign guardianship.” The best French and English patterns are imitated and improved by a touch of national genius and artistic traditions. Complete statistics are wanting, so that the statistical Annuario resorts to indirect indications. But the rapid increase of imports of coal (9,339,000 tons in 1910, as against 779,000 tons in 1871); the growth of the mining industries, which have trebled their production during the fifteen years, 1870 to 1885; the increasing production of steel and machinery (£4,800,000 in 1900), which—to use Bovio’s words—shows how a country having no fuel nor minerals of her own can have nevertheless a notable metallurgical industry; and, finally, the growth of textile industries disclosed by the net imports of raw cottons and the number of spindlesssss1—all these show that the tendency towards becoming a manufacturing country capable of satisfying her needs by her own manufactures is not a mere dream. As to the efforts made for taking a more lively part in the trade of the world, who does not know the traditional capacities of the Italians in that direction?