of February ratified at Makallé the additional convention to
the treaty of Uccialli, but refused to recognize the Italian occupation
of the Mareb. The negus, however, conformed to article
17 of the treaty of Uccialli by requesting Italy to represent
Abyssinia at the Brussels anti-slavery conference, an act which
strengthened Italian illusions as to Menelek’s readiness to submit
to their protectorate. Menelek had previously notified the chief
European powers of his coronation at Entotto (14th December
1889), but Germany and Great Britain replied that such notification
should have been made through the Italian government.
Germany, moreover, wounded Menelek’s pride by employing
merely the title of “highness.” The negus took advantage of
the incident to protest against the Italian text of article 17,
and to contend that the Amharic text contained no equivalent
for the word “consent,” but merely stipulated that Abyssinia
“might” make use of Italy in her relations with foreign powers.
On the 28th of October 1890 Count Antonelli, negotiator of the
treaty, was despatched to settle the controversy, but on arriving
at Adis Ababa, the new residence of the negus, found agreement
impossible either with regard to the frontier or the protectorate.
On the 10th of April 1891, Menelek communicated to the powers
his views with regard to the Italian frontier, and announced
his intention of re-establishing the ancient boundaries of Ethiopia
as far as Khartum to the north-west and Victoria Nyanza to the
south. Meanwhile the marquis de Rudini, who had succeeded
Crispi as Italian premier, had authorized the abandonment of
article 17 even before he had heard of the failure of Antonelli’s
negotiations. Rudini was glad to leave the whole dispute in
abeyance and to make with the local ras, or chieftains, of the
high plateau an arrangement securing for Italy the cis-Mareb
provinces of Seraè and Okulè-Kusai under the rule of an allied
native chief named Bath-Agos. Rudini, however, was able
to conclude two protocols with Great Britain (March and April
1891) whereby the British government definitely recognized
Abyssinia as within the Italian sphere of influence in return for
an Italian recognition of British rights in the Upper Nile.
The period 1887–1890 was marked in Italy by great political activity. The entry of Crispi into the Depretis cabinet as minister of the interior (4th April 1887) introduced into the government an element of vigour which had long been lacking. Though sixty-eight years of age, First Crispi Cabinet. Crispi possessed an activity, a rapidity of decision and an energy in execution with which none of his contemporaries could vie. Within four months the death of Depretis (29th July 1887) opened for Crispi the way to the premiership. Besides assuming the presidency of the council of ministers and retaining the ministry of the interior, Crispi took over the portfolio of foreign affairs which Depretis had held since the resignation of Count di Robilant. One of the first questions with which he had to deal was that of conciliation between Italy and the Vatican. At the end of May the pope, in an allocution to the cardinals, had spoken of Italy in terms of unusual cordiality, and had expressed a wish for peace. A few days later Signor Bonghi, one of the framers of the Law of Guarantees, published in the Nuova Antologia a plea for reconciliation on the basis of an amendment to the Law of Guarantees and recognition by the pope of the Italian title to Rome. The chief incident of the movement towards conciliation consisted, however, in the publication of a pamphlet entitled La Conciliazione by Father Tosti, a close friend and confidant of the pope, extolling the advantages of peace between Vatican and Quirinal. Tosti’s pamphlet was known to represent papal ideas, and Tosti himself Tosti and conciliation. was persona grata to the Italian government. Reconciliation seemed within sight when suddenly Tosti’s pamphlet was placed on the Index, ostensibly on account of a phrase, “The whole of Italy entered Rome by the breach of Porta Pia; the king cannot restore Rome to the pope, since Rome belongs to the Italian people.” On the 4th of June 1887 the official Vatican organ, the Osservatore Romano, published a letter written by Tosti to the pope conditionally retracting the views expressed in the pamphlet. The letter had been written at the pope’s request, on the understanding that it should not be published. On the 15th of June the pope addressed to Cardinal Rampolla del Tindaro, secretary of state, a letter reiterating in uncompromising terms the papal claim to the temporal power, and at the end of July Cardinal Rampolla reformulated the same claim in a circular to the papal nuncios abroad. The dream of conciliation was at an end, but the Tosti incident had served once more to illustrate the true position of the Vatican in regard to Italy. It became clear that neither the influence of the regular clergy, of which the Society of Jesus is the most powerful embodiment, nor that of foreign clerical parties, which largely control the Peter’s Pence fund, would ever permit renunciation of the papal claim to temporal power. France, and the French Catholics especially, feared lest conciliation Terms of the “Roman Question.” should diminish the reliance of the Vatican upon France, and consequently French hold over the Vatican. The Vatican, for its part, felt its claim to temporal power to be too valuable a pecuniary asset and too efficacious an instrument of church discipline lightly to be thrown away. The legend of an “imprisoned pope,” subject to every whim of his gaolers, had never failed to arouse the pity and loosen the purse-strings of the faithful; dangerous innovators and would-be reformers within the church could be compelled to bow before the symbol of the temporal power, and their spirit of submission tested by their readiness to forgo the realization of their aims until the head of the church should be restored to his rightful domain. More important than all was the interest of the Roman curia, composed almost exclusively of Italians, to retain in its own hands the choice of the pontiff and to maintain the predominance of the Italian element and the Italian spirit in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Conciliation with Italy would expose the pope and his Italian entourage to suspicion of being unduly subject to Italian political influence—of being, in a word, more Italian than Catholic. Such a suspicion would inevitably lead to a movement in favour of the internationalization of the curia and of the papacy. In order to avoid this danger it was therefore necessary to refuse all compromise, and, by perpetual reiteration of a claim incompatible with Italian territorial unity, to prove to the church at large that the pope and the curia were more Catholic than Italian. Such rigidity of principle need not be extended to the affairs of everyday contact between the Vatican and the Italian authorities, with regard to which, indeed, a tacit modus vivendi was easily attainable. Italy, for her part, could not go back upon the achievements of the Risorgimento by restoring Rome or any portion of Italian territory to the pope. She had hoped by conciliation to arrive at an understanding which should have ranged the church among the conservative and not among the disruptive forces of the country, but she was keenly desirous to retain the papacy as a preponderatingly Italian institution, and was ready to make whatever formal concessions might have appeared necessary to reassure foreign Catholics concerning the reality of the pope’s spiritual independence. The failure of the conciliation movement left profound irritation between Vatican and Quirinal, an irritation which, on the Vatican side, found expression in vivacious protests and in threats of leaving Rome; and, on the Italian side, in the deposition of the syndic of Rome for having visited the cardinal-vicar, in the anti-clerical provisions of the new penal code, and in the inauguration (9th June 1889) of a monument to Giordano Bruno on the very site of his martyrdom.
The internal situation inherited by Crispi from Depretis was very unsatisfactory. Extravagant expenditure on railways and public works, loose administration of finance, the cost of colonial enterprise, the growing demands for the army and navy, the impending tariff war with France, and the over-speculation in building and in industrial ventures, which had absorbed all the floating capital of the country, had combined to produce a state of affairs calling for firm and radical treatment. Crispi, burdened by the premiership and by the two most important portfolios in the cabinet, was, however, unable to exercise efficient control over all departments of state. Nevertheless his administration was by no means unfruitful. Zanardelli,
