But for Villari I should have been expelled from Italy on account of my letters exposing the situation, which created such a sensation that Rothschild wrote to a financial authority in Rome to inquire what truth there was in them, receiving naturally such assurances as only hid the trouble.

But when the crash came people said, "How did you know?
What a prophet you were!" etc., etc.

Tanlongo, the director of the Banca Romana, which led off in the crash, threatened the "Times" with a libel suit, and accompanied the threat by offers to me of personal "commercial facilitations" to drop the subject.

The _argumentum ad hominem_ did not weigh, but it was desired in the office to avoid legal troubles and I was advised to keep a more moderate tone.

The disaster came so soon after, however, that I got all the credit, and maintained abroad the prestige of a greater authority in Italian finance than I perhaps deserved.
It is true that honesty and courage are two things that a correspondent has no right to boast of, for honest editing and management presupposes them in him, and a conspicuous want of either cuts his career very short unless he is uncommonly clever; but as the result of my personal experience I may say that, having campaigned with many English colleagues, I have found them to be almost universally men of thorough honesty and unflinching courage.
Personality aside, I think I may be permitted to say so much of a profession of whose real character and besetting temptations no one can know so much as one of themselves, and of whom the general public knows very little.
The financial authority which thus accrued to me became of not unimportant influence a little later when the second scratch ministry broke up under the financial depression, with gold at 16 premium, the scandals of the bank affair oozing into publicity, and insurrection breaking out in Sicily and Tuscany, with movements pending in the Romagna, where the spring had come late and so saved the country from a great disaster.