It is possible that my advice turned the balance in his mind, but it is, with one later exception, the only instance in which I ever ventured to advise him as to a political line of conduct, though I was generally credited with a good deal of meddling.
The conduct of the Italian factions and politicians during the two years of the second ministry of Crispi, the internecine war of intrigues to which the King lent a negative but effectual assent, and which ended in the disaster of Adowah, showed me that the Italian commonwealth is incurably infected with political caries, and that, though the state may endure, even as a constitutional monarchy, for years, the restoration of civic vitality to it is only to be hoped for under the condition of a moral renovation, to which the Roman Catholic Church is an unsurmountable obstacle, because the Church itself has become infected with the disease of the state,--the passion of personal power, carried to the fever point of utter disregard of the general good.

The liberty which the extreme party in Italian politics agitates for is only license, and, with the exception of a few amiable and impracticable enthusiasts in the extreme Left and a few honest and patriotic conservators of the larger liberties towards the Right, there are nothing but self-seekers and corrupt politicians in the state.

During the years of my residence in Italy, the strengthening conviction of these facts has dampened my early enthusiasms for its political progress and my faith in its future, and, retiring at the limits of effective service from a position into which I had entered with sympathy, I buried all my illusions of a great Italian future as I had those of a healthy Greek future.

My profound conviction is that until a great moral reform shall break out and awaken the ruling classes, and especially the Church, to the recognition of the necessity of a vital, growing morality to the health of a state, there will be no new Italy.

The idle dreamers who hope to cure the commonweal by revolution and the establishment of a republic will find, if their dream come true, that to a state demoralized in its great masses, more liberty can only mean quicker ruin.