Liberalism Tested

Governments in western Europe, where liberal institutions were seemingly well entrenched, sought to control turn-of-the-century conflicts with pragmatic policies that often struck at liberalism’s very foundations. Political parties in Britain discovered that the recently enfranchised voter wanted solid benefits in exchange for his support. In 1905, the British Liberal Party won a majority in the House of Commons and pushed for social legislation aimed at the working class. “We are keenly in sympathy with the representatives of Labour,” one Liberal politician announced. “We have too few of them in the House of Commons.” The National Insurance Act of 1911 instituted a program of unemployment assistance funded by new taxes on the wealthy.

The Irish question, however, tested Britain’s commitment to such liberal values as autonomy, opportunity, and individual rights. In the 1890s, new groups formed to foster Irish culture as a way of heightening the political challenge to what they saw as Britain’s continuing colonization of the country. In 1901, the circle around poet William Butler Yeats and actress Maud Gonne founded the Irish National Theater to present Irish rather than English plays. Gonne took Irish politics into everyday life by opposing British efforts to gain the loyalty of the young. Every time an English monarch visited Ireland, he or she held special receptions for children. Gonne and other Irish volunteers sponsored competing events, handing out candies and other treats for patriotic youngsters. One home rule supporter marveled at “the procession . . . of thirty thousand school children who refused to be bribed into parading before the Queen of England.” Promoters of an “Irish way of life” encouraged speaking Irish Gaelic instead of English and supporting Catholicism instead of the Church of England. This cultural agenda gained political force with the founding in 1905 of Sinn Féin (“We Ourselves”), a group that strove for complete Irish independence.

Once committed to economic growth and the rule of law, Italian leaders, now saddled with debt from unification, began to drift away from these liberal values. Instead, corruption plagued Italy’s constitutional monarchy, which had not yet developed either the secure parliamentary system of England or the authoritarian monarchy of Germany to guide its growth. To forge national unity in the 1890s, prime ministers used patriotic rhetoric and imperial adventure, notably a second unsuccessful attempt to conquer Ethiopia in 1896. Giovanni Giolitti, who served as prime minister for three terms between 1903 and 1914, adopted a policy known as trasformismo (from the word for “transform”), using bribes and public works programs to gain support from deputies in parliament. Political opponents called Giolitti the “Minister of the Underworld” and accused him of preferring to buy the votes of local bosses rather than spending money to develop the Italian economy. In a wave of protest, urban workers in the industrial cities of Turin and Milan and rural laborers in the depressed agrarian south demanded change. Giolitti appeased the protesters by instituting social welfare programs and, in 1912, virtually complete manhood suffrage.