Meanwhile, the Italian minister of Treasury Signor Luzzatti stressed to others outside Italy that granting credit was no mere charity, but rather a matter of mutual interest in preventing revolution. Italy was a nation “whose dire stress might be the means of producing a confl agration,” Luzzatti warned, noting that such developments “might spread to England herself” (ibid., ff . 4).

Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, loc. 1345