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Appendix: Einaudi, President of the Italian Republic (1948–1955) Message After the Oath*

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Appendix: Einaudi, President of the Italian Republic (1948–1955) Message After the Oath* Appendix: Einaudi, President of the Italian Republic (1948–1955) Message after the Oath* At the general assembly of the House of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic, on Wednesday, 12 March 1946, the President of the Republic read the following message: Gentlemen: Right Honourable Senators and Deputies! The oath I have just sworn, whereby I undertake to devote myself, during the years awarded to my office by the Constitution, to the exclusive service of our common homeland, has a meaning that goes beyond the bare words of its solemn form. Before me I have the shining example of the illustrious man who was the first to hold, with great wisdom, full devotion and scrupulous impartiality, the supreme office of head of the nascent Italian Republic. To Enrico De Nicola goes the grateful appreciation of the whole of the people of Italy, the devoted memory of all those who had the good fortune to witness and admire the construction day by day of the edifice of rules and traditions without which no constitution is destined to endure. He who succeeds him made repeated use, prior to 2 June 1946, of his right, springing from the tradition that moulded his sentiment, rooted in ancient local patterns, to an opinion on the choice of the best regime to confer on Italy. But, in accordance with the promise he had made to himself and his electors, he then gave the new republican regime something more than a mere endorsement. The transition that took place on 2 June from the previ- ous to the present institutional form of the state was a source of wonder and marvel, not only by virtue of the peaceful and law-abiding manner in which it came about, but also because it offered the world a demonstration that our country had grown to maturity and was now ready for democracy: and if democracy means anything at all, it is debate, it is struggle, even ardent or * Message read on 12 March 1948 and republished in the Scrittoio del Presidente (1948–1955), Giulio Einaudi (ed.), 1956. 304 Message after the Oath 305 even tenacious struggle among different and opposing opinions; it is, in the end, the victory of an opinion, clarified as dominant over other opinions. It is in your debates, Honourable Members of Parliament, that there resides true life, the very life of the institutions we have freely bestowed on ourselves. And if I have any cause for regret at the separation from you decreed by your resolution, then it is precisely this: no longer will I be able to take part in debates, from which alone the common will arises; no longer will I be able to experience the joy – which is among the purest joys the human heart can feel – of being compelled little by little, as a result of the arguments expounded by others, to inwardly con- fess that one is fully or partly in the wrong, thereby moving slowly towards embracing the opinion of men wiser than ourselves. Giustino Fortunato, one of the men who most greatly honoured the Mezzogiorno and this House, always proudly spoke out against the calumnies of those who, prior to 1922, had scoffed at the parliament and derided it as a place where too much talking took place: on the contrary, he declared, it had been his great fortune to learn much from listening to members far less educated than himself, and he ascribed to parliamentary debate the merit of having created a ruling class springing from the suffrage that had little by little expanded and has now become almost universal, a better ruling class than that which, at the dawn of the Risorgimento, was created by limited suffrage. Now, a clear picture is emerging of the great task that is entrusted here to you who bear the momentous duty of enacting the principles of the Constitution, and to myself, whom the fundamental law of the Republic has made the guardian of its observance. Between the two dates of 1848 and 1948, commemorated on the cente- nary day by both your presidents, a radically new problem has arisen, one that great political thinkers of the past century declared to be insoluble: namely, the problem of ensuring that democratic systems endure when those called upon to vote and pass resolutions are no longer restricted priv- ileged minorities but tens of millions of citizens, all equal before the law. Universal suffrage seemed at that time – and still seems to many – incompatible with freedom and democracy. The constitution Italy has adopted is a chal- lenge to this pessimistic vision of the future. It affirms two solemn principles: preserve all those elements of the present social structure, and exclusively those, that guarantee the freedom of the human person against the omnip- otence of the state and the arrogance of private power; and guarantee to all people, whatever may be the circumstances of their birth, the greatest pos- sible equality of starting points. This sublime mission of human elevation is one that we all, parliament, government and president, are called upon to sustain. Twenty years of dictatorial government brought the country civil strife, foreign war and such severe material and moral devastation that all hope of redemption appeared to have become vain. And yet, after saving the indestructible national unity that stretches – regional and local differences 306 Appendix notwithstanding and although so painfully mutilated – from the Alps to Sicily, we are now tenaciously reconstructing the ravaged national fortunes, and we have no less than twice given the world an admirable demonstration of our resolve to return to free democratic political competitions and of our capacity to cooperate as equals among equals, in the assemblies whose endeavours are directed to reconstructing that Europe from whence shone on the world an immense light of thought and humanity. Gentlemen, Honourable Senators and Deputies, lifting our eyes on high, let us humbly set out on the hard path along which our beautiful and adored country is destined to reach ever more glorious goals of moral gran- deur, of free civil life, of social justice and thus of material prosperity. Once again let there resound in this hall the cry ‘Long Live Italy!’ On Delays in the Debate and Approval of Draft Bills* The premise that will be taken as the starting point seems, at the very least, controversial. The premise is that the delay in debating and approving draft bills presented by the government or upon the initiative of Parliament is detrimental and that the enormous backlog of draft bills can be considered as verging on scandal. This premise contrasts with the unequivocal teaching of the major political writers, among whom one need only mention the names of Guicciardini and Galiani, according to whom one of the greatest afflictions of peoples is the abundance of new laws. But quite apart from the teachings of the wise, those who criticize the delays in the forging of laws forget that the entire parliamentary structure was created, perhaps unwittingly and perhaps also against the wishes of the law-makers them- selves, with the aim of achieving that delay. The existence of two Houses in very many countries, and the process adopted in some countries wherein debate takes place by submitting bills to three readings, or in others by submitting them to the scrutiny of committees, and the rigorous nature of the rules designed to guarantee the free expression of all opinions and to safeguard minorities against majorities, are all unintentional tools that had to be introduced in order to regulate the flow of new laws, making their rapid approval difficult and subjecting them to fairly rigorous selection. The selection may come about accidentally, but it offers a means of ensuring that the rules governing the life of a country are not overturned at an excessively fast rate. If one starts out from the correct and experimentally demonstrated prem- ise that new laws are per se detrimental, and that more often than not a bill is proposed as a result of the ephemeral impulses of poorly informed * Notes of 22 October 1952 and 21 September 1950, published in Scrittoio del Presidente (1948–1955), Giulio Einaudi (ed.), 1956. 307 308 Appendix public opinion or because of incompetence in applying the old laws, then everything becomes clear in the parliamentary mechanism, and the con- straints imposed on new legislation by the mechanism itself appear admi- rable. The writer of these observations recalls having repeatedly defended Parliament, before 1922, against the accusation of sluggishness in passing laws and of futility in debating, a charge that even then was levelled by the Fascist party against the parliamentary institution. We have seen the results of the suppression of tools which, through the slow pace and futility of debates, guaranteed the freedom of citizens. Let us not renew the same unfounded accusations today if we do not wish to find ourselves confronted with the same effects. That the two Houses should be entrusted with different duties is a true proposition, but what is highly controversial is the proposition that in order to obtain such an outcome it is appropriate to explicitly attribute different tasks to the two Houses. The results obtained when there is an attempt to attribute to a given House technical – and possibly also juridical and administrative – tasks are well known. Those Houses are not the parliament, but rather mere endorsement chambers. In Houses of this kind, only con- structive criticism is allowed, which effectively means that the criticism put forward against any adjective is no longer criticism, but simply conform- ism. Criticism that is required to have its range of action within a specified sphere, the so-called technical sphere, is not true criticism, for if criticism is to be true to its nature, then it must be unlimited and therefore political.
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