Thornton Wilder Esq.
50 Deep Wood Drive
Hamden, Conn.

Written to an English friend.

December 28th. 1930.

Thank you for your dear letter. You can imagine how I feel about Vinci and Rendi. It is a heavy irony that I should be free in their place and I will have no peace until the fight is won. Vinci-guerra has been even more of a hero than you think. At the trial he said that the idea had come to him, while really he learned who had originated it only in August, 6 weeks after I had started circularizing the papers. His role consisted only in suggesting to me a number of addresses. Rendi learned about it in September. When I left I arranged that the thing should be continued between ....... people (who have not been discovered) and Rendi and Vinci were only to help, and make suggestions in case the texts I was sending from America did not arrive. So it happened that text No.10 was compiled by them (all the others are by me.) I had arranged for other people to undertake the mailing and especially emphasized that Vinci should not do it, because he was too suspected. After I sailed in October, one of the men withdrew his help because the other movement "Giustizia e Liberta" with which he was more identified, made him an "out out". I don't know for what reason Vinci started mailing letters himself. By November the police had spies watching all the mail boxes of central Rome and they caught Vinci while mailing a dozen letters. They knew he had frequent contacts with Rendi and so they arrested him too. How they came to my house after that I don't know. Perhaps they visited all houses with which Vinci and Rendi had been in touch and found my mimeograph under Mother's mattress.

Two friends of mine in America have promised money for Claudina, (whom I suppose is with Tilgher) and for Rendi's family who is going back to Switzerland from where the wife is.

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Waiting till some other man is found to carry on the A.N. in
Italy, I will continue the mailing of circulars from abroad. Even if
one-tenth arrive they will re-start the chain at the interior. You
don't tell me whether you received the parcel I sent you and whether
you feel you can mail some from London. I suppose you feel that as a
British subject you shouldn't get mixed up with Italian home politics;
I quite understand.

Other plans I have of which I will tell you when they have taken a
more concrete shape.

Of course I am going to spend most of my time studying conditions
in Italy, political economy and social science, and the Bibliothèque
Nationale will be my refuge.

So far I have not met among the exiled any capable of discussing
things serenely and objectively. They are all too hurt and out of
touch with Italy to have a really realistic vision of things there.
Perhaps I will find someone later. Certainly it would be splendid to
carry on your idea. Though I feel that it's worth more to study con-
ditions now, than to draw a constitution of a plan for the future. I
may be wrong, but I feel that a Constitution, or a programme of action
unless it is made in connection with a perfectly defined actual situa-
tion, taking into account all the elements as they are on a given day,
is bound to have an element of abstractness that makes its value nul.
There are no plans good in themselves. Don't you think in history
it has proved to be more dangerous to impose Programmes worked out in
the abstract "anterim", than to be found in a situation without a
definite program? Fascism is not going to fall by itself, suddenly
leaving a hole what must be filled by somebody: it will be overthrown
by a group of people, or of interests. It will make a tremendous

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difference in the general situation whether these forces will come from
the right or from the left, from the existing institutions or from
new hidden elements. From the bankers and industrialist, or from the
peasants or the workers. Through violence or through peaceful pressure.
To draw a programme, making abstraction from these elements seems to me
not only unpolitical but a bit naïve. I remember discussions in Paris
between ... and other exiles, to settle whether the new state
should be called "La Republica dei Lavoratori" or "Republica" alone,
etc., etc.

If one wanted to make several programmes to suit all possible
data one should make 10,000.

I think that on the other hand there is an infinite work to do in
the line of historical present study. Of general tendencies good
for all cases in Italy I don't think one could put down more than a few.
Among these I would certainly put down the following:

1.- A much more clear distinction between the three powers, (getting
close to the American system.)

2.- Vocational representation, or corporative chamber (such as now
exists only on paper) either for an "economic parliament" side by
side with the political one, or better; the parliament to be made
half through the old geographical constituencies and half through
vocational ones.

3.- Decentralisation and regionalism. Perhaps regional economical
parliaments as a first step to the central political parliament.

4.- Creation of a non-political civil-service (imitating England) by
giving better treatment to state employees and therefore co-
interesting them in the State. Keeping outside politics the

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technical Ministries and service; power of the State based not on
the power of the party that occupies it but on its own.

5.- The State should try to acquire control over the life of the country and even over the press, not through compulsion, but acquiring sufficient wealth to enable it to have the best papers and the best men in every field.

6.- Reduction of all the Ministries' budgets in order to triplicate the budget of education.

7.- Vigorous collaboration towards the Briand plan and in general with the League of Nations.

8.- Raprochement with France to the maximum in order to arrive at a minimum of worry for both and to a collaboration in the exploitation of Colonies.

9.- Every effort toward gradual abolition of tariff barriers.

10.- Policy toward the Vatican directed to consider the Church always more as a private institution. Building up of a class of <u>well paid</u>, intelligent, elementary school teachers to substitute little by little the influence of priests.

I am sorry to have left in London my Walt Whitman. I wish you
would send it to me! Write me please sometime.

Your affectionate,

(Signed) Lauro.