The Fortnightly Review

ITALY has just emerged unscathed and rejuvenated from an ordeal of the nature of which no foreigner who draws his information on the subject solely from the official Green Book can form an adequate conception. To the future historian the recent crisis and its various accompaniments will appear as a sequence of symptoms connoting a national fermentation which could end only in a rapid decay or else a new spiritual conformation of the Italian people. The Green Book is hardly more than a useful and instructive record of one of the manifestations of that remarkable process; it offers a picture of the concrete struggle between narrow-minded Austrian egotism embodied in formulas of negation and suspense which no system of logic can hold in coherent bonds, and a set of' fixed principles and rules of conduct cemented by national faith at the base of which lay equity and plighted troth. Baron Sydney Sonnino, who was responsible for the Italian part of the official correspondence, was peculiarly fitted for the work

setting forth the position of his country as affected by the Triple Alliance and as subsequently modified by Austria's failure to carry out the obligations which that instrument imposed on her. His qualifications were six years' experience in Italian legations and embassies of the ways of foreign diplomacy, a passion for detail which enabled him quickly to master the bearings of a problem from which he had long stood aloof, a rare public spirit and unquestioned personal probity. And all his communications from December 9th, 1914, down to May 3rd, 1915, inspire one with respect for the reserve, dignity, and moral integrity of Italy's Minister and for the force of the pleas which he advanced in favour of the special thesis which had been formulated by his predecessor.

But the Green Book affords us at most interesting glimpses of dialectical thrust and parry, and an amazing instance of the denseness of Austrian diplomacy. We search its pages in vain for an attempt to examine Italy's relations with Austria and Germany

VOL. XCVIII.

N.S.

B

in their fundamental and comprehensive bearings. None of the official communications goes to the roots of things, still less does the Minister announce cr imply the decisive fact that these roots had been loosened long before hy Austria’s corrosive anti-Italian machinations. Yet it was mainly because of this sundering of interests, and despite the seeming sincerity of the tone of the official discussion, that the conclusion seemed to me to be foregone from the first, nay before Baron Sonnino had ever signed one of the despatches. And Italy's partnership with the Central Empires was bereft of its last shred of justification when the European conflict was unchained, and might aptly be likened to a hollowed tree whose leaves were still green, but whose trunk the first fierce gust that blew would sweep from the ground. And the war of nations was not merely a blast, but a whirlwind. Moreover, the issues in the Green Book are narrow, and the forensic arguments, dealing with a single aspect of a vast problem, and that the least momentous, could carry their expounders no further than the expediency of granting or the right of withholding this or that strip of territory and left wholly untouched the higher spiritual grounds on which the Italian people, as distinguished even from its trusty leaders, has since courageously taken its stand. Baron Sonnino, indeed, expressly admitted to his Austrian colleague that the consensus of public opinion in Italy favoured neutrality, and that only Austria's refusal to gratify Italy's ambitions in the Balkans and the Adriatic would cause a grave reaction. What he and his colleagues were seemingly unaware of was that a potent principle of fermentation had already begun to stir the nation, and that this fermentation, none the less active that it was largely inarticulate, was slowly working the most momentous change that that people has undergone in modern times.

Two distinct elements lay at the bottom of Italy's quarrel with Austria. One of these was the grounded conviction that the Treaty which regulated their alliance had been perfidiously twisted to her detriment, and the other was the pent-up element of indignation against the Empire whose uniform policy, whether it assumed the garb of friendship or of rivalry, had been steadily directed to the permanent crippling of the young Latin State. This moral element, reinforced by sympathy for Belgium and a profound sense of the duty of a civilised people towards its brethren, was one of the main motive powers of that inner Italy of which neither Sonnino nor Giolitti appear to have had any inkling; of the nucleus of the regenerate nation which had been

(1) Green Book. Sonnino's despatch of December 9th, 1914, p. 2.

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The Fortnightly Review, Том 104