ITALY AND THE ADRIATIC.

"NOBODY threatened Italy-neither Austria-Hungary nor Germany. Without a drop of blood flowing and without the life of a single Italian being endangered, Italy could have secured the long list of concessions which I recently read to the House : territory in the Tyrol and on the Isonzo as far as the Italian speech is heard; satisfaction of the national aspirations in Trieste; a free hand in Albania; and the valuable port of Vallona. Why have they not taken it?"

These remarkable words have been recently uttered by the Imperial Chancellor, Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg, in the Reichstag, dealing with the entry of Italy into the war.

People in every part of the world have probably put the same question to themselves: "Why have they not taken it? Why on earth has Italy entered into this terrible war, and this after more than a ten months' experience of what ruin and havoc war has brought to a large portion of Europe-to Belgium, to France, to Russia, and to Serbia-she has willingly and even enthusiastically cast the die? Why has she accepted all the ominous consequences of a struggle fought against very redoubtable enemies, who now, more than ever, seem far from beaten?"

Some, very few happily, have dared to express the opinion even in this country that Italy's intervention, belated and undesirable, was due to sheer imperialistic motives. Never a statement has carried within itself such an evident contradiction. If Italy had really been moved by selfish and grasping reasons, her neutrality, openly declared at the beginning of August, would have been offered to the highest bidder; and Italy would have spared herself all the ghastly miseries and uncertainties of war. A French writer said, with reason, that by her present intervention Italy could hardly do more for the cause of justice and civilisation than what she had done already by her declaration of neutrality, which saved not only Paris but the whole of Europe. The reasons of Italy's neutrality as well as the reasons of her present intervention spring from the same source. Never has a source been purer, and never a neutrality and a war have been inspired by loftier aspirations and interests, than those which have guided the Italian Government and are guiding now the fortunes of the Italian Army and Navy towards the Alps and the sea, towards the barriers that nature and history have given her.

The German and Austrian statesmen, as well as the very few mischief-makers who are trying now to misinterpret Italy's aims and ideals, are denouncing her as the violator of the principle of nationality upon which her first Risorgimento was based, just because she wishes to liberate those of her children who are now under Austrian tyrannic rule. "The constant policy of Austria has aimed for many years at the destruction of Italian nationality and civilisation along the Adriatic coast." These words by Baron Sonnino, the Italian Foreign Minister, are from the circular despatch sent on May 23rd to the representatives of Italy abroad. Very seldom a war has been declared upon a clearer and graver indictment. This is supported in the official document by a short quotation of facts and tendencies which ought already to be well known to the whole world, and which ought to be seriously meditated upon by German statesmen and Pan-Slav agents all over Europe.

"The progressive replacing," wrote Baron Sonnino, "of officials of Italian race by officials of other nationality, and the artificial immigration of hundreds of families of other nationalities, which have taken place at Trieste, the decrees aiming at exclusion from the town of Trieste and the industries exploited by the town of Italian employees, the denationalisation of the principal services of the town of Trieste and the diminution of municipal powers; the obstacles of all sorts placed in the way of the institution of new national schools; the denationalisation of the judicial administration; the question of a university which formed the subject of diplomatic negotiations; and the denationalisation of shipping companies, were preparing intensively policies tending to favour another nationality to the detriment of the Italians. The unjustified and constantly increasing methodical expulsion of Italian subjects and the constant policy of Austria towards her Italian populations were not solely due to internal reasons or reasons connected with the different nationalities struggling in the monarchy. It, on the contrary, appeared to be largely inspired by a strong sentiment of hostility and hatred towards Italy which prevailed in some circles close to the Austrian Government, and had a determining influence upon its decisions." This constant policy of "the destruction of Italian nationality and civilisation along the Adriatic coasts," so solemnly stated by the Italian Consulta, although being the gravest point of accusation in the long list of grievances against her hereditary foe, Austria, for which Italy is now waging her war, has been frequently, and sometimes even intentionally, overlooked by some overzealous champions of the boundless aspirations of minor nationalities, which in their past, and especially in the present,

history have not always revealed themselves as the too scrupulous champions of the principle of nationality.

The disclosures of the official Green Book ought to have cleared up any possible uncertainties or misconstructions as to Italy's motives and as to the highmindedness that has once more inspired Italian statesmanship.

Italy has never once, through all the thirty-two years of her alliance with the Central Empires, swerved from the path of duty and faith towards her obligations. Nor was this limited to an adherence to the letter of the Triple Alliance. It carried out the spirit with which it was formed, namely, the preservation of the peace and of the political equilibrium of Europe, and she has carried out her mission by firmness and moderation, by a firmness which has not been shaken even in the face of the most painful sacrifices.

These "most painful sacrifices" to which Italy has submitted herself for nearly fifty years of her recent history ought not to be lost sight of. The reasons of the present Italian war, as well as the open affirmation of the Italian aspirations and rights, are deeply rooted in those "sacrifices" of the new and not yet completed nation, as well as in the long and indescribable sufferings of the Italians of the eastern shore of the Adriatic and more especially of the Italians of Dalmatia-through the iniquitous denationalising policy pursued by Austria.

Of all the problems which had been left unsolved by the unification of the country in 1870, and especially those concerning its present unnatural and most dangerous frontiers on the Alps and across the Adriatic (frontiers imposed upon Italy by Austria after her cession of Lombardy and Venetia, in 1859 and 1866), the historical problem of the Adriatic has proved to be the most deeply felt by the whole nation. After having submitted with resignation to the yoke of the Triple Alliance, which through its intimate combination of Berlin with Vienna has always appeared to the eyes of some of us as the continuation of the Holy Roman Germanic Empire, the Italians felt that the time had come to settle it once and for all by restoring Italy's position in that narrow sea which had been hers for twenty centuries until Campoformio (1797), or even until July, 1866, when Italy's fleet was beaten by Tegethoff at Lissa, and the Austrians, in order to exclude Italy from her sea and Russia from the Balkans, had begun to denationalise Dalmatia and Istria by pursuing their policy of oppressing Italians in favour of the Croatians. Real Croatians, Croatians of Croatia, having been the strenuous supporters of Austria and of the Hapsburg dynasty in 1848 against the Hungarian struggle for national independence, have bitterly

Their

felt in the last decades what racial oppression meant.
brethren or cousins, however, the Croatians of Dalmatia, faithful
and blind tools of Austrian dynastic policy of the denationalisation
of the Adriatic, have made Italians of the eastern coast of that
sea feel what national hatred and tyranny meant. Without the
unfortunate result of the battle of Lissa, without the Austrian
defeat of Sadowa, Austrian policy of the Drang nach Osten, as
the unconscious forerunner of Germany towards Salonika and the
Egean Sea, would have never probably tempted the shrewd and
far-reaching mind of Bismarck. And as the national existence
of the Italians of Dalmatia and Istria has most bitterly been tried
in consequence of Lissa and of the still unaccomplished unity of
Italy, the relations between Italians and Slavs on those Adriatic
shores-where there have always been two nationalities and two
languages at least since the seventh century, and where the Latin
and Italian element is the sole and autochthonous element of the
country and of the country's history, civilisation, and art-would
have probably continued to be the most cordial and close, as they
have always been throughout the past centuries. Without
Austria's venomous policy of the divide et impera, the Slavs, we
are sure, will prove loyal and friendly in the future, as they have
always proved before Austrian interference, towards the Italian
natives of those shores, who have even if they are, as in
Dalmatia, for instance, a minority-national rights as well as
the Slavs.

But Austria, after Königgraetz, had turned her attention from the north to the south and the east. Prussia and the Hohenzollerns, having barred her influence for ever in her former provinces, Austria with her Hapsburg dynasty began to pursue the Drang nach Osten policy. This policy meant the total exclusion of Italy from her historic sea; but it meant especially the violent denationalisation of Dalmatia, of Fiume, of Istria, and of Trieste. Croatians and Slovenes, the people loyal to Hapsburg and to the Catholicism, had to become under Austrian rule the new masters of the Italian Sea. An Austrian emissary, the Baron von Pfluck, was sent from Vienna to Dalmatia in 1870 in order to start the new order of things planned by Vienna. The Italian majority of the Dalmatian representatives in the Viennese Parliament and in the Diet of Zara was upset from one day to the other. All the Italian municipalities fell into the hands of the Croatians. All the Italian schools (and this was the biggest crime) were unscrupulously suppressed from one day to the other. Only Zara was allowed to keep one; and this is the only reason, perhaps, why Zara, my native town, has been able to remain,

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notwithstanding her many Slav schools, the most Italian of all the Italian towns.

With the abolition of all the political rights of the Italians, with the suppression of all the Italian schools, with the total elimination of the Italian language, which was the official one till only three years ago, from all the offices, it is not surprising if Austria's statistics of the population in Dalmatia and in Istria have dared to reduce the figures of the Italians to an extraordinarily low percentage. The Austrian statistical lies, ad usum Croatorium, however, have not only been accepted without reserve by the few jealous authorities on the Jugo-Slav question in this country, but have been very carefully exaggerated in order to impress more deeply the British public opinion.

Statistics and census, however, count very little if manipulated by notorious forgers of the truth, as is the case with the Austrian officials. They count even less in countries in which, like Dalmatia and Istria, every sign of civilisation belongs to the autochthonous population of the very narrow coast between the sea and the Dinaric Alps, in countries in which the Italian language and the Venetian dialect are nearly exclusively spoken in every civilised family, even in those belonging to the most fanatic haters of Italians, in countries in which the powerful resistance of the martyred Italians of those provinces is clearly proving to-day to the whole world that Austrian mission of hatred and tyranny has finished for ever, if Italy be victorious, in the Adriatic.

Men of every party in Italy are resolved to-day therefore that Italy's national, geographical, and strategical unity should finally be accomplished. Without restoring her position in Dalmatia and Istria, it is universally felt Italy would perpetuate her present conditions of unrest and insecurity in the Adriatic, where her actual frontiers, from Venice down to Brindisi and Santa Maria d'Leuca, are indefensible and purely artificial, where every town and village on the opposite shore is a harmonic imitation and continuation in the architecture as well as in the language and the costumes of Venice.

Dalmatia and Istria have never, neither in geography nor in history, belonged to the Balkans. Those two provinces, secluded by the three nearly impervious chains of the Carso, of the Velebit, and of the Dinaric Alps, from the Slav lands of the Balkans, will be, as they have always been, the natural bridges between Italy and the Balkan people, between the Western civilisation and the East.

With feelings of dismay and surprise, therefore, Italians, to whatever party they may belong, have recently seen the unfair