trous methods had been
provoked. But it was not too late. A Foreign Minister not blind to what
was happening in foreign countries would have seen that if he valued the
goodwill of France and England and America--and this goodwill was a
necessity for the Italians--it was incumbent on him to modify his
politics. The British Press was not unanimous--all the prominent
publicists did not, like a gentleman a few months afterwards in the
_Spectator_, say that "if the Yugoslavs contemplated a possible war
against the Italians, by whose efforts and those of France and Great
Britain they had so recently been liberated, then would the Southern
Slavs be guilty of monstrous folly and ingratitude." Baron Sonnino might
have apprehended that more knowledge of the Yugoslav-Italian situation
would produce among the Allies more hostility; he should have known that
average Frenchmen do not buy their favourite newspaper for what it says
on foreign politics, and that the _Journal des Debats_ and the
_Humanite_ have many followers who rarely read them. And, above all
else, he should have seen that the Americans, who had not signed the
Treaty of London, would decline to lend themselves to the enforcement of
an antiquated pact which was so grievously incongruous with Justice, to
say nothing of the Fourteen Points of Mr. Wilson. But Sonnino threw all
these considerations to the winds. He should have reconciled himself to
the fact that his London Treaty, if for no other reason than that it was
a secret one, belonged to a different age and was really dead; his
refusal to bury it was making him unpopular with the neighbours. One
does not expect a politician to be quite consistent, and Baron Sonnino
is, after all, not the same man who in 1881 declared that to claim
Triest as a right would be an exaggeration of the principle of
nationalities; but he should not in 1918 have been deaf to the words
which he considered of such weight when he wrote them in 1915 that he
caused them to be printed in a Green Book. "The monarchy of Savoy," he
said in a telegram to the Duke of Avarna on February 15 of that year,
"has its staunchest root in the fact that it personifies the national
ideals." Baron Sonnino was rallying to the House of Karageorgevi['c]
most of those among the Croats and Slovenes who, for some reason or
other, had been hesitating; for King Peter personified the national
ideals which the Baron was endeavouring to throttle. As Mr. Wickham
Steed pointe