might be that in the
meantime adroit measures and good luck would brush away these
disagreeable phenomena. And he would then be rightly looked upon as one
who had deserved well of his country. So he set about the task with such
a thoroughness that he turned not alone the thoughts of men, but their
heads. Professor Italo Giglioli addressed a letter to _The New Europe_
in which he said that he was claiming now not the territories given by
the Treaty of London, but considerably more. He wanted all Dalmatia,
down to Kotor. In foreign hands, he said, Dalmatia would be an eternal
danger, and besides: "What in Dalmatia is not Italian is barbaric!" It
was a melancholy spectacle to see a man of Giglioli's reputation saying
that Dubrovnik, the refuge of Slav culture in the age of darkness and
the place in which Slav literature so gloriously arose, was, forsooth,
throughout its history always Italian in culture and in literature.
"Among thinking people in Italy," proclaims the Professor, "there are
indeed but few who will abandon to the Balkan processes a region and a
people which have always been possessed by Italian culture and which
constitute the necessary wall of Italy and Western Europe against the
inroads of the half-barbaric East." He protests that it is ridiculous of
_The New Europe_ to assert that the secret Treaty of London is supported
by a tiny, discredited band of Italians; and indeed that Review has
regretfully to acknowledge that many of his countrymen have been swept
off their feet and carried onward in the gale of popular enthusiasm.
Giglioli ends by asking that his name be removed from the list of _The
New Europe's_ collaborators. In vain does the _The New Europe_ say that
the Professor's programme must involve a war between Italians and
Yugoslavs. "We must be prepared for a new war," said the _Secolo_ on
January 12. "The Italians who absolutely demand the conquest of Dalmatia
must have the courage to demand that the demobilization of our Army
should be suspended, and to say so very clearly." And the _Corriere
della Sera_ warned Orlando of the consequences if he took no steps to
silence the mad voices. "No one knows better," it wrote, "than the
Minister of the Interior, who is also Premier, that on the other coast
Italy claims that part of Dalmatia which was assigned to her by the
Treaty of London, but not more.... If the Government definitely claims
and demands the whole of Dalmatia, then the agitation is justif