aid, the attainment of unity and
independence for the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was and must be alike
the reason and the certain issue of our War.... Italy felt that if
Serbia had been swallowed up by that monstrous Empire--itself a vassal
of the German Empire--her own economic expansion and political
independence would have received a mortal blow. And so she was on
Serbia's side, first in neutrality, then in intervention.... Those who
only see, in the formation of the Yugoslav State, a sympathetic or
antipathetic episode of the War, or a subsidiary effect of it, have
failed to detect its inner meaning." As for the Treaty of London which
was concluded against the enemy, it was not to be regarded as intangible
against a friendly people. By special grants of autonomy, as at Zadar,
or by arrangements between the two States, he would see the language and
culture of all the trans-Adriatic sons of Italy assured. He warned his
countrymen lest, in order to meet the peril of a German-Slav alliance
against them, they should have to subordinate themselves to France and
England, and be their proteges instead of their real Allies--a situation
not unlike that of the Triple Alliance when Germany protected them
against the ever-imminent attack of Austria.... "But perhaps the
Yugoslavs will not be grateful or show an equal spirit of conciliation?
Certainly they will then have no vital interests to push against Italy,
and in the long run sentiments follow interests." There was, in fact,
throughout the speech only one questionable passage, that in which he
said that "if Italy renounced the annexation of Dalmatia she might
obtain from Yugoslavia or from the Peace Conference the joy of pressing
to her heart the most Italian city of Rieka, which the Treaty of London
renounced." This may have been a sop to Cerberus. But Bissolati's
appeals to justice and to wisdom fell upon the same stony ground as his
demonstration that Dalmatia's strategic value is very slight from a
defensive point of view to those who possess Pola, Valona and the outer
islands. There is a school of reasonable Italians, such as Giuseppe
Prezzolini, who for strategic reasons asked for the isle of Vis. Mazzini
himself, after 1866, found it necessary, for the same reasons, that Vis
should be Italian, since it is the key of the Adriatic. Some of us
thought that it might have been feasible to follow the precedent of
Port Mahon, which Great Britain occupied without exercising sov