t of the city, would give
a startling result. The Italians of Rieka are convinced that their
existence depends on good relations with the Yugoslavs. They wish the
town and port to be independent under the sovereignty of the League of
Nations. This I have recently been told by a large number of Italians in
Rieka who are obliged, in public, to support d'Annunzio." Signor Nitti
must have been aware that the voice of the C.N.I. was very far from
being the voice of Rieka. The C.N.I. had reasons of their own for
wishing to postpone the day when their arbitrary powers would come to an
end and a legal Government, whether that of the League of Nations or of
the people's will or of Italy or of Yugoslavia, be established.

SOME OF RIEKA'S SCANDALS

Owing to the complaints of innumerable citizens the C.N.I. had nominated
a Commission to inquire into the pillage of the former Austrian stores
at Rieka--this town, as we have mentioned, had been the base for the
Albanian army--and the findings of that Commission displayed the
culpability of the most prominent members of the C.N.I. This document
was for a long time unknown to the general public, but was afterwards
published in Italy by Signor Riccardo Zanella, himself an Italian and an
ex-deputy and ex-mayor of Rieka. There was, by the way, an article in
the Triest paper, _Il Lavoratore_, at the beginning of September 1920,
wherein one Tercilio Borghese, a former member of d'Annunzio's army,
confesses that on June 21, he was ordered by d'Annunzio, as also by
Colonel Sani and Captain Baldassari, to get Signor Zanella in some way
out of the world. Hinko Camero and Angelo Marzi['c], his fellow-workers,
had likewise to be removed; and for this purpose Borghese says that the
Colonel provided him with a revolver. He was also to try to seize any
compromising documents. But he was forced by his conscience to reveal
everything to Zanella.... Now this confession may be true or false, but
the Triest "fascisti" (Nationalists) believed in it, for they issued a
placard on which they called Borghese a traitor and threatened him with
death. "He who after November 1918 returns to the martyred town," writes
Signor Zanella, "is simply stupefied in beholding that those personages
who now strut on the political scene, burning with the most ardent
Italian patriotism, are the same who until the eve of Vittorio Veneto
were the most unbending, the most eloquent and the most devoted
partisans and servants of