was then regarded
as the sign of being a first-class power; and that Italy should be
tricked out of Tunis seemed to advertise to the world that she was not
a first-class power. For her protests availed nothing.

The Italians did not know then, nor for a long time afterward, that
_the French seizure of Tunis was directly due to Bismarck's
instigation_. Lord Salisbury, also, who seems to have been in the
plot, approved it for his own reasons. Bismarck's motives were
plain--he wished to entangle France further in African colonial
ventures. It had taken forty years, many thousand soldiers' lives, and
great expenditures for France to make Algiers reasonably safe. As
Tunis would increase the French burdens, it followed that every
regiment needed there would diminish the strength of the armies with
which France guarded herself from a German attack on her eastern
frontier.

Having roused the Italians to wrath by this ruse, Bismarck had no
difficulty in persuading them to join the Triple Alliance. He hardly
needed to suggest that, if they had felt anxious at the possibility of
French hostile pressure before, they had an even greater reason for
such anxiety now that the French controlled the Mediterranean south of
them. We may suspect also that Bismarck pointed out, as a special
inducement, that, if Italy joined the alliance, she would be free from
the likelihood of an attack by Austria.

Accordingly, in 1882, Italy entered into partnership with Germany and
Austria for mutual defense. The only powers likely to assail them at
that time were France and Russia; for England was still isolated, and
Bismarck, although he felt a strong antipathy toward the English, was
too shrewd a statesman either to scorn or to provoke them. As late as
1889, he approved of Italy's seeking an _entente_ with England.

At the time Italy joined the Triplice she felt, no doubt, an unwonted
sense of security. Were not two powerful empires standing by, ready
to defend her? Her wounded pride, also, was solaced by her admission
on equal terms into such a league. Neither France nor any other could
henceforth taunt her with being a second-rate power.

The immediate result of the alliance was the spread of German
commercial and financial enterprises throughout the peninsula, and the
steady growth of Italian bad feeling toward France. A large group of
Italians made Gallophobia their guiding principle. They remembered
that, in the sixties, Napoleon III. had m