ttacked by many as connoting
a departure from principle, but the deviation was more apparent than
real, for under all the wrappings of idealistic catchwords lay the
primeval doctrine of force. The only substantial difference between the
old system and the new was to be found in the wielders of the force and
the ends to which they intended to apply it. Force remains the granite
foundation of the new ordering, as it had been of the old. But its
employment, it was believed, would be different in the future from what
it had been in the past. Concentrated in the hands of the
English-speaking peoples, it would become so formidable a weapon that it
need never be actually wielded. Possession of overwhelmingly superior
strength would suffice to enforce obedience to the decrees of its
possessors, which always will, it is assumed, be inspired by equity. An
actual trial of strength would be obviated, therefore, at least so long
as the relative military and economic conditions of the world states
underwent no sensible change. To this extent the war specter would be
exorcised and trying abuses abolished.

That those views were expressly formulated and thrown into the clauses
of a secret program is unlikely. But it seems to be a fact that the
general outlines of such a policy were conceived and tacitly adhered to.
These outlines governed the action of the two world-arbiters, not only
in the dictatorial decrees issued in the name of political idealism and
its Fourteen Points, which were so bitterly resented as oppressive by
Italy, Rumania, Jugoslavia, Poland, and Greece, but likewise in those
other concessions which scandalized the political puritans and gladdened
the hearts of the French, the Japanese, the Jugoslavs, and the Jews. The
dictatorial decrees were inspired by the delegates' fundamental aims,
the concessions by their tactical needs--the former, therefore, were
meant to be permanent, the latter transient.

All other explanations of the Italian crisis, however well they may fit
certain of its phases, are, when applied to the pith of the matter,
beside the mark. Even if it were true, as the dramatist, Sem Benelli,
wrote, that "President Wilson evidently considers our people as on the
plane of an African colony, dominated by the will of a few ambitious
men," that would not account for the tenacious determination with which
the President held to his slighted theory.

Italy's position in Europe was in many respects peculiar. Me