t the
disaster. Without that the Central Empires would infallibly have won the
war."[195] And there is no reason to doubt his assertion. In truth Italy
had done all she had promised to the Allies, and more. She had
contributed materially to save France--wholly gratuitously. It was also
her neutrality, which she could have bartered, but did not,[196] that
turned the scale at Bucharest against the military intervention of
Rumania on the side of the Teutons.[197] And without the neutrality of
both these countries at the outset of hostilities the course of the
struggle and of European history would have been widely different from
what they have been. And now that the Allies had achieved their aim they
were to refuse to perform their part of the compact in the name, too, of
a moral principle from the operation of which three great Powers were
dispensed. That was the light in which the matter appeared to the
unsophisticated mind of the average Italian, and not to him alone.
Others accustomed to abstract reasoning asked whether the best
preparation for the future regime of right and justice, and all that
these imply, is to transgress existing rights and violate ordinary
justice, and what difference there is between the demoralizing influence
of this procedure and that of professional Bolshevists. There was but
one adequate answer to this objection, and it consisted in the
whole-hearted and rigid application of the Wilsonian tenets to all
nations without exception. But even the author of these tenets did not
venture to make it.

The essence of the territorial question lay in the disposal of the
eastern shore of the Adriatic.[198] The Jugoslavs claimed all Istria and
Dalmatia, and based their claim partly on the principle of nationalities
and partly on the vital necessity of having outlets on that sea, and in
particular Fiume, the most important of them all, which they described
as essentially Croatian and indispensable as a port. The Italian
delegates, joining issue with the Jugoslavs, and claiming a section of
the seaboard and Fiume, argued that the greatest part of the East
Adriatic shore would still remain Croatian, together with all the ports
of the Croatian coast and others in southern Dalmatia--in a word, twelve
ports, including Spalato and Ragusa, and a thousand kilometers of
seaboard. The Jugoslavs met this assertion with the objection that the
outlets in question were inaccessible, all except Fiume and Metkovitch.
As