by Bismarck, gave some information (all that is known)
about this shadowy agreement.]

* * * * *

It will be well now to turn to the events which brought Italy into line
with the Central Powers and thus laid the foundation of the Triple
Alliance of to-day.

The complex and uninteresting annals of Italy after the completion of
her unity do not concern us here. The men whose achievements had
ennobled the struggle for independence passed away in quick succession
after the capture of Rome for the national cause. Mazzini died in March
1872 at Pisa, mourning that united Italy was so largely the outcome of
foreign help and monarchical bargainings. Garibaldi spent his last years
in fulminating against the Government of Victor Emmanuel. The
soldier-king himself passed away in January 1878, and his relentless
opponent, Pius IX., expired a month later. The accession of Umberto I.
and the election of Leo XIII. promised at first to assuage the feud
between the Vatican and the Quirinal, but neither the tact of the new
sovereign nor the personal suavity of the Pope brought about any real
change. Italy remained a prey to the schism between Church and State. A
further cause of weakness was the unfitness of many parts of the
Peninsula for constitutional rule. Naples and the South were a century
behind the North in all that made for civic efficiency, the taint of
favouritism and corruption having spread from the governing circles to
all classes of society. Clearly the time of wooing had been too short
and feverish to lead up to a placid married life.

During this period of debt and disenchantment came news of a slight
inflicted by the Latin sister of the North. France had seized Tunis, a
land on which Italian patriots looked as theirs by reversion, whereas
the exigencies of statecraft assigned it to the French. It seems that
during the Congress of Berlin (June-July 1878) Bismarck and Lord
Salisbury unofficially dropped suggestions that their Governments would
raise no objections to the occupation of Tunis by France. According to
de Blowitz, Bismarck there took an early opportunity of seeing Lord
Beaconsfield and of pointing out the folly of England quarrelling with
Russia, when she might arrange matters more peaceably and profitably
with her. England, said he, should let Russia have Constantinople and
take Egypt in exchange; "France would not prove inexorable--besides, one
might give her Tunis or Syria[