Bismarck writing: "Italy must not be numbered to-day among the
peace-loving and conservative Powers, who must reckon with this fact. . . .
We have much more ground to fear that Italy will join our adversaries
than to hope that she will unite with us, seeing that we have no more
inducements to offer her[257]."

[Footnote 256: _Politische Geschichte der Gegenwart_, for 1881, p. 176;
quoted by Lowe, _Life of Bismarck_, vol. ii. p. 133.]

[Footnote 257: _Bismarck: Some Secret Pages_, etc., vol. iii. p. 291.]

This frame of mind changed after the French acquisition of Tunis.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

should have been the feeling of MM. Waddington and Ferry when Bismarck
encouraged them to undertake that easiest but most expensive of
conquests. The nineteenth century offers, perhaps, no more successful
example of Macchiavellian statecraft. The estrangement of France and
Italy postponed at any rate for a whole generation, possibly for the
present age, that war of revenge in which up to the spring of 1881 the
French might easily have gained the help of Italy. Thenceforth they had
to reckon on her hostility. The irony of the situation was enhanced by
the fact that the Tunis affair, with the recriminations to which it led,
served to bring to power at Paris the very man who could best have
marshalled the French people against Germany.

Gambetta was the incarnation of the spirit of revenge. On more than one
occasion he had abstained from taking high office in the shifting
Ministries of the seventies; and it seems likely that by this
calculating coyness he sought to keep his influence intact, not for the
petty personal ends which have often been alleged, but rather with a
view to the more effective embattling of all the national energies
against Germany. Good-will to England and to the Latin peoples,
hostility to the Power which had torn Elsass-Lothringen from
France--such was the policy of Gambetta. He had therefore protested,
though in vain, against the expedition to Tunis; and now, on his
accession to power (November 9, 1881), he found Italy sullenly defiant,
while he and his Radical friends could expect no help from the new
autocrat of all the Russias. All hope of a war of revenge proved to be
futile; and he himself fell from power on January 26, 1882[258]. The
year to which he looked forward with high hopes proved to be singularly
fatal to the foes of Germany. The armed intervention of Britain in Egypt
turned