light-heartedly, but it is impossible for Italy to limit herself only to
the Trentino, as that would not give her a satisfactory military
frontier. From that point of view, the basin of Bolzano (Bozen) is as
strictly necessary to Italy as the Rhine is to France."

No one has been more zealous in the cause of Italy than I have been; no
one has been more whole-heartedly with the Italians in their splendid
efforts to recover the lands to which they are justly entitled; no one
more thoroughly realizes the agonies of apprehension which Italy has
suffered from the insecurity of her northern borders, or has been more
keenly alive to the grim but silent struggle which has been waged
between her statesmen and her soldiers as to whether the broad
statesmanship which aims at international good-feeling and abstract
justice, or the narrower and more selfish policy dictated by military
necessity, should govern the delimitation of her new frontiers. But,
because I am a friend of Italy, and because I wish her well, I view with
grave misgivings the wisdom of thus creating, within her own borders, a
new _terra irredenta_; I question the quality of statesmanship which
insists on including within the Italian body politic an alien and
irreconcilable minority which will probably always be a latent source of
trouble, one which may, as the result of some unforseen irritation,
break into an open sore. It would seem to me that Italy, in annexing the
Upper Adige, is storing up for herself precisely the same troubles which
Austria did when she held against their will the Italians of the
Trentino, or as Germany did when, in order to give herself a strategic
frontier, she annexed Alsace and Lorraine. When Italy puts forward the
argument that she must hold everything up to the Brenner because of her
fear of invasion by the puny and bankrupt little state which is all that
is left of the Austrian Empire, she is but weakening her case. Her
soundest excuse for the annexation of this region lies in her fear that