encourage and assist them, if she will maintain their superb roads and
improve their railway communications, then I believe that a few years, a
very few, will see them thronged by even greater crowds of visitors than
before the war. And the fact that in the future there will be more
American, English, French and Italian visitors, and fewer Germans, will
make South Tyrol a far pleasanter place to travel in.

The Italians are fully alive to the gravity of the problems which
confront them in attempting to assimilate a body of people, as
courageous, as sturdily independent, and as tenacious of their
traditional independence as these Tyrolean mountaineers--descendants of
those peasants, remember, who, led by Andreas Hofer, successfully defied
the dictates of Napoleon. Though I think that she is going about the
business of assimilating these unwilling subjects with tact and common
sense, I do not envy Italy her task. Generally speaking, the sympathy of
the world is always with a weak people as opposed to a strong one, as
England discovered when she attempted to impose her rule upon the Boers.
Once let the Italian administration of the Upper Adige permit itself to
be provoked into undue harshness (and there will be ample provocation;
be certain of that); once let an impatient and over-zealous
governor-general attempt to bend these stubborn mountaineers too
abruptly to his will; let the local Italian officials provide the
slightest excuse for charges of injustice or oppression, and Italy will
have on her hands in Tyrol far graver troubles than those brought on by
her adventure in Tripolitania.

Though the Government has announced that Italian must become the
official language of the newly acquired region, and that used in its
schools, no attempt will be made to root out the German tongue or to
tamper with the local usages and customs. The upper valleys, where