country, a significant mark of the popular sentiment being
the declaration of the Italian Socialists upon the reasons
of their inability to oppose the war. An equal source of
danger is the fact that the government feels that it no
longer controls the current of public opinion."

The whole drama of Italian intervention is summed up in these lines,
which explain it better than would the longest and most learned
commentaries.

The Italian government, restrained by a politic wisdom and prudence,
excessive, perhaps, but very excusable, did not wish for war. To the
utmost limits of patience, until its dignity and its sense of security
could bear no more, it did all that could be done to spare its people
the greatest calamity that can befall a land. It held out until it was
literally submerged and carried away by the flood of Germanophobia of
which the passage which I have quoted speaks. I witnessed the rising
of this flood. When I arrived in Milan, at the end of November, 1914,
to speak a few sentences at a charity-fête organized for the benefit
of the Belgian refugees, the hatred of Germany was already storing
itself up in men's hearts, but had not as yet come to the surface.
Here and there it did break out, but it was still fearful, circumspect
and hesitating. One felt it brewing, seething in the depths of men's
souls, but it seemed as yet to be feeling its way, to be reckoning
itself up, to be painfully attaining self-consciousness. When I
returned to Italy in March, 1915, I was amazed to behold the
unhoped-for height to which the invading flood had so swiftly risen.
That pious hatred, that necessary hatred, which in this case is merely
a magnificent passion for justice and humanity, had swept over
everything. It had come out into the full sunlight; it thrilled and