in a special article of the Triple Alliance,--the seventh,--under which
she had bound herself to grant compensations to Italy for any disturbance
of the Balkan situation. Austria, when she was brought to recognize this
commission of fault,--which was not until December, 1914, not seriously
until the close of January, 1915,--pretended that her blow at Serbia was
chastisement, not occupation. But it is absurd to assume that having
chastised the little Balkan state she would leave it free and independent.
It is true that in January Austrian troops were no longer in Balkan
territory, but that was not due to intention or desire! They had been
there, they are there now, and they will be there as long as the Teutonic
arms prevail. It is a game of chess: Italy knew the gambit as soon as
Austria moved against Serbia. The response she must have known also, but
she had not the power to move then. So she insisted pertinaciously on her
right under the seventh clause of the Triple Alliance to open negotiations
for "compensations" for Austria's aggression in the Balkans, and finally
with the assistance of Berlin compelled the reluctant Emperor to admit her
right.

These complexities of international chess, which the American mind
never seems able to grasp, are instinctively known by the man in the
street in Europe. Every one has learned the gambits: they do not have
to be explained, nor their importance demonstrated. The American can
profitably study those maps so liberally displayed in shop windows,
as I studied them for hours in default of anything better to do in
the drifting days of early May. The maps will show at a glance that
Italy's northern frontiers are so ingeniously drawn--by her hereditary
enemy--that her head is virtually in chancery, as every Italian knows
and as the whole world has now realized after four months of patient
picking by Italian troops at the outer set of Austrian locks. And there
is the Adriatic. When Austria made the frontier, the sea-power question