intimated through the Minister of Public Safety that they would not be
responsible any longer for his personal safety. There was nothing for
him but to go--before Parliament had assembled!

As Italy seethed and boiled, threatening to break into revolutionary
violence, while the King received one respectable nonentity after
another, who each time after a very brief consideration declined the
proffered responsibility, Giolitti must have thought that the life of
the politician is not an easy one. He was stoned when he appeared on
the streets in his motor. He had to sneak out of the city at dawn that
last day. Where was all the _neutralista_ sentiment so evident the first
months of the war? And where was the German influence supposed to be so
strong in the upper commercial classes? Germans as well as Austrians
were scurrying out of Italy as fast as they could. Their insinuating
multiplicity was proved by the numbers of shuttered shops. More hotels
along the Pincian, whose "Swiss" managers found it prudent to retire
over the Alps, were closed. Angry crowds swarmed about the Austrian
and German consulates, also the embassies when they could get through
the cordons of troops on the Piazza Colonna. Noisy Rome these days might
very well give rise to pessimistic reflections on the folly of popular
government to politicians like Giolitti and the Prince von Buelow, whose
obviously prudent policies were thus being upset by the "voice of the
piazza" led by a very literary poet! No doubt at this moment they would
point to Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the King of Greece as enlightened
monarchs who know how to secure their own safety by ignoring the will
of their peoples. But the end for Ferdinand and Constantine is not yet.

* * * * *

The trouble with the politician as with the trained diplomat is that