believe in the potency of all established and dominating power whatever
it may be. But these "leading citizens" fortunately are a minority in
any democracy. They do most of the negotiating, much of the talking, but
when the crisis comes,--and the issue is out in the open for every one
to see,--they have to reckon with the instinctive majority, whose
emotional nature has not been dwarfed. That majority is not necessarily
the "rabble," the irresponsible and ignorant mob of the piazza as the
German Chancellor sees them: it is the great human army of "little
people," normal, simple, for the most part honest, whose selfish stake
in the community is not large enough to stifle their deepest instincts.
In them, I believe, lies the real idealism of any nation, also its plain
virtues and its abiding strength.

The Italian situation was a difficult one, obviously. Public opinion
had been perplexed. There were the classes I have just mentioned, by
interest and temperament either pro-German or honestly neutral. There
was the radical mob that the year before had temporarily turned Italy
into republics. There was the unreliable South. And the hard-ground
peasants who feared, justly, heavier taxes and the further hardships
of war. And there were the millions of honest but undecided Italians
who hated Teutonism and all its deeds, who were intelligent enough to
realize the exposed situation of Italy, who felt the call of blood for
the "unredeemed," and the vaguer but none the less powerful call of
civilization from their northern kin--above all who responded to the
fervid historical idealism of the poet voicing the longing of their
souls to become once more the mighty nation they had been. These were
the people whose change of hearts and minds surprised Giolitti and the
Germans.

What had been going on in those hearts of the plain people all these