which was noisily proclaimed by Germany to the world. Chancellor
Bethmann-Hollweg's sneer concerning the "voice of the piazza having
prevailed" revealed not merely pique, but also a complete
misunderstanding, a Teutonic misapprehension of the underlying motives
that led to an inevitable step. No one who witnessed, as I did at close
range, the swift unfolding of the drama which ended on May 23 in a
declaration of war, can accept such a base or trivial reading of the
matter. Like all things human the psychology of Italy's action was
complex, woven in an intricate pattern, nevertheless at its base simple
and inevitable, granted the fundamental racial postulates. Old impulses
stirred in the Italians as well as new. Italy repeated according to the
modern formula the ancient defiance by her Roman forefathers of the
Teutonic danger. _"Fuori i barbari"_--out with the barbarians--has lain
in the blood of Italy for two thousand years, to be roused to a fresh
heat of hate by outraged Belgium, by invaded France, by the Lusitania
murders. Less conscious, perhaps, but not less mighty as a moving force
than this personal antagonism was the spiritual antagonism between the
Latin and the German, between the two visions of the world which the
German and the Latin imagine and seek to perpetuate. That in a large and
very real sense this world agony of war is the supreme struggle between
these two opposed traditions of civilization--a decision between two
competing forms of life--seems to me so obvious as to need no argument.
In such a struggle Italy must, by compulsion of historical tradition as
well as of political situation, take her part on the side of those who
from one angle or another are upholding with their lives the inheritance
of Rome against the pretensions of force--law, justice, mercy, beauty
against the dead weight of physical and material strength.

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