that if she had frankly started the negotiations with this essential
concession, it would have made any real difference. I think not. Her
maximum was insufficient: it nowhere provided for that defensible
frontier, and it was but a meager satisfaction of those other aspirations
of nationality which she despised. It still left a good many Italians
outside of the national fold, and it still left Italy exposed to whatever
strong hand might gain control on the east shores of the Adriatic. At all
events, in this last moment of the eleventh hour, if the ambassadors had
been authorized to yield all that Baron Sonnino had begun by asking, it
would not have kept Italy from the war--now.

Elsewhere I have dealt with the legal and strategic questions involved
in the "Green Book." These diplomatic briefs, White or Yellow or Orange
or Green, seem more important at the moment than in perspective. They
are all we observers have of definite reason to think upon. But nations
do not go to war for the reasons assigned in them--nothing is clearer
than that. Like the lengthy briefs in some famous law case, they are
but the intellectual counters that men use to mask their passions, their
instincts, their faiths. According to the briefs both sides should win
and neither. And the blanks between the lines of these diplomatic briefs
are often more significant than the printed words.

While Baron Macchio and Prince von Buelow, the Ballplatz and
Friedrichstrasse, Baron Sonnino and his colleagues were making the
substance of the "Green Book," the people of Italy were deciding the
momentous question on their own grounds. The spirit of all Italy was
roused. Italian patriotism gave the answer.

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