While France was ruining the German people’s sources of life, the peoples who had fought most ferociously against Italy became, through the War, friendly nations, and every aspiration of Italy appeared directed to lessen the prestige of the new friends and allies.

The territories annexed to Italy have a small economic value.

For more than thirty years Italy had sold a large part of her richest agricultural produce to Germany and had imported a considerable share of her raw materials from Russia.  Since the War she has found herself in a state of regular isolation.  A large part of the Italian Press, which repeats at haphazard the commonest themes of the French Press instead of wishing for a more intense revival of commercial relations with Germany, frightens the ignorant public with stories of German penetration; and the very plutocracy in France and Italy—­though not to the same extent in Italy—­abandons itself to the identical error.  So to-day we find spread throughout the peninsula a sense of lively discontent which is conducive to a wider acceptance of the exaggerations of the Socialists and the Fascists.  But the phenomenon is a transitory one.

Italy had no feeling of rancour against the German people.  She entered the War against German Imperialism, and cannot now follow any imperialistic policy.  Indeed, in the face of the imperialistic competitions which have followed the War, Italy finds herself in a state of profound psychological uneasiness.

France worries herself about one people only, since as a matter of fact she has only one warlike race at her frontiers:  Germany.  Italy’s frontiers touch France, the German peoples, the Slav races.  It is, therefore, her interest to approve a democratic policy which allows no one of the group of combatants to take up a position of superiority.  The true Italian nationalist policy consists in being against all excessive nationalisms, and nothing is more harmful to Italy’s policy than the abandonment of those democratic principles in the name of which she arose and by which she lives.  If the policy of justice is a moral duty for the other nations, for Italy it is a necessity of existence.  The Italian people has a clear vision of these facts, notwithstanding a certain section of her Press and notwithstanding the exaggerations of certain excited parties arisen from the ashes of the War.  And therefore her uneasiness is great.  While other countries have an economic crisis, Italy experiences, in addition, a mental crisis, but one with which she will be able to cope.

France, however, is in a much more difficult situation, and her policy is still a result of her anxieties.  All the violences against Germany were, until the day before yesterday, an effect of hatred; to-day they derive from dread.  Moral ideas have for nations a still greater value than wealth.  France had until the other day the prestige of her democratic institutions.  All of us who detested the Hohenzollern