The Libyan enterprise, undertaken on an impulse, against the opinion of Italy’s allies, Austria and Germany, against the wish of England and France, is a very serious political responsibility for Italy.

The European War was the consequence of a long series of movements, aspirations, agitations.  It cannot be denied, and it is recognized by clear-thinking men like Lloyd George, that France and England too have by their actions taken on themselves their part in the serious responsibility.  To say that in the past they had never thought of war is to say a thing not true.  And there is no doubt that all the diplomatic documents published before and during the War show in Russia, above all, a situation which inevitably would soon lead to war.  In the Balkans, especially in Serbia, Russia was pursuing a cynical and shameless policy of corruption, nourishing and exciting every ferment of revolt against Austria-Hungary.  Russian policy in Serbia was really criminal.  Everyone in Germany was convinced that Russia was preparing for war.  The Tsar’s pacificist ideas were of no importance whatever.  In absolute monarchies it is an illusion to think that the sovereign, though apparently an autocrat, acts in accordance with his own views.  His views are almost invariably those of the people round him; he does not even receive news in its true form, but in the form given it by officials.  Russia was an unwieldy giant who had shown signs of madness long before the actual revolution.  It is impossible that a collective madness such as that which has had possession of Russia for three years could be produced on the spur of the moment; the regime of autocracy contained in itself the germs of Bolshevism and violence.  Bolshevism cannot properly be judged by Western notions; it is not a revolutionary movement of the people; it is, as I have said before, the religious fanaticism of the Eastern Orthodox rising from the dead body of Tsarist despotism.  Bolshevism, centralizing and bureaucratic, follows the same lines as the imperial policy of almost every Tsar.

Undoubtedly the greatest responsibility for the War lies on Germany.  If it has not to bear all the responsibility, as the treaties claim, it has to bear the largest share; and the responsibility lies, rather than on the shoulders of the Emperor and the quite ordinary men who surrounded him, on those of the military caste and some great industrial groups.  The crazy writings of General von Bernhardi and other scandalous publications of the same sort expressed, more than just theoretical views, the real hopes and tendencies of the whole military caste.  It is true enough that there existed in Germany a real democratic society under the control of the civil government, but there was the military caste too, with privileges in social life and a special position in the life of the State.  This caste was educated in the conception of violence as the means of power and grandeur.  When a country