Italy gave two reasons for her demand.  First, she declared it incompatible with her own vital interests that both shores of the strait between Corfu and the mainland should pass into the hands of the same power, because the combination of both coasts and the channel between them offered a site for a naval base that might dominate the mouth of the Adriatic.  Secondly, she maintained that the native Albanian speech of the Epirots proved their Albanian nationality, and that it was unjust to the new Albanian state to exclude from it the most prosperous and civilized branch of the Albanian nation.  Neither argument is cogent.

The first argument could easily be met by the neutralization of the Corfu straits,[1] and it is also considerably weakened by the fact that the position which really commands the mouth of the Adriatic from the eastern side is not the Corfu channel beyond it but the magnificent bay of Avlona just within its narrowest section, and this is a Moslem district to which the Epirots have never laid claim, and which would therefore in any case fall within the Albanian frontier.  The second argument is almost ludicrous.  The destiny of Epirus is not primarily the concern of the other Albanians, of for that matter of the Greeks, but of the Epirots themselves, and it is hard to see how their nationality can be defined except in terms of their own conscious and expressed desire; for a nation is simply a group of men inspired by a common will to co-operate for certain purposes, and cannot be brought into existence by the external manipulation of any specific objective factors, but solely by the inward subjective impulse of its constituents.  It was a travesty of justice to put the Orthodox Epirots at the mercy of a Moslem majority (which had been massacring them the year before) on the ground that they happened to speak the same language.  The hardship was aggravated by the fact that all the routes connecting Epirus with the outer world run through Yannina and Salonika, from which the new frontier sundered her; while great natural barriers separate her from Avlona and Durazzo, with which the same frontier so ironically signalled her union.

[Footnote 1:  Corfu itself is neutralized already by the agreement under which Great Britain transferred the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1863.]

The award of the powers roused great indignation in Greece, but Venezelos was strong enough to secure that it should scrupulously be respected; and the ‘correct attitude’ which he inflexibly maintained has finally won its reward.  As soon as the decision of the powers was announced, the Epirots determined to help themselves.  They raised a militia, and asserted their independence so successfully, that they compelled the Prince of Wied, the first (and perhaps the last) ruler of the new ‘Albania’, to give them home rule in matters of police and education, and to recognise Greek as the official language for their local administration.  They ensured observance