This language was not understood by the Italian people.  For them the sacredness of treaties was a dogma not to be questioned, and least of all by the champion of right, justice, and good faith.  They had welcomed the new order preached by the American statesman, but were unable to reconcile it with the tearing up of existing conventions, the repudiation of legal rights, the dissolution of alliances.  In particular their treaty with France, Britain, and Russia had contributed materially to the victory over the common enemy, had in fact saved the Allies.  “It was Italy’s intervention,” said the chief of the Austrian General Staff, Conrad von Hoetzendorff, “that brought about the disaster.  Without that the Central Empires would infallibly have won the war."[195] And there is no reason to doubt his assertion.  In truth Italy had done all she had promised to the Allies, and more.  She had contributed materially to save France—­wholly gratuitously.  It was also her neutrality, which she could have bartered, but did not,[196] that turned the scale at Bucharest against the military intervention of Rumania on the side of the Teutons.[197] And without the neutrality of both these countries at the outset of hostilities the course of the struggle and of European history would have been widely different from what they have been.  And now that the Allies had achieved their aim they were to refuse to perform their part of the compact in the name, too, of a moral principle from the operation of which three great Powers were dispensed.  That was the light in which the matter appeared to the unsophisticated mind of the average Italian, and not to him alone.  Others accustomed to abstract reasoning asked whether the best preparation for the future regime of right and justice, and all that these imply, is to transgress existing rights and violate ordinary justice, and what difference there is between the demoralizing influence of this procedure and that of professional Bolshevists.  There was but one adequate answer to this objection, and it consisted in the whole-hearted and rigid application of the Wilsonian tenets to all nations without exception.  But even the author of these tenets did not venture to make it.

The essence of the territorial question lay in the disposal of the eastern shore of the Adriatic.[198] The Jugoslavs claimed all Istria and Dalmatia, and based their claim partly on the principle of nationalities and partly on the vital necessity of having outlets on that sea, and in particular Fiume, the most important of them all, which they described as essentially Croatian and indispensable as a port.  The Italian delegates, joining issue with the Jugoslavs, and claiming a section of the seaboard and Fiume, argued that the greatest part of the East Adriatic shore would still remain Croatian, together with all the ports of the Croatian coast and others in southern Dalmatia—­in a word, twelve ports, including Spalato and Ragusa, and a thousand kilometers of seaboard.  The Jugoslavs