of bitter sarcasms.  President Wilson, they complained, ignored his far-resonant principle of self-determination when Japan presented her claim for Shantung, but refused to swerve from it when Italy relied on her treaty rights in Dalmatia.  And when the inhabitants of Fiume voted for union with the mother country, the President abandoned that principle and gave judgment for Jugoslavia on other grounds.  He was right, but disappointing, they observed, when he told his fellow-citizens that his presence in Europe was indispensable in order to interpret his conceptions, for no other rational being could have construed them thus.

The withdrawal of the Italian delegates was construed as an act of insubordination, and punished as such.  The Marquis de Viti de Varche has since disclosed the fact that the Allied governments forthwith reduced the credits accorded to Italy during hostilities, whereupon hardships and distress were aggravated and the peasantry over a large area of the country suffered intensely.[227] For Italy is more dependent on her allies than ever, owing to the sacrifices which she offered up during the war, and she was made to feel her dependence painfully.  The military assistance which they had received from her was fraught with financial and economic consequences which have not yet been realized by the unfortunate people who must endure them.  Italy at the close of hostilities was burdened with a foreign debt of twenty milliards of lire, an internal debt of fifty millards, and a paper circulation four times more than what it was in pre-war days.[228] Raw materials were exhausted, traffic and production were stagnant, navigation had almost ceased, and the expenditure of the state had risen to eleven milliards a year.[229]

According to the figures published by the Statistical Society of Berne, the general rise in prices attributed to the war hit Italy much harder than any of her allies.[230] The consequences of this and other perturbations were sinister and immediate.  The nation, bereft of what it had been taught to regard as its right, humiliated in the persons of its chiefs, subjected to foreign guidance, insufficiently clad, underfed, and with no tangible grounds for expecting speedy improvement, was seething with discontent.  Frequent strikes merely aggravated the general suffering, which finally led to riots, risings, and the shedding of blood.  The economic, political, and moral crisis was unprecedented.  The men who drew Italy into the war were held up to public opprobrium because in the imagination of the people the victory had cost them more and brought them in less than neutrality would have done.  One of the principal orators of the Opposition, in a trenchant discourse in the Italian Parliament, said, “The Salandra-Sonnino Cabinet led Italy into the war blindfolded."[231]