By slow degrees the sentiments of the Italian nation underwent a disquieting change.  All parties and classes united in stigmatizing the behavior of the Allies in terms which even the literary eminence of the poet d’Annunzio could not induce the censors to let pass.  “The Peace Treaty,” wrote Italy’s most influential journal, “and its correlate forbode for the near future the Continental hegemony of France countersigned by the Anglo-American alliance."[233] Another widely circulated and respected organ described the policy of the Entente as a solvent of the social fabric, constructive in words, corrosive in acts, “mischievous if ever there was a mischievous policy.  For while raising hopes and whetting appetites, it does nothing to satisfy them; on the contrary, it does much to disappoint them.  In words—­a struggle for liberty, for nations, for the equality of peoples and classes, for the well-being of all; in acts—­the suppression of the most elementary and constitutional liberty, the overlordship of certain nations based on the humiliation of others, the division of peoples into exploiters and exploited—­the sharpening of social differences—­the destruction of collective wealth, and its accumulation in a few blood-stained hands, universal misery, and hunger."[234]

Although it is well understood that Italy’s defeat at the Conference was largely the handiwork of President Wilson, the resentment of the Italian nation chose for its immediate objects the representatives of France and Britain.  The American “associates” were strangers, here to-day and gone to-morrow, but the Allies remain, and if their attitude toward Italy, it was argued, had been different, if their loyalty had been real, she would have fared proportionately as well as they, whatever the American statesmen might have said or done.

The Italian press breathed fiery wrath against its French ally, who so often at the Conference had met Italy’s solicitations with the odious word “impossible.”  Even moderate organs of public opinion gave free vent to estimates of France’s policy and anticipations of its consequences which disturbed the equanimity of European statesmen.  “It is impossible,” one of these journals wrote, “for France to become the absolute despot of Europe without Italy, much less against Italy.  What transcended the powers of Richelieu, who was a lion and fox combined, and was beyond the reach of Bonaparte, who was both an eagle and a serpent, cannot be achieved by “Tiger” Clemenceau in circumstances so much less favorable than those of yore.  We, it is true, are isolated, but then France is not precisely embarrassed by the choice of friends.”  The peace was described as “Franco-Slav domination with its headquarters in Prague, and a branch office in Agram.”  M. Clemenceau was openly charged with striving after the hegemony of the Continent for his country by separating Germany from Austria and surrounding her with a ring of Slav states—­Poland, Jugoslavia, Czechoslovakia,