This sharp and timely admonition was the preamble of a motion.  The Conference was just then about to separate for a “well-earned holiday,” during which its members might renew their spent energies and return in October to resume their labors, the peoples in the meanwhile bearing the cost in blood and substance.  The Italian delegate objected to any such break and adjured them to remain at their posts.  Why, he asked, should ill-starred Italy, which had already sustained so many and such painful losses, be condemned to sacrifice further enormous sums in order that the delegates who had been frittering away their time tackling irrelevant issues, and endeavoring to rule all Europe, might have a rest?  Why should they interrupt the sessions before making peace with Austria, with Hungary, with Bulgaria, with Turkey, and enabling Italy to return to normal life?  Why should time and opportunity be given to the Turks and Kurds for the massacre of Armenian men, women, and children?  This candid reminder is said to have had a sobering effect on the versatile delegates yearning for a holiday.  The situation that evoked it will arouse the passing wonder of level-headed men.

It is worth recording that such was the atmosphere of suspicion among the delegates that the motives for this holiday were believed by some to be less the need of repose than an unavowable desire to give time to the Hapsburgs to recover the Crown of St. Stephen as the first step toward seizing that of Austria.[293] The Austrians desired exemption from the obligation to make reparations and pay crushing taxes, and one of the delegates, with a leaning for that country, was not averse to the idea.  As the states that arose on the ruins of the Hapsburg monarchy were not considered enemies by the Conference, it was suggested that Austria herself should enjoy the same distinction.  But the Italian plenipotentiaries objected and Signor Tittoni asked, “Will it perhaps be asserted that there was no enemy against whom we Italians fought for three years and a half, losing half a million slain and incurring a debt of eighty thousand millions?”

A French journal, touching on this Austrian problem, wrote:[294] “Austria-Hungary has been killed and now France is striving to raise it to life again.  But Italy is furiously opposed to everything that might lead to an understanding among the new states formed out of the old possessions of the Hapsburgs.  That, in fact, is why our transalpine allies were so favorable to the union of Austria with Germany.  France on her side, whose one overruling thought is to reduce her vanquished enemy to the most complete impotence, France who is afraid of being afraid, will not tolerate an Austria joined to the German Federation.”  Here the principle of self-determination went for nothing.

Before the Conference had sat for a month it was angrily assailed by the peoples who had hoped so much from its love of justice—­Egyptians, Koreans, Irishmen from Ireland and from America, Albanians, Frenchmen from Mauritius and Syria, Moslems from Aderbeidjan, Persians, Tartars, Kirghizes, and a host of others, who have been aptly likened to the halt and maimed among the nations waiting round the diplomatic Pool of Siloam for the miracle of the moving of the waters that never came.[295]