Italy was made to feel that France’s attitude towards her was systematically semi-hostile. No one act, excepting the concentration of the French fleet in the Mediterranean, was deemed radically serious, but the endless sequence of pin pricks was construed as evidence of a disposition which was as unfriendly as seemed compatible with neighbourly relations. Among these things, the protection of Italian religious communities in the East was taken by the Germans as the text for repeated diatribes against France for her unfriendly conduct towards her Latin sister. Atheistic France, it was sneeringly remarked, insists on protecting in the East the very communities which she has driven from her own territories in Europe, not because of the love she bears them, but by reason of her jealousy and hatred of Italy. I remember one dispute of the kind which arose about the house of an Italian religious congregation in Tripoli of Syria. All the members save one being Italians, and having demanded the protection of their own Government, were entitled to have it, in virtue of a convention on the subject between France and Italy a few years before. The French Ambassador in Rome was anxious to have the question put off indefinitely, although at bottom there was no question at all, seeing that the case had been provided for. During the negociations and discussions that needlessly went on for fully two years, Germany lost no opportunity to rub France’s unfriendliness into Italy’s memory, and to prove that Italy’s one natural ally is Austria-Hungary. These things are of yesterday, and it needs some little time to deaden the recollection of them. When the present war was on the point of breaking out, one of the first misstatements spread by the diplomacy of the two Prussianized allies was Italy’s promise to co-operate with them against France, in return for the stipulated cession to her--as her share of the spoils of war--of Tunis, Savoy, and Nice. That this proposal was to have been made is certain. Whether the intention was actually carried out I am unable to say. But the archives of the French Foreign Office possess an interesting and trustworthy report on the subject, only one item of which is erroneous, to the effect that Italy had succumbed to the temptation. Writing in the first half of June last on the subject of Italy’s foreign policy, I expressed myself in the following terms: