The world did not understand why Italy waited until May, 1915, before declaring war on Austria, but the reason was plain. Exhausted by their war in Tripoli the Italians had neither munitions nor food and their soldiers even lacked uniforms. It took nine months, therefore, to prepare for war. Another year passed before Italy could undertake to face Germany; for the Germans had so thoroughly honeycombed Italy's commerce, industry and finances that it took two years for the Italians to oust the Germans and to train men to replace them. By these delays, which seemed to the outside world suspicious, Italy did another service. If she had plunged in prematurely as the Allies and her friends besought her to do she would have been speedily overwhelmed. Imagine what a blow that would have been to the Allied Cause, especially coming so early in the War. Her prudence saved Europe this disaster. Had Northern Italy become enslaved the Teutonic forces could have threatened France on the southeast, and with Genoa as a port they could have made the Mediterranean much more perilous for the Allied ships and transportation. It is not for the United States, a country of over one hundred million population, and yet checked if not intimidated by a small body of German plotters and their accomplices, to look scornfully on Italy's long deferred entrance into the War. The Pro-German element in Italy was relatively stronger than here and the elements which composed it--the Blacks, the Germanized financiers and business men, many nobles and the Vatican--openly opposed making war on the Kaiser. In spite of all these difficulties, in spite of the very great danger she ran, because if the Germans win they threaten to restore the Papal temporal power, and the Austrians, Italy stood by the Allies. For her to be untrue tot he cause of Democracy would be almost unthinkable; the great men who made her a united nation were all in different ways apostles of Democracy. Mazzini was its preacher; Garibaldi fought for it on many fields, in South America, in Italy and in France; Victor Emmanuel was the first democratic sovereign in Europe in the nineteenth century; Cavour, beyond all other statesmen of his age, believed in Liberty, religious, social and political and applied it to his vast work of transforming thirty million Italians out of Feudalism, and the stunting effects of autocracy into a nation of democrats.