The peril of insisting upon a reasonable decision as to frontiers, a decision in accordance with principles, was demonstrated by the storm Mr. Wilson caused when he tried to defend the South Slavs against Italy. Italy had her secret treaty with the other Entente Powers. The Treaty of London, signed in 1915, had been the price paid for Italian intervention. In their desperate need the Entente Powers secretly sold out Serbia, the nation in whose defense they had begun the war, to Italy; and Italy had taken the precaution of occupying militarily what she had been promised more than three years earlier, when the armistice with Vienna was signed. In addition Italy claimed Fiume, which had been outside of the 1915 agreement. But this seemed reasonable to her, in view of modifications of that agreement elsewhere. President Wilson was given clearly to understand that his principles had nothing whatever to do with the Austrian treaty. Similarly, Rumania had her secret intervention bargain, made with the Entente Powers in 1916. And France sponsored the most extreme claims of Poles, Czechs, and Rumanians, because she intended to form of these peoples a _bloc_ to take the place of Russia in the new alliance against Germany. In making the Treaties of St.-Germain and Trianon, therefore, border districts were bartered with no regard whatever either for the wishes or economic necessities of their inhabitants. By these treaties Czechoslovakia was created; Poland, Rumania, and Serbia were made as large as possible and given contiguous frontiers and direct railway communications; and Italy did unto the Austrians and South Slavs what she had for half a century been complaining of the Austrians doing unto her. The result is a patchwork of states, none satisfied, and all reduced to political unrest and economic chaos. The two formerly dominant peoples of the Hapsburg Empire, the Austrians and the Hungarians, were given a large dose of the medicine they had long been prescribing to their subject peoples. Invoking the sacred principle of nationality, Italy triumphantly completed her unification by adding the “unredeemed Italians” of the Hapsburg Empire. But with them she insisted on incorporating in Greater Italy hundreds of thousands of Austrians and South Slavs. The principles invoked here were historical and strategical. The Adriatic must become an Italian lake. To accomplish this and to have a strategic frontier, nearly 300,000 Austrians of the Tyrol were separated from their compatriots, and a like number of Slovenes, Croats, and Dalmatians were prevented from joining the Greater Serbia of their dreams.