It is in the hour of great trial that our conscience shows us, as in a mirror, all our past shortcomings, and it admonishes us that we reap what we have sown. Reviewing the past, the Italian Government must have known that it could not have the unswerving loyalty of a people who for fifty years had been fed on promises, big words, and magniloquent speeches covering illiterateness, oppressive taxation, obstacles to activity, and necessity of emigration. It is not with words alone that one gives happiness to a nation and receives love and support. Emigration and Bolshevism are the two symptoms of the disease that threatens the nation. Nearly a million Italians emigrated in 1913, and socialism has a firmer footing in Italy than in any other country. Surely these facts have far-reaching significance. The conclusion is that there can be little doubt that men had to be called to the colors so as to manage them better with martial discipline. Possibly it was a wise measure and a necessary prologue to the rigid censorship and to Sacchi's decree, which was a kind of _lettre de cachet_. I have often asked myself, What is the Italian's most dominant characteristic? What is his most conspicuous idiosyncrasy? One day I answer it in one way, another in another. But on mature reflection I think it is that he believes what he wants to believe and that he does not trust any one implicitly. He trusts his own fellow citizen least of all. He says he trusts him, but when he puts him in a position of trust he puts somebody in to watch him and to report on him. The Italian has not that confidence in his fellow human beings that a normal man has in his honest wife, that a normal mother has in her dutiful child, that a normal lover has in his trusted _innamorata_. I am so prejudiced in the Italian's favor that I must defend even his infirmities. For centuries Italy was divided and weak, and countless times she has been the tool of the ambitious, the insatiate, and the predatory. She has been used over and over by more powerful nations as tongs to get their chestnuts out of the fire. For every favor she has received she has had to pay dearly, and she has learned by sad experience that promises are usually made of fragile material. Leaving out the treatment she received from France and England in the nineteenth century, more particularly during the years when she was big with nationality and unity, and during the period when she gave birth to these beloved terms, the treatment she received from these nations in 1911 and 1912, while she was waging the Libyan War, still rankles in her bosom. Despite Salisbury's promises and his parable of the stag, they recall England's disparagement of her initiative and of her conduct of her righteous War. They recall the sinister frenzy that France displayed when they took the S. S. _Carthage_ into one of their ports because they believed she was carrying aeroplanes to the Turks, and the S. S.