The facts here are sufficiently simple and well known. Italy was concerned, in the first place, to liberate the 400,000 Italians in the Trentino, to which she had every right; and secondly, to secure a strong natural frontier on her most exposed side, on the side looking towards Germany. The frontier which she asked for, and which the Conference accorded her, was the crest of the highest east-to-west ranges in the Tyrol--the line of the Oetzthaler and Zillerthaler Alps and the Hohe Tauern--a line which cuts the great historic north-to-south corridor through the Tyrol, not in its wider southern section, but at its highest and narrowest point, the Brenner Pass. The new frontier is about the best one that could be drawn from the geographic standpoint, since it follows the natural line of division, the watershed between the rivers that flow south to the Adriatic, and those that flow north and east to the Danube. It also affords the strongest strategic barrier that Italy could find. It has, however, the drawback of including in Italy a compact German-speaking population of about 250,000; old German towns like Botzen, Meran, Brixen, and various localities famous in German song and story, the homes of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolese hero of 1809, and of Walther von der Vogelweide. Whether among the several parallel ranges farther south than the Brenner a frontier might not have been found which would have afforded Italy tolerable guarantees of security without involving the necessity of her absorbing so many Germans, is a question on which a great deal might be said. Among the experts at Paris opinions were divided on that subject, but in the Supreme Council, already somewhat embarrassed, perhaps, by the Adriatic question, the Italian view prevailed. If the national principle has been somewhat violated to Austria’s detriment in the south, it has been applied in her favor in the east. The adjacent border zone of Hungary had a solid German-speaking population; and, at a time when Hungary was being broken up along ethnographic lines, it seemed only fair to unite these Germans to Austria. Alone among the states of the defeated Alliance, Austria has thus emerged from the War with at least one territorial acquisition. At any rate, under the new conditions one can no longer speak of ‘happy Austria’ or of the ‘gay Viennese.’ Almost ruined by the War and its aftermath, weighed down by the financial charges imposed by the Peace Treaty, prostrated by the separation of the heart of the old monarchy from most of the provinces which had nourished and sustained it, suffering terribly at present and utterly despondent about her future, Austria has become the Niobe of nations. Today she is forced to compete with Armenia as a supplicant for the charity of the world.