But one would prefer to regard the settlement of the Hungarian problem made at Paris not as a matter of retributive justice, but rather as a sweeping application of the principle of nationality in the region where that principle had been most trampled upon; as the only kind of settlement in any way acceptable to those peoples who were in the majority in the old Hungarian state; and therefore as the only plan that could restore peace to this sorely distracted part of Europe. I now pass to the questions concerning the territories on the Adriatic coast, part of which formerly belonged to Austria and part to Hungary. All of these territories are in dispute between Italy and Yugo-Slavia; and their problems taken together make up the so-called Adriatic question, which among all the problems that the Peace Conference has had to face has shown itself the most delicate, difficult, and interminable. The Adriatic question relates mainly to the following five territories: (1) The province or ‘crownland’ of Gorizia and Gradisca; (2) Trieste; (3) Istria; (4) Dalmatia--these four all formerly parts of Austria; and (5) Fiume, which belonged to Hungary. In addition some small bits of the provinces of Carinthia and Carniola have been involved in the dispute. All these territories have a certain geographic unity. They form a long, narrow fringe of coastland and islands, rigidly separated from the Yugo-Slav hinterland by the successive chains of the Julian Alps, the Karst, the Velebite Mountains, and the Dinaric Alps. These ranges, which are the continuation of the Italian Alps, seem to detach the eastern coast of the Adriatic from the world beyond the mountains and to orient it towards the opposite western shore, of which it appears to be, in many respects, only an extension. Indeed, in its climate, its physical aspect, its vegetation; in the customs and mode of life of its inhabitants; its seafaring and commercial activities, and its age-long reliance upon communications by water rather than by land, this littoral region resembles Italy much more than the Balkans.