Then suddenly a ray of light shone through the clouds. The ever-cheerful Signor Nitti, after a conference with Lloyd George and Clemenceau--no Yugoslav being present, whereas Signor Nitti was both pleader and judge--was authorized to say that the December memorandum had been shelved. Terms more favourable to Italy were substituted and the Yugoslav Government were told they must accept them. One of these terms was to modify the Wilson line in Istria, ostensibly for the protection of Triest and in reality to dominate the railway line Rieka-St. Peter-Ljubljana; another of the terms was to present Italy with that narrow corridor which in December the Allies had so peremptorily disallowed. No wonder the American Ambassador in France gave his warning. "You are going," he said, "much too far and much too quickly. President Wilson cannot keep pace with you." The French Government was passing through a period of change, and these new proposals, as was underlined in the _Temps_,[47] emanated from London. Mr. Lloyd George, who may have wished for Signor Nitti's aid in his offensive against France in the Russian and Turkish questions, was this time very badly served by his intuition. The Yugoslavs were ordered to accept the new proposals or to submit to the application of the Treaty of London, that secret and abandoned instrument which--to mention only one of the objections against it--provided for complete Yugoslav sovereignty over Rieka, a solution that, in view of Italy's inflamed public opinion, was for the time being impracticable. And while the Yugoslavs were told that Rieka would, under the Treaty of London, fall to them, no details were given as to how d'Annunzio was to be removed. "Nous sommes dans l'incohérence," as Clemenceau used to say of the political condition of France before the war. Seeing that the Italian Government and the C.N.I. had shown themselves so powerless, were France and England going to turn the poet out? But Mr. Lloyd George was more fortunate than Disraeli, whose error in the question of Bosnia and Herzegovina had had such dire results; on February 13, a very firm note was issued by President Wilson, which compelled France and Great Britain to withdraw from the position they had taken up. Wilson would have nothing to do with the notorious corridor, though Clemenceau had said on January 13, to the Yugoslav delegates: "Si nous n'avions pas fait cette concession, nous n'avions pas eu le reste." "The American Government," said Wilson, "feels that it cannot sacrifice the principle for which it entered the war to gratify the improper ambition of one of its associates, Italy, to purchase a temporary appearance of calm in the Adriatic at the price of a future world conflagration." The rejoinder of the French and British Premiers was a trifle lame, and when they ventured to add that they could not believe that it was the purpose of the American people, as the President threatened, to retire from the treaty with Germany and the