How that alliance came to be made, and remade, against the sympathies and aspirations of a free people is one of the mysteries of diplomacy which Italian history has yet to solve. Perhaps there was corruption; perhaps there was nothing worse than honest blundering; perhaps the frequent spectacular visits to Rome of the Kaiser William (who is almost Oriental in his “sense of the theatre,” and knows better, perhaps, than any European sovereign since Napoleon how to apply it to real life) played upon the eyes of the Italian race, always susceptible to grandiose exhibitions of power and splendour. But we cannot forget the old Austrian sore, and we remember what Antonelli is reported to have said to Pius IX before the outbreak of the campaign of 1859: “Holy Father, if the Italians do not go out to fight Austria, I believe, on my honour, the nuns will do so.” THE PART PLAYED BY ITALY The Triple Alliance was a secret document, but everybody knew that it required Italy to join with Austria and Germany in the event of their being compelled to engage in a defensive war. Therefore the first question for Italy was whether the war declared by Austria against Serbia and by Germany against Belgium, although apparently aggressive, was in reality defensive. There was a further question for Italy--what would happen to her if she decided against her Allies? She did decide against them, thereby giving the lie direct to the Harnacks, Hauptmanns, Ballins, and von Bülows who had been telling the neutral nations that the war had been forced upon Germany. By all the laws of nations Germany and Austria ought then, if they had honestly believed their own story, to have declared war on Italy. They preferred to wheedle her, to try to buy her, bribe her, corrupt her, body and soul. They failed. After flooding the peninsula with lying literature, directed chiefly against ourselves, Germany sent back to the Italian capital its most astute statesman, who was married to a much-admired Italian woman. It was all in vain. Italy knew her own mind and had made reckoning with her own heart. She had begun with contempt for the nation which could invade Serbia, under the pretence of avenging the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand, and with loathing for the other nation which could violate Belgium after it had sworn to protect her, and now she went on to hatred and horror of the perpetrators of the outrages in Liège, in Louvain, and in Rheims, that were scorching men’s eyes in the name of war.