Under such circumstances what was the government for the political classes? A coach in a land of brigands; for the most popular elements a coach to be attacked on the roadside; for the better elements, a coach they had a right to drive, whip in hand. Every man stood up against the government either begging or threatening; so that it is no wonder that the next generation of gentlemen mostly stood aside and shunned politics, seeing that at best the men who mixed in it were moved by selfish ambition, or were a vulgar crew of Arrivists and mischief plotters. Abstention on the one side was, however, a form of selfishness, as harmful to the state as Arrivism on the other. Provided they kept clean hands, the abstentionists did not mind that the national conscience should be either corrupted or lulled to sleep by the people whose interest it was that it should slumber. Obviously their withdrawal from public life had the same cause as the ambition and the unscrupulous opportunism of the others. After fifty years of heroic life and feelings, they wanted to attend to their own business and enjoy life privately. Public cares and struggles had been the order of the day for half a century, and public conscience relaxed; with a sudden eclipse of national consciousness, Italy lost the pride of autonomy in foreign affairs and ceased to realise in deeds the part it had to play in the history of the world. Its foreign policy is the best index of the spiritual conditions of the period, and according to the historian, Michele Rosi (who is neither a Fascist nor a Liberal, nor a Socialist, because he is a man born to put together facts, historical facts, and live a passionate life among them instead of living it among men) the line of conduct of Italian foreign ministers at this stage can be described as the policy of men who distrusted themselves more then they distrusted others. Rosi does not say so, but the facts he puts together do say so. Of this the best proof was the Triple Alliance. In 1873 Marco Minghetti went with King Vittorio Emmanuele II to Berlin and to Vienna to discuss a second alliance with Germany and more cordial relations with the Austrian court. The followers of Garibaldi raised an outcry as they saw in this a sure proof that the King of Italy was giving up Trento and Trieste, whereas it had never been thought in the past that Rome or Venice might have been so abandoned. In Parliament, however, the Left was quite willing to lean on the shoulder of Germany, and was submitting even to an alliance with Austria, although some of the members had dark remembrances of its rule. But at the same time they flirted with France, who was going more and more to the Left, and whose anti-clericalism seemed to cheer on their own anti-Catholicism.