When the war broke out involving all the great European Powers the public generally believed Italy to be bound to back the Triple Alliance. Immediately the Socialists and the extreme Left stirred up a campaign on the ground that the Italian people were pacifists and supporters of international Socialism. It is not easy to say whether, even had it been pledged to do so, the government would have been able to obtain the support of the nation to enter war immediately. Morally the people were not ready to accept a war without attack or without provocation from somebody.[3] On the first of August Italy declared neutrality and on that day the _Giornale d’Italia_ clearly stated that such neutrality was not like that of Holland or Switzerland, and above all should not be considered as definitive. The tenor of the press showed on which side an eventual intervention of Italy would take place. Everybody was either neutralist or interventionist, but nobody was in favour of an intervention on the side of the Triple Alliance. The most Germanophile never went farther than neutralism; all that they hoped and prayed for was the non-intervention of Italy. The argument of the neutralist papers was based on a statement of the economic and individual sacrifices that war would involve, and a plea that Italy could not yet be fit to enter such a conflict. Anti-idealists or sceptics (as many of the sons of the heroes of the Risorgimento were) they all agreed to regard life as the supreme value and material well-being as its natural frame. Of war they only saw the destructive side. They were certainly logical. A conception of life so thoroughly materialist could not permit of a higher view of war; for war certainly does destroy life and if it can and does promote an improvement in the material conditions of life it is only as a remote consequence of the class changes, and the industrial and commercial stimulus carried in its trail. The immediate consequences are certainly unsettling and paralysing to business. On the other hand the interventionists had as the basis of their argument a set of platitudes the abstract ideology of which was nearly as objectionable as the materialism of their opponents. France, Belgium and England were identified with right and civilisation, Germany and Austria with wrong and barbarity. Therefore Italy should have the honour of being among the righteous avengers of liberty and civilisation against their traditional foe, barbarity. This opposition of two abstractions to the materialism of their opponents betrayed the ideologic heirloom of the eighteenth century, so dear to the self-admiring minds of the educated mob. For there is such a thing as an educated mob and it is sure to be on the side that offers a high sounding rhetoric, a certain number of stock phrases and a fascinating ideology. It is so much easier to accept ready-made ideas than to work them out from actual reality.