Nevertheless it is not Fascist Italy, it is not the real friends of Italy, who will ever find fault with the ideas that brought Italy to join the Allies and face the tragic ordeal of war. For it was the war, the mystery of death faced by millions of her sons, which has made Italy a moral value, and a first-rate historical factor in the present political world. The select minority that was the brain and soul of the Risorgimento has disappeared; national consciousness now fills the individual consciences of the majority, and this extension of the national conscience had nothing to do with the extended vote; it is a consequence of the war. Personality, national personality means actual unity of conscience and will just as much as individual personality. Such personality has effectively been born in Italy out of the ordeal that meant direct or indirect sacrifice from every man and woman, for nobody would doubt the reality of the object for which his sacrifice was made. Italy and her star were, up to 1915, a good theme for popular or academic literature, but when it had required blood and tears from every home it became that which could easily be transformed into the most awful and objective reality. Hence the religiousness of their new realisation of Italy. It loomed indeed awful, like an obscure divinity, when it called men who did not quite know why they had to fight to the supreme sacrifice. One has to keep in mind how little civilisation and barbarity, pompous words, meant to the Italian lower class, and how little Sicilians or Neapolitans cared for Trento and Trieste. After Caporetto it was a different matter. The traditional foe was on their land, and by then they had realised what war meant. Therefore, one may say that their national soul was tempered between Caporetto and the Armistice, and that only then they became an ethical value, a spiritual entity or rather personality fit to play a part in the constructive history of the world. The point cannot be over-stated. It is only through the war that the spiritual reality of the country was enabled to strike roots in the souls of the labourers and middle class men, ceasing thereby to be the monopoly of a small intellectual and aristocratic minority. The subjects of the King of Italy all became Italian citizens, and the people was finally one in its full independence; it was, indeed, the last act of the Risorgimento. Few foreigners, no foreigner so to speak, had in 1915 a fair idea of what was the state of mind of the Italians and still less of what could be their mentality. It will not be too daring to say that in this ignorance lay the cause of all the diplomatic difficulties and of the fallacious appreciations of what that country could give, or has actually given, with the consequent mutual vexations that were to strain the relations between the Allies and Italy.