The author had already, in 1915, spent two years in Italy and studied a good deal; yet youth did not allow at the time more than an intuition of the fact—the conviction of which was to be acquired by ten years of experience, observation and study. The Allies expected too much of a generation whose fathers had fought the Wars of Independence with sheer heroism and with material means that England or France would have considered hardly fit for a colonial campaign. On the other hand, they overlooked the possibilities of a people who had in front of itself the whole of its national future, an historical mentality which was likely to keep it from the sterilising conception of positivism, abstract idealism or materialism, once it should have reached a clear sense of its own secular reality, a Lacedemonian frugality, and finally intellectual forces not inferior to those of the Kantian and Hegelian Germany. The Italians for their part had to overcome a radical scepticism. They had a very poor opinion of what military achievement they could get out of their lower class, their traditional financial deficiency made them fear economic destruction almost more than the life sacrifice of so many men. Munitions were a nightmare, renewal of their coal and wheat stocks a puzzling problem. They had to trust blindly to the Allies. In fact it is a wonder that they should have overcome the sense of despondency that might have paralysed them altogether. Thus it happened that the Italians did actually achieve far more than they expected, far surpassing their own opinion of their military efficiency; whilst doing far less than the Allies had expected. Hence no end of misunderstandings. They thought that they had surprised us by an unsuspected revelation of force and efficiency and they ascribed our rather disappointed attitude to envy and fear of their new power. Before the war they thought too little of themselves, because, as we have said, they were still nationally unconscious, while the British and French governments overrated the forces that they might contribute without acknowledging their ambitions to develop the latent forces of which they were conscious. Such misunderstanding was to breed all the difficulties that we knew of at the end of the war. The Italians had been victorious in war, they had triumphed over their enemies, and above all over themselves, since they had asserted their reality as an actual political value. But they were defeated in peace, or at least were on the very point of being defeated and destroyed by peace. * * * * *