Why did the King not send for Giovanni Giolitti, the one statesman who under ordinary circumstances might have expected a summons? Neither Giolitti nor any of his intimates was invited to form a cabinet and reëstablish constitutional government. Nothing would appear to be more natural than that the leader of the Opposition, controlling a majority of the Deputies, who avowedly represented a policy opposed to that of the ministers who had resigned, should be asked himself to take charge. But Giolitti was never asked, and daily the shouting in the streets grew louder, more menacing, and the mood of the public more tense. Nothing was plainer than that if Giolitti had a majority of the Deputies, the people were not for him and his policies. The House of Savoy, as the King so well put it, rules by expressing the will of the people. Each day it was more evident what that will was. Giolitti, the master politician, was being outplayed by mere honest men. They had used him--as Germany had used him--to try out the temper of the nation. With him they drew the _neutralista_ and pro-German fire beforehand, prudently, not to be defeated by hostile party criticism in the Chamber. And when they got through with the politician, they threw him out: literally they intimated through the Minister of Public Safety that they would not be responsible any longer for his personal safety. There was nothing for him but to go--before Parliament had assembled! As Italy seethed and boiled, threatening to break into revolutionary violence, while the King received one respectable nonentity after another, who each time after a very brief consideration declined the proffered responsibility, Giolitti must have thought that the life of the politician is not an easy one. He was stoned when he appeared on the streets in his motor. He had to sneak out of the city at dawn that last day. Where was all the _neutralista_ sentiment so evident the first months of the war? And where was the German influence supposed to be so strong in the upper commercial classes? Germans as well as Austrians were scurrying out of Italy as fast as they could. Their insinuating multiplicity was proved by the numbers of shuttered shops. More hotels along the Pincian, whose "Swiss" managers found it prudent to retire over the Alps, were closed. Angry crowds swarmed about the Austrian and German consulates, also the embassies when they could get through the cordons of troops on the Piazza Colonna. Noisy Rome these days might very well give rise to pessimistic reflections on the folly of popular government to politicians like Giolitti and the Prince von Bülow, whose obviously prudent policies were thus being upset by the "voice of the piazza" led by a very literary poet! No doubt at this moment they would point to Ferdinand of Bulgaria and the King of Greece as enlightened monarchs who know how to secure their own safety by ignoring the will of their peoples.