ITALY OUR FRIEND.
WE publish elsewhere an article which is an invitation to friendship between Great Britain and Italy, and we desire heartily to associate ourselves with the spirit in which it is written. It is a strange thing that it should be necessary at this time of day to argue the desirability and naturalness of Anglo-Italian friendship, for educated Englishmen have always been passionate admirers of Italy with her "fatal gift of beauty," and of the Italians themselves as an idealistic people who have fought their way in modern times towards a thoroughly liberal view and practice of life. Yet there is no doubt that Great Britain and Italy have been drifting apart. Greatest irony of all, this is the direct result of the war, of Italy's aoceptance of the common cause, in which she suffered to an extent that has never been properly appreciated in this country.
The return of Signor Giolitti to power in Italy is a token and proof of the revulsion of feeling in Italy. Shortly before she entered the war the Italians paraded the streets of their cities shouting " Morte a Giolitti ! " They did so because they wanted to take up arras against Germany without another moment's delay, and Signor Giolitti persistently preached the doctrine that Italy was commer- cially so dependent upon Germany that she could not afford to break with her. "A break,' said Signor Giolitti in effect, "will mean ruin. In finance and trade it is still our fate to be a tied house .of Germany. Even if the Entente Powers were to win the war they could not make good to Italy what financially and commercially she stands to lose." " Morte a Giolitti! "was still the reply, of the Italian cities. Italy entered the war. But now that Italy is not very far from ruin, now that she cannot get or cannot pay for coal to feed her furnaces, and now that the murmured discontent of revolutionary-minded men is plainly heard, the Italian people have come to the conclusion that there. was a good deal in what Signor Giolitti said. That is the simple explanation of the fact- that they have returned him to power. They feel that the Nationalist Baron Sonnino and the more moderate Signor Nitti have both failed them, and they return to the veteran whom metaphorically they condemned to death five years ago. "After all he has gr.at experience and he may save us." We say without hesitation that if the rift between Italy and ourselves should be allowed to remain, or worse than that, should become wider, a terrible error in our foreign policy would have been committed. We should have been guilty of the mistake of changing a relationship of sympathy and understanding towards Italy in whieh the hearts and the intellects of British people have long been engaged. At this point we should like to suggest that Anglo-Italian relations and the problem of improving them should take a foremost place among the studies of the new British Institute of Inter- national Affairs. The Institute could have no more inter- esting subject for research nor one likely to be more fruitful in its results.
Among the countless Englishmen who are admirers and lovers of Italy, none is more prominent than Mr. G. M. Trevelyan, who is the British historian of the Risorgirnento, and who served with the Italian forces throughout the war. We should like to call attention to his statement of the Italian case in the issue of the New Europe of July 8th. It is a model of what such a statement should be. Mr. Trevelyan has always taken a liberal view in politics, and it is sad that it should be necessary—yet it is necessary—to ioint out that he is committing no illiberal act in telling ritiah readers what Italians are thinking. Mr. Trevelyan oes not pretend that the Italians are necessarily right all through, for their words and thoughts are necessarily coloured by disillusionment and even resentment, but it id evident that Mr. Trevelyan would go a large part of the way. in company with them. The fact is that British people in cultivating the interests of the South Slays have rushed to an extreme. We feel it a duty to say this because our readers will remember that years before the war began we wrote frequently about the grievances of the South Slays and the oppression they suffered under Austrian and Hungarian rule. We expressed our belief that the danger spot of Europe was to be found among the -South Slav races, and that if war came it would probably have its source in that part of Europe. All that we wrote then we hold by, but it is none the less true that by over- emphasising the South Slav case British people are now in, great danger of forgetting the troubles of others—the Italians in I-articular—who also have their grievances. The present British state of mind is rather like that of the early Christian heretics who in almost every case were by inten- tion orthodox men ; they were so intent upon keeping Christian doctrine safe from error at some threatened point that they overstated the immediate issue and fell into a new heresy. To assume that the South Slays are justified and the Italians unreasonable in any dispute between Jugoslavia and Italy is to forget the whole Italian record of idealism and liberal thought.
We notice that Mr. Ronald McNeill drew attention in the House of Commons lately to the forcible stoppage of the Glasgow Relief Commission to Montenegro by the Serbian authorities. Mr. McNeill pointed out that this incident was being widely cited abroad as proof of the contempt with which the British Government was being treated on the shores of the Adriatic, and he asked whether the Government would do anything, diplomatic or otherwise, to remove the Serbian obstruction to the distribution of relief to the Montenegrins. We do not profess to have any special information on this matter, but it is surely relevant to what we have been saying. Nobody troubles much to inquire about allegations against the Serbians, to whom something like carte blanche in the Adriatic has been given by British opinion, whereas it is carelessly accepted as true—also without inquiry—that the Italians are guilty of aggression and intransigence. There is a tendency here to read everything in the light of the Treaty of London, and to say that Italy came into the war to get what she could out of that Treaty. But as Mr. Trevelyan points out, the terms of that Treaty were not known to the Italians in May, 1915, when they were crying " Morte a Giolitti." The broad reason why the Italians joined us was that they were Western, Latin and liberal in thought ; and they backed their sentiments by losing a greater proportion of dead and wounded in the war than even Great Britain herself lost. It was no easy fighting in which the Italians last half a million dead. Unfortunately, the experience of many British officers and men was concerned entirely with the sequel to the unhappy incident of Capor- etto. Mr. Trevelyan, after dwelling on the British failure to appreciate the extent of the Italian sacrifice, tells us that what exasperates Italians is the Palmerstonian tone which they find in part of the British Press, the tone "of a superior person telling a benighted foreigner how to manage his own affairs." "Such passages," he says, "are often reprinted with fierce comments in Italy." The Italians, he goes on to explain, will take almost anything in the way of criticism from a friend. "But the tone is not friendly ; that is the trouble."
We have. no thought of advocating that Englishmen should accept the Italian point of view, right or wrong. We must examine it thoroughly and judge it on its merits.
"Italy right or wrong" must never be our motto, but our motto unquestionably ought to be, "Italy must always be our friend, and we must deal with her as a friend and in no other way." It is the Latin habit to be intensely logical, and logic often leads straight to error in politics, as we know, even while the argument seems to be superficially impec- cable. But we need not be afraid to bear this fact in mind so long as our intentions are always those of a sincere friend. As regards the accusation of aggression, it was only to be expected that the Italians would remark that while the British Empire has greatly extended ita borders as the result of the war, Englishmen throw up their hands in horror at the notion of Italy acquiring new territory in Dalmatia. Of course, the Italians may easily be =elect about British profit from the war, and probably are misled. A large part of the so-called fresh British annexations are responsibilities of which we would moat gladly wash our hands. They bring us anxiety and many demands on competent personnel which we cannot meet, and they cause us to spend money which we have not got. The comparison may be unfair, but none the less we are not surprised that the Italians gaze with terror across the Adriatic and medi- tate upon the possibility of a fresh coalition of forces aimed against them in future. The long Eastern coast of their country has not a single harbour for ships of war between Venice and the extreme south. They want to make them- selves secure on the opposite shore just as naturally as we tell ourselves that we must remain secure by refusing to Ireland freedom to welcome a foreign invader. Italy sees her perfectly genuine alarm treated as though it were an intrigue, while all the time she reads in the newspapers of the aggrandisement of Greece with the willing help of the Allies. "What," she asks, "did Greece do in the Great War ? " It is a searching question. It is time that such questions should be discussed and answered here in the generous manner of friends and sympathisers. We hope especially that the British Institute of Foreign Affairs will not ignore our suggestion.
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