A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W X Z

The World Decision

R >> Robert Herrick >> The World Decision




All this may now be pondered in the "Green Book," more briefly and
cogently in the admirable statement which Italy made to the Powers when
she declared war on Austria. That the Italian Government was not only
within its treaty rights in demanding those "compensations" from Austria,
but would have been craven to pass the incident of the attack on Serbia
without notice, seems to me clear. That it was a real necessity, not a
mere trading question, for Italy to secure a stronger frontier and control
of the Adriatic, seems to me equally obvious. These, I take it, were the
vital considerations, not the situation of the "unredeemed" Italians in
Trent and Trieste. But Austria, in that grudging maximum of concession
which she finally offered to Italy's minimum of demand, insisted upon
taking the sentimental or knavish view of the Italian attitude: she would
yield the more Italianated parts of the territory in dispute, not the
vitally strategic places. Nor would she deliver her concessions until
after the conclusion of the war--if ever!--after she had got what use
there was from the Italians enrolled in her armies fighting Russia. For
Vienna to regard the tender principle of nationalism is a good enough
joke, as we say. Her persistence in considering Italy's demands as either
greed or sentiment is proof of Teutonic lack of imagination. The Italians
are sentimental, but they are even more practical. It was not the woes of
the "unredeemed" that led the Salandra Government to reject the final
offering of Austria, and to accept the risks of war instead. It was rather
the very practical consideration of that indefensible frontier, which
Austria stubbornly refused to make safe for Italy--after she had given
cause, by her attack upon Serbia, to render all her neighbors uneasy in
their minds for their safety.

So much for the sentimental and the strategical threads in the Consulta
negotiations. It was neither for sentiment nor for strategical advantage
solely that Italy finally entered the war. Nevertheless, if the German
Powers had frankly and freely from the start recognized Italy's position,
and surrendered to her _immediate_ possession--as they were ready to do
at the last moment--sufficient of those national aspirations to safeguard
national security, with hands off in the Adriatic, Italy most probably
would have preferred to remain neutral. I cannot believe that Salandra
or the King really wanted war. They were sincerely struggling to keep
their nation out of the European melting-pot as long as they could. But
they were both shrewd and patriotic enough not to content themselves with
present security at the price of ultimate danger. And if they had been as
weak as the King of Greece, as subservient as the King of Bulgaria, they
would have had to reckon with a very different people from the Bulgars and
the Greeks--a nation that might quite conceivably have turned Italy into a
republic and ranged her beside her Latin sister on the north in the world
struggle. The path of peace was in no way the path of prudence for the
House of Savoy.

* * * * *

Lack of imagination is surely one of the prominent characteristics of
the modern German, at least in statecraft. Imagination applied to the
practical matters of daily living is nothing more than the ability to
project one's own personality beneath the skin of another, to look
around at the world through that other person's eyes and to realize
what values the world holds for him. The Prince von Bülow, able diplomat
though they call him, could not look upon the world through Italian
eyes in spite of his Italian wife, his long residence in Rome, his
professed love for Italy. It must have been with his consent if not
by his suggestion that Erzburger, the leader of the Catholic party in
the Reichstag, was sent to Rome at this critical juncture. The German
mind probably said,--"Here is a notable Catholic, political leader of
German Catholics, and so he must be especially agreeable to Italians,
who, as all the world knows, are Catholics." The reasoning of a stupid
child! Outwardly Italy is Catholic, but modern Italy has shown herself
very restive at any papal meddling in national affairs. To have an
alien--one of the "_barbari_"--seat himself at the Vatican and try to
use the papal power in determining the policy of the nation in a matter
of such magnitude, was a fatal blunder of tactless diplomacy. Nor could
Herr Erzburger's presence at the Vatican these tense days be kept secret
from the curious journalists, who lived on such meager items of news. No
more tactful was it for Prince von Bülow to meet the Italian politician
Giolitti at the Palace Hotel on the Pincian. There is no harm in one
gentleman's meeting another in the rooms of a public hotel so respectable
as the Palace, but when the two are playing the international chess
game and one is regarded as an enemy and the other as a possible traitor,
the popular mind is likely to take a heated and prejudiced view of the
small incident. Less obvious to the public, but none the less untactful,
was the manner in which the German Ambassador tried to use his social
connection in Rome, his family relationships in the aristocracy of Italy,
to influence the King and his ministers. He might have taken warning from
the royal speech attributed to the Queen Mother in reply to the Kaiser:
"The House of Savoy rules one at a time." He should have kept away from
the back stairs. He should have known Italy well enough to realize that
the elements of Roman society with which he was affiliated do not
represent either power or public opinion in Italy any more than good
society does in most modern states. Roman aristocracy, like all
aristocracies, whether of blood or of money, is international in its
sympathies, skeptic in its soul. And its influence, in a decisive question
of life and death to the nation, is nil. The Prince von Bülow was wasting
his time with people who could not decide anything. As Salandra said, with
dignified restraint in answer to the vulgar attack upon him made by the
German Chancellor,--"The Prince was a sincere lover of Italy, but he was
ill-advised by persons who no longer had any weight in the nation"--as
his colleague in London seems to have been ill-advised when he assured
his master that Englishmen would not fight under any circumstances! The
trouble with diplomacy would seem to be that its ranks are still recruited
from "the upper classes," whose gifts are social and whose sympathies
reflect the views and the prejudices of a very small element in the
state. Good society in Rome was still out on the Pincian for the afternoon
promenade, was still exchanging calls and dinners these golden spring
days, but its views and sympathies could not count in the enormous complex
of beliefs and emotions that make the mind of a nation in a crisis. Prince
von Bülow's motor was busily running about the narrow streets of old Rome,
the gates of the pretty Villa Malta were hospitably open,--guarded by
_carabinieri_,--but if the German Ambassador had put on an old coat and
strolled through the Trastevere, or had sat at a little marble-topped
table in some obscure café, or had traveled second or third class between
Rome and Naples, he might have heard things that would have brought the
negotiations at the Consulta to an abrupter close one way or the other.
For Italy was making up its mind against his master.

* * * * *

Rome was very still these hesitant days of early May, Rome was very
beautiful--I have never known her so beautiful! The Pincian, in spite
of its afternoon parade, had the sad air of forced retirement of some
well-to-do family. The Piazza di Spagna basked in its wonted flood
of sunshine with a curious Sabbatical calm. A stray _forestieri_ might
occasionally cross its blazing pavements and dive into Piale's or Cook's,
and a few flower girls brought their irises and big white roses to the
steps, more from habit than for profit surely. The Forum was like a wild,
empty garden, and the Palatine, a melancholy waste of fragments of the
past where an old Garibaldian guard slunk after the stranger, out of
lonesomeness, babbling strangely of that other war in which he had part
and mixing his memories with the tags of history he had been taught to
recite anent the Roman monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse of
bees among the spring blossoms and looked out upon the silent field that
once was the heart of Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this
richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people was to be tested in
the agony of a merciless war, that even now the die was being cast less
than a mile away across the roofs. The soil of Rome is the most deeply
laden in the world with human memories, which somehow exhale a subtle
fragrance that even the most casual stranger cannot escape, that condition
the children of the soil. The roots of the modern Italian run far down
into the mould of ancient things: his distant ancestors have done much
of his political thinking for him, have established in his soul the
conditions of his present dilemma.... I wonder if Prince von Bülow ever
spent a meditative hour looking down on the fragments of the Forum from
the ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of the Capitoline that
leads to the Campidolgio, as far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts
the newer city? Probably not.

* * * * *

Germany wanted her place in the sun. She had always wanted it from the
day, two thousand years and more ago, when the first Teuton tribes came
over the Alpine barrier and spread through the sun-kissed fields of
northern Italy. The Italian knows that in his blood. There are two ways
in which to deal with this German lust of another's lands--to kill the
invader or to absorb him. Italy has tried both. It takes a long time to
absorb a race,--hundreds of years,--and precious sacrifices must be made
in the process. No wonder that Italy does not wish to become Germany's
place in the sun! Nor to swallow the modern German.

When the Teuton first crossed the Alpine barrier and poured himself
lustfully out over the fertile plains of northern Italy, it was literally
a place in the sun which he coveted. In the ages since then his lust has
changed its form: now it is economic privilege that he seeks for his
people. In order to maintain that level of industrial superiority, of
material prosperity, to which he has raised himself, he must "expand"
in trade and influence. He must have more markets to exploit and always
more. It is the same lust with a new name. "Thou shalt not covet" surely
was written for nations as well as for individuals. But our modern
economic theory, the modern Teutonic state, is based on the belief: "Thou
shalt covet, and the race that covets most and by power gets most, that
race shall survive!" And here is the central knot of the whole dark
tangle. The German coveting greater economic opportunities, knowing
himself strong to survive, believes in his divine right to possess. It
is conscious Darwinism--the survival of the fittest, materially, which
he is applying to the world--Darwinism accelerated by an intelligent will.
And the non-Germanic world--the Latin world, for it _is_ a Latin world in
varying degrees of saturation outside of Germany--rejects the theory and
the practice with loathing--when it sees what it means.

* * * * *

What makes for the happiness of a nation? I asked myself in the mellow
silence of ancient Rome. Is it true that economic conquest makes for
strength, happiness, survival for the nation or for the individual?

This Italy has always been poor, at least within modern memory--a literal,
actual poverty when often there has not been enough to eat in the family
pot to go around. She has had a difficult time in the economic race for
bread and butter for her children. There is neither sufficient land easily
cultivable nor manufacturing resources to make her rich, to support her
growing population according to the modern standards of comfort. The
Germans despise the Italians for their little having.

Yet the Italian peasant--man, woman, or child--is a strong human being,
inured to meager living and hardship, loving the soil from which he digs
his living with an intense, fiery love. And poverty has not killed the
joy of living in the Italian. Far from it! In spite of the exceedingly
laborious lives which the majority lead, the privations in food, clothing,
housing, the narrowness,--in the modern view,--of their lives, no one
could consider the Italian people unhappy. Their characters, like their
hillside farms, are the result of an intensive cultivation--of making
the most out of very little naturally given.

A healthy, high-tempered, vital people these, not to be despised in the
_kaiserliche_ fashion even as soldiers. Surely not as human beings, as a
human society. And their poverty has had much influence in making the
Italians the sturdy people they are to-day. Poverty has some depressing
aspects, but in the main her very lack of economic opportunity--the want
of coal and factories and other sources of wealth--has kept most of these
people close to the soil, where one feels the majority of any healthy,
enduring race should be. Poverty has made the Italians hard, content with
little, and able to wring the most out of that little. It has cultivated
them intensively as a people, just as they have been forced to cultivate
their rock-bound fields foot by foot.

There are qualities in human living more precious than prosperity, and
in these Italians have shared abundantly--beauty, sentiment, tradition,
all that give color and meaning to life. These are the treasures of Latin
civilization in behalf of which the allied nations of Europe are now
fighting....

* * * * *

I am well enough aware that all this is contrary to the premises of the
economic and social polity that controls modern statecraft. I know that
our great nations, notably Germany, are based on exactly the opposite
premise--that the strength of a state depends on the economic
development of its people, on its wealth-producing power. Germany has
been the most convinced, the most conscious, the most relentless exponent
of the pernicious belief that the ultimate welfare of the state depends
primarily on the wealth-getting power of its citizens. She has exalted
an economic theory into a religion of nationality with mystical appeals.
She has taught her children to go singing into the jaws of death in order
that the Fatherland may extend her markets and thus enrich her citizens
at the expense of the citizens of other states, who are her inferiors in
the science of slaughter. A queer religion, and all the more abhorrent
when dressed out with the phrases of Christianity!

All modern states are more or less tainted with the same
delusion--ourselves most, perhaps, after Germany. "We have all sinned,"
as an eminent Frenchman said, "your people and mine, as well as England
and Germany." It is time to revise some of the fundamental assumptions
of political philosophers and statesmen. Let us admit that peoples may
be strong and happy and contented without seeking to control increasingly
those sources of wealth still left undeveloped on the earth's surface,
without cutting one another's throats in an effort for national expansion.
The psychology of states cannot be fundamentally different from that of
the individuals in them. And the happiness of the individual has never
been found to consist wholly, even largely, in his economic prosperity.

Because the Latin soul divines this axiomatic belief, because the
Latin world admits a larger, finer interpretation of life than
economic success, all civilization waits upon the great decision of
this war.

* * * * *

Suddenly in the calm of these drifting, hesitant days, when nobody
knew what the nation desired, there came a bolt of lightning. I have
said that the German people lack imagination by which to understand
the world outside themselves. They do not coördinate their activities.
Otherwise, why commit the barbarism of sinking the Lusitania, just at
the moment when they were straining to keep Italy from breaking
completely the frayed bonds of the Triple Alliance? Probably it never
entered any German head in the "high commandment" that the prosecution
of his undersea warfare might have a very real connection with the
Italian situation. He could not credit any nation with such "soft
sentimentality," as he calls it. Yet I am not alone in ascribing a
large significance to the sinking of the Lusitania in Italy's decision
to make war. Every observer of these events whom I have talked with or
whose report I have read gives the same testimony, that Italy first
woke to her own mind at the shock of the Lusitania murders....

The news came to me in my peaceful room above the Barberini Gardens.
The fountain was softly dripping below, the spring air was full of the
song of birds as another perfect day opened. The warm sunshine reached
lovingly up the yellowed walls of the old palace opposite. All the
little, old, familiar things of a long past, which pull so strongly
here in Rome at the human heart, were moving in the new day. The life
of men, so troubled, so sad, seemed beautiful this May morning, with
the suave beauty of ideals that for centuries have coursed through the
blood of Italy.... Luigi, the black-haired, black-eyed lad who brought
the morning coffee and newspapers, was telling me of the horrid crime.
With his outstretched fist clenched and shaking with rage he said the
words, then, dropping the paper with its heavy headlines, cursed it as
if it too symbolically represented the hideous thing that Germany had
become. "Now," he cried, "there'll be war! We shall fight them, the
swine!" A few days afterward Luigi departed to fight the "swine" on
some Alpine pass.

Luigi's reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania was typical of all
Rome, all Italy. The same burst of execration and horror was in every
mouth. "Fuori i Barbari" was the title of a little anti-German sheet
that was appearing in Rome: it got a new significance as it hung in
the kiosks or was scanned by scowling men. It became the muttered cry
of the street. I am not simple enough to believe that the sinking of
the Lusitania of itself "drove Italy into the war." Nations no more
than individuals, alas, are idealistic enough to sacrifice themselves
simply for their moral resentments. But this fresh example of cynical
indifference to the opinion of civilization, just at the critical point
of decision for the Italian people, had much to do with the rousing of
that war fury without which no government can push a nation into war.
First there must be the spirit of hate, a personal emotion in the hearts
of many. It must be remembered also that Italy had felt with the entire
civilized world the outrage of Belgium. It has even been rumored that
one of the hard passages between Italy and her German allies was the
condition that Germany wished to attach to any Austrian concessions,
by which Italy at the peace conference should uphold Germany's "claims"
to Belgium. No one knows the truth about this, but if true it is in
itself an adequate explanation of the failure of the negotiations. And
now the Lusitania came with a fresh shock as an iterated example of
German state policy. It proclaimed glaringly to the eyes of all men
what the Teutonic thing is, what it means to the world. The Latin has
been cruel and bloody in his deeds, like all men, but he has never made
a cult of inhumanity, never justified it as a principle of statecraft.
Italians, prone to hate as to love, prone especially to hate the Teuton,
those aliens who have lusted after their richness and beauty all these
centuries, felt the Lusitania murders to the depths of their souls. It
was like a red writing on the wall, serving notice that in due season
Germany and Austria would tear Italy limb from limb because of her
"treachery" in not abetting them in their attack upon the peace of
the world.

Prince von Bülow and Baron Macchio might as well have discontinued
their daily visits to the Consulta after the 7th of May. Whatever
they might have hoped to accomplish with their diplomacy to keep Italy
neutral had been irretrievably ruined by the diplomacy of Grand Admiral
von Tirpitz. The smallest match, the scratch of a boot-heel on stone,
can set off a powder magazine. The Lusitania was a goodly sized match.
If the King and his ministers were waiting for the country to declare
itself, if they wanted the excuse of national emotion before taking
the final irrevocable steps into war, they had their desire. From the
hour when the news of the sinking of the Lusitania came over the wires,
Italy began to mutter and shout. The months of hesitation were ended.
There were elements enough of hate, and Germany had given them all
focus. "Fuori i Barbari!" I bought a sheet from the old woman who
went hurrying up the street shouting hoarsely,--"Fuori i Barbari!" ...
"Fuori i Barbari!" ... "Barbari!"....




II


_The Politician Speaks_

Giovanni Giolitti came to Rome, a few days after the Lusitania affair.
Ostensibly he had come to town from his home in little Cavour, where he
had been in retirement all the winter, to visit a sick wife at Frascati.
Montecitorio, home of politicians, began to hum. Rome quivering with the
emotions of its great decision muttered. What did Giolitti's presence at
this eleventh hour signify? Remember what the shrewd American observer
had said the week before,--"Giolitti will tell the Italians what they
want."

The master politician, the ex-Premier, the heir to Crispian policies,
was received at the railroad station by a few faithful friends, much
as Boss Barnes or Boss Penrose, returning from a voluntary exile in
New York or Pennsylvania, might be received by a few of the "boys."
They were Deputies from Montecitorio frock-coated and silk-hatted,
like politicians all the world over, not a popular throng of a hundred
thousand Romans singing and shouting, such as a few days later was to
gather in the piazza before the same station to greet the poet,
D'Annunzio. It is well to understand the significance of this
unobtrusive coming of the political leader at the moment, to realize
what sinister meaning it had for the existing Government, for the
Italian nation, for the Allies--for the world.

The Italian Deputies who had been elected two years before, long before
even the astutest politician had any suspicion of the black cloud that
was to rise over Europe, were Giolittian by a great majority. Giolitti
was then the chief figure in Italian politics and controlled the Chamber
of Deputies. The Giolitti "machine," as we should say, was the only
machine worth mention in Italy. Rumor says that it was buttressed with
patronage as American machines are, and, more specifically, that Giolitti
when in power had diverted funds which should have gone into national
defense to political ends, also had deferred the bills of the Libyan
expedition so that at the outbreak of the war Italy found herself badly
in debt and with an army in need of everything. Soldiers drilled in the
autumn of 1914 in patent leathers or barefooted and dressed as they could,
while the Giolittian clubs and interests flourished. Also it was said
that the prefects of the provinces, who in the Italian system have large
powers, especially in influencing elections, were henchmen of the
politician. I do not know how just these accusations may be, nor how
true the more serious accusation shortly to be hurled abroad that
Giolitti had sold himself for German gold. The latter is easy to say
and hard to prove; the former is hard to prove and easy to believe--it
being the way of politicians the world over.

However dull or bright Giolitti's personal honor may have been,
the Parliamentary situation was difficult in the extreme--one of
those absurd paradoxes of representative government liable to happen
any time. Here were five hundred-odd elected representatives of the
people owing allegiance, really, not to the King, not to the nation,
not to the responsible ministers in charge of the state, but to the
politician Giolitti. If they had been elected under the stress of
the war, after the 1st of August, 1914, they might not have been the
same personal representatives of Giovanni Giolitti. We cannot say.
Democracies are prone to be deceived in their chosen representatives:
they discover them mortgaged to a leader, secret or open. The Salandra
Government knew, of course, Giolitti's prejudices in favor of Italy's
old allies, disguised as patriotically _neutralista_ sympathies. He
had discreetly retired to little Cavour in Piedmont all the winter,
maintaining a disinterested aloofness throughout the prolonged
negotiations. Yet he knew, the Salandra Government and the King knew,
the people knew, that Giovanni Giolitti must be reckoned with before
Parliament could be opened to ratify the acts of the ministers, to
support them in whatever measures they had prepared to take. It would
be simple political insanity to open the Chamber before Giolitti had
been dealt with, leading to acrid discussions, scandal, the inevitable
downfall of the ministry, and political chaos. The nation must be united
and express itself unitedly by its legal mouthpieces before the world.

Copyright (c) 2007. famouswriterz.com. All rights reserved.