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 sufficient to say that after a generation of subservience to Vienna, they have now definitely passed over to the Opposition, and thus greatly added to the embarrassments of the Government.

Thus the speech from the Throne, with its vague and two-edged phrases, revealing the indecision and divided counsels which pull in two or even more opposing directions, is likely to remain a memorial of the impasse to which two generations of a refusal to think or to govern has reduced the Austrian state. The whole inner framework of the Dual Monarchy rests upon a hurriedly drafted memorandum, framed in 1867 to meet the demands of a single race, the Magyars, and the interests of their German-Austrian accomplices. The fundamental problems of the other nationalities, which that settlement ignored, have made themselves heard with growing insistence from year to year, but have been stifled or postponed by official indolence. To-day, when they can no longer be ignored, the decadence of authority and morale renders the State incapable of solving them, and there is an odour of the tomb at every turn. In Austria, too, the leaven of revolution is working, under the powerful impetus of the Russian upheaval. All the old values have been overthrown, and the atmosphere is so charged with electricity, that no human being can foretell the events of the near future.

The Latin and the Anglo-Saxon are natural allies as different from, and as indispensable to, one another as man and wife. Pre-eminently in time of war the differences are, perhaps, more visible than the mutual aid; but the discerning eye will not fail to see that, in the case of Great Britain and Italy, each owes a great debt to the other for very valuable services. It is true, and has been handsomely acknowledged by prominent Italians, that Great Britain had more to give and has given it lavishly; but it has not been so generously recognised by us in these islands that—whatever may have been the motives which prevailed in some of the least-ventilated corners of the Consulta—the overmastering impulse which sent the Italian nation to war with the Central Powers was a happy blend of irredentism (which warmed her soul with a holy and enthusiastic wrath against the ancient tedesco enemy) and idealism which, in Signor Bissolati’s words, forms so large a part of the political thought of democratic Italy. And, be it remembered, Italy came in at a moment when mere prudence might have coun-