Page:The New Europe - Volume 4.djvu/25

 We have spoken frankly and sincerely without fear of the alleged “touchiness” of the Italian people. Our faith in the sound sense of Italy is more robust than that of her diplomatists who constantly represent her to Allied statesmen as living in a kind of suppressed hysteria; and our belief in her uprightness is firmer than that of the member of an Italian Embassy in an Allied capital who quite recently argued that, in regard to her Adriatic claims, Italy “had demanded one hundred in the expectation of being beaten down to take twenty.” It is not in this spirit that firm friendships can be cultivated. They require sincerity. Without it the Allied peoples will not be able to marshal all their forces, moral and material, for the attainment of their greatest war aim—a Europe set free from tyranny to develop in peace on the basis of assured national right.

is more and more difficult to obtain a clear idea of the political situation in Austria-Hungary. Kaleidoscopic changes are followed by sudden rumours, circumstantial announcements and prompt denials. But the very fact that Germany suffers equally from the increased severity of the censor in matters Austrian, and that even papers of the standing of the Frankfurter Zeitung have been penalised for their frank messages from Vienna, is the best proof of the alarm in official German circles at the progress of disintegration in the Dual Monarchy.

Even through the veil between us it is not difficult to detect the désorientation of the Emperor Charles and his advisers. The six months of the Clam-Martinic régime lent themselves naturally to misinterpretation. Because he refused to uphold the unveiled absolutism of Stürgkh or to comply with the insistent demands of the Austrian Pangermans for a constitutional coup d'état and the imposition of German as the language of State, a few thoughtless optimists have rushed into the opposite extreme and rashly assumed that Count Clam was throwing himself into the arms of the Slavs. In reality, with that blind groping for ideas which characterizes a certain type of mediocre Austrian aristocrat, he was searching for a middle course, and thought he had found it in the meaningless phrase: “My programme is Austria.” He forgot that the rarest being in Austria is the man who