Making of Middle Europe

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1918 Excerpt: ... for once at least, the people had been wiser than many of their leaders and the instinct of a race had asserted itself in wise opposition to the representatives of the people who sat on the Capitoline Hill. II. YOUNG ITALY Young Italy of the first years of the Twentieth Century had certain definite aims and aspirations. These were the aspirations of a people, long the subjects of brutal and selfish foreign tyranny, tardily come to independence, and now, after sombre years of domestic hardship and self-discipline, arrived at the point from which they believed they could undertake to achieve for their country abroad a rank to which its population, position, and recent progress gave it title. In the generation that lay between the occupation of Rome and the close of the last century Italy had time and again seen her position in the world made humiliating through her inability to urge her own claims with more than passive earnestness. France had shouldered her out of Tunis. Austria had annexed Bosnia. Britain had laid hands upon Egypt and Cyprus and was transforming the Mediterranean into a British lake. Within the Triple Alliance Italy was treated rather as a poor relative than as an equal. Outside of the Alliance, France and Russia, indignant at Italian presence in a hostile group, treated Italian policies and Italian aspirations with contemptuous hostility. In Abyssinia an Italian effort to erect a colonial empire had met with terrible disaster and Adowa had been a demonstration for Europe of Italian military weakness. Poverty and misery at home, a feeble foreign policy, and an abject subservience to German dictation, this had been the history of Italian affairs from the moment when unity was achieved to the hour when a new century was to usher in a new and...