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The conduct of this administration has created difficulties which we shall have to surmount.... We shall have to adopt a new policy, a policy of firmness and consistency through which alone we can promote an enduring friendship." The theme friendship is for the non-interventionists, the theme "new policy" and "firmness" is for the interventionists.
M. Bratiano's appropriate attitude may be described as statuesque. Occasionally his Press organs commented upon the manifestations of the interventionists in words barbed with bitter sarcasm and utilitarian maxims. "Roumania's blood and money," the Independence Roumaine explained, "must be spent only in the furtherance of Roumania's interest."
The Spaniards were simply doing what any empire does to suppress rebellion and enforce obedience, but the brutalities of imperialism, as practiced in Cuba by the Spaniards, gave the American interventionists their opportunity. Day after day the newspapers carried front page stories of Spanish atrocities in Cuba.
By stretching the word to cover what Mr. Wilson had done, as well as what the real interventionists wanted, the issue between the two factions was to be repressed. Having got by the two explosive points "Huerta" and "intervention" by letting the words mean all things to all men, the speech passes for a while to safer ground.
The point at issue was just that: the Italian Neutralists stood for material advantages, advantages tangible, ponderable, palpable; the Interventionists stood for moral advantages, intangible, impalpable, imponderable imponderable at least on the scales used by their antagonists.
That it lacked unanimity was particularly apparent just before and again just after the war when feelings were not subject to war discipline. It was as though the Italian character were crossed by two different currents which divided it into two irreconcilable sections. One need think only of the days of Italian neutrality and of the debates that raged between Interventionists and Neutralists.
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