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The southern portion of Tirol the so-called Trentino, the district round the town of Trent is purely Italian by race, and its union with the kingdom of Italy has long been the chief point in the programme of the Italian Irredentists or extreme Nationalists. It is a poor and mountainous country, which belongs geographically to its southern rather than to its northern neighbour.
Their plan was to get rid of all the non-Turkish peoples which separate the Turks of Anatolia from the Turks of Baku and Azerbaijan, and this was the second motive of the Armenian deportations, which they put in hand a month or two after their military projects had failed. The Turkish Irredentists propose, in fact, to gain their ends by bloodshed and terrorism.
And, as we came in, we sang, very loudly and perhaps somewhat out of tune, the chorus of La Campana di San Giusto, the forbidden song which to the Italian Irredentists stands for somewhat the same officially repressed but inextinguishable emotions, as that once forbidden song The Wearing of the Green stood for to the Nationalist Irishmen of a now vanished generation.
In other words, the Irredentists of to-day and, since Italy entered the war, virtually the entire nation has subscribed to Irredentist aims and ideals dream of an Italy whose northern frontier shall be formed by the main chain of the Alps, and whose rule shall be extended over the entire eastern shore of the Adriatic.
Italy had all along been inviting some such blow by her concentration on Trieste, a divergent quest after booty which led away from the enemy's vital parts; for the Adriatic was already closed to the Central Empires by the French and British fleets, and the fall of Trieste, however gratifying it might be to Irredentists though Trieste had never belonged to Italy or Italian rulers would have no appreciable effect upon the issue of the war.
Had he been an idealist he would have done so, and raised in Germany a cry like that of the Italian Irredentists. Or he might have claimed for his country its natural boundaries; after freeing the upper waters of the Rhine from foreign dominion he might have claimed that the great river should flow to the sea, German.
This abundance of lobsters, turned to commercial account later, when it became known, gave rise to the Lobster Fisheries Question, one of the stalking-horses of the English Irredentists.
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