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Updated: June 28, 2025
And, to condemn him, it is not necessary to believe him to have been a knave bought by German gold. It is important to realize what happened overnight. Giolitti had become the most hated, most denounced man in all Italy, and in so far as he represented honest neutralista sentiment the cause was dead. If that was what the Salandra Government wanted to achieve, they had got their desire.
There is no saying, of course, what might have happened had the King offered the premiership to Giolitti, and had that astute politician been rash enough to accept the responsibility of forming a government in accord with his own neutralista sympathies. It is more than likely that revolution would have ensued: possibly Italy would have entered the war as a republic.
The Venezelos-Zaimis situation was impossible in Italy, though the circumstances were almost parallel, with Salandra and Giolitti. The piazza knew the deep Biblical truth, "He who is not for me is against me," and execrated the professed neutralista Giolitti. But the Greeks, it seems, are more easily managed by a "strong" government and a German king. The end, however, is not yet in sight.
They had used him as Germany had used him to try out the temper of the nation. With him they drew the neutralista and pro-German fire beforehand, prudently, not to be defeated by hostile party criticism in the Chamber.
He had to sneak out of the city at dawn that last day. Where was all the neutralista sentiment so evident the first months of the war? And where was the German influence supposed to be so strong in the upper commercial classes? Germans as well as Austrians were scurrying out of Italy as fast as they could. Their insinuating multiplicity was proved by the numbers of shuttered shops.
It would be wiser to let a little more cotton leak into Germany through Switzerland than to agitate the question of contraband at this delicate moment. The cotton brokers, the grain merchants, and a few others were making money out of Italy's neutrality, and neutralista sentiment was naturally strong among these classes and their satellites.
If he could not openly champion an active fulfillment of the alliance, at least he was avowedly neutralista, the best that Berlin and Vienna had come to hope from their southern ally. He was the great unknown factor politically, with his majority in the Chamber, his personal prestige.
Democracies are prone to be deceived in their chosen representatives: they discover them mortgaged to a leader, secret or open. The Salandra Government knew, of course, Giolitti's prejudices in favor of Italy's old allies, disguised as patriotically neutralista sympathies.
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