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Updated: May 29, 2025
No nation desires war for war's sake, and the interpretation put upon Giolitti's words by the extreme neutralists and, in particular, by the insincere organs of the Vatican, was that he had seen enough to convince him that the Cabinet had decided to wage war against Germany and Austria at all costs and irrespective of the nation's interests.
That was the object for which Giolliti's presence was needed in Rome. The amended proposals were typewritten and distributed by Erzberger, the leader of the German Catholic parliamentary party, who was an over-zealous agent of the Wilhelmstrasse and a persona grata at the Vatican. He, a German, had gone to Rome to bestir the neutralists and lead the movement against the Italian Government.
Thus in Russia they were conservative and autocratic in their intercourse with the ruling spheres, and revolutionary in their relations with the Socialists and working classes; in France and Britain they were democrats and pacifists; in Italy they were rabid nationalists or neutralists according to the political sentiments of their environment; in Turkey, Morocco, Egypt and Persia staunch friends of Islam.
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.
During the fall and winter of 1914, the Italians had seemed about equally divided in favor of intervention and neutrality. While a large majority of the common people clamored for war, the neutralists probably included the larger proportion of influential citizens.
The effect of the war seemed at first to be quite in an opposite sense to mark the beginning of a general débâcle of the Italian State and of the moral forces that must underlie any State. If entrance into the war had been a triumph of ideal Italy over materialistic Italy, the advent of peace seemed to give ample justification to the Neutralists who had represented the latter.
At this juncture his house in Rome became a center of neutralists, and Von Bülow began overtures to Baron Sonnino, the new Italian Foreign Minister, to discover what territorial concessions the Italian Government would demand as recompense for the action of Austria and as the price of adherence to the alliance.
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.
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