The Adriatic Negotiations at Paris

I

THE story of the Paris negotiations about the Adriatic has not yet been written; perhaps all of it cannot be told until we read the papers of Orlando and Lloyd George, of Sonnino and President Wilson, and of some other figures who, at times at least, played a part in the drama; but certainly an attempt can now be made to outline the picture and to reconstruct the progress of one of the failures of Paris, a failure, however, which paved the way for the final ending, by the Treaty of Rapallo, of the differences between Italy and the kingdom of the Serbs, the Croats, and the Slovenes.

First of all, let us recall to our minds just what the Adriatic problem was. When Italy became at once a united nation and a great power, her situation geographically was both singularly satisfactory and unsatisfactory. That great peninsula, which looks on the map like a gigantic boot projecting into the Mediterranean, has a coast-line with an extraordinary opportunity for commerce. On the other hand, the Italian frontier on the north and northeast was almost hopeless for defense, and, indeed, seemed drawn so as to invite attack.

But we are concerned only with the Adriatic, whose western waves wash the coasts of Italy for five hundred miles, from beyond Venice to the Mediterranean. From the point of view of modern naval warfare, no sea is more one-sided. Every advantage is with the east: the many islands, often with concealed channels and with an indented shore behind them, protected by an almost impassable mountain range along the coast, not only are beyond all attack, but, with their deep harbors and their hiding-places, make an ideal haven for warships; but the unbroken coast-line on the Italian side, with its shallow waters and almost no ports, affords no naval base. Moreover, the waters of the Italian shores are shallow, while those leading to the Mediterranean by the Straits of Otranto are deep and the currents swift, so that mines in that twenty miles of channel are hardly possible. No wonder that, despite the Allied fleets, Austria controlled the Adriatic throughout the war.

But the Adriatic problem meant more than this. The shores of the Adriatic that were not Italian were largely within the Empire of Austria-Hungary. Before the war, the peninsula of Istria, coming down east of Venice, had to the north the great Austrian port of Trieste and near its southern tip the famous naval base of Pola. Hungary reached the sea just below, at Fiume, the outlet for a hinterland of varied races under different governments. Farther south, Austrian territory extended along the coast, in the narrow strip of Dalmatia, that Adriatic wall along which Serbia was looking for a window. And when one thought of the Adriatic, one could not but think of the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, annexed by Austria-Hungary with a cynical contempt for treaties; and one must think also of two other countries on the sea below Dalmatia — Montenegro, that superb anomaly of independence, and Albania, a land that had always lived its own life in the Balkans, but apart from the rest of the world and of Europe till 1913.

With its memories of Italian civilization and culture, where Italian power had long since lost sway; with its medley of races, of religions, and of governments; with the conflicting strategic positions and ambitions of the great powers bordering on its waters; with its cross-currents of commercial rivalries, and with ancient hatreds smouldering under modern injustice, the Adriatic presented a situation which, at any static stage, it might well seem impossible to change without disaster, but which, in the state of flux created by a great war, became a problem whose solution was well worthy of any wisdom.

II

The diplomatic history of the Adriatic in the World War is usually dated from the Pact of London. But I put it farther back. I date it from that night in August, 1914, when the Italian Ambassador at Paris woke the French Minister of Foreign Affairs in his bedroom, and told him that the attacks by Germany on France and on Russia were not a casus fœderis within the terms of the Triple Alliance, and that Italy would remain neutral. Then was taken the great decision by Italy, a decision which really put the Adriatic question on the lap of the gods, and which, by permitting the withdrawal of French troops from the Italian frontier, made possible the first victory of the Marne.

Now, the Pact of London has been denounced by almost every recent critic; and, in particular, it has been denounced by every so-called ‘liberal,’ a term which seems to me often to mean one who is very tolerant of his own point of view. We have been told that the Pact of London was secret, that it was a bargain — a hard bargain — driven by Italy with the Allies, and that it violated every principle of self-determination and of justice. Well, despite the critics and despite the fact that they charged me at Paris with the crime of being pro-Italian, I think I can consider the Pact of London by an examination of its provisions in the light of the circumstances surrounding its creation; and that is how any international document should be considered.

That treaty was signed on April 26, 1915, between Italy, Great Britain, France, and Russia; and one of its provisions was that Italy should enter the war on the side of the Allies within one month thereafter. This fact alone repels all criticism on the ground of secrecy at the time; for it could hardly be expected that public announcement would be made of a future move in the war.

Of course, no one can defend secret treaties in principle, for the principle of secrecy in diplomacy is an evil one. But the evil was not generally recognized in Europe in 1915; we are apt to forget the great change which has taken place in world-sentiment in this matter. The Covenant of the League of Nations contains a clause for the public registration of treaties; any such idea would have been wholly illusory and impossible only a few years ago, for the fundamental law of almost every continental state made provision for secret treaties. Indeed, if we go back a century in our own history, we find the Congress of the United States under Madison passing secret laws, which for years were kept off our statute-books.

By the rest of the Pact of London it was agreed that Italy should have various territorial acquisitions in the Adriatic and elsewhere, and that she should be given a loan in London of £50,000,000 — a very modest sum from the later point of view of war finance. I am reminded in this connection of a remark which Mr. Lloyd George is reported to have made in Paris, to the effect that the refusal of Great Britain to give Turkey a loan of £20,000,000 in 1914 was the most extravagant economy known to history.

Of course, the territorial clauses of the Pact of London were a bargain between Italy and the Allies; but I fail to see that they were a harsh bargain. Passing, for the moment, any question of the righteousness of the clauses, surely France and Great Britain were not being treated harshly; they were not giving away anything of their own, and from the point of view simply of self-interest, they could well afford to be generous with the territory of their enemies before they were just; it was not their ox that was being gored in Dalmatia.

Now the territorial clauses of the Pact of London have such a direct relation to the Adriatic negotiations at Paris that it is necessary to examine those clauses in some detail; perhaps their justice or injustice has become a matter of no practical moment; but still I shall turn aside to consider that question of justice, for otherwise the background of the Paris negotiations may be seen in a false light.

The moral qualities of an act are to be judged as of its date and not from subsequent events. I not only admit, but insist, that in 1919 it would have been wrong and unjust, as well as unwise and impossible, to carry out the terms of the Pact of London; but, to consider fairly the situation of 1915, we must lay aside our knowledge of subsequent events, difficult as that is to do.

In the spring of 1915, when Italy entered the war, the cause of the Allies was not going well. They were making no progress on the Western Front, and in the East, Russia was about to meet with a severe defeat. No one dreamed of a rout of Germany or of a complete remaking of the map of Europe. A continuance of the former European alignment seemed reasonable to expect, in a modified form, perhaps, but certainly with no overturn of the situation.

Italy had lived her national life of two generations in a continuous and justified state of fear — a sentiment almost unknown to American statesmen, but which has had, and has, a more profound influence on European thought and action than can well be imagined. The door in the Alps was open. Italy visualized a German empire and an Austro-Hungarian empire existing after the war, the former probably, and the latter certainly, deeply hostile to her; and so Italy sought safety, sought to acquire a frontier as impregnable as possible, together with the control of the Adriatic. Most of the questioned territorial gains secured by Italy in the Pact of London in the region we are now considering were of comparatively little material value; their worth was chiefly as a defense against attack.

Furthermore, unless the Empire of Austria-Hungary was to collapse, the future of the Jugo-Slav movement was problematical. In 1915, one might, perhaps, have predicted a greater Serbia, but hardly a union of all the Jugo-Slavs. Certainly, there was no heaven-sent reason why any of those peoples should be governed from Vienna or from Budapest rather than from Rome, if they were not to have their own capital at Belgrade. And while Serbia did not sign the Pact of London, Russia, the self-constituted protector of the Balkan Slavs, was a consenting party.

So, while the terms of the Pact of London were drawn in the spirit of the old and now discredited diplomacy, still Italy, from the standpoint of 1915, was largely justified in signing that treaty, although the same treaty in 1919 would have been unrighteous and unjust.

By the Pact of London, while a part of the coast toward the north of the Adriatic, including specifically Fiume and all the coast of Croatia, was not to be Italian, the whole of the Istrian peninsula was to go to Italy, and in addition an extensive strip of Dalmatia above Spalato, with nearly all the islands off the coast; and when to these was added Valona and its gulf, almost opposite Brindisi and the heel of the Italian boot, the control of the Adriatic was complete; it would have been wholly Italian in all but name.

But by the time the Conference of Paris met, a change had come over the spirit of the political dream of Eastern Europe. The ancient empire, which had been the natural enemy of Italy, had vanished. And here let me say that it is a common criticism, born of common ignorance, to charge the Conference of Paris with the Balkanization of Eastern Europe, that catching phrase. It was no treaty that set up separate governments at Prague, at Budapest and at Vienna, for those separate governments had existed since before the German Armistice. And no Peace Conference could have joined together these fragments of an empire which its peoples had put asunder.

Nor was it any outside influence which brought to a conclusion that national movement which resulted in the union of the three Jugo-Slav peoples — peoples of different religions, indeed, and under different governments, some of whom had been under alien rule for centuries, but who were all of nearly the same blood and of nearly the same speech.

It has recently been made public, as perhaps some had earlier suspected, that not all the Americans at Paris were of one mind with their chief about the principle of self-determination. It now appears that there were some unexpressed and private thoughts at Paris, to the effect that self-determination is a rather unsettling doctrine and one not based on sufficiently ancient legal precedents; but surely everyone who is at all familiar with the history of the Jugo-Slav movement will agree with Woodrow Wilson that ‘self-determination is not a mere phrase.’

For in place of Serbia we found, not a Greater Serbia, but a new kingdom, the kingdom of the Serbs, the Croats, and the Slovenes; a kingdom including Serbia and Montenegro, and which had taken in not only Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also Croatia and Slavonia, and other parts of Austria-Hungary; a kingdom which regarded its claim to Dalmatia and the adjacent islands as perfect, and which had aspirations, not only to Istria but even to Trieste.

And the change that had come was not a change in fact and in feeling only, but also in law. The Jugo-Slavs were not bound technically or in any other sense by the Pact of London, but held it as void from their point of view, and claimed that it had been annulled by the so-called ‘Pact of Rome,’ of April, 1918, a claim which had in it, perhaps, more of equity than of technical accuracy. But more important, practically, was the fact that the United States was certainly not bound by the Pact of London, to which we had never directly or indirectly assented; indeed, the American legal view was that the Pact of London, so far as it conflicted with the Fourteen Points, bound nobody at all; for the Fourteen Points had in substance been accepted by Italy as well as by France and Great Britain, even though they had not been formally incorporated in the AustroHungarian Armistice of November 3, 1918, as they were in the strictest sense made part of the German Armistice eight days later.

But the Pact of London remained a factor throughout the negotiations. The British and the French recognized fully the unwisdom of that treaty in the light of events, though they were naturally unwilling to deny that an agreement which they had signed was binding as to them; so that, with some hesitation, doubtless, they recognized that they could not deny their support to Italian claims based on that treaty.

But, as all the world knows, the Italians did not stand on the Pact of London alone, for they claimed Fiume, which was specifically and by name excluded from their claims by that very document.

III

It was with such a background, such a confusion of conflicting facts and legal theories, that the Paris negotiations between the United States and Italy regarding the Adriatic took place.

For it was between those two powers that the real Adriatic negotiations at Paris were carried on. The British and the French were entirely willing to accept in advance anything that America and Italy agreed to, and the JugoSlavs were practically committed to the same view by their offer of arbitration before President Wilson. Indeed, as the Jugo-Slavs were a new political union of peoples, it was said at Paris, perhaps with some reason, that their three representatives, Mr. Vesnich, a Serb, Mr. Pachitch, a Slovene, and Mr. Trumbitch, a Croat, would have preferred to accept, as easier to defend in their own country, an agreement announced to them rather than one that had obtained their assent. Obviously, any criticism which alleged that one branch of the newly formed union had been sacrificed for the benefit of the others would not have been easy to meet. The difficulties of their situation were illustrated by a symbolic remark made by one of their delegates in Paris, that he was negotiating with a dagger at his back, held by his own colleagues.

If I have succeeded in my attempted outline of the geography of the Adriatic, it will be seen that there were four regions there where the Italian and Jugo-Slav views and aspirations clashed: Istria, the islands belonging partly to Istria and partly to Dalmatia, the Dalmatian mainland, and Fiume. Doubtless, if the question were asked of anyone which of these four was the cause of the final difficulty between President Wilson and the Italians, the answer would be Fiume; but that answer would be wrong. It was not Fiume that proved the finally impossible point, but another region, very closely related to that of Fiume, it is true, but still distinct: it was a little strip of territory running along the Gulf of Fiume and then down the Istrian coast, with a hinterland of small importance — a strip which a New York journalist at Paris wittily called the ‘Riverside Drive of Istria’; a strip which the Italians valued highly, but only because it would bring Italian territory up to Fiume itself.

During President Wilson’s first visit to Europe, little progress was made toward any settlement of the Adriatic question. Signor Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, had, indeed, during that time, most actively and heartily worked with President Wilson in the drafting of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and the relations between the two chiefs of state were most cordial. But the Adriatic was not directly related to a peace with Germany, with which all the delegations were then more particularly occupied.

It was not until President Wilson came to Paris for the second time that the whole matter was taken up directly between him and Signor Orlando, in great detail. The Italians naturally wanted settled a question which was of more direct interest to them than the terms of the peace with Germany, even including reparations.

In the negotiations, President Wilson rested almost wholly, I think I may say wholly, on the opinions of his territorial advisers on all details of the various proposals. He was, indeed, willing to accept any agreement freely entered into between Italy and the Jugo-Slavs; but no such agreement was possible, perhaps for the reasons I have indicated, perhaps, partly, because of the very natural hostility then existing between the two countries. The Serbs had, of course, fought valiantly and devotedly on the side of the Allies; but the Croats and the Slovenes had been subjects of Austria-Hungary, and while many of them had in fact supported the Allied cause, still the Italians did not then feel very kindly toward peoples, some of whom had, a few short months before, fought against Italian troops on the Piave.

The American point of view, as I have said, necessarily was that the subject must be considered wholly independently of the Pact of London; and the opinion of Professor Douglas Johnson, the eminent geographer of Columbia University and the American territorial adviser, in this matter supported the Italian claims as to Fiume not at all, practically not at all as to the Dalmatian mainland, to a very limited extent as to the islands, and in Istria up to, but only up to, the line drawn by Professor Johnson, which became known as the Wilson line.

It is difficult to describe verbally the Wilson line, in which, indeed, important changes were made from time to time after it was originally laid down; but it left in Jugo-Slav territory a very considerable part of eastern Istria, and specifically, and more important, perhaps, it was intentionally drawn so as to leave wholly in Jugo-Slav territory the railroad running north from Fiume to Vienna. From the Italian point of view, one great, objection to it was bound up with the matter of Fiume; for the Wilson line, in every form, left Fiume physically separated by land from Italy.

The views of the American territorial adviser were that the position taken by him really involved very great concessions to Italy: that the Wilson line was drawn so as to leave several hundred thousand Slavs in Italy and perhaps only 75,000 Italians on the other side of the frontier; that Dalmatia, with the exception of Zara, a city of 12,000 people, was almost wholly Slav; and that the Dalmatian and Istrian islands were likewise mostly Slav; and, finally, that Fiume, while possibly half-Italian in its population, was the essential economic outlet to the sea for a vast hinterland, much of which was part of Jugo-Slavia and the rest a part of Hungary and other regions toward the north.

IV

This leads me to say something a little more in detail of Fiume, a city which for its size has certainly had more than its share of the headlines on the front pages during the last two years.

Fiume owes its commercial importance to its location at the only real break in the mountain-range running down the eastern coast of the Adriatic. Nowhere else along that shore south of Fiume can railroads easily reach the sea. While it has not a naturally fine harbor, its facilities had been well developed by Hungary, and are susceptible of further improvement; and while logically not serving the same territory as Trieste, it is a commercial rival of that city. In 1914 the trade of Hungary found its political and natural outlet at Fiume, and its surrounding country and neighboring hinterland were wholly Slav. If the suburb of Susak, a part of the port, is included as being in everything but in law a part of the city, the Italians, while the largest group in Fiume, were not a majority of the population.

These facts made the Italian claim to Fiume seem to President Wilson wholly outside of any principle of self-determination, and the Italian argument had no other real basis. So that, so long as the Italian demands included Fiume, any successful result of negotiations between President Wilson and the Italian representatives was impossible. So-called ‘compromise proposals’ could mean only that one side or the other should give way. And in fact the negotiations between Orlando and President Wilson in March and April were more than unsuccessful, for they ended in President Wilson’s public statement of April 23, which not only ended the discussions, but caused the temporary withdrawal of the Italian delegation from Paris.

The reasons that led President Wilson to declare publicly his position in a matter which was under discussion are still somewhat obscure. It seems that he was informed, I believe erroneously, that a public statement was about to be made by the Italian delegation. Certainly, late in the evening of the day before the issuance of President Wilson’s statement, Count Macchi di Cellere, the Italian Ambassador at Washington, who was then in Paris, had no idea of such a purpose, for he then handed me a typewritten copy of the latest Italian proposal, in four brief items; and the day that President Wilson’s statement appeared, the count told me that Signor Orlando had not succeeded in his attempt to see President Wilson that day, owing to the latter’s other engagements; and that Mr. Lloyd George had sent word to the Italian delegation that three of the four items of the Italian proposal were acceptable, and had asked for information as to the fourth, which concerned Fiume.

But whatever were the reasons for President Wilson’s action, certainly some of its effects were unfortunate. It stirred up much feeling about the whole matter, particularly in Italy, and tended to take the question out of the realm of discussion and argument and into the sphere of the emotions, an unsatisfactory background for any international exchanges.

Still, the negotiations were only interrupted ; their first chapter was closed, but they were resumed, on the initiative of Colonel House, when Orlando and Sonnino came back to Paris. And I feel free to speak in some detail of those later negotiations of May, 1919, for their story has been largely published in Italy in the Memoirs of Count Macchi di Cellere.

Colonel House’s aim was to arrive at a solution which would be satisfactory to the Italians, and which, at the same time, would not be an abandonment of the principles laid down by President Wilson. Certainly, this was a consummation devoutly to be wished, but one that seemed almost impossible on its face. However, Colonel House not only tried it, but demonstrated that it was not impossible; and while the desired goal was not reached, the failure was no fault of his.

After talking with Orlando and President Wilson, Colonel House evolved and had accepted this plan for discussions, which, indeed, was itself a proof of his extraordinary influence, both with his chief, President Wilson, and with his friend, Signor Orlando: conversations were to take place between Orlando and myself, with the view of reaching an accord between us, either temporary or final; anything that we agreed on would be supported by Colonel House, and would be carefully considered by President Wilson on Colonel House’s recommendation; in other words, whatever Orlando agreed to with me would bind Italy, but not America.

My path in the matter, so far as personal relations were concerned, was made easier by my close friendship with Count Macchi di Cellere, whose death, a few months later, was a real loss to his own country and a sad blow to his many friends here. And while Signor Orlando kept the negotiations strictly in his own hands, the Count di Cellere was frequently, and Baron Sonnino occasionally, present at our talks.

These rather extraordinary conversations with Signor Orlando, which took place at the hotel of the Italian delegates, and which were necessarily carried on in French, were always entirely amicable and cordial; indeed, Signor Orlando’s attractive personality, combined with his juristic attitude of mind, precluded any other course of discussion.

I often recall a few words of Signor Orlando which seemed to me to speak in part his thoughts on the meetings of the Council of Four. I was talking one evening with him and Marshal Joffre, who said to Orlando, in French, ‘Do you know any English?’ To which Orlando replied that he knew very little— ‘Nothing,’ he added, ‘except these words, “eleven o’clock, I don’t agree, good-bye.’”

Now, there is one sort of solution almost always possible in a diplomatic discussion, and that is a modus vivendi, an agreement to postpone final decision and to arrange a status for the intervening time. In view of the divergence of thought between President Wilson and the Italians, this seemed one way out of the difficulty, and it was discussed in various forms. Rut there were obvious objections to any such postponement, and the terms of the intermediate status, the questions of temporary occupation and of temporary government, presented new problems without solving old ones.

The real attitude of the Italians was not one of eagerness for the application of the Pact of London; they regarded it rather as a claim which they might reluctantly be forced to press. Orlando said to me that that treaty was his last line of defense; that, if no solution were possible, if no delay were obtained, he would be compelled to fall back upon the Pact of London, — for he would have nothing else, — although he did not like it and did not believe it was in accordance with the principles of President Wilson.

So the talks with Signor Orlando soon turned toward the possibility of a definitive agreement, and I proposed a formula, the most important point of which was that Fiume should be an independent city and free port under the protection of the League of Nations. This suggestion was not wholly novel, but it was the first time, I think, that it had been definitely made in that form in the negotiations. It differed from the views of the American territorial advisers, who would have preferred to give Fiume to the Jugo-Slavs; and it at the same time rejected the Italian demand, which would have made Fiume Italian, or, at least, have put it under Italian protection.

My own belief at Paris was — and despite the episode of d’Annunzio, I have never seen any reason to change it— that a fair vote by secret ballot of the inhabitants of Fiume would have shown a very large majority in favor of a free city and against either Jugo-Slav or Italian sovereignty; people usually vote according to their own ideas of self-interest; and that Fiume, which is essentially a port of through traffic both ways, would be more prosperous and more developed under its own control than under either that of Italy or that of the Jugo-Slavs, particularly in view of the Hungarian and other traffic, seems to me clear. I do not intimate that that fact, if it be a fact, is conclusive, but it is certainly entitled to some weight.

It soon appeared that President Wilson would accept this solution as to Fiume. The Italians hesitated. But in their inner feelings, the members of the Italian delegation were not at all of one mind about Fiume. After all, Fiume represented a dream of Italian sentiment rather than a reality of Italian needs. And there were not lacking Italian statesmen who thought that, by insisting on Fiume, Italy would be seeking a shadow which might well mean abandoning some real substance. And finally Orlando yielded and agreed that he would accept the solution as to Fiume. I thought for a moment that perhaps Colonel House had again achieved the seemingly impossible, and that the Adriatic question was to be solved.

But there remained Dalmatia, the islands off the coast, and Istria. The first presented comparatively little difficulty, though causing much discussion. The Italians claimed only one or two towns on the mainland, and Baron Sonnino, unyielding as he is usually pictured, said that Italy was not inflexible about the islands.

Baron Sonnino has often been painted in the black colors of a reactionary, and no one knew better than he that the indictment had been drawn. He said to me once with a smile, ‘ If we come to an agreement, you might add a clause to the effect that Baron Sonnino should retire from office, for that might help to get the agreement accepted’; and ‘after all,’ he added, ‘I am an old man, and have been in office as Foreign Minister since the war began.’

Reactionary or no, Baron Sonnino had all the charm of the old school, and his manner made me recall the remark of Lord Rosebery, who said that, while he agreed with the Liberals, he preferred to dine with the Conservatives.

V

All that was left was the location of the Wilson line in Istria; the Italians wanted it moved east at its southern end, over toward Fiume, so as to leave in Italy all of Istria, with a boundaryline touching Fiume itself; but here President Wilson, still resting on the recommendations of his territorial advisers, refused to yield; and the Italians were equally firm, considering that they had already given up too much, or at least enough, of their claims, and that the physical junction with Fiume was indispensable from their standpoint.

Indeed, national aspirations are so bound up with national sentiment and tradition, that it is not a matter of pure fancy to recall that the Italian claim of 1919 had been phrased six centuries before the Conference of Paris, by Dante, in one of the most famous lines of the Inferno, where he spoke of the sea east of Istria as ‘the Quarnero, whose waters are the confines of Italy and bathe her farthest frontiers.’

So on this point of Istria, a comparatively minor one, if the situation is looked at as a whole, the negotiations broke down and failed to result.

Whose duty was it to yield? The answer depends on the point of view. The American territorial advisers, rightly considering the Pact of London a nullity as to the United States, considered, not only that Italy had received great concessions, but that she had really yielded nothing at all. Their opinion was that, as Italy had been given the strongest possible frontier in the north, a grant which included as Italian even the southern part of the Austrian Tyrol, and as the remaining land-frontier had been drawn east of the ethnic line, Italy had received all her just claims; and they considered, too, that Italy would be safe as to the Adriatic, an opinion shared by the American naval experts.

The other argument was that, assuming the correctness of the views of the American territorial advisers, the importance of reaching a solution outweighed the importance of the change in the line in Istria; that the difference between the two proposals was not great enough to be a difference in principle, but only in degree; that the advantages of a present solution so nearly correct in theory, a solution in which Italy had yielded her claim to Fiume,— a claim which, whether defensible or not, had aroused passions and feelings of a grave character, — should not be dismissed in favor of the mere possibility of a slightly different solution later on; and that a continuance of such a difference between two neighboring countries involved grave risks of war; or if not the risk of war, that it involved at least the possibility of the application of the provisions of the Pact of London — a treaty which everyone, Italy included, wished to discard.

I am frank to say that the latter was my own view; I thought that President Wilson should have yielded for the sake of the greater good of a final settlement as against the lesser good of the assumed correctness of the Wilson line.

Whether I am right or not, certainly the failure of the settlement brought about a year and a half of uncertainty, and made possible the mimic war of d’Annunzio; and the final result, as we shall see, was more favorable to Italy in regard to Istria and the Wilson line than the solution proposed in the conversations that I had with Orlando.

Whether one agrees or not with the stand of President Wilson, one cannot but admire its courage and its disregard of political results; the man who stands for what he thinks just, even when his course is bound to lose votes, is almost as rare nowadays as the great auk. Those political results followed as surely as the night the day; the opposition to President Wilson capitalized his stand on the Adriatic question, and from their flotation of the sentiment which that stand had aroused drew large dividends in ballots.

After President Wilson came back to Washington, discussions continued at Paris and by exchanges between the various governments. Their most important feature was the proposal to Italy, made in December, 1919, by Great Britain, France, and the United States jointly, in which President Wilson, under the advice of Dr. Bowman, of the American Geographical Society, made substantial concessions from his earlier views. But this proposal was not accepted, and it was followed by the accord of January, 1920, between France, Great Britain, and Italy, under the leadership of Signor Nitti, an accord which President Wilson refused to accept, but which, so far as it related to Jugo-Slav relations with Italy, was in substance incorporated into the final agreement of the Treaty of Rapallo.

I omit any discussion of the occupation of Fiume by d’Annunzio — that amazing madness which destroyed for months the trade of a commercial city and brought about increased feeling among the various partisans on all sides, but which convinced no one who was not convinced before, and left the official attitudes of the governments of Italy and of the Jugo-Slavs unchanged.

Nor can I do more than allude to the matter of Albania — an important part of the Adriatic question, but one not so much discussed at Paris.

All ideas of any partition of Albania, or of an Italian protectorate, or even of Italian occupation of the port of Valona, have been finally abandoned. By a treaty signed on August 2, 1920, Italy, retaining only two headlands near Valona and the island of Saseno, off the coast, recognizes the independence of Albania within the frontiers of 1913; any doubt as to the separate existence of Albania is at an end: she has a real and apparently stable government of her own, and has, indeed, become a member of the League of Nations.

But the final settlement of the Adriatic question between Italy and the Jugo-Slavs is not unrelated to the inconclusive Paris negotiations. That settlement took place last autumn, and its moving cause was the American election on November 2, which obviously left Italy a free hand and which brought keenly home to the Jugo-Slavs the advice of the Scriptures: ‘Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him.’

For just ten days after our election, there was signed on November 12, at Rapallo, a little winter resort near Genoa, a treaty between Italy and the kingdom of the Serbs, the Croats, and the Slovenes, which settled their differences as to the Adriatic, and settled them as the Italian government, not as the Italian extremists, wanted them settled.

It is interesting to compare the terms of the Treaty of Rapallo with those proposed at Paris. Italy gets four island groups in the Adriatic, of considerable strategic but little other importance; and in Dalmatia a little territory at Zara. Fiume, with a small strip running along the gulf, becomes independent. Thus far, we might be in Paris instead of at Rapallo. But the Wilson line in Istria becomes a thing of dreams. Not only do the Italians get a frontier touching that of Fiume; not only do they get all of Istria; but the line near Laibach goes even east of the line of the Pact of London, making a strategic frontier even more strategic than before.

I called the Adriatic negotiations at Paris a failure. Perhaps I was too harsh: although they did not reach any final result, they demonstrated the obsolescence of the Pact of London, they paved the way for an agreement to be reached between the parties, and they showed the moral fibre of a man who wanted to be right, even while he was President.

I try never to think of what might have been at Paris, for nothing is more vain than to recast a mythical present from an imaginary past. One must be a philosopher and think of Sainte-Beuve’s striking phrase in his introduction to the Memoirs of Saint Simon: ‘On ne refait point l’histoire par hypothèse.’ (History cannot be made over by supposing.)