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By
1922
In this book are embodied the ideas which, as a parliamentarian, ashead of the Italian Government, and as a writer, I have upheld withfirm conviction during the last few years.
I believe that Europe is threatened with decadence more owing to thePeace Treaties than as a result of the War. She is in a state of dailyincreasing decline, and the causes of dissatisfaction are growingapace.
Europe is still waiting for that peace which has not yet beendefinitely concluded, and it is necessary that the public should bemade aware that the courses now being followed by the policy of thegreat victorious States are perilous to the achievement of serious,lasting and useful results. I believe that it is to the interest ofFrance herself if I speak the language of truth, as a sincere friendof France and a confirmed enemy of German Imperialism. Not only didthat Imperialism plunge Germany into a sea of misery and suffering,covering her with the opprobrium of having provoked the terrible War,or at least of having been mainly responsible for it, but it hasruined for many years the productive effort of the most cultured andindustrious country in Europe.
Some time ago the ex-President of the French Republic, R. Poincaré,after the San Remo Conference, à propos of certain differences ofopinion which had arisen between Lloyd George and myself on the onehand and Millerand on the other, wrote as follows:
"Italy and England know what they owe to France, just as France knows what she owes to them. They do not wish to part company with us, nor do we with them. They recognize that they need us, as we have need of them. Lloyd George and Nitti are statesmen too shrewd and experienced not to understand that their greatest strength will always lie in this fundamental axiom. On leaving San Remo for Rome or London let them ask the opinion of the 'man in the street.' His reply will be: 'Avant tout, restez unis avec la France.'"
I believe that Lloyd George and I share the same cordial sentimentstoward France. We have gone through so much suffering and anxietytogether that it would be impossible to tear asunder links firmlywelded by common danger and pain. France will always remember with asympathetic glow that Italy was the first country which proclaimed herneutrality, on August 2, 1914; without that proclamation the destiniesof the War might have taken a very different turn.
But the work of reconstruction in Europe is in the interest of Franceherself. She has hated too deeply to render a sudden cessation of herhate-storm possible, and the treaties have been begotten in rancourand applied with violence. Even as the life of men, the life ofpeoples has days of joy and days of grief: sunshine follows the storm.The whole history of European peoples is one of alternate victoriesand defeats. It is the business of civilization to create suchconditions as will render victory less brutal and defeat morebearable.
The recent treaties which regulate, or are supposed to regulate,the relations among peoples are, as a matter of fact, nothing but aterrible regress, the denial of all those principles which had beenregarded as an unalienable conquest of public right. President Wilson,by his League of Nations, has been the most r