in question was not altogether clear and
self-consistent. 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. The ease with which the most inconsistent ideas were
pressed into service by both parties showed that the issue was not
between two opposing political opinions, two conflicting concepts of
history, but actually between two different temperaments, two
different souls.

For one kind of person the important point was to fight the war,
either on the side of Germany or against Germany: but in either event
to fight the war, without regard to specific advantages--to fight the
war in order that at last the Italian nation, created rather by
favoring conditions than by the will of its people to be a nation,
might receive its test in blood, such a test as only war can bring by
uniting all citizens in a single thought, a single passion, a single
hope, emphasizing to each individual that all have something in
common, something transcending private interests.

This was the very thing that frightened the other kind of person, the
prudent man, the realist, who had a clear view of the mortal risks a
young, inexperienced, badly prepared nation would be running in such a
war, and who also saw--a most significant point--that, all things
considered, a bargaining neutrality would surely win the country
tangible rewards, as great as victorious participation itself.

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. On the eve of the war these two Italian characters stood
facing each other, scowling and irreconcilable--the one on the
aggressive, asserting itself ever more forcefully through the various
organs of public opinion; the other on the defensive, offering
resistance through the Parliament which in those days still seemed to
be the basic repository of State sovereignty. Civil conflict seemed
inevitable in Italy, and civil war was in fact averted only because