an
agreement. In fact, results which could be secured only by persuading
indifferent or hostile people and capturing their good-will he expected
to attain by holding aloof from all and leading the life of a hermit,
one might almost say of a misanthrope. One can imagine the feelings, if
one may not reproduce the utterances, of English-speaking officials,
whose legitimate desire for a free exchange of views with Italy's
official spokesman was thwarted by the idiosyncrasies of her own
Minister of Foreign Affairs. In Allied circles Baron Sonnino was
distinctly unpopular, and his unpopularity produced a marked effect on
the cause he had at heart. He was wholly destitute of friends. He had,
it is true, only two enemies, but they were himself and the foreign
element who had to work with him. Italy's cause was therefore
inadequately served.

Several months' trial showed the unwisdom of Baron Sonnino's attitude,
which tended to defeat his own policy. Italy was paid back by her allies
in her own coin, aloofness for aloofness. After she had declined the
Jugoslavs' ingenious proposal to refer their dispute to Mr. Wilson the
three delegates[212] agreed among themselves to postpone her special
problems until peace was signed with Germany, but Signor Orlando, having
got wind of the matter, moved every lever to have them put into the
forefront of the agenda. He went so far as to say that he would not sign
the Treaty unless his country's claims were first settled, because that
document would make the League of Nations--and therefore Italy as a
member of the League--the guarantor of other nations' territories,
whereas she herself had no defined territories for others to guarantee.
She would not undertake to defend the integrity of states which she had
helped to create while her own frontiers were indefinite. But in the art
of procrastination the Triumvirate was unsurpassed, and, as the time
drew near for presenting the Treaty to Germany, neither the Adriatic,
the colonial, the financial, nor the economic problems on which Italy's
future depended were settled or even broached. In the meanwhile the
plenipotentiaries in secret council, of whom four or five were wont to
deliberate and two to take decisions, had disagreed on the subject of
Fiume. Mr. Wilson was inexorable in his refusal to hand the city over to
Italy, and the various compromises devised by ingenious weavers of
conflicting interests failed to rally the Italian delegates,
who