remacy would have been strained to breaking point by
the many heavy tasks imposed upon it simultaneously in widely-separated
seas. Our communications through the Mediterranean would, indeed, have
been almost impossible to maintain.

Many bribes were offered to Italy at this time by the Central Powers in
the hope of inducing her to join them--Corsica, Savoy and Nice, Tunis,
Malta, and probably even larger rewards. But Italy remained neutral.

In May 1915 she entered the war on our side, in the first place to free
those men of Italian race who still lived outside her frontiers, under
grievous oppression, and whom Austria refused to give up to their Mother
Country, and, in the second place, because already many Italians
realised, as Americans also realised later, that the defeat of the
Central Powers was a necessary first step towards the liberation of
oppressed peoples everywhere and the building of a better world. Italy
entered the war at a time when things were going badly for us in Russia,
and looked very menacing in France, and when she herself was still
ill-prepared for a long, expensive and exhausting struggle. The first
effect of her entry was to pin down along the Alps and the Isonzo large
Austrian forces, which would otherwise have been available for use
elsewhere.

She entered the war nine months after the British Empire, but her
losses, when the war ended, had been proportionately heavier than ours.
According to the latest published information the total of Italian dead
was 460,000 out of a population of 35 millions. The total of British
dead for the whole British Empire, including Dominion, Colonial and
Indian troops, was 670,000, and for the United Kingdom alone 500,000.
The white population of the British Empire is 62 millions and of the
United Kingdom 46 millions. Thus the Italian dead amount to more than 13
for every thousand of the population, and the British, whether
calculated for the United Kingdom alone or for the whole white
population of the Empire, to less than 11 for every thousand of the
population. The long series of Battles of the Isonzo,--the journalists
counted up to twelve of them in the first twenty-seven months in which
Italy was at war,--the succession of offensives "from Tolmino to the
sea," which were only dimly realised in England and France, cost Italy
the flower of her youth. The Italian Army was continually on the
offensive during those months against the strongest natural defence