ntirely through this organisation....

The reasonable uncommercial man would like to reject all this last sort
of talk as "suspicion mania." So far as the Banca Commerciale Italiana
goes, I at least find that easy enough; I quote that instance simply
because it is a case where suspicion has been dispelled, but in
regard to a score of other business veins it is not so easy to dispel
suspicion. This war has been a shock to reasonable men the whole world
over. They have been forced to realise that after all a great number
of Germans have been engaged in a crack-brained conspiracy against the
non-German world; that in a great number of cases when one does business
with a German the business does not end with the individual German. We
hated to believe that a business could be tainted by German partners or
German associations. If now we err on the side of over-suspicion, it is
the German's little weakness for patriotic disingenuousness that is most
to blame....

But anyhow I do not think there is much good in a kind of witch-smelling
among Italian enterprises to find the hidden German. Certain things are
necessary for Italian prosperity and Italy must get them. The Italians
want intelligent and helpful capital. They want a helpful France.
They want bituminous coal for metallurgical purposes. They want cheap
shipping. The French too want metallurgical coal. It is more important
for civilisation, for the general goodwill of the Allies and for Great
Britain that these needs should be supplied than that individual British
money-owners or ship-owners should remain sluggishly rich by insisting
upon high security or high freights. The control of British coal-mining
and shipping is in the national interests--for international
interests--rather than for the creation of that particularly passive,
obstructive, and wasteful type of wealth, the wealth of the mere
profiteer, is as urgent a necessity for the commercial welfare of France
and Italy and the endurance of the Great Alliance as it is for the
well-being of the common man in Britain.

3

I left my military guide at Verona on Saturday afternoon and reached
Milan in time to dine outside Salvini's in the Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele, with an Italian fellow story-writer. The place was as full as
ever; we had to wait for a table. It is notable that there were still
great numbers of young men not in uniform in Milan and Turin and Vicenza
and Verona; there was no effect anywhere of a