ethnographic, geographic and economic unity; our
people would, without any doubt, oppose to it an energetic and
justified resistance."] At other times during the nineteenth century
the Great Powers made amongst themselves and without consulting the
Small Powers certain arrangements which affected the latter, although,
as Professor Westlake observes,[88] all the States, so far as their
sovereignty is concerned, stand equal before the law. But these
arbitrary arrangements had always been made in the interest and for
the security and well-being of the weaker State, as, for example, when
the Congress of Berlin decided on the independence of Roumania and
Serbia, in accordance with the will of the people. This beneficent
action on the part of the Great Powers infringed none of the
principles of international law, whereas the Treaty of London took
away from the smaller Power nearly everything of value it possessed
and stripped it of the possibility of future greatness; the spoil was
presented by the Great Powers to one of themselves. We may concede, as
Mr. C. A. H. Bartlett of the New York and United States Federal Bar
points out in his closely reasoned monograph[89]--we may concede that
belligerents can by way of anticipation allot enemy land among
themselves, yet such a compact cannot properly be exercised by them so
as to work injustice to another ally who was not a party to the
division of territory. From the first it was well understood that the
Treaty of London could only be imposed in direct defiance of the
wishes of the populations most immediately concerned, so that the
Italian Cabinet insisted that the whole transaction should be kept
from the knowledge of the Serbian Government. As an illustration of
the domineering and extortionate nature of Italy's demands (to which
the Entente submitted) one may mention that part of the proposed
boundary was traced over the high seas beyond the three-mile limit,
which of course was a proposition entirely at variance with
international law. We should not forget, says the _Spectator_,[90] the
whole Italian record of idealism and liberal thought. And Mr. G. M.
Trevelyan, an Italian exponent,[91] remarks that the terms of the
Treaty of London were unknown to the people who paraded the streets
of Rome impatient for their country to enter the War, and threatening
with death the Minister Giolitti who had hitherto succeeded in keeping
them out of it. The grandiose bargain which the Gover