rything orders you to do so; and I can see nothing on the
side of honour, justice or humanity, on the side of the will of the
centuries or the human race, nor even on the side of prudence and
self-interest, that allows you to avoid it. Is it not better and more
worthy of yourselves than all the subtleties, plottings and petty
bargainings of diplomacy?

The one hour, the peremptory hour has struck when your aid can break
the balance between the powers of good and evil which, for more than
two hundred days, have kept the future of Europe hanging over the
abyss.

Fate has granted you the magnificent boon, the all but divine
privilege, of saving from the most horrible of deaths four or five
millions of innocent human beings, four or five millions of martyrs
who have performed the finest action that a people could perform and
who are perishing because they defended the ideals which your fathers
taught them. I know that we are faced by duties which until to-day had
never entered into the morality of States; for it is but too true that
this morality still lags a thousand miles behind that of the meanest
peasant. But, if such a thing has never yet been done, it is all the
more glorious to be the first to do it, to make an effort that will
raise the life of nations to a level which the life of the individual
has long since attained. And no people is better qualified than the
Italian to make this effort which the world and the future are
awaiting as a deliverance.

But I will say no more. I have been reproached for speaking of matters
which, as a foreigner, I ought not to discuss. I believed that these
great questions of humanity interested the whole human race. Perhaps I
was wrong. I will respect the profound silence in which great actions
are developed; and I leave to the meditation of your hearts that which
I am constrained to leave unsaid. They will tell you very much better
than I could all that I had to say to you.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: Delivered in Rome, before the Associazione della Stampa,
13 March, 1915.]

* * * * *

PRO PATRIA: III

VIII

PRO PATRIA: III[4]

1

Although nothing entitles me to the honour of addressing you in the
name of my refugee countrymen, nevertheless it is only fitting, since
a kindly insistence brings me here, that I should in the first place
give thanks to England for the manner in which she welcomed them in
their distress. I am bu