lway connections with the other side of the frontier have
been prohibited. Though the renting of their mountain pastures had
always been the peasants' chief source of income, the military
authorities issued orders, long before this war began, that Italian
herdsmen could no longer drive their cattle across the border to
graze, the prohibition being based on the ground that the herdsmen
were really Italian army officers in disguise. In recent years the
fear of Italian spies has become with the Austrian military
authorities almost an insane obsession. Innocent tourists, engineers,
and commercial travellers were arrested by the score on the charge of
espionage. The mere fact of being an Italian was in itself ground for
suspicion. Compared with the attitude of the Austrian Government
toward its Italian subjects in the Trentino, the treatment accorded by
the Boers to the British residents of the Transvaal was considerate
and kind. Thus there arose in the Trentino, as in all Austrian
provinces inhabited by Italians, a strange, unhealthy atmosphere of
suspicion, of secrecy, and of fear. This atmosphere became so
pronounced in recent years that it was sensed even by passing
tourists, who felt as though they were in a besieged city, surrounded
by secret agents and spies.

But, oppressive and tyrannical as are Austria's methods in the
Trentino, the final expression of her anti-Italian policy is to be
found in the Adriatic provinces. Here lie Austria's chief
interests--the sea and commerce. Here, therefore, is to be found an
even deeper fear of Italianism, and here still sterner methods are
employed to stamp it out. The government of Trieste is, in fact,
organized for that very purpose--witness the persecutions to which the
citizens of Italian descent are subjected by the police, the countless
political imprisonments, the systematic hostility to Italian schools
in contrast to the Government's generosity toward German and Slovene
institutions, and the State assistance given to Czech, Croatian, and
Slovene banks for the purpose of taking the trade of the city out of
Italian hands. Italians are excluded from all municipal employments,
from the postal service, the railways, and the State industries. Nor
does the official persecution end there. The presentation of many of
the old Italian operas is forbidden. The singing of Garibaldi's Hymn
leads to jail. Every year thousands of Italian papers are
confiscated. Until the war began hundre