ds of Italians were expelled
annually by the police, to be replaced (according to the official
instructions of 1912) "by more loyal and more useful elements."

Though for more than five centuries Trieste has belonged to the House
of Hapsburg, the city is as Italian as though it had always been ruled
from Rome. There is nothing in Trieste, save only the uniforms of the
military and the _K.K._ on the doors of the Government offices, to
remind one of Austrian rule. The language, the customs, the
architecture, the names over the shop-doors, the faces of the
people--everything is characteristically Italian. Outside of Trieste
the zones of nationality are clearly divided: to the west, on the
coast, dwell the Italians; in the mountainous interior to the eastward
are the Slavs. But in Istria, that arrowhead-shaped peninsula at the
head of the Adriatic, the population is almost solidly Italian. Though
alternately bribed and bullied, cajoled and coerced, there persists,
both among the simple peasants of the Trentino and Istria and the
hard-headed business men of Trieste, a most sentimental and
inextinguishable attachment for the Italian motherland. There is,
indeed, something approaching the sublime in the fascination which
Italy exercises across the centuries on these exiled sons of hers.

The arguments adduced by Italy for the acquisition of Dalmatia are by
no means as sound ethnographically as her claims to the Trentino and
Trieste. Though the apostles of expansion assert that ten per cent of
the population of Dalmatia is Italian, this is an exaggeration, the
most reliable authorities agreeing that the Italian element does not
exceed three or four per cent. But this is not saying that Dalmatia is
not, in spirit, in language, in traditions, Italian. Cruise along its
shores, talk to its people, view the architecture of Ragusa, of Zara,
of Spalato, and you will not need to be reminded that Dalmatia was
Venetian until, little more than a century ago, Napoleon handed it
over to Austria at the peace of Campo Formio in return for the
recognition of his two made-to-order states, the Cis-Alpine and
Ligurian Republics.

It is safe to say that the war will produce no more delicate problem
than that of Dalmatia, which, as I have already shown, can never be
settled on purely racial lines. Those who have studied the subject
agree that to completely shut off Austria-Hungary from the sea would
be a proceeding of grave unwisdom and one whic