The World Decision | Page 8

prejudices of a very small element in the state. Good society in Rome was still out on the Pincian for the afternoon promenade, was still exchanging calls and dinners these golden spring days, but its views and sympathies could not count in the enormous complex of beliefs and emotions that make the mind of a nation in a crisis. Prince von B��low's motor was busily running about the narrow streets of old Rome, the gates of the pretty Villa Malta were hospitably open,--guarded by carabinieri,--but if the German Ambassador had put on an old coat and strolled through the Trastevere, or had sat at a little marble-topped table in some obscure caf��, or had traveled second or third class between Rome and Naples, he might have heard things that would have brought the negotiations at the Consulta to an abrupter close one way or the other. For Italy was making up its mind against his master.
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Rome was very still these hesitant days of early May, Rome was very beautiful--I have never known her so beautiful! The Pincian, in spite of its afternoon parade, had the sad air of forced retirement of some well-to-do family. The Piazza di Spagna basked in its wonted flood of sunshine with a curious Sabbatical calm. A stray forestieri might occasionally cross its blazing pavements and dive into Piale's or Cook's, and a few flower girls brought their irises and big white roses to the steps, more from habit than for profit surely. The Forum was like a wild, empty garden, and the Palatine, a melancholy waste of fragments of the past where an old Garibaldian guard slunk after the stranger, out of lonesomeness, babbling strangely of that other war in which he had part and mixing his memories with the tags of history he had been taught to recite anent the Roman monuments. As I wandered there in the drowse of bees among the spring blossoms and looked out upon the silent field that once was the heart of Rome, it was hard to realize that again on this richly human soil of Italy the fate of its people was to be tested in the agony of a merciless war, that even now the die was being cast less than a mile away across the roofs. The soil of Rome is the most deeply laden in the world with human memories, which somehow exhale a subtle fragrance that even the most casual stranger cannot escape, that condition the children of the soil. The roots of the modern Italian run far down into the mould of ancient things: his distant ancestors have done much of his political thinking for him, have established in his soul the conditions of his present dilemma.... I wonder if Prince von B��low ever spent a meditative hour looking down on the fragments of the Forum from the ilex of the Palatine, over the steep ascent of the Capitoline that leads to the Campidolgio, as far as the grandiose marble pile that fronts the newer city? Probably not.
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Germany wanted her place in the sun. She had always wanted it from the day, two thousand years and more ago, when the first Teuton tribes came over the Alpine barrier and spread through the sun-kissed fields of northern Italy. The Italian knows that in his blood. There are two ways in which to deal with this German lust of another's lands--to kill the invader or to absorb him. Italy has tried both. It takes a long time to absorb a race,--hundreds of years,--and precious sacrifices must be made in the process. No wonder that Italy does not wish to become Germany's place in the sun! Nor to swallow the modern German.
When the Teuton first crossed the Alpine barrier and poured himself lustfully out over the fertile plains of northern Italy, it was literally a place in the sun which he coveted. In the ages since then his lust has changed its form: now it is economic privilege that he seeks for his people. In order to maintain that level of industrial superiority, of material prosperity, to which he has raised himself, he must "expand" in trade and influence. He must have more markets to exploit and always more. It is the same lust with a new name. "Thou shalt not covet" surely was written for nations as well as for individuals. But our modern economic theory, the modern Teutonic state, is based on the belief: "Thou shalt covet, and the race that covets most and by power gets most, that race shall survive!" And here is the central knot of the whole dark tangle. The German coveting greater economic opportunities, knowing himself strong to survive, believes in his divine right to possess. It is conscious Darwinism--the