The World Decision | Page 2

life--seems to
me so obvious as to need no argument. In such a struggle Italy must, by
compulsion of historical tradition as well as of political situation, take
her part on the side of those who from one angle or another are
upholding with their lives the inheritance of Rome against the
pretensions of force--law, justice, mercy, beauty against the dead
weight of physical and material strength.
* * * * *
One had no more than put foot on the quay at Naples before the
atmosphere of fateful hesitation in which Italy had lived for eight
months became evident to the senses of the traveler. Naples was less
strident, less vocal than ever before. That mob of hungry Neapolitans,
which usually seizes violent hold of the stranger and his effects, was
thin and spiritless. Naples was almost quiet. The Santa Lucia was
deserted; the line of pretentious hotels with drawn shutters had the air
of a summer resort out of season. The war had cut off Italy's greatest
source of ready money--the idler. Naples was living to itself a subdued,
zestless life. Cook's was an empty inutility. The sunny slopes of
Sorrento, where during the last generation the German has established
himself in all favorable sites, were thick with signs of sale.
In other respects there were indications of prosperity--more building,
cleaner streets, better shops. In the dozen years since I had been there,
Italy had undoubtedly prospered, and even this beggar's paradise of sun
and tourists had bettered itself after the modern way. I saw abundant
signs of the new Italy of industrial expansion, which under German
tutelage had begun to manufacture, to own ships, and to exploit itself.
And there were also signs of war-time bloat--the immense cotton
business. Naples as well as Genoa was stuffed with American cotton,
the quays piled with the bales that could not be got into warehouses. It
took a large credulity to believe that all this cotton was to satisfy Italian
wants. Cotton, as everybody knew, was going across the Alps by the
trainload. Nevertheless, our ship, which had a goodly amount of the
stuff, was held at Gibraltar only a day until the English Government
decided to accept the guarantees of consul and Italian Ambassador that

it was legitimately destined for Italian factories--a straw indicating
England's perplexity in the cotton business, especially with a nation
that might any day become an ally! It would be wiser to let a little more
cotton leak into Germany through Switzerland than to agitate the
question of contraband at this delicate moment.
The cotton brokers, the grain merchants, and a few others were making
money out of Italy's neutrality, and neutralista sentiment was naturally
strong among these classes and their satellites. No doubt they did their
best to give an impression of nationalism to the creed of their pockets.
But a serious-minded merchant from Milan who dined opposite me on
the way to Rome expressed the prevailing beliefs of his class as well as
any one,--"War, yes, in time.... It must come.... But first we must be
ready--we are not quite ready yet"; and he predicted almost to a day
when Italy, finding herself ready, would enter the great conflict. He
showed no enthusiasm either for or against war: his was a curiously
fatalistic attitude of mind, an acceptance of the inevitable, which the
American finds so hard to understand.
* * * * *
And this was the prevailing note of Rome those early days of May--a
dull, passive acceptance of the dreaded fate which had been threatening
for so many months on the national horizon, ever since Austria
plumped her brutal ultimatum upon little Serbia. There were no vivid
debates, no pronounced current of opinion one way or the other, not
much public interest in the prolonged discussions at the Consulta; just a
lethargic iteration of the belief that sooner or later war must come with
its terrible risks, its dubious victories. Given the Italian temperament
and the nearness of the brink toward which the country was drifting,
one looked for flashes of fire. But Rome, if more normal in its daily life
than Naples in spite of the absence of those tourists who gather here at
this season by the tens of thousands, was equally acquiescent and on
the surface uninterested in the event.
The explanation of this outward apathy in the public is simple: nobody
knew anything definite enough as yet to rouse passions. The Italian
newspaper is probably the emptiest receptacle of news published

anywhere. The journals are all personal "organs," and anybody can
know whose "views" they are voicing. There was the "Messagero,"
subsidized by the French and the English embassies, which emitted
cheerful pro-Ally paragraphs of gossip. There was the "Vittorio,"
founded by the German party, patently the mouthpiece