A minute number of this small body consisted of real Italians, people
who very exceptionally had settled in Dalmatia; but among these rare
families there was not any single one of that extensive class in
Venice which had been presented by their Government with vast domains,
with farms and forests in Dalmatia. Well, the Count of Thurn observed
that this small body of Italianized Slavs would probably not help him
very much, for the Italian culture and the education which they were
so proud of were--it is not unjust to say--nearly always superficial
and not such as to compensate for this party's lack of numbers. But
yet, for what they were worth, he supported them. No doubt the project
which the Archduke Charles evolved in 1880, to transplant
German-Austrians to Dalmatia, would have been preferred by von Thurn.
"These colonists," explained the Archduke, "by their culture and
laboriousness, by their devotion to the House of Habsburg would give
to the Dalmatians a most valuable example and would soon persuade them
thoroughly to merge themselves among the mass of peoples faithful to
the Emperor." But this plan could not be carried through, because the
people of Dalmatia would have risen in revolt; moreover, the most
fertile regions had been so neglected that too many of them were now
marshes or through other causes uninhabitable. Thus von Thurn assisted
the Italianized party; they would, at any rate, unlike the other
Serbo-Croats of Dalmatia, not strive for union with anybody else.
Before the French Revolution no one in Italy dreamed that it would be
possible to bring about Italian unity, and the patriots of 1848 longed
only for the liberation of their Peninsula; they spoke of Triest as
"the port of the future Slavia" or as "a neutral zone, a transitional
region between Slavia and Italy."