On April 26, 1915, the negotiations were concluded between France,
Great Britain, Russia and Italy; the Treaty of London was signed and
the Italians had become our Allies. By this Treaty we and France and
Russia undertook to give them, if we were victorious, a very large
increase of territory--over which, by the way, we none of us had any
right of disposal.
["For Serbia and for Montenegro this is a war of defence and of
liberation and not of conquest," said the Yugoslav Committee in London
(May 1915)--which Committee, by the way, made its first headquarters
in Rome, and only transferred itself to London and Paris in view of
the frankly hostile attitude of Sonnino and his colleagues. It
consisted of the prominent Croats and Slovenes who had managed to
escape across the Austrian frontier. "Serbia and Montenegro," said the
Committee, "fight to liberate our people from a foreign yoke and to
unite them in one sole, free nation.... To perpetuate the separation
of these territories in leaving them under the Austro-Hungarian
domination or another foreign domination, would be in flagrant
violation of our ethnographic, geographic and economic unity; our
people would, without any doubt, oppose to it an energetic and
justified resistance."] At other times during the nineteenth century
the Great Powers made amongst themselves and without consulting the
Small Powers certain arrangements which affected the latter, although,
as Professor Westlake observes,[88] all the States, so far as their
sovereignty is concerned, stand equal before the law. But these
arbitrary arrangements had always been made in the interest and for
the security and well-being of the weaker State, as, for example, when
the Congress of Berlin decided on the independence of Roumania and
Serbia, in accordance with the will of the people. This beneficent
action on the part of the Great Powers infringed none of the
principles of international law, whereas the Treaty of London took
away from the smaller Power nearly everything of value it possessed
and stripped it of the possibility of future greatness; the spoil was
presented by the Great Powers to one of themselves. We may concede, as
Mr. C. A. H. Bartlett of the New York and United States Federal Bar
points out in his closely reasoned monograph[89]--we may concede that
belligerents can by way of anticipation allot enemy land among
themselves, yet such a compact cannot properly be exercised by them so
as to work injustice to another ally who was not a party to the
division of territory. From the first it was well understood that the
Treaty of London could only be imposed in direct defiance of the
wishes of the populations most immediately concerned, so that the
Italian Cabinet insisted that the whole transaction should be kept
from the knowledge of the Serbian Government. As an illustration of
the domineering and extortionate nature of Italy's demands (to which
the Entente submitted) one may mention that part of the proposed
boundary was traced over the high seas beyond the three-mile limit,
which of course was a proposition entirely at variance with
international law. We should not forget, says the _Spectator_,[90] the
whole Italian record of idealism and liberal thought. And Mr. G. M.
Trevelyan, an Italian exponent,[91] remarks that the terms of the
Treaty of London were unknown to the people who paraded the streets
of Rome impatient for their country to enter the War, and threatening
with death the Minister Giolitti who had hitherto succeeded in keeping
them out of it. The grandiose bargain which the Government had made
was unknown to them; but surely Mr. Trevelyan is paying meagre tribute
to their idealism and liberal thought when he implies they would have
been elated by a knowledge of the details of the Treaty. Ought not,
rather, a people imbued with the afore-mentioned virtues to have
threatened with death a Minister who should attempt to carry through
so scandalous an instrument? "The broad reason why the Italians joined
our side," says Mr. Trevelyan, "was because they were a Western, a
Latin and a Liberal civilization." Mr. Bartlett, who ponders his words
with legal precision, thinks that "Italy was not inspired by any very
noble principles of right and justice when the War began, nor until
long after it had swept over the greater portion of Europe ... nor was
she spontaneously moved by any sentiment of human justice. She was
cool, calculating and business-like. She weighed carefully in the
balance the advantages and disadvantages she might derive from the
pending struggle; she saw on which side the profit might lie, and with
that commercial prudence for which her people are renowned she set her
own price on the value of her aid to the Entente." But if the long
hesitation was nothing more than governmental prudence, and if the
nation as a whole was out of sympathy with such ideas, how came it
that, after the plunge was taken, no less than 300 deputies left their
cards on Signor Giolitti? The country was, through various causes,
swept into the War; and in considering whether this was in harmony
with or in opposition to the desires of the majority I think one
should pay at least as much attention to the deputies who acted as to
the crowd who shouted.... The country was swept into the War, and a
Bologna newspaper (_Resto del Carlino_, March 21, 1915) has published
a telegram from Sonnino to the Italian Ambassadors in Paris, London
and Petrograd, which announced that Italy was joining in the World War
for the purpose of destroying the strategical advantage enjoyed by
Austria in the Adriatic. But at the same time the Southern Slavs must
be prevented from gaining a similar position, and so the coast must be
neutralized from Kotor to the river Voju[vs]a. Sonnino expressly gives
Rieka to the Croats. It is not only this which lends great interest to
the document, but the fact that Italy's entrance into the War was
determined five weeks before the signing of the Treaty of London and
two months before she actually declared war.