There seems to be a general, if not clearly-defined, impression that the claims of Italy to her unredeemed provinces on the eastern shores of the Adriatic are based more or less on a very recent imperialistic policy, and that their attainment would be a repayment for the help given by Italy in the present war, entailing gross injustice to other races. Fiume is spoken of as a Hungarian town, although the Magyars are at most only a twelfth of the population. One writer, obviously honest and eager to deal fairly with the subject, suggested a little while ago that Trieste should become, at the end of the war, an international city; another, less unbiassed, perhaps, but equally misinformed, suggested that Austria be given a “chance” in the future partition of the Adriatic. Austria has had her chance; and this state of mind, this uncertainty, is the direct result of the policy through which Austria wished to justify her possessions in the Adriatic in face of the democracies of the world.
There was never a more ruthless application of the motto “
Divide et impera” than the history of these unfortunate provinces can show. For half-a-century the most cruel policy of wholesale banishment and persecution was carried out by the Viennese Government; yet the world at large heard little of it, since the Italians, represented by a hopeless minority in the Austrian Parliament, could not make themselves heard while the storm raged between Czechs and Germans. Italy, their natural protector, was gagged and bound by the unnatural treaty of alliance, which was the first cause of that mistrust with which she was in the past sometimes regarded by those very nations whose history, race and sympathies fashioned them to be her friends. The free choice of the people of Italy in the moment of crisis showed where the heart of Italy had always been, but the mischief has not been undone wholly yet.
The Italian claims on Trieste, Istria and Dalmatia (their right to the Trentino does not seem to have been questioned) are neither imperialistic nor recent. Since ever the idea of a united Italy began to take root from the blood-soaked fields of Napoleonic campaigns these provinces, which had been Roman first and then Venetian, in any case Latin for twenty centuries, were claimed for the new Italy. In the little town of Capodistria two pieces of cannon placed in the only square and a gallows equally permanently established, were necessary to stifle the protests of the people when the population was handed over to Austria in payment for her treachery to Venice. The people in the Dalmatian towns wept with grief when they saw the insignia of the Venetian Republic lowered. It was not difficult then to know the political wishes and the nationality of these provinces.
In the days of Mazzini and Garibaldi the aim of the Italian patriots was equally known and accepted by all liberal-minded people. “Austria is arming herself to defend Istria and Venice; for Garibaldi, as soon as his army is reinforced, will throw himself on Dalmatia, crossing from Puglia, and shut in the face of the barbarians that always open door, the Italian Alps,” wrote Count Prospero Antonini to G. Rinaldi. Cavour's Charge d'Affaires, in a long interview with Napoleon III., submitted a memorial, which gave as the boundaries of Northern Italy “Piedmont, Lombardy, Venice, Italian Friuli and the coastland of Dalmatia.” There was then no doubt in the minds of statesmen as to the justice of the Italian claims, the only doubts were as to the expediency of a war to realise them.
If further proof be wanted, one need only glance at the proclamations of the Dalmato-Istrians calling the people to arm for Italian independence, to the sums of money freely and generously given for the liberation of Venice ; to the repeated protests of the municipalities of Istria against its union with Krain; to the requests for national and administrative autonomy. Carlo Cattaneo in January, 1851, in a letter to
The Times and the
Daily News, wrote:
“Many English people are under the erroneous impression that Austria possesses her Italian provinces in virtue of some old hereditary right, and they go so far as to believe that Prussia or any other Germanic Power has not only the right, but the duty, by uninterrupted tradition, to ensure to Austria the domination of these lands. I wish to point out that two-thirds of the Italian subjects of Austria are quite a recent acquisition; almost four million inhabitants belong to the Venetian States and its original dependencies on the Istrian coast of the Adriatic — Istria, Dalmatia, Ragusa, and Cattaro. ... The way in which the Venetian, the oldest autonomous State existing in Europe, passed sixty years ago suddenly from one moment to the next, from being the ally of Austria to becoming its prey and victim, marks one of the lowest and meanest transactions to be met with in modern history.”
This is the
fons et origo of all the evil which, let us hope, the present war will rectify, as it certainly will if justice and right are to prevail over violence, and if the remnants of a policy by which nations were traded in and handed about like chattels are no longer to poison the future destinies of the world. The Treaty of Campoformio, which gave Austria these provinces, irrespective of the wishes of the population, prepared the way for the attempt to force a way through to Salonika and to the East, suppressing on the way both the Italians of Dalmatia and the Slavs of Serbia.
As long as the Austrians still hoped to reconquer Venice and their Italian dominion, they did not deny the Italian nationality of the southern provinces. In 1848 the
Osservatore Triestino, the official organ of the Austrian Government in Trieste, commenting upon a proclamation of the Governor relative to a revolt in favour of Italy ruthlessly suppressed, wrote:
“Citizens, he who writes is Italian, and proud of the fact. If he were ordered to renounce his nationality he would be the last to write a line in this paper; but, for the love of Heaven, be not misled by those who play upon your unfounded fear of seeing your nationality adulterated, disturbing your minds by a mere phantom.”
How well founded was this fear of a murderous attempt upon their nationality is proved by the fact that little more than half a century later an apparently unbiassed writer could seriously suggest the internationalization of Trieste.
As Austria lost first Lombardy and then Venice, she tightened her deadly grip on the remaining provinces. Her dream of an Italian domain lost, with the establishment of a free and united Italian nation, she had no more use for an Italian population. Taking advantage of the fact that Italy was shackled by an alliance and that Germany was drawing to herself the alarmed attention of the rest of Europe, she turned her energies to the ruthless systematic uprooting of the Italian element in her Italian provinces. How this war was waged and with what success will be considered in the next article.
Italy and the Balkans: The Problem of Dalmatia II
The latest Austrian statistics give an overwhelming majority of Slavs in Dalmatia. The Slavs themselves are not satisfied with this majority, and maintain that the statistics favour the Italians. The electoral returns seem to show that, far from being favoured, the Italians in Dalmatia have been under-estimated by two-thirds. But if the policy of persecution, of intimidation, and violence pursued by Austria during the last fifty years is not to be allowed to obtain its object, if the great democracies of the world are not to let crime go unpunished, it will be necessary to consider not the statistics of today alone, but the statistics of the last fifty years, and to inquire very carefully into the astonishing changes which have taken place. Even in 1880 all the municipalities of the largest Dalmatian cities were Italian. Today the capital alone — Zara — has an Italian corporation. Even Ragusa had until the turn of the century a municipality which consisted half of Italian and half of Serbian representatives. Now Ragusa, like Spalato since 1883, like Sebenico and Trau, is entirely in the hands of the Croats.
In the Dalmatian Diet of 1861 the Italian party had thirty members against thirteen more recently. When the Venetian Republic fell the Dalmatian cities showed in unmistakable manner their attachment to the State which had carried on the traditions of Rome extending over a period of twenty centuries. What has happened in the last fifty years to change the national character of the province? Simply this: the Austrians, to justify their possession in the face of Europe, which demanded a national base for the State, decided upon a crusade to denationalise the whole of the Italian provinces, a crusade which sometimes was childish and futile, as when the Austrian authorities cut a Venetian lion from one of the city walls of Monfalcone, but more often was bloody and violent.
The notion originated with Radetzky. But it was not adopted at once, for Austria had still hopes of recovering Venice and possibly the Milanese, in which case there would have been one more nationality to steady the political balance of the empire. When the statesmen of Vienna realised that Italy was more likely to claim what belonged to her by right than to lose a part of what she held, they embarked on their new policy, which is the exact counterpart of the policy carried on by Germany in Alsace-Lorraine and attempted in a necessarily modified form in Belgium since the occupation. Europe demanded that the people should choose their government. Austria and Germany — autocracies — undertook to provide the kind of people that would be faithful to them. The experiment has not been altogether successful in Dalmatia, for part of the Slavs now demand separation. But the Croatian Slav is still one of the mainstays of the monarchy, and in the meantime the Italians were sacrificed.
How Austria respected the wishes and aspirations of her people is shown by the manner in which the elections for the Diet were carried on in Dalmatia. The preparation consisted in a series of acts of brutal violence to intimidate the Italian electors. Flourishing vineyards were destroyed, trees cut down, fields ready for the harvesters trampled upon, electors shot at and stoned. The electoral commission worked protected by the soldiers' bayonets. One of the Austrian officials, unaware that a Croatian victory had been ordered from Vienna, reprimanded the authors of some gross fraud. He was immediately suspended, and the campaign was carried on with greater violence, with contemptuous disregard of all equity and justice.
When it became apparent that the victory would go to the Italians unless new subterfuges were resorted to, the Slav electors were recalled and made to impersonate voters long dead. The Italians discovered the fraud, and obtained and produced death certificates; the commission refused to listen to them. But victory still hung in the balance. The special Viennese envoy had to resort to open violence. He began by teaching the Slav from the country to make the road dangerous for the Italian electors. He ended by ordering or countenancing a charge of two battalions of Tyrolese chasseurs to disperse a few hundred Italians who were waiting their turn to enter the polling booth.
Is it surprising if the result gave a Diet in which the number of the Italian representatives fell from thirty to thirteen? Nor was the method adopted to win over the municipal government essentially different. When Spalato passed over to the Croatians in 1883 a couple of warships kept their guns trained on the town, while patrols of soldiers and sailors prevented Italian electors from reaching the voting stations. Italian votes were cancelled, clocks were tampered with to hasten or suspend the closing hour as the election seemed to go in favour of or against the Croatian party. The Austrian “prefect” ordered all the Government employees to vote for the Croatians, and the Slav bishop issued a similar command to his dependents. Thus gradually all the civic government fell into the hands of the protégés of the Austrians. A few years ago the islands of Brazza, Lisa, Werbosca, in Lesina, still held out. Today the capital — Zara — stands alone.
To capture the municipal government was essential to the success of the Austrian plan. The municipality alone is sufficiently powerful to protect the city and the surrounding district from the attacks of the government party. To drive away or convert forcibly the Italians, it was necessary to control schools and churches. This could not be done as long as the town authorities had the means to open new schools and the power to protest against a political campaign carried on from the pulpit. When the control of the city government was secured church and schools were used with unparalleled. unscrupulousness to sow hatred and distrust of all Italians.
There are cases on record where the Croatian priests (the bishops of Trieste and Veglia are Slavs) have refused to administer baptism and the last sacraments of the Church to Italians because they were Italians. A funeral procession was refused admittance to church, and denied permission to enter the cemetery for the same reason. A few years ago the Bishop of Veglia, Monsignor Mahnic, issued an order that religion was to be taught [in Croatian in all the Quarnero islands] irrespective of the nationality of the students and of their inability to understand the language. But the schools' council had still some power over which the Government's hand did not stretch, and it exercised it by substituting for the priests lay teachers able and willing to teach religion in the only tongue the pupils spoke and understood. At the close of the scholastic year the bishop retorted by excommunicating both teachers and council, a procedure which the Croatian clerical paper, Pucki Prigateli, described as an excellent manoeuvre.
Another teacher was arrested and tried because he happened to use Latin instead of Croatian when singing the “Tantum ergo.” When a religious body from Slav Zagabria asked permission to open a school at Pola, the authorisation was granted immediately, but the friars of Pirano, when they made a similar request, received a sharp denial, because they were of Italian nationality. Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely, but enough has been said, perhaps, to prove at least that the power which inspired this policy of extermination against the Italians of the Irredenta is hardly likely to have “cooked” the statistics in order to favour the Italians at the expense of the Slavs. The Italians of Dalmatia, says Gayda, contributed 30 per cent of the provincial taxes in 1911, yet the Budget did not give them a single school in which their children could receive their education in the language of their fathers.
The Austrian Minister of Education, after many petitions, acknowledged in 1886 that “the conditions required by the law for the institution of an Italian school at Spalato exist without doubt,” and the Imperial tribunal confirmed the Government's statement, and yet the school was not established.
Italy and the Balkans: The Problem of Dalmatia III
The Austrian statistics in regard to the Italian population of Dalmatia are exceedingly eloquent, if seen in their true perspective. Once the official census gave 56,000 Italians; in 1880 the official figure fell to 20,000; ten years later there were apparently only 16,000 Italians left. The conclusion is obvious; the Italians were being suppressed no less effectively than they could have been, if Vienna had followed the example of Constantinople and adopted its more primitive and more direct way of destroying the Armenians. Cruel or puerile, the persecution of the Italians is always directly traceable to Vienna. As long as the Austrian Lloyd ships belonged to a Trieste company they were named after cities and the heroes of mythology — there was the Venezia, the Milano, the Pandora, the Ettore. As soon as the Government stepped in and controlled the company, Achilles and Hector had to make way for the names of obscure Austrian statesmen. Of course, it was childish; but it was the reductio ad absurdum of Teutonic thoroughness. The church, the school, the police were handed over to an alien race. The names of things and places had to follow.
When the war began it was considered that the game had been won in Dalmatia. Trieste was the next objective, and all the apparatus used in Dalmatia was brought to bear — provocation, intimidation, military force. In addition, Trieste being a commercial city and consequently less dependent on favours and less afraid of the displeasure of the Government, banks began to exercise their influence to finance and direct politico-commercial operations similar in every way to those undertaken by Germany to snare other unsuspecting peoples and making them dependent financially upon Berlin. The Government offices were filled with foreigners, of whom not one could speak correctly the language of the people. Every obstacle was placed in the way of Italian subjects wishing to establish themselves in Trieste, and to prevent the swelling of the Italian party, in spite of the fact that no foreign subject could obtain political rights.
A [man named] M. Vernet was refused permission to build a mill because he happened to speak Italian like a native, having lived some years in Sicily. When he threatened to place the matter in the hands of the French Consul, he was told that had he made known his nationality sooner all the difficulties would have vanished, and the concession was given forthwith.
An Italian was murdered by a drunken Croat. All that the murderer could say in defence was that he had killed “an Italian.” He was condemned to four months' imprisonment. More than once Italian subjects accused of a trifling offence have been condemned to terms of imprisonment and — inevitable corollary — deportation. If the Court of Appeal cancelled the sentence and the imprisonment was remitted, the banishment was nevertheless upheld by the police even for those born in Trieste, if the parents were Italian subjects.
Throughout these years the animus of the Austrian authorities in these provinces was that of the bully who, although physically much stronger than his victim, is afraid and anxious lest he should be caught red-handed and his brutality punished. They lost their heads for no particular reason; they believed the wildest rumours. They mobilised suddenly all the available troops in Dalmatia and set them to defend the coast, because it had been reported (obviously by some wag) that 30,000 Garibaldian volunteers were preparing to invade it. The Athletic Club of Trieste, with 3,000 members, was closed by order of the police five times. But as there is no law against the formation of a new society, the closure of the club only meant a change of name.
Some of the reasons given for the action of the authorities are perhaps worth recording. In 1864 the alleged reason was that a public entertainment had been given in the garden of the club; in 1882 the club postponed a meeting in sign of mourning for the death of Garibaldi, and this, the Austrian authorities said, showed that the club had “political aims dangerous to the safety of the State.”
“I want to clear out all these Italians,” the the chief of the police was overheard to say in Trieste. “We must do in Trieste as we have done in Dalmatia; help with every means the non-Italian elements and wipe out the Italians altogether,” wrote Lieutenant-Marshal Foerstner in the Oesterreichische Rundschau shortly before the war.
The merciless persecution of the Italians in the unredeemed provinces must be taken into account even before the great historical and important military claims of Italy on these lands are considered. Any solution, any proposal which did not make full amends for the wrongs suffered during fifty years by the Italian population would be bound to encourage a policy which is not only immoral, when measured by every canon humanity ever evolved to save civilisation from barbarism, but is also bound to lead to international complications. The sufferer must needs revolt against the oppressor as soon as the opportunity arises. The oppressor himself who does wrong, and is conscious of it, redoubles his cruelties to stifle the victim before Nemesis can overtake him.
Neither the most cynical and most hardened criminals nor the new tyrant can escape this instinctive dread of justice even when they have reason to think themselves beyond its reach. Germany was eager to “give France a lesson,” although she knew that France was not in a position to attempt, and was far from contemplating, the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine. At the time of the Messina earthquake Austrian generals, betraying the instinct which combines fear and cruelty, suggested an attack on Italy to prevent even the remote possibility of a cry of anger from the mother country for the Italian population across the frontier deprived of its birthright. One wrong leads inevitably to another.
As for the strategical claims of Italy on these coastal provinces, their importance may have been thought exaggerated once. Now, however, it must be clear that for the mastery of the Adriatic the possession of the eastern coast is an indispensable condition. Neither Italian, English nor French commanders have been able to accomplish much, in spite of the great skill shown in smaller operations and the devotion of the sailors. “The long coastal State of Dalmatia, which flanks Bosnia-Herzegovina on the west,” writes Sir Thomas Holdich, “is divided from them by the effective wall of the Dinaric Alps. Across that rugged system no railway has yet been carried, and Dalmatia owes her independent existence entirely to the natural strength of her frontier.”
This is the reason why her history and her civilisation were those of Rome and Venice, not those of the people living beyond the Alps. These are, of course, frontier provinces, and frontier provinces have always a more or less mixed population. If the Czechs obtain their autonomy and France recovers Alsace-Lorraine, the percentage of the foreign population will be higher there than it will be in these unredeemed provinces of Italy. Nor is it to be thought that the fulfilment of the Italian claim would mean the exclusion from the Adriatic of other nations. Both to the north and to the south of Dalmatia there are excellent harbours which would give the hinterland its outlet on the sea.
