152 SHORT NOTICES January of the Austro-Hungarian treaties, which Dr. Pribram has printed as a result of his investigations into the Vienna archives. The account of the negotiations which preceded the five treaties of the Triple Alliance has been reserved by the editor for another volume. We have here, besides the documents, the illuminating introduction of Professor Pribram, which analyses, with a remarkable impartiality, the significance of the various documents. It is however difficult to accept his conclusion that while Italy secured the greatest advantages from the Triple Alliance ' Austria-Hungary doubtless got the worst bargain '. Italy obtained, it is true, considerable commercial and financial advantages, but these were largely neutralized by the ten years' tariff war with France. She received from 1891 onwards a promise of the definite support of the Triple Alliance in the event of a war with France, if the latter power altered in any way the status quo on the North African coast. On the other hand she came to realize, especially after Adowa, that her best chance of obtaining Tripoli and the Cyrenaica lay in an agreement with France ; since the increasing subordination of Turkey to Germany rendered it unlikely that she would obtain these possessions through the Triple Alliance. Moreover the Alliance condemned her to an indefinite renunciation of Italia Irre- denta, which ensured the constant hostility of a large section of Italian public opinion ; while the fear that the pope would be restored by French aid, which Bismarck used as an effective argument in 1882, had become completely illusory by the end of the century. Nor is it true that Austria- Hungary ' attained nothing but a certain degree of assurance that her ally would not attack her in the rear in case she should become involved in a war with Russia '. Dr. Pribram himself admits that the defection of Italy would have involved incalculable consequences. This is particu- larly true after the , conclusion of the Franco-Russian alliance in 1894, the accession of Italy to which would have dealt Austria-Hungary a fatal blow ; whereas, fortified by the alliance, she wag able to keep Serbia and Roumania in her orbit, to look forward with confidence to the eventual annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and to envisage the possibility of an advance through Novi-Bazar to the Aegean. Dr. Pribram points out that by the text of the treaties Italy was not bound to assist Austria- Hungary if the latter was attacked by Russia alone. This is a true and important point : her only security against such an attack lay in the successive renewals of the alliance with Germany after 1879. That the Triple Alliance had become a complete unreality by the date of its last renewal in 1912 is obvious. The three anti-French articles, which re- mained unaltered since they had been inserted at the demand of Italy in 1891, had no possible reference to the actual situation ; while the hope expressed in the protocol, which also dates from 1891, that England will accept the programme established by the two earlier of these articles, is grotesque. The Alliance was probably strongest and most harmonious between 1887 and 1891, when France still remained isolated, and when England made her closest approach towards it by her adhesion to the Mediterranean agreement of 1887 with Italy and Austria-Hungary. It had, however, already lost that essentially defensive character, which can only justly be ascribed to its first signature in 1882. C. R. C.
