like a bolt from the blue, her ultimatum to Turkey. In this document the Italian Foreign Minister, after recapitulating in the vaguest terms a list of grievances, which even if they had been well founded, were of the most trivial, indeed, puerile character, calmly announced the Italian Government's intention of occuping Tripoli and Cyrenaica by military force, and summoned Turkey within twenty-four hours to express acquiescence in this burglarious proceeding. It shocked even the most blasé of our imperialist leader writers.
The consummation of Italian unity which had awakened such generous sentiments and such high hopes, opened up avenues of the highest endeavour for the exploration of Italian statesmen. The poorest, the most heavily taxed, and, in the South, one of the most uneducated and half-fed populations in Europe constituted a paramount claim upon its rulers. But a number of Italians thought otherwise.
Italy, as soon as she is independent … will have in turn to think of that need of expansion eastwards and southwards which all Christian people feel… Whether it be to Tunis or to Tripoli, or to an Island, or to any part of the European Continent matters not.
Thus the author of Delle speranze d'Italia. In fact Italian unity had hardly been attained when the fever of imperialism seized hold of Italy's governing classes, and the country in Europe which, perhaps, could least afford it, plunged headlong into oversea adventures
The seed of the Tripoli "raid" was sown at the Berlin Congress which met in June, 1878, ostensibly to revise the Treaty of San Stefano concluded between Russia and Turkey at the close of the Russo-Turkish War. The Congress arose through the British Government's threat of war upon Russia if the Treaty were ratified, on the ground that it affected certain provisions of the general European Settlement at Paris in 1856 and must, therefore, be first submitted to a European Conference. The real reason was the fear of British diplomacy, that if the provisions of the Treaty stood, Russia, using Bulgaria as a cat's-paw, would be in a stronger position to attain the goal of her Tsars' secular ambitions—Constantinople. Everything about the Congress and its preliminaries was fraudulent. The very day after it met, indiscreet disclosures revealed that the diplomatists concerned had
