seek to place us in a position where we might be able to dispense with it; he should provide us with a guarantee that, our obligations to the two Empires once cancelled, France would not renew her Tunisian venture in other regions, that she would never again betray us in our own peninsula by means of the Vatican, and that she would undertake to ensure our independence. But up to the present nothing has been done to persuade us that the French people and their Government desire to become our serious and loyal friends.
Sincerity and loyalty are strange words in the mouth of an adept in a profession whence the exercise of the human virtues is rigidly excluded. A year before that letter was written, the Italian Government, fearing an attack by France, had made urgent representations to Berlin and London, and in July, 1900, Lord Salisbury, marking a considerable advance upon his attitude in 1887, had told the Italian Ambassador that Italy must occupy Tripoli, "that the Mediterranean may be prevented from becoming a French lake"—but not at that precise moment!
By 1901–2 Italy and France or rather the diplomatists of those countries had concluded their little "compensation" deal. Delcassé's plans for Morocco were maturing and Italy's benevolent neutrality was secured at the price of a free hand in Tripoli. The alliance between thieves was complete. In January 30, 1902, Italy squeezed a similar consent out of Austria in the shape of a declaration by Baron Posetti, the Austrian ambassador, that his government, "having no special interests to safeguard in Tripoli and Cyrenaica," would do nothing to prevent Italy taking such action therein as might seem to her appropriate.
Incredible as it may appear, the third renewal of the Triple Alliance, which took place five months later (June 28, 1902), contained a repetition of the same anti-French provision on Italy's behalf in the separate but attached agreement to which allusion has already been made! Through such septic processes was imperialism in North Africa promoted.
Thenceforth the ripening of the Tripoli plum was merely a matter of time and opportunity. It shaped well when the Russian Tsar and the Italian King signed a secret pact at Racconigi on October 24, 1909, the last paragraph of which reads as follows: "Italy and Russia bind themselves to adopt a benevolent attitude, the former in the interests of the Russian Straits question, the latter in the
