During the Paris Conference the representatives of Italy showed hardly
any interest at all in the problems concerning the peace of Europe,
the situation of the conquered peoples, the distribution of raw
materials, the regulation of the new states and their relations with
the victor countries. They concentrated all their efforts on the
question of Fiume, that is to say on the one point in which Italian
action was fundamentally weak in that, when it was free to enter into
the War and lay down conditions of peace, at the moment when the
Entente was without America's invaluable assistance and was beginning
to doubt the capacity of Russia to carry on, it had never even asked
for Fiume in its War Treaty, that it had made the inexplicable mistake
of neglecting to communicate that treaty to the United States when
that country came into the War and to Serbia at the moment when
Italy's effort was most valuable for its help. At the conference Italy
had no directing policy. It had been a part of the system of
the German Alliance, but it had left its Allies, Germany and
Austria-Hungary, because it recognized that the War was unjust, and
had remained neutral for ten months.
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