THE ALLIED ENEMIES.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9539, 10 July 1909, Page 7

THE ALLIED ENEMIES.

The tense relationship between Austria and Italy, which no Triple Alliance protestations serve to improve, has received a new irritant in the refusal of Austria to participate in the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unity in 1911. In intensely hostile spirit had been aroused in Italy, and Baron Aehrenthal has begun to realise that he has gone too far, with the consequence that there is every prospect that the Austrian Government will "climb down." This will not present much difficulty in the iorm cf on j thin?, seeing that Austria's pretext for non-participation was si t ply th:>t the number of recent exhil'itirns had been inimical to the industrial develop iient of the*' country. The real reason, of course—and the reason seized immediately by every cbancellerie in Europe—was that Austro-Hungary objected to taking part, directly or indirectly, in fetes in which the Italians will celebrate the annexation of Venice, the absorption of the States governed by families allied to the Hapsburgs, and the occupation of Rome. Meantime tne incident has avakened in Italy all the hostility engenered by the affair, of the San. jail railway, by the crisis in the Near East, and by the refusal to create an Italian university at the Austrian, town of Trieste. The Italians see in the decision of the Cabinet of Vienna a new form of protest against the capital sovereignty of Rome. The Emperor Francis Joseph, it is recalled. has never consented to return the visits of the King of Italy by going to Rome; and it is considered certain that the hereditary Archduke Franz Ferdinand, even more strictly Roman catholic than his uncle, will follow the same line of conduct when he ascenda the throne. The , personal relatives between the rulj irg families are thus destined to becoming cooler and cooler. But the Governments, in view of the existence of the Triple Alliance, are hardly free to expose their sentimental prejudices in this fashion, and it, is the Austrian official Press which is the most inclined to support a cessation of what is otherwise something more than a pin-prick to Italian susceptibilities.