At this point, it becomes necessary to consider the questions at issue, region by region.
Gorizia, Trieste, and Istria are three small territories which, in Roman times, formed a part of Italy and of the province of Venetia, and which the modern Italians still call Venetia Julia. Most scholars will agree, I think, that geographically these territories belong to Italy, and that the Julian Alps and the Karst Mountains, which come down to the sea on the Quarnero, mark the natural frontier of Italy on the northeast.
Historically, Venice held the larger part of Istria and a small part of Gorizia for many centuries down to the fall of the republic in 1797. Trieste was an independent commune until in 1382 it came under Hapsburg rule. The larger part of Gorizia and eastern Istria, after passing for centuries from one German princeling to another, have been under the Hapsburgs since the close of the Middle Ages.
Ethnographically, Venetia Julia seems to show a slight Yugo-Slav majority (52%). In Gorizia there were in 1910 155,000 Slovenes against 90,000 Italians; in Trieste 119,000 Italians against 59,000 Yugo-Slavs; in Istria 203,000 Yugo-Slavs against 147,000 Italians. But the Italians, not without some show of reason, contest these figures as being much too favorable to their opponents, owing to the bias and the unscrupulous methods of the Austrian census-takers. Furthermore, it would be difficult for even an honest census to give an accurate picture of the racial complexities of a province like Istria, which has been said to contain more fragments of diverse nationalities than any other province of similar size in Austria, and fragments that generally do not get properly classified in the census because there is no rubric for them. What is one to do with such ethnographic curios as the Chiches, the Morlaks, the Rumenes of Istria—people who do not know what they are themselves, nor can any philologist tell them? One of the best observers of the region has discovered no less than thirteen “ethnographic nuances,” and such a confusion and intermixture of tongues that even educated people had difficulty in deciding what language they spoke. He found here Croaticized Slovenes, and Slovenized Croats; Croaticized Rumenes, Italianized Croats, and Croaticized Italians; finally a population of whom all that could be said was that their costume was Italian, their manners Slav, and their language a mixture of everything. Under such circumstances one cannot place great reliance on the census.
Perhaps it is more significant that just before the War, out of seventeen deputies elected from these three provinces to the Reichsrat, ten were Italians, and only seven Yugo-Slavs. In the provincial diets the Italians outnumbered the Slavs two to one. Seventy per cent of the communes are said to have had Italian administrations. Italian was indubitably the chief language of business, of administration, of the cities, and of the educated classes pretty generally, the one language that everybody knew and without which it was impossible to get along.
Under these circumstances, it has, in the first place, been settled that Trieste belongs to Italy. Of the Italian character and sentiment of that city throughout its history, there can be no doubt. If the Yugo-Slavs for a time laid claim to it, that was because the rural districts around it are Slovene and because Trieste is the natural port for the Slovene provinces in the interior. Nevertheless, it would appear that the Yugo-Slavs would have been wiser never to raise a claim so obviously doomed to defeat.
It appears probable that the whole of Gorizia and Istria will also go to Italy. This is, of course, a more questionable decision; but, in view of the geographic facts in the case, the solidly Italian population in the coastal districts, the preponderant position of the Italian language and civilization everywhere, and the apparent preponderance of Italian political sentiment as measured by the elections, this would seem to be a not unfair solution.
Much more serious are the problems presented by the remaining two territories: Dalmatia and Fiume.
As to Dalmatia the Yugo-Slav claim can be stated very simply. That province had in 1910 a population of 635,000, of whom 611,000 (96%) were Yugo-Slavs and only 18,000 (3%) Italians. Even if one admits some inaccuracy in these figures, the most extreme Italian claims do not rise above 60,000 (10% of the total population). All the deputies sent from Dalmatia to the Reichsrat for many years back have been Yugo-Slavs, and the latter control every commune in the province, save only the capital Zara. The Yugo-Slav predominance is so overwhelming that, at first glance, it is not easy to understand how the Italians can have any serious claim at all.
The Italians rest their case, in the first place, upon history. They point to the wellnigh eighteen hundred years of Latin rule in Dalmatia: the Roman period, the age of the independent Latin-Dalmatian communes, the long sway of Venice, inaugurated by the famous expedition of 998, in honor of which the Doge ever afterwards bore the title Dux Dalmatiae, and to commemorate which there was instituted the famous annual ceremony of the ‘wedding of the sea’ by Venice.