30 The Great War when the German navy would sweep the EngHsh from the sea and the British Colonial Empire be the prize of victory. France destroyed, Russia crippled, England would be exposed to the greatest peril in her history, and the possibility of such peril had driven England into the Triple Entente. For Italy the prospect was most confused. A vic- tory for Austria would mean Austrian expansion in the Balkans, along the Adriatic and toward the iEgean. Austria, too, was the secular enemy. Thousands of Italians were still subject to Austrian tyranny in the " unredeemed lands." Austria is the Italian rival in the Adriatic, and if victorious would be able to lay hands on Salonica, the key to the Near East. Again, should Italy join the Germans and Aus- trlans her coast would be at the mercy of the French Mediterranean fleet; her newly won Tripolltan col- ony would be the inviting prize for French garrisons of native troops in Algeria and Tunis. To balance this Italian reward for fidelity to her allies would doubtless be Tunis and perhaps Egypt, if England, too, were defeated. Such, briefly, were the major considerations which a general war had for the rulers and the leaders of peoples and nations in Europe. So complicated and confusing were the policies and the purposes of the Great Powers who now stood on the edge of a war more terrible than Europe had known since Na- poleon abdicated at Fontainebleau.