THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXII, Issue XII, 19 March 1904, Page 54

THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR.

Italian Friendship for Japan.

After England there is no other country in Europe which feel* such warm sympathy and cordial friendship for Japan as Italy (remarks the Rome correspondent of the “Pall Mall Gazette”), which has much to fear from an exorbitant augmentation of the (tower of Russia, as the Slav invasion knocks at the door of the Peninsula, and has already swept away the Italian civilisation, which centuries of Venetian influence and occupation had given to the Eastern coast of the Adriatic. The relations between Rome and Tokio are so cordial that at one moment it was even thought that a regular alliance existed between the two eountires. This is princicipally due to the personal influence of the Princes of the Royal House, who having several times visited the Land of the Rising Sun. The first to go there was the Duke of Genoa, brother of Queen Margherita, in 1873, who returned in 1879; but recently the Duke of the Abruzzi, in 1895, and the Count of Turin in 1898, both cousins of the present King, made rather long sojourns in Japan.

The friendly feeling already existing was strengthened by the recent visit of Marquis Ito, who had long interviews with the leading Italian politicians, and especially with the late Premier, Signor Zanardelli, to whom he openly said that, notwithstanding the courteous reception received in St. Petersburg in 1902, he had no illusions about the situation in which his country found itself plac'd before Russia, and regarded a conflict us being sooner or later, inevitable. It was then that Marquis Ito was decorated with the Collar of the Annunziata, the highest order in Italy, entitling the wearer to call himself cousin of the King.