to invoke principles — partito d'opportunistic voi non avete diritto d' invocare principii ; worshippers of the fait accompli, you may not assume the garb of priest of morality. Your science lives in the phenomenal world, in the event of the day — you have no ideal. La vostra scienza vive sul fcnomeno, sull’ incidente dell’ oggi ; non avete ideale. Your alliances are not with the free, but with the strong ; they rest not on notions of right and wrong, but on notions of immediate material utility. Materialists, with the name of God on your lips, enemies in your hearts, but ostensible venerators of the words of the Pope, seeking by desire of aggrandisement to break those treaties of 1815 on which you rely todeprive the people of the right of insurrection, — between you and me there is no difference but this one : I say, holy is every war against the foreigner, and I reverence him that tries it, even though he succumb ; you say, holy is every war that succeeds, and you insult the fallen. You heaped insults on the bold people of Milan on the 6th of February ; you would have proclaimed them magnanimous saviours of their country if they had prevailed. Surely you do not deem that a people subject to foreigners, and capable of delivering itself, may not do it, simply because the arms that are left in its hands have not a given length. ... If the people of Italy brandished their knives to the cry, Viva it re Sardo ! and conquered, you would embrace them as your brethren. And if they conquered even without that cry you would embrace them the next day, in order to take advantage of their success.
And then, in that tone of prophecy which he often affects but has seldom assumed so successfully, he says : —
Piedmont is not a definite, limited State, living of its own vitality. It is Italy in the germ. It is the life of Italy, concentrated for a time at the foot of the Alps. . . . Italy, whatever happens, cannot become Piedmont. The centre of the national organism cannot be transferred to the extremity. The heart of Italy is in Rome, not in Turin. No Piedmontese monarch will ever conquer Naples ; Naples will give herself to the nation, never to the prince of another Italian province. The monarchical principle cannot destroy the papacy, and annex to its own dominions the States of the Pope.
In all this declamation there is not a little truth. It is hard to show the error of the conclusions drawn by Mazzini from premises which he holds in common with Cavour. There is a vast difference between the amount of misery inflicted by the French Revolution and by the absolutism of the old monarchy ; but there is an intense similarity of features and character between the crimes of the Revolutionists and the crimes of the Legitimists. The
