society was penetrated with corruption ; self-government was almost unknown. Down to 1848 this was due to the Austrians. Their policy has to answer for the degradation of Italy, and for the perils which have befallen the Church. Nor has the change that has passed over the Empire in the reign of Francis Joseph brought any serious improvement in the condition of Italy. For this the Italians alone are responsible ; for they have rejected every advance, and have feared nothing so much as Austrian concessions. The war of 1859 had not the moral excuse of the war of 1848. The justification of a rising against the old régime did not apply to the new. In the recent war Austria was attacked, not because of misgovernment, but because of national antagonism. The first plea was fiercely repudiated by the Italian patriots, and that which they substituted is absolutely revolutionary and criminal. The fall of the other thrones followed, by the law of gravitation, when the Austrian supremacy was removed ; and the reason urged against the government of the Pope and of the King of Naples, whether rightly or wrongly applied, was sound in principle ; whilst Tuscany and Lombardy were taken from the Austrians on grounds which are in all cases false. The real charge against Austria was, that she prevented reforms in the States which she influenced ; the misgovernment of these States was the chief weapon by which she was expelled. That Austria alone should be expelled, whilst the other sovereigns remained, would have been an inversion of the order both of ideas and of things. The events of the last two years are secondary to the Italian war, and possess neither the same importance in principle nor the same proportion of guilt which give to that event its foul pre-eminence in modern history.
But the policy of Cavour was revolutionary at home as well as abroad ; and it is his notion of government and of the position of the State, more than his ambitious policy, that brought him into collision with the Church. He was not intentionally a persecutor, or consciously
