of active measures which, under the particular circumstances of such an eventuality, it might be prudent and right to take. But we do say, that this is one of the cases in which the very amplest reserve of England's freedom and power to act in any way that she might judge right under any complication arising from such a course of action on the part of the Congress, should be expressly and solemnly claimed in her name. We should not only keep ourselves innocent of the doing, and steadily disapprove the deed, but we should show ourselves ready and watchful to take advantage of any ulterior possibility, and to use at our discretion any legitimate means for annulling the consequences of an illegal transaction. There is little doubt that the thinking mass of the English nation is prepared to take at least this responsibility upon itself; and equally little doubt, that by this demeanour its influence as well as its honour will be best consulted in the approaching deliberations.

It may not impossibly be asked in the Congress as well as out of it,-if England is not only so clear on the point of her own duty and policy, but so determined not to bate a jot of her own ideas and opinions in deference to the opinions and ideas of others,-what, in her view, is the use of a Congress at all, except to endorse the fiat of England? If she starts by refusing to concede the reasonableness or feasibility of any solution but one, and that, by the way, one in furtherance of which she has not hitherto spent a farthing or raised a finger,-how can she expect that any concession will gracefully be made in her direction, either by those who have already relinquished somewhat through the ill fortune of war, or by those who have tried the hazard boldly and unsparingly, and who have accepted loyally, in full satisfaction of their demands for Italy, such advantages as the good fortune of war gave them? If the plenipotentiaries of every nation to be represented in the Congress are to come alike provided with no margin to their positive instructions, and with no spirit of conciliation or pliancy in their general views, how is it possible that they should ever agree? Had the reconstitution of Central Italy been a question of detail, or of the simple expediency of any particular political arrangement within the undoubted competency of the forum of the great Powers of Europe, the objection to an over-jealous and dogmatic obstinacy of demeanour would be cogent enough. But the question is not one of detail, but of principle; not of expediency and convenience, but of the actual and acquired rights of a nation; not arising out of any unquestionable mandate of divine right inherent in the several kingly persone or popular sovereignties of Europe when met together, but involving in itself the very root, and marking the very limit, of the juris

diction which in their corporate capacity they can exercise. It is true, that England has spent neither blood nor money in active struggle for the cause of Italian liberty and union; true, that twelve months ago she was ready to look with the gravest and coldest suspicion on the unselfishness and sincerity of those who were forcing the question to a violent issue; and that her present attitude of hearty sympathy may well appear in extravagant contrast with her former professions of standing aloof to those who do not care to investigate, or who cannot appreciate the logic of her motives: but the issue raised in the quarrel between Austria, France, and Sardinia, whether as stated in the preliminary pleadings of the diplomatic correspondence, or as solved in the verdict taken by consent at Villafranca, was a very different one from that which has since been brought into the court of appeal of European opinion. The French Emperor was perhaps not far from the truth (though in a sense in which he did not intend his words to be taken) when he explained his acceptance of the Villafranca conditions by asserting that the dimensions of the struggle were enlarging themselves incommensurately with particular interests of France. Although the actual dimensions, as a matter of gros bataillons, were not grown, and would not have grown, beyond what a careful counting of the cost might have enabled an acute player to anticipate from the commencement of the game, the moral direction of the struggle was altering, and its moral importance growing, while the specific interests of France were not widening in proportion. As soon as the tendency of the Central Italians to take their destiny into their own hands became apparent through the impotence of the feelers thrown out in behalf of the Emperor's cousin, the critical point of real interest transferred itself from the open plains of Lombardy to the cities of the Duchies and the Romagna, and the critical weapons were changed from the simple method of crossed bayonets to the development of earnest thought and will within those cities. Whether or no Victor Emmanuel and his Piedmontese councillors were rightly chargeable with inordinate personal ambition in provoking Austria again to stake her supremacy in Italy on the sharpness of her sword, is a question which it has become nugatory to ask or answer, in the face of the attitude so steadily taken and maintained by thepeoples of Central Italy. Not that the gain of eight millions in the place of three makes any difference in the subjective purity of motive, or justifies an immoral ambition as salutary, on the ground that the consideration was comparatively so much better worth the grasping. But the unanimity of the Central Italians, expressed in a dignified and solemn choice through the mouths of those who were at once their freely elected repre

sentatives and their most natural and fitting leaders by station and education, has not only reflected in some sort a different colour on the personal behaviour of the King of Sardinia from the beginning, but has radically altered the point of view from which impartial bystanders must judge the morality and the rights of the case. It is no longer a question of greater or less aggrandisement of the house of Savoy, but of the free exercise of the reasonable instinct of a people, left with no contradictory de facto allegiance to restrain and hamper its expression.

The moral position which Victor Emmanuel might have assumed before a Congress, in regard of the provinces of Central Italy, at the date of the peace of Villafranca, differed as widely from the relation he bears to them now, as the position of the Prince of Orange towards the people of England when he landed at Torbay, from his relation to them when the estates of the realm had tendered the crown of England to William and Mary at Whitehall. The transfer of the allegiance of Central Italy is as much an accomplished fact as the palpable and entire loss of power by the Grand Dukes and the Pope in the Duchies and the Romagna: and of this fact the first and main legitimate business of the Congress is to take official cognisance. The iron crown of Lombardy has, if we are not mistaken, accompanied the retiring armies of Austria as a symbol or a trophy. But if Victor Emmanuel, "strong in the rights" (to use his own manly words) which the offer made by those several provinces has given him, does succeed in placing on his head, with the assent and recognition of the Congress, the crown of a great North Italian Kingdom, he may certainly repeat, with at least as much unmingled truthfulness as has ever been attached to its utterance on any similar occasion, the stereotyped royal phrase of Dieu me l'a donné.

Against this simple rule, upon which we have been mainly harping, that an accomplished fact is not to be confounded with a theory or aspiration not reduced into action,-Mazzini has always been, and still is, a persevering offender. Any acceptance of the course recommended in Mazzini's letter of October last to Victor Emmanuel would have proclaimed the re galantuomo an ambitious madman, an unscrupulous gamester, careless alike of the lives of thousands and of the destinies of those states which have placed their rights in his hands, or an absolute fool. To have thrown down, as he was bid, the crown of Piedmont for that of "indivisible Italy,"-in other words, to have gratuitously invoked on his own head the whole material force of which Austrian revenge and Neapolitan rancour might dispose, while rendering it absolutely impossible for his former ally to assist him with a single Zouave or a single centime,-to

have overturned in an instant the prestige of tranquil selfknowledge and rational self-respect which has characterised the successive steps of the constituent Duchies in forming themselves provinces of a tangible and practicable united kingdom,—would have been at once an irreparable blunder and an unjustifiable crime. If there is one man in Europe who should understand by experience that peace has its victories as well as war, that man is Victor Emmanuel. The organisation of constitutional freedom and liberal government in Piedmont during the nine years of peace which followed the overthrow of Novara, has been the most indispensable condition precedent to, if not the moving cause of, the growing influence attached to his name and position within the other states of Italy; and the conquest of a stronghold of right won by him in the half year of peace that has elapsed since Villafranca is incomparably greater than any advantage which had been given him by the previous campaign, and its diplomatic close. The urgent advice of an irresponsible and impracticable dreamer was to throw back into the yawning gulf of uncertainty the gains which had been realised, and the pledges which had been undertaken :

"Vedrai che l' uom di setta è sempre quello :

Pronto a giocar di tutti, e a dire addio

Al conoscente, all' amico, e al fratello."

And for what? Of the feelings of Venice there is no doubt; but it is not a whit more certain that the people of the Two Sicilies desire at this moment either absolutely to depose their reigning dynasty, or, even then, to join a kingdom containing the whole of Upper Italy, than it is certain that Canada longs to be annexed to the United States, or that the United States yearn for re-union with England. Whatever change the Sicilies may wish for, it is for them to pronounce; and not for Mazzini, Garibaldi, or Victor Emmanuel, nor for strangers in or outside of Italy. And until they have so pronounced for a change of rules or of boundaries, and carried their own decree into execution, like the inhabitants of the Duchies and the Legations, with an energy and earnestness not to be mistaken, it is the bounden duty of Europe to assume that, whatever administrative or constitutional reforms they may desire, they are content to be left within the same dynastic and territorial relations as now. If, on the other hand, the Congress resolve to treat the Central Italian provinces, which have quietly shaken off the clogs that interfered with their free action, with such measures as might be applicable to them if they were still in the gall of bitterness inseparable from the sway of the Bourbons of Naples, it will commit the very crime of arbitrary excess in the line of re

pressive interference, which Mazzini is eager to commit in the direction of revolutionary propagandism. The reactionary conspirators will in that case unhappily have more power to carry out their own views than the republican prophet, whose extravagancies they will go as far to justify, as his scheme, if adopted, would have gone towards the palliation of theirs and it is for this reason mainly that we have thought it necessary to analyse at such length the nature and the tendencies of the latest headstrong error of the incorrigible Mazzini.

It is now a trite observation, that the most indigestible morsel of all for the Congress to swallow will be the recognition of the independence of the Romagna. The most powerful and the most proudly unbending of all European Powers in the conclave, even were he not to appear in it by any special attorney, will undeniably be-servus servorum. It is impossible to draw any relevant logical distinction between the cases of the Duchies and the Legations. The concession of any alternative whatever to the Villafranca stipulations for the return of the Grand Dukes, will imply that an equal right to an equally large alternative resides in the impenitent abjurers of an infallible sovereign. Yet it is obviously more difficult for a Protestant power to interfere, with a reasonable chance of prevailing by protest or otherwise, in this special case than in any other. The plain broad ground which we have advocated as that on which England should stand all through,-that bygones are bygones, and that a Congress has no authority to reopen the questions which in the way of fact have settled themselves,—is the only ground upon which we can hope or claim to exercise upon this point an intelligible and unsuspected influence over public opinion or diplomatic deliberations. It is for the Roman Catholic Powers alone to buy off, if need be, by compensation in concordats or hard cash, the inevitable comminations of a plundered Holy Father. The spreading virulence of the Irish clamour in defence of the rights of the Head of the Church is a sufficient indication of the tone in which any special interposition of Protestant England in the matter of St. Peter's patrimony would be taken up by her adversaries. As far as our power of giving any support is concerned, the cause of the Legations will have to stand with and by that of the Duchies.

Before this paper has gone through the press, it will probably be known with more definitive or at least more official certainty who is to represent England as plenipotentiary. We have no intention of speaking disparagingly of Lord Cowley, who is understood to be selected by the Government for this purpose; but in default of any proved remarkable aptitude on his part for such a task, we could well have wished that it were intrusted