. 
 
 1
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 ITALY, 
 
 AUSTRIA, AND THE POPE. 
 
 SI JLfttcv 
 
 TO 
 
 SIR JAMES GRAHAM, BART. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOSEPH MAZZINI. 
 
 " They made an exile — not a slave of me." — Byron. 
 
 Where thou findest a lie that is oppressing thee, extinguish it. Lies exist there 
 only to be extinguished ; they wait and cry earnestly for extinction." 
 
 Tnos. Carlyle 
 
 LONDON: 
 PRINTED BY U. ALBANESI, 
 
 S, QUEEN STREET, GOLDEN SQUARE. 
 
 1845.
 
 D(t 
 
 TO 
 
 THE RIGHT HON. SIR JAMES GRAHAM, BART, 
 
 HOME SECRETARY. 
 
 Sir, 
 
 To you, for certain unexpected reasons, I will crave leave 
 
 to dedicate this Pamphlet on the Affairs of Italy. It embodies 
 
 my authentic views on the social questions which now 
 
 agitate that Country. You will find here in brief compass 
 
 what I mean and endeavour in regard to it, and what I 
 
 shall continue to mean and endeavour, no more and no less. 
 
 Valuable time need not henceforth be spent in deciphering 
 
 invitations to tea and expressions of sympathy for my Italian 
 
 School sent me by English friends. The purport of my 
 
 private correspondence is, has been and will continue to be 
 
 — this. 
 
 Yours, 
 
 With all due respect, 
 
 Joseph Mazzini. 
 May 1845.
 
 SIR, 
 
 I thank you much for having afforded me the 
 long desired opportunity, to lay before a free nation, 
 full of generous instincts, the sorrows of a brave, 
 unhappy, misunderstood people : — to depose at its 
 bar the complaints of twenty or twenty two millions 
 of men, whose fathers headed the march of civilisation 
 in Europe, and who demand for themselves and that 
 same Europe, to be made partakers of the large, free, 
 active and continually progressive life which God has 
 ordained for his creatures. 
 
 By the spiritual and temporal, the domestic and 
 foreign oppressions that lie heavy upon them, — they 
 are to-day deprived of all liberty of thought, of speech, 
 and of action. 
 
 You, Sir, so far as in you lay, have aggravated our 
 unhappy position. 
 
 When you opened my correspondence at the desire 
 of one or several of our governments, you scattered 
 germs of mistrust in the heart of our youth — you 
 proved to them that the Union of the Governments 
 against us is complete, — you destroyed the prestige 
 which in their eyes attached itself to the respected name 
 of England.
 
 • 2 
 
 But you at the same time also revealed to me, to me 
 an Italian, exiled for the national cause, a duty which 
 in part I am able to accomplish. That mistrust which 
 you have caused to germinate must be destroyed, — 
 for the good of my country and the honour of yours, I 
 must demonstrate to my fellow-countrymen that they 
 would err, in confounding the English Government 
 with the English Nation. Whilst calling forth ( so far 
 as it may be done by a solitary individual ) an expres- 
 sion of public opinion in favour of our sacred cause, I 
 must prove to Italy that on the day when her national 
 Flag borne by strong and pure hands shall float in the 
 wind, here as every where else it will be greeted with 
 active sympathy. — Moreover whilst I repel, not for 
 ourselves alone but also for the cause we represent in 
 a foreign land, all that is odious and misunderstood in 
 that term Conspiracy, all the suspicion, Sir, that your 
 calculated silence casts upon our actions, I must at 
 the same time reveal to all how completely the 
 strife in which the noblest amongst us have so 
 long been engaged is for us an affair of Duty, — and 
 that the means whereby we endeavour to work our end 
 are those that are alone left for us. — We take our 
 stand upon this ground, and God willing we shall man- 
 tain it, as calumniated, yet proud ; as honourable, altho' 
 dishonourably opposed, calm and firm before God and 
 our own consciences, the only judges we can recognise, 
 in the exceptional position wherein we have been 
 thrown. 
 
 It is so much the more necessary that all this should 
 be made manifest, because throughout the whole of the 
 controversy arising out of the shameful transaction of 
 the letter opening, the cause of the Italian People has 
 not obtained a single decisive manifestation of sym-
 
 3 
 
 pathy. By the Press as well as within the House, the 
 cause has been admirably pleaded so far as the indivi- 
 duals whom it so nearly touched were concerned, so far 
 as concerned the Country whose character for honour 
 and loyal good faith was implicated, but the question as 
 it concerned Italy has not even been touched upon. 
 
 The means have been condemned, but none have 
 troubled themselves to enquire into the end for which it 
 was used. All men proclaimed the practice to be im- 
 moral, but none turned his attention to the theory 
 involved and of which the act in question was only an 
 application, bold it is true to shamelessness, but never- 
 theless strictly logical. — Upon every side all voices 
 have cried out to you, Sir, : " You have no right to 
 " open the letters of this man any more than those of 
 " other men ; you have not the right to interfere in the 
 " affairs of other people : restrict yourself to watching 
 " that the safety of the kingdom be not directly 
 " menaced, and do not by overstepping these limits, 
 " violate the rights of individuals ; " — but I know 
 no one who has risen up to say : " you have rendered 
 " yourself doubly culpable in opening the private 
 " correspondence of this man, you have by so doing 
 " not only violated the rights of an individual, whose 
 " conduct towards us, Englishmen, is irreproachable 
 " — you have violated the law of Nations, the law of 
 " all the world and of God who governs it. — Placed 
 " between right and wrong, you have chosen the 
 " wrong. Between a flagrant injustice sustained by 
 " brute force, and the efforts of those who were en- 
 " deavouring to put it down, you have declared your- 
 self for brute force — you have ranged England on 
 " the side of the oppressors against the oppressed, — 
 " on the side of the executioner against the victim, — 
 
 a 2
 
 4 
 
 " you have raised her fair standard in the service of 
 " European despotism ; for the national motto : 
 " Religious and Political Liberty for the whole world, 
 " you have substituted the motto : Liberty for us, 
 " Tyranny for all the world beside. As if egotism 
 " could ever be made the basis of freedom, as if the 
 " true interest of England could ever be contrary to 
 
 the Law of God -Love of all, for all ; Amelioration 
 " and development of all, by all. 
 
 It is here however as it seems to me that the whole 
 point of the question lies, for you and for your coun- 
 trymen. Now that we are once warned, it matters 
 little to us whether you open our letters or not : either 
 we shall write nothing that can compromise our poor 
 friends, or else we shall not transmit them by the Post : 
 — that which it does concern us more nearly to know, 
 is, whether in her efforts and in the struggle which is 
 preparing, Italy is to count upon one enemy more. It 
 signifies little to the country which you represent — or 
 rather which I trust you do not represent — whether you 
 have usurped one illegitimate prerogative more or less; 
 if uprightness be not in your heart or in your political 
 tendencies, you would always possess sufficient 
 power to do ill ; — but that which it does concern this 
 country to know is to ascertain whither it is being led : 
 it must be precisely informed upon the principles of your 
 international policy — it behoves it to take care that 
 Government does not prostitute its name to diplo- 
 matic chancelleries nor consign it to the maledictions 
 of the mothers of Italy, or the contempt of brave men 
 who suffer for well doing. Twenty warrants no more 
 ihimeight, (the righteous yearly number accordingto the 
 Lords' Committee ) will not retard the progress of the 
 cause of Italian liberty ; but one single warrant given
 
 by the Government of a people professing to be free 
 and christian, with a design to protect an unjust cause 
 affixes a lasting stain upon the honour of the country, 
 gives to others a temptation to immorality, and 
 augments every where that want of faith in virtue, 
 and in political honesty, which is the principal feature 
 of our epoch. 
 
 One man only amongst you, Members of the Ca- 
 binet, has felt this. Whilst you, Sir James, confined 
 yourself topresenting us as the final solution of a problem 
 in morality the dead letter of an Act that broke out of 
 a state of things altogether different to yours, — he 
 saw at once that your cause was irredeemably lost, un- 
 less you could ground it upon some generalprinciple, and 
 he sought for a justification of the espionage exercised 
 against me in a definition of the mission of England in 
 Europe. — " It is " said the Duke of Wellington in 
 his place on the fourth of July 1844 " it is the proud 
 " distinction of the policy of this country that our 
 " object and our interest is not only to remain at 
 " peace ourselves with the whole world, but to main- 
 " tain peace throughout the world and to promote the 
 " independence, the security and the prosperity of 
 " every country in the world, " — I accept, for my 
 part, this definition as it stands, and I find it very 
 superior to all those theories of non-intervention under 
 which all questions of inter-national order and European 
 progress are effaced, and nothing left but petty ques- 
 tions of individual claims. — The absolute non-inter- 
 vention doctrine in politics, appears to me to be what 
 indifference is in matters of Religion, viz : a 
 disguised atheism — the negative, without the vitality 
 of a denial, of all belief, of all general principles, of 
 every mission of nations on behalf of Humanity. We
 
 are all thank God bound to each other in the world, 
 
 and all that has ever been transacted upon it, that has 
 
 been good, great, or eminently progressive, has taken 
 
 place owing to Intervention. I am only astonished 
 
 *hat in the midst of Parliament where these words were 
 
 uttered, no one arose amongst all those who have 
 
 recently travelled this Italy, or who study her history 
 
 were it only in the journals — to say to him : 
 
 " Security ! peace ! independence ! my Lord ! that is 
 
 " precisely what the man is seeking for his country, 
 
 " whose correspondence your colleagues have violat- 
 
 " ed — it is what was sought by those men who were 
 
 " shot some months since in Calabria, possibly in 
 
 " consequence of this violation. — There is no Se- 
 
 " curity except under Laws, under wise laws voted 
 
 " by the best men, sanctioned by the love of the 
 
 " people ; and there are no laws in Italy; there is in- 
 
 " stead the caprice of eight detested masters, and of a 
 
 " handful of men chosen by these masters to second 
 
 " their caprice. There can be no peace, except where 
 
 " there is harmony between the Governors and the 
 
 " Governed, where the Governement is the Intelligence 
 
 " of the country directing it, and the people the arm 
 
 " of the country executing his decrees, — and do you 
 
 " not hear the echo of the fusillades of Bologna and 
 
 " of Cosenza attesting Strife? a strife, my Lord, which 
 
 " amidst the tears of the good and the blood of the 
 
 " brave has gone on without ceasing for fifty years, 
 
 " between moral force which protests by the scaffold, 
 
 " and violence which seeks to stifle protestation in 
 
 " blood ? and as to Independence you know well, 
 
 " my Lord, that that word as applied to Italy is bitter irony; 
 
 " you well know that nearly one fourth part of the 
 
 " whole peninsula is governed by an army of 80,000
 
 " Austrian*, and that the Princes who govern the 
 
 " remainder, are, in spite of themselves, nothing 
 
 14 more than the Viceroys of Austria; and if a cry for 
 
 " Liberty, for progress or for amelioration arise from 
 
 " the bosom of any of these Viceroyalties, the Aus- 
 
 " trian army, in spite of the principles that England 
 
 " and France have proclaimed ten times within the 
 
 " last twenty years, comes forward to silence it with its 
 
 " veto. The mission that your words trace out for our 
 
 " country is very beautiful, mj^ Lord ; a mission of 
 
 " protection, of fraternal benevolence, a generalisation 
 
 " so far as is possible of the benefits we enjoy, such in 
 
 " truth is the mission a christian nation would do 
 
 44 well to exercise ; but how can you make it work 
 
 " along with your sanction of the system of espionage ? 
 
 " with your protection of the Car cere cluro, and of the 
 
 " scaffold? Do they desire good or evil, justice or 
 
 " injustice those men whom it is endeavoured to brand 
 
 " by styling them Revolutionists? Therein lies the 
 
 " whole question, and have you taken the trouble to 
 
 " examine it ? They desire to obtain the same 
 
 44 liberty which We — let it not be forgotten, through a 
 
 44 revolution — are now enjoying: liberty of conscience to 
 
 " give them a Religion, of which at present thanks to the 
 
 44 despotism under which they lie, they have only a 
 
 44 parody — liberty of speech, that they may preach 
 
 44 righteousness; liberty of action, that they may put it 
 
 44 into practice ; the liberty, my Lord, which we pro- 
 
 44 mised them along with* independence when you were 
 
 " Commander in Chief of the Allied Armies, and 
 
 44 when we stood in need of their aid to overthrow, 
 
 * Manifesto of G. Bentnick Admiral of the British Fleet, May 14, 
 1814.
 
 (I 
 
 8 
 
 Napoleon. They desire for a state of things, the 
 elements of which are hatred, mistrust, and fear, 
 to substitute a condition under which they would 
 be able to know each other, to love each other, to 
 help each other onwards towards one common aim. 
 They desire to destroy chimeras, to extinguish 
 falsehood, to bury out of sight corpses that are aping 
 life ; in order to put in their stead, a Reality ; 
 something true, acting, living, a power which shall 
 be strong enough to guide them, and to which they 
 may without shame yield allegiance. They desire 
 to Live, my Lord, to live with all the faculties of their 
 being, to live as God commands ; — to walk on- 
 wards with the rest of the world, — to have brethren 
 and not spies around them, — to have instructors, 
 and not masters, — to have a home and not a prison. 
 Can you imagine that England is exercising her 
 mission when she says to them — No ! The World 
 goes onwards, but ye shall be stationary : there is no 
 God for you, ye have the Emperor of Austria and the 
 Pope. Ye are of the race of Cain, of the accursed 
 race ; ye are the Parias of Europe : resign yourselves 
 in silence, suffer in all your members, but stir not, 
 seek not for relief, because Europe slumbers, and you 
 might disturb her repose ? — Christ, my Lord, also 
 fulfilled a revolutionary Mission. He came to 
 destroy the chimeras and the idols of the old world : 
 he destroyed the peace of paganism. In the face of 
 a religion which sanctioned distinction of races, 
 of castes, of natures, — he announced a 
 religion, the fundamental doctrine of which 
 was the unity of the human family, the offspring of 
 God, in order that we might arrive at universal 
 brotherhood. Would you, my Lord, had you been
 
 " living then, in the name of Peace and of the estab- 
 " lished Governments, have declared yourself on the 
 " side of Herod against Jesus ? " 
 
 The Italian question is very little understood in 
 England. People know in general terms that the 
 country is suffering, but few are aware to what a height 
 that suffering has arrived. They know that some 
 efforts are making to change its manner of Government, 
 but they believe it is by a mere handful of conspira- 
 tors, destitute of influence and not possessing the 
 sympathies of the masses, without any thing in short, 
 except the blind and dangerous promptings of their 
 own hearts. 
 
 In Italy nothing speaks : silence is the common 
 law. The people are silent by reason of terror, the 
 masters are silent from policy. Conspiracies, strife, 
 persecution, vengeance, all exists, but make no noise: 
 they excite neither applause nor complaint ; one might 
 fancy the very steps of the scaffold were spread with 
 velvet, so little noise do heads make when they fall. 
 The stranger in search of health, or the pleasures of 
 arts passes throu' this fairy land on which God has 
 lavished without measure all the gifts which he has 
 divided amongst the other lands of Europe ; — he 
 comes upon a spot where the soil has been recently 
 stirred, and he does not suspect that he is treading on 
 the grave of a martyr. The earth is covered with 
 flowers, the Heaven above smiles with its divine aspect: 
 the cry of misery which from time to time convulses 
 his native conntry, is rarely heard here ; and two 
 great epochs of the human race — two worlds, the 
 world of paganism, and the world of middle age, Chris- 
 tianity, — lie before him to study, — what cares he for 
 the Present ? He says to himself : there is here
 
 10 
 
 abundance of food, there is sunshine, there is music 
 in the air ; what more can this indolent race desire? — 
 Other men too, men of figures, statistics, utilitarians, 
 go their ways, judging of Italy as they would of any 
 other country in a normal state, neglecting on one hand 
 the great fact of the slavery, and the trampling down 
 of all the indigenous elements ; and on the other hand 
 the strength of vitality, the desire to live which in spite 
 of all obstacles, is beginning to dawn upon us : — they 
 meet here and there with fragments of superficial re- 
 form, they give the honour of it, not to our efforts or 
 the spirit that sustains us in the strife, but to our go- 
 vernments, and they exhort us to have patience — to 
 confine ourselves to pacific efforts for homeopathic 
 amelioration, which alone seems to conciliate their 
 lukewarm desire for the good and what they are pleased 
 to term the repose of Europe. They abdicate at the 
 frontier every thing like Faith, remembrances and 
 high heroic and social views. The idea of Nation is 
 too abstract for them. They see in Italy nothing but 
 a country, a surface of so many thousand square miles, 
 peopled by so many million bodies, ( the souls do 
 not enter into their calculation ) for whom all that can 
 reasonably be expected from their political rulers, is a 
 certain amount of food, clothing, and of material com- 
 forts, — pcmem et circenses ■ — As the Guter Franz 
 effaced from his plan of Spielberg, the Man, in order 
 that he might remember nothing but the numbered 
 prisoner, they would willingly efface the name of Italy 
 from the map of Europe, in order to substitute for it a 
 cipher. And above all this, influencing at once both 
 the thoughtless traveller and self styled practical men, 
 hovers the Vw virtisl the adoration of the actual, the 
 incessant confusion of Might with Right. You have
 
 11 
 
 risen up twice, thrice : twice, thrice, have you 
 fallen; you are then destined to suffer. We side only 
 with the strong — we adore Victory. The cry is 
 brutal ; still it influences the entire question, it engen- 
 ders the indifference of the people and directs the pro- 
 ceeding of the Governments. We, exiled patriots 
 have our letters opened, whilstit is highly probable, Sir 
 James, that you would respect the missives of Italian 
 monarchy, or republic, or at least that you would only 
 open them on your own account. — 
 
 Beyond these two classes of observers another party 
 is formed, who may be called your party — the 
 governmental party — that which holds up 
 Austria as the civilizing power in Italy ; it says : 
 " Peace, peace, we must have peace, at any price, w T ere 
 " it even the peace of the tomb. Italy is disturbed, 
 " her princes are weak, Austria is strong : Austria 
 " cannot help but extend her influence by one means 
 " or other over the whole country. The Lombard - 
 " Venetian Provinces are less unhappy, are better ad- 
 " ministered than the other States of Italy : — there 
 " is amongst them some trace of progress, whilst there 
 " is none amongst the States of the Pope or elsewhere ; 
 " it is advantageous that the paternal government of 
 " Metternich, and the Aulic Council would extend 
 " itself beyond the Po : it is advisable that by the 
 " exercise of its sway, it should repress both the agi- 
 " tation amongst the people, and the needless caprices 
 " of the Kings of Italy. " 
 
 The difference would not be great between this 
 argument, and that which an Italian might use, who 
 seeing the continually increasing agitation of Ireland, 
 and the powerlesness hitherto of England to repress 
 it, should conclude, that a more energetically
 
 12 
 
 despotic hand was needed to control it, and should 
 go to seek for it in a foreign land, in Russia for in- 
 stance. The question of nationality, the one impor- 
 tant point, is entirely overlooked. 
 
 Evidently, of all parties, this one is the most grossly 
 immoral. Fostered by a commercial treaty, it 
 has been adopted by you, Sir, not in con- 
 sequence of an erroneous conviction, but it in 
 consequence of a false line of policy which 
 prompts you to seek in a government which 
 only lives in his immobility, an ally, in the war with 
 Russia, which you foresee will sooner or later become 
 inevitable. It finds however some favour in England. 
 Openly preached by the tory journals during the 
 last italian disturbances, it relies on some statistical 
 details given in the book of a Prussian* who passed 
 through Italy in 1840, furnished with letters of Intro- 
 duction from Prince de Metternich, and repeated by 
 other travellers who find it more easy to copy, than 
 to observe for themselves. These details are inexact, 
 incomplete and partially false. — It is not true that 
 the Italian provinces under the austrian rule are 
 well governed ; — it is not true that the habits and 
 local tendencies of those provinces are consulted and 
 provided for by a special administration ; — it is not 
 true that central, provincial, municipal assemblies free 
 to speak, unshackled, sure of being listened to, form, as 
 has been asserted, a species of representative Constitu- 
 tion for Lombardy ; — it is not true that owing to the 
 care of a paternal government, the material comforts 
 are so great as to cause it to be forgotten, ( not by 
 Italians, that is out of question thank God, but forgot- 
 
 * Von Raumcr.
 
 13 
 
 ten by you English ) that our government is a foreign 
 yoke, which deprives us of what is the most precious 
 to a man in this world, Independence, Spontaneity, 
 Liberty. 
 
 No doubt of it, Lombardy is in a state of 
 progress ; exhausted as they have wished to make it, 
 the heart of the country still beats: no doubt of it; 
 elementary instruction is getting diffused, industry 
 multiplies its efforts, population is on the increase, 
 But what is there in all this which the vitality that is in 
 us, the movement going on in Europe around us, the 
 necessarily progressing order of things, and twenty 
 nine years of peace, are not sufficient to account for ? 
 To prove the disadvantage of a foreign and despotic 
 government, must all Lombardy sink to wreck like 
 Venice ? And because, it seems, we can and will live — 
 li\ e for the Future and for the destinies that are in 
 store for us — does this make any alteration in the 
 question with regard to Austria ? You compare the 
 year 1839 with 1829 or with any other year of the 
 period beginning from 1815. Why don't you compare 
 the State of Lombardy during all that period, with 
 its state during a former period, were it even the 
 stormy one of the Cisalpine Republic, were it what we 
 are far from regarding favourably, that of the kingdom 
 of Italy? Why dont you study with Gioj a the force 
 of our vitality in the symptoms which revealed them- 
 selves at the breath, nothing but the breath, of 
 libertv from 1796 to 1799: as contrasted with the 
 thirteen months of Austrian possession which imme- 
 diately followed? Or rather, if you would know what 
 Lombardy independent of foreign power is capable of, 
 why not go back to the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
 turies? Why not compare with the paltry advances
 
 14 
 
 so pompously signalized at the present day, the 200,000 
 inhabitants of Milan at that time, its seventy maim- 
 factories of cloth, its 60,000 workers in wool and its 
 forty millions of francs, which five cities alone, Milan, 
 Como, Pavia, Cremona, and Monza, exported solely in 
 wool, every year, by the port of Venice ? We advance, 
 you say ; yes, doubtless we advance thank God ; all 
 the stationary genius of Mr. de Metternich cannot dry 
 up the sap which ferments in our old Italian race ; but 
 are you aware what tears and sweat every step of 
 progress costs in that quarter ? Are you aware that 
 such industrial enterprises, seen in action now, derive 
 their origin from attempts in 1818, and helped at that 
 period to drive towards the Spielberg those who first 
 conceived them ? Are you aware how many of those 
 schools the diffusion of which fills you with admiration 
 owe their existence only to individual generosity and 
 to unheard of perseverance ? Have you ascertained 
 if those decrees of organisation which you cite with so 
 much complacency be other than tardy ratifications 
 of facts accomplished, through a mass of obstacles, by 
 zealous and pious men belonging to the country ? 
 Have you ascertained if all these protections granted, 
 are not a means adopted by Austria, to give a false 
 direction to what it could not hinder from growing up ? 
 
 I will now declare what the Austrian Government in 
 Lombardy really is. 
 
 It appears to me essential to devote a few pages to 
 it in this place, because if I can prove, not to you, 
 Sir James, and your colleagues, but to all who read 
 this without having previously made up their minds, 
 that Austria so far from being, even as regards the 
 bodily welfare of the inhabitants, a civilizing power in 
 Italy, is the declared enemy of all progress, of all
 
 I 
 
 amelioration, I may spare myself all trouble as regards 
 the other Italian Governments, because your own 
 organs confess them to be all execrable, requiring to 
 be overturned altogether, unless speedily reformed. — 
 
 In Lombardy there is a Viceroy ; he has the su- 
 preme regency ; all the reports of the Governors are sent to 
 him: he gives audiences, and a royal chancery surrounds 
 him. There is then a local Government, say the 
 partizans of Austria ; and they only forget one thing, 
 which is, the list of prerogatives this Government 
 has not. 
 
 It is in Vienna, where all taxes direct and indirect 
 are imposed, — all regulations concerning the Post- 
 Office made — and nearly all the higher of- 
 ficers under Government, the Podestd, the Delegates, 
 the Deputies of the Central Congress, the Councillors 
 of Tribunals, the Gouerno, the Magistrate Camerale, 
 the Administrators of Finance, the Prefect of the 
 Monte-di-Pieta, every individual employed in any new 
 institution, the Professors of the schools, &, are 
 nominated. Vienna enjoys the prerogative of 
 fixing the salaries of Government employes, 
 all pensions, the distribution of the funds for 
 the yearly expenditure, the approval of all new 
 undertakings the expenses of w r hich will exceed 
 3,000 florins, and of all speculations going beyond that 
 sum. Vienna legislates for all that concerns private 
 sales without auction, for all extra expenditure ; il 
 decrees all military levies ; it chooses the subjects of 
 instruction, &, &. Vienna in one word possesses the 
 whole Legislative Power ; the Executive works timidly, 
 because it is liable to central control and reprimand : 
 italian officers are to send copies of their Registers to 
 Vienna.
 
 16 
 
 It is at Vienna from amongst the Austrians 
 and the Tyrolese, that a great number of the 
 Government employes in Lombardy are selected. 
 It has been said that an almost equal number of Ital- 
 ians find employment at Vienna* ; the statement is 
 false, even as regards numbers. But granting it were 
 correct, is it not miserable shuffling to compare the 
 subaltern posts filled by some few Italians at Vienna 
 lost in the extent of a wide organisation, with the, 
 important places filled at Milan, by Austrians, in the 
 "midst of an infinitely more limited order of things ? — 
 I subjoin the list of the principal posts filled by for- 
 eigners in the Lombard-Venitian Provinces, and let the 
 reader judge for himself. 
 
 Chancery of the Viceroy ■ two Aulic Councillors out 
 of the three which compose it. 
 
 Giunta I. R. del Censimento. (census) : the Vice- 
 president, a Councillor. 
 
 Government : the Governor, the Vice-president, a 
 Councillor : two Secretaries : the Dispatching Di- 
 rector. 
 
 Police : the Director General ; an Asssistant, a Sec- 
 retary, five upper Commissaries ; five subaltern Com- 
 missaries ; nearly all the corps of the Police Military 
 Guard : Commandant, Captains, Lieutenants, &. 
 
 Censorship : a Censor. 
 
 University ; a Director and three Professors. 
 
 Veterinary School : the Director. 
 
 Schools of Philosophy and Gymnastics : eleven Pro- 
 fessorsf. 
 
 Magistrato Camerale (Fiscal) : the President ; a 
 
 * Raumer. 
 
 f Several of them, it is true, are directed to teach the gcrman 
 language.
 
 17 
 
 Secretary, the Inspector in Chief of the Guards of the 
 Confines ; the Vice-secretary. 
 The Mint : the Director. 
 
 The Post-Office : the Director, and twenty two 
 subalterns. 
 
 Inspection of the Tobacco Manufactory : the Ins- 
 pector. 
 
 Guards of the Confines : all the Commissaries, ex- 
 cept four. 
 
 Tribunals. Milan. — Tribunal of Appeal : the Pre- 
 sident and nine Councillors, 
 out of twenty five. 
 Tribunal of the first Inst- 
 ance : the President and two 
 Councillors. 
 
 Criminal J Tribunal : six 
 
 Councillors. 
 Brescia. — Tribunal of the first Ins- 
 tance : the President. 
 Cremona. — 
 Bergamo. — 
 Como. — 
 Pavia. — 
 Sondrio. — 
 
 The Army : nearly the whole of the military hier- 
 archy. 
 
 From this list, and the functions reserved to itself 
 by Vienna, it is easy to perceive what is the Govern- 
 ment ( Governo ) properly speaking. It is nothing 
 but an intermediate link, a secondary wheel in a more 
 important mechanism, performing the work of the 
 Congregazioni (Assemblies), Delegations, &, but able to 
 do scarcely any thing by itself, signing notifications, 
 
 B 
 
 id. 
 
 id. 
 
 id. 
 
 id. 
 
 id. 
 
 id. 
 
 id. 
 
 id. 
 
 id. 
 
 id
 
 18 
 
 which do not emanate from it, and possessing no 
 power except to receive the emoluments of office. 
 
 Let us now examine into the degree of power pos- 
 sessed by the Central, Provincial and Municipal 
 Assemblies. 
 
 The limits are clearly defined in the § 24 and 25 of 
 the letters patent embodying these Assemblies the 
 24th of April 1815. 
 
 " We permit the Central Assembly, respectfully to 
 " present before us, the wants, wishes, and petitions 
 " of the nation, as to all that regards the public ad- 
 " ministration, reserving it to ourselves to consult it 
 " whenever we consider it necessary. 
 
 " The Central Assembly, has not the right to 
 " make either General Ordonances, nor Statutes on 
 ' ' Taxes and Imposts, nor can it exercise by itself or in 
 " own name any act of Authority Legislative, Judicial, 
 " or Executive. " 
 
 What then is it allowed to do ? — 
 
 It may speak, upon the Comptes-rendus of towns 
 and Communes, upon the dikes of rivers and works 
 of a similar kind, plans for bridges and causeways, in 
 as much as they are executed at the expense of the 
 Provinces, not at that of the State ; — and upon insti- 
 tutions of public charity. 
 
 Speak I say, because even on these matters the 
 Central Assemblies have only a general inspectorship, 
 and their province is to merely suggest fund- 
 amental maxims. They are obliged, within four- 
 teen days from their sittings, to submit the results 
 of their labours to the Government and if they 
 are approved of, they are published in its name. 
 And notwithstanding by how many precautions is not 
 this helplessness surrounded ! — Composed of noble
 
 19 
 
 citizens, of citizens not noble, and of the representa- 
 tives of royal towns, they are presided over by the 
 Governor of the territory*. The nomination of the 
 Members is reserved to the Sovereign, who chooses 
 them out of lists furnished by the Provincial Assemblies, 
 and in the royal towns by the Councils of the Communes: 
 their functions continue six years, and they can be re- 
 elected ; none can resign without sovereign permission. 
 They receive from Government an annual salary of 
 2,000 florins ; the members of the Provincial As- 
 semblies receive nothing, in order that they may strive 
 by their conduct and deserve to be promoted to the 
 Central Assemblies. 
 
 The provincial assemblies are regulated upon the 
 same basis ; — they are in their functions as compared 
 to the central assemblies, what those are with regard to 
 the Government. They are presided over by the royal 
 Delegate. The Sovereign had choice of the members when 
 the assemblies were first instituted ; since that time, it 
 has been delegated to the Communes to propose the 
 candidates : the provincial assemblies form triple lists 
 out of those proposed ; these lists go to the central 
 assemblies and thence to the Government, which cither 
 confirm them or not. 
 
 But is not the liberty denied to the States and 
 Provinces, granted at least to the Communes, where the 
 insignificance of the jurisdiction precludes all danger of 
 a strong opposition to the central power ? 
 
 * He gives his vote as member of the Congregation ; and ex- 
 amines afterwards, in his quality of President of the Government , the 
 report addressed to him. The Assembly consequently knows be- 
 fore hand that it cannot give a vote contrary to that of its President, 
 without having the Government opposed to it. 
 
 B 2
 
 20 
 
 Far from it. The Common Councils, such as they 
 were organised by the Government Patents of the 12th 
 of February and the 1 2th of April 1816, assemble re- 
 gularly twice a year, in January or February to revise 
 the expences of the preceeding year and in September 
 and October to examine into those for the year follow- 
 ing. The royal Delegate and the Commissary of the 
 district are present during the sittings, gens-d'armes 
 being at the door, to watch over the proceedings, to call 
 over laws and regulations, and to dissolve the Councils 
 every time that they venture by a hair's treadth to 
 overstep the prescribed limits, — that is to say, the 
 interior administration of the communal territory. The 
 Councils cannot incur any liability whatever, nor elect 
 amongst themselves, without previously obtaining per- 
 mission from a higher power, a single functionary for 
 the service of the Commune ; they cannot constitute 
 a Procureur General or Special, they cannot accept or 
 refuse an inheritance, or a legacy or donation of any 
 kind, and the minutes of their proceedings must be 
 sent up to Government which can either sanction them 
 or not. Whenever the class of proprietors is numer- 
 ous, a certain number are taken from amongst them to 
 form part of the Council. The election of mem- 
 bers ( made in the first instance by the Government) 
 emanates from the Provincial Assemblies, out of a 
 double list furnished by the Common Councils, the 
 approval of the second delegation being necessary. 
 They remain in office three years. 
 
 In the chief towns of the Provinces and in the royal 
 towns there exists a Municipal Assembly ; the chief 
 ( Podesta) must be a land owner and a noble, and - the 
 Government appoints him, as he appoints the asses- 
 sors ; the division of affairs amongst the assessors
 
 21 
 
 must be subject to the approbation of the Royal Del- 
 egate. I subjoin in a note some facts which prove the 
 utter powerlessness of the Municipal Assemblies*. But 
 
 * The Company of Sappers and Miners at Milan is supported at 
 the expense of the Commune, which pays even to the annual rent 
 of the Barracks delle Grazie, where they reside ; nevertheless the 
 Commune has not the least authority over them, On solemn pub- 
 lic occasions which require the presence of some individuals of this 
 body, the Municipal Assembly must bespeak the courtesy of the 
 Director General of Police, in order that he may condescend to in- 
 vite the Commandant of the corps to provide them. When any 
 modification in the costume of the Corps is requisite, the sanction 
 of the Royal Delegation, and of the Director of Police must first be 
 obtained . 
 
 The Government I. R. severely reprimanded the Municipal Body 
 for having in 1836, expended 50 austrian livres in a Signet, with- 
 out applying to the I. R. Mint. They were reprimanded 
 for a payment of 700 livres, made by the Commune to a physician 
 who had been engaged in 1835, 36, 37, to superinfend the execu- 
 tion of the sanitary arrangements. They were reprimanded by the 
 Government for a daily salary granted by the Common Council to 
 a lamplighter, which exceeded 45 centimes : they were reprimanded 
 Jur paying by the year instead of every three months for the munic- 
 ipal advcrtsements inserted in the privileged Gazette of Milan. 
 
 The Government interference is so minute that in 1840 a long 
 dispatch directed the Government of Milan to call together the 
 municipal assembly in order that it might explain why in the an- 
 nual statistics of arts and trades in 1839 there had been 103 tailors 
 marked, whereas, in that of 1838 the number indicated 105. The 
 same Chamber hit upon a scheme to promulgate the laws whereby 
 all the Communes, and all th^ employes were obliged to subscribe to 
 the bulletin of laws published annually by the Government, not so 
 much, as the dispatch naively observed, that the laws might be 
 come known, as the treasury might be profited. And it cited the 
 russian Government as realising 300,000 thalers a year by this tax. 
 
 There is no need to enlarge on the natural dislike every body has 
 to enter upon any sort of business with the Communes and Municip- 
 alities on account of the tardiness and the endless hindrances which
 
 /y 
 
 22 
 
 have I not said enough upon the internal construction 
 of these pretended local powers, to enable candid men 
 to perceive, that all which has been organised of this 
 sort of things, has been with the intention of shewing 
 the Italians an outward semblance, and not to give 
 them the reality ? Local power ! Why, every affair 
 of whatever nature that exceeds the value of a hundred 
 francs must be removed to Vienna and be decided 
 there at the risk of some years delay ! 
 
 It is then indeed Austria which reigns directly and 
 excusively, in the Lombard- Venetian States. 
 
 Now, how does she govern it ? 
 
 Even supposing that she should desire to govern 
 well, she would not be able to do so. — The distance from 
 the head Government, the customs of a different race, 
 the secret resistance from all that is national in the 
 country which goes on against the invaders, and imposes 
 upon them mistrust and persecution as a necessity, 
 besides all this, the Chinese principle of immobility 
 represented in Europe by Austria, ( and which the 
 hetrogenous elements of which she is composed will not 
 allow her to abandon without ruin ) would suffice to 
 annihilate the best intentions in the world. Happily 
 ( and this expression in the mouth of a declared 
 enemy ought to surprise no one) happily, she has none. 
 We may fight without constraining ourselves, without 
 any sacrifice of gratitude. Austria is well aware that 
 she encamps in Italy for a time ; she has no other 
 
 inevitably result from this strange dependency, for instance the dis- 
 cussion between a Commune of the Bergamasque and that of another 
 province about a conscript, which lasted beyond the eight years 
 fixed for his services. A legacy of 3 lire and 64 centimes left by 
 a poor devil who died in prison at Mantua in 1835, was not paid 
 to his sister until 1840, —
 
 23 
 
 intentions except to prolong as much as possible this 
 indefinite period and to exploiter to the utmost, the 
 territory which at present she possesses. As far as 
 she can, she resists all movement, and progress. When 
 this progress seems on the point of accomplishing its 
 ends by its own strength, she takes possession of it, she 
 sanctions it, to deaden its consequences, and to deceive 
 Europe. There results from these double tactics, a 
 system of imposture, a system of appearances, which 
 cannot be laid too bare, and of which the two headed 
 Eagle seems to have been chosen for the symbol. 
 
 Take public instruction for instance. We will say 
 nothing of the number of primary and other schools; 
 their establishment is due in great measure to the ex- 
 ertion of charitable individuals, and nearly half the 
 expense of supporting them, falls upon the Communes. 
 The question is to ascertain not their number, but 
 ichat they are, thanks to the Government which directs 
 them. You saj' they are opened to all citizens, and / 
 tell you, (though that is not singular in England) that 
 the lower orders are in point of fact entirely excluded 
 from them : they possess neither the time nor the 
 means to profit by them ; the poverty of the fathers 
 imposes a law of labour upon the children who ought 
 to repair to them and on the day and evening of Sunday, 
 the only time they are at liberty, there is no instruction. 
 You will cite as a proof of the good intentions of the 
 Government, the law which imposes a slight fine upon 
 the labourer, who neglects to send his children to 
 school, and I in return, cite that law which formally 
 forbids the entrance to schools, to all those children 
 whose ragged clothes betray their poverty : the first law 
 is only a tax which the second proves to be felt. 
 
 Faithful to its habit, Austria has hampered as much
 
 24 
 
 as possible our Italian movement towards popular 
 instruction, and intellectual developement ; when she 
 saw individual perseverance gradually surmount all 
 obstacles, and elementary schools, or infant asylums, 
 rise spontaneously here and there, she left to the Com- 
 munity the expense of keeping up these Institutions, 
 and took possession of the Directorship, in order to 
 deaden their utility and fashion them to her own ends s 
 and behold what she has done for them ! The instruc- 
 tion is almost null in its effects ; in the rural element- 
 ary schools especially. The ignorance and the neglig- 
 ence of the masters are proverbial : their salary is very 
 small and they are not sufficient for the number of 
 scholars all of an age requiring special attention. Mu- 
 tual instruction is proscribed, the direction of the 
 schools is confined to the curate, to the Commissary, 
 to the Delegate ; they can dismiss the master at their 
 pleasure. 
 
 In some of the classes, the subjects of instruction are 
 strangely jumbled ; the third class for example com- 
 prehends fourteen different topics, all very important, 
 which are to be taught in one single year by a single 
 master, to children eight or nine years old ; in other 
 classes they take up an enormous time. The master is 
 required to make a minute report to Government of 
 the conduct of the scholars ; the information is secret, 
 without control, without reparation for unjust accusa- 
 tions. Morality is neglected; what they pretend to teach 
 of it, consists of the duties of subjects towards their 
 Sovereign*. Espionage is inculcated. 
 
 * I wish I could print entire this servile work written to crush 
 the soul and understanding, but the following is a short specimen 
 of it.
 
 25 
 
 Instruction is corrupted, in the Asylums for Children, 
 founded by private benevolence, but directed by the 
 Government which does not take the smallest share 
 in their support. Placed in the hands of priests, and 
 of men known for their devotion to the Government, 
 they bend their souls betimes to the yoke of passive 
 obedience. I insert here the time table of one day in 
 the week, taken at random; it will suffice to shew the 
 nature of the education given in those places. 
 
 EMPLOYMENT ON THURSDAY. 
 
 Time. 9 — 9 \ Roll call, prayers, singing 
 
 (hymn of the Emperor.) 
 9 \ — 10 Exercise of memory 
 
 upon the psalms. 
 10 — 10 J Breakfast and recreation. 
 
 Question : — How ought Subjects to conduct themselves to- 
 wards their Sovereign ? 
 
 Answer : — Subjects ought to behave towards their Sovereign 
 like faithful slaves towards their master. 
 
 Question : — Why ought they to behave like slaves ? 
 
 Answer ; — Because the Sovereign is their Master and his power 
 extends over their property, as over their persons. 
 
 Question ; — Is it a blessing that God bestows in giving us good 
 and christian Kings and Superiors ! 
 
 Answer : — Yes, it is one of the greatest blessings the Deity can 
 bestow when he gives us good and christian Kings and Superiors, 
 such as those under whom we have the happiness to dwell. We 
 ought to pray that God will grant a long life and a long reign to 
 our beloved Monarch. 
 
 2721 copies of this catechism together with 13,057 copies of I 
 know not what pitiful servile religious manuel, are distributed an- 
 nually to the sehools in Lombardy, whilst they have not a single 
 Italian history.
 
 26 
 
 10 i 
 
 — 11 
 
 Nomenclature for the 
 classes. 
 
 11 
 
 -11 h 
 
 Explanation for the above. 
 
 11 h 
 
 —12 
 
 Play and prayers. 
 
 12 
 
 -12 J 
 
 Arithmetic. 
 
 12 J 
 
 — 1 
 
 Cathechism. 
 
 1 
 
 — 2 
 
 Dinner and prayers. 
 
 2 
 
 — 3 
 
 Writing. 
 
 3 
 
 Q 1 
 
 O 2 
 
 Reading. 
 
 O ^ 
 
 — 4 
 
 Singing (the hymn of the 
 Emperor) . 
 
 4 
 
 — 5 
 
 Play and prayers. 
 
 The Course of the Gymnasiums extends over six years. 
 Latin is taught there. History, geography, aritmethic, 
 algebra, religion, poetry, rhetoric, one single master is 
 appointed to teach all these things. Admission into 
 the Gymnasium is retarded until the tenth year, so 
 that a complete course of study cannot be completed 
 until the twenty fifth year. The same system of 
 espionage which marks the elementary schools, is car- 
 ried on in the Gymnasium ; the Government is minu- 
 tely informed of all that goes on. 
 
 Then come the Lyceums employing a tw o years course 
 of study. In them are taught algebra, physic, mechanics, 
 religion, philology, philosophy, natural history, univer- 
 salhistory; Italian literature has no place. Philosophy is 
 reduced to a metaphysical maze taught after some ger- 
 man method. Vico, Pagano, Romagnosi, as well as all 
 the great italians thinkers of the 1 7th century, are ab- 
 solutely exiled thence. The cabinets of natural 
 philosophy and natural history are shabbily endowed. 
 
 The Universities, (the medical, legal, and mathe- 
 matical Faculties) , crown the system and develope
 
 27 
 
 its aim more and more. No one can be a Professor 
 in them without having previously undergone special 
 examinations ; and it is from Vienna that the questions 
 come which are to be given, and it is to Vienna that the 
 answers are sent for approval. Men of high intellect 
 repulse these humiliating conditions, to leave the field 
 free to mediocrities, who obtain the Chairs by all sorts 
 of intrigues at Vienna*, devotion to Austria being in 
 fact the sine qua non of success. The avarice of the Gov- 
 ernment takes advantage of the death of a Professor to 
 appoint for six or eight months a Substitute whose 
 salary is smaller than that of the Professor. The ins- 
 truction given is upon the themes sent from Vienna ; a 
 maxim, an expression, a word deviating in the least 
 from the prescribed doctrines, involves the loss of the 
 Chair, prison, persecution of all kinds. And this is 
 not the case in the Law studies alone : Hartman is the 
 text prescribed to the fellow countrymen of 
 Rasori, Tommasini, and Buffalini. The organisation 
 of the Faculties is left incomplete and in disorder. 
 In the medical Faculty, Anatomy, and Natural 
 History are entirely taught in nine months. 
 There are no theoretical principles for surgery ; the 
 practical part only is taught. Pathology, midwifery, 
 veterinary, materia medica, are jumbled into one and 
 the same year the third ; there is no Chair for patholo- 
 gical and comparative anatomy f ; the same professor 
 being engaged to give surgery lectures one year and 
 
 * A Corneliani is preferred to men such as Tommasini, Buffalini, 
 Giacomini. The Chairs in spite of the pretended competitorship 
 are in general the price of some secret service promised or performed. 
 
 t The cahinets of anatomy, pathology, and physiology have 
 an endowment which docs not exceeds £ G8.
 
 28 
 
 to teach the operating practice the other, the student 
 often finds himself put to one of the most difficult 
 operations, before having tried his hand at the most 
 simple one, before he is even acquainted with the first 
 elements of Surgery. In the legal Faculties, common 
 law is taught from the prolegomenies of the german 
 Zeiler. The professorship of International Law, which 
 was suppressed by the Austrian Government, is re- 
 placed by a three days' instruction, in the course of 
 Natural Law. Statistics, taught on a german system, 
 is almost entirely limited to Austria. The commen- 
 taries on the (Jivil Law are more obscure than the 
 text. Political Economy is confined entirely to a 
 justification of the Prohibition System. The instruc- 
 tion in Political Science tends so shamelessly to suppress 
 the individuality of the student that his ansivers are 
 required to contain the identical words pronounced from 
 the Chair : at the beginning of the Course the Pro- 
 fessor gives notice, that in his school replies dictated 
 by good sense alone are not received. In the Mathem- 
 atical Faculty, which is still worse organised than the 
 other two, I do not know whether there is now an 
 astronomical Chair, but there was none in 1841 ; per- 
 haps it was feared lest Italian intelligence, gazing on 
 the sublime spectacle of the Universe, should thence 
 learn the secret of the eternally active, eternally 
 progressive Life of God, and despise the inert vegeta- 
 tive existence, in which it is desired to confine it. 
 
 Such is the organisation of the University Course 
 of education ; for as to the free schools for esthetics, 
 greek and latin literature, archeology, &, they are not 
 worthy of mention ; the choice falls upon professors so 
 ignorant that no one follows them, and the very 
 school where Foscolo presided over impressionable
 
 29 
 
 and inspired youth, is often now obliged to be closed 
 for want of an audience. The lot of the student there 
 is a very melancholy one. He feels himself at the 
 very threshold excluded from social privileges, by the 
 fourteen articles of special prescriptions which are im- 
 posed upon him by the Police. He is obliged to give 
 up his ticket of leave to reside in any part of Lom- 
 hardy, in order to receive one which binds him to a 
 permanent residence at the University. Hunting and 
 fencing are prohibited to him. He is compelled to 
 shave off his moustache, and this is deemed of so much 
 importance, that in 1840 a letter came down from the 
 Governor of Lombardy to stimulate the zeal of the 
 employes, and to repress the insubordination of the 
 schools upon this point. Obliged to submit to the forms 
 of a religion he does not believe, subjected to the double 
 surveillance of the academic body and the Police, iso- 
 lated, by the interdictions and suspicion which attach- 
 es, I do not say to all association, but to all appearance 
 of association, looked upon with mistrust and brutally 
 insulted on the smallest pretext by the soldiery, and 
 the guards of police, without the least stimulus to 
 emulation, without any esteem in his heart for those 
 who instruct him, with the sword trembling over his 
 head of expulsion in 24 hours for the least fault, if he 
 be not reduced to a state of idiotcy, he may thank the 
 inspiring heaven which is above his head, the grand 
 memories which surround him, and the Italian leaven, 
 that ferments in his soul, and which three centuries of 
 servitude and corruption have not been able to kill. 
 The fees for his matriculation are heavier now than before 
 the entrance of the Austrians, and his feelings are woun- 
 ded by the inequality which is sanctioned, between the 
 nobles, the land owners, and the sons of employes. He
 
 30 
 
 pays again heavy fees upon his examination, the pro- 
 duce of which goes amongst the dignitaries of the 
 University, the Regent, the Directors, the Dean of 
 Faculties, the Professors, the Chancellors, beadles and 
 scribes. The examinations for taking a Doctor's 
 degree are many. And an interval of at least three 
 months between each examination being rigorously 
 insisted upon, he necessarily loses another year when 
 his term of study is completed. It is then only after 
 sixteen years at least, often nineteen, that a young 
 man can succeed in being created a Doctor. Even after 
 that, there are still several years of 'alunnato and of labour 
 without recompence, for all employment is in fact 
 closed against him, the nomination to all posts being 
 in the hands of the Bureaux de Police. Another ex- 
 amination must be passed before he can be qualified; 
 the number of notaries and advocates is limited; and 
 the architect engineer needs four years' more practice, 
 and ten thousand francs security before he can 
 exercise his profession in peace. 
 
 Such, Sir, is a brief abstract of the instruction, the 
 bread of life, distributed by a paternal Government to 
 our youth, and in order that it may not apply for it 
 elsewhere, no one can teach even as an elementary 
 master, without government authority : the most 
 conscientious studies which might be pursued under a 
 master who is not authorised are declared null, and 
 there is a prohibition against going to study at foreign 
 universities. This conduct of government is not even 
 justified by its liberality as regards the expenses. A 
 great number of elementary schools and public col- 
 leges owe their existence entirely to private endow- 
 ments f. Government has taken possession of them, 
 
 f The famous college of Ghislieri, amongst others.
 
 
 31 
 
 reduced the capital, and now dissipates the interest. 
 
 Let us now leave this, let us quit the sphere of 
 official instruction and see if once all difficulties sur- 
 mounted, once the intellect confirmed in the right road, 
 it is allowed to breathe freely, Alas no ! The most 
 minute interference is exercised over all your proced- 
 ings. You wish to read in the public Libraries, — 
 whence the cap of the workman is formally excluded 
 — you are refused Gall, Lavater, Alfieri, Byron, Shak- 
 speare. In the book-shops, you can get nothing — 
 immoral romances excepted — of what is printed ab- 
 road, not even an edition of Dante by Foscolo, 
 published two years ago in London by Rolandi. You 
 wish to write — and five and six censors remorselessly 
 bar the way. 
 
 In the kingdom of Venetian Lombardy there is 
 a censorship for the journals, another censorship 
 for books, confided to two offices ad hoc, situated 
 at Milan and at Venice ; a third for the Provinces, 
 exercised by the Delegate or any one he may employ 
 to supply his place, for writings which do not exceed 
 a printed sheet ; a fourth for engraving and theatrical 
 representations ; then special censors for ecclesiastical 
 works and works on medecine and mathematics, &, all 
 charged to prevent the development of new opinions. 
 There are no political journals except the Privileged 
 Gazette at Milan which belongs to Government, and 
 the Police choose the news to be inserted in it. No 
 foreign newspapers are allowed, except those which 
 represent Legitimacy or royal power, and even those 
 are suppressed whenever they contain any thing which 
 displeases. The tax often centimes which is imposed 
 on each number is however sufficient to render their 
 circulation next to nothing. It is to Vienna that ap-
 
 32 
 
 plication must be made, before a literary journal can 
 be commenced, it is Vienna which sends or modifies 
 the programma of such journal. There are circulars 
 to interdict the use of little asteriscks * * * * and to 
 substitute & & & & for them. Returner, a witness who 
 cannot be suspected confesses that, dramatic writers 
 are enjoined to place a good prince beside a bad one in 
 their works, whether history bears them out or not. And 
 when you have satisfied all these exactions — when you 
 have disarmed these rabid curtailers of syllables, by 
 giving up to them the best passages you had written, 
 when at length you appear under the protection of the 
 censor, you are still under the axe. The Police more 
 powerful than are the censors, may turn round upon 
 you, and whether owing to a sudden illumination, or 
 whether in consequence of your having excited impru- 
 dent applause — seize, and suppress your work, 
 and confiscate the volumes which have already 
 appeared. That is the fact about translations of 
 foreign historical works collected by Bettoni, to which 
 the emperor himself had subscribed for a copy. 
 
 I own, Sir, that I grow out of patience, and that I am 
 tempted to believe, I do not say in bad faith alone, but 
 in I know not what bitter irony, whenever I hear 
 murmured the word intellectual progress, as the con- 
 sequent of measures pursued by a government whose 
 real intention was so frankly declared in the famous 
 speech uttered by Francis 1st at Lubiana in 1820: 
 " We have no need of knowledge, it is enough for me if 
 my subjects know how to read and write. " A me basta 
 che i miei sudditi sappiano leggere e scrivere. You 
 point to certain elementary works issued by the royal 
 printing press ! but have you read these books ? Do 
 you know ( though the fact of a monopoly of all
 
 33 
 
 elementary books being granted to this press ought to 
 have made you guess as much), do you know that 
 their aim is to denationalize us as much as possible ? 
 You instance a few incontestable signs of intellectual 
 development, a few illustrious names : is there 
 then nothing short of death, degradation, ab- 
 solute helplessness, sufficient to prove the evil in- 
 fluence which the leaden yoke of Austria imposes 
 upon our faculties ? And do you not perceive that it 
 is precisely from the struggle that these developments 
 take their rise ? We are forbidden to print in Lom- 
 bardy : we print at Lugano on the frontier ; we are 
 forbidden to read good foreign books : the contra- 
 band trade corrects this absurd prohibition. Is that 
 any reason why you should attribute the steps of 
 progress taken amongst us to the working of the 
 Austrian system ? Do you not find the same intellec- 
 tual progress accomplishing itself in those parts of Italy, 
 (the Papal States, the kingdom of Naples, for example) 
 which you have no scruple in declaring horribly 
 governed ? Ah ! if your actions — I do not speak to 
 you, Sir James, but to your countrymen — if your 
 actions were more influenced by that principle of 
 Christian brotherhood which fall so often from 
 your lips ; if, instead of going by the tradition of I 
 know not what scraps of the treaty of Vienna, you would 
 hold by the eternal covenant of God with his creature ; 
 if you could once convince yourself that all injustice 
 sanctioned against one of its members is an injury to 
 Humanity, you would take the pains to become 
 aware that when it was desired, with an anti-national 
 aim, to revive the Institute, Castiglioni refused the 
 Presidency, Manzoni and Torti, names you love 
 to cite, withdrew their claims, — Grossi and 
 
 c
 
 
 34 
 
 Cattaneo, elected by the members, were repudiated by 
 Government. You would take the trouble to 
 ascertain or to recollect that under this Government, 
 so favourable to intellectual progress, not a single lite- 
 rary man of note (Manzoni alone perhaps excepted) 
 has passed through life without meeting with persecu- 
 tion ; that since 1814, Foscolo has died here, under 
 your eyes, in exile ; Berchet lives so ; Pellico, Bor- 
 sieri and others wore out their chains in Spiel- 
 berg ; Zuccala died of grief in consequence of the 
 persecutions which he brought upon himself by a lecture 
 on Dante ; Melchior Gioja was kept eight months 
 in prison without being brought before a judge ; Ro- 
 magnosi, dragged to prison at the age of seventy, 
 declared innocent after eight or ten months imprison- 
 ment, found himself deprived of the right of keeping a 
 private school in his own house, and when called by 
 Lord Guilford to a Chair of Jurisprudence at Corfu, 
 his passport was refused. 
 
 Let us consider now the prosperity, the fi- 
 nancial state of the country. I can on no account 
 accept the question as stated by men whose motto 
 is panem et circenses. I should consider that I 
 was sinning against my country and against my own 
 immortal soul. My belief is, that under an un- 
 just, oppressive, illegal government there may be 
 prosperity as a temporary incident, but never as a 
 normal fact ; and therefore I have no repugnance to 
 furnish one more proof of it, since it properly belongs 
 to my subject, We are advancing, thank God ! — 
 but by means of Austria, or in spite of the 
 Austrian system ? There lies the whole question. 
 
 Now those who maintain that it is owing to 
 Austria, forget only one fact, which seems to us of
 
 35 
 
 some importance : it is that the sum total of the revenue 
 over which they rejoice so loudly is substr acted from 
 Lombardy and annually ingulfed in the coffers of Vienna. 
 The following is a table of the net revenue of 
 the State ; it will, I hope, prove two things, the man- 
 ner in which the Lombard population are aggrieved, 
 and the annual loss sustained by the country. I 
 have not comprised in it the amount produced 
 by the Communal taxes, which for the nine pro- 
 vinces amount to 9,446,000 lire (Austrian money) ; 
 because this sum, although it presses heavily on a 
 people already exhausted, does not go to swell the 
 Austrian Treasury. 
 
 NET REVENUE OF THE STATE. 
 
 DIRECT TAXES. 
 
 Austrian Lire. 
 
 Territorial taxes and for the maintenance 
 
 
 of the Dykes .... 
 
 . 21,973,000 
 
 Personal taxes .... 
 
 . 2,127,000 
 
 Taxes on Trade or Commerce 
 
 633,000 
 
 INDIRECT TAXES. 
 
 
 Customs ..... 
 
 . 10,363,000 
 
 Salt ...... 
 
 . 7,963,000 
 
 Tobacco ..... 
 
 . 3,484,000 
 
 Consumption in the walled Communes 
 
 . 2,767,000 
 
 in the open Communes 
 
 . 4,872,000 
 
 Gunpowder and nitre 
 
 109,000 
 
 State lands (Biens Demaniaux) 
 
 332,000 
 
 Stamps ...... 
 
 . 1,418,330 
 
 Mortgages, rates, sporting licences . 
 
 881,000 
 
 Consolidated taxes and stamps on w T eight 
 
 
 and measures .... 
 
 529,000 
 
 Forests ..... 
 
 91,000 
 
 c 2 

 
 36 
 
 ADMINISTRATION AND REVENUE DUES. 
 
 Property of the Crown assigned to the new Aust. Lire. 
 
 Sinking Fund . . . . 4,000 
 
 Proceeds of the Sinking Fund . . 330,000 
 
 Lotteries 1,865,000 
 
 Securities ...... 58,000 
 
 Deduction of 2 per cent on the salaries of 
 
 Government offices . . . . 163,000 
 
 Sundry proceeds from the Central Treasury 3 1 5,000 
 
 Tne Mint is always a source of loss, and was 
 so in 1839, to the am mnt of 50,000 lire, 
 
 Total 60,277,000 
 
 This sum of 60,277,000 lires received by Govern- 
 ment, net of all expenses, leaves Milan every year for 
 Vienna : multiplying it by the number of years 
 which have passed since 1815, (without counting the 
 interest that it would have borne,) it amounts to the sum 
 of 1,748,033,000, removed from circulation in the 
 Venetian-Lombard Provinces, that is to say from 
 amongst a population of about five millions of souls. 
 The territorial impost (17. 7. centimes for each scudo) 
 has never been lowered from what it was during the 
 war-time under the French, notwithstanding the 
 peace that Austria has enjoyed since 1815. 
 
 The capitation tax is felt by every individual, but 
 crushes the poorer population in the rural districts. The 
 Customs replace it in the interior of towns ; where one 
 frequently sees the custom-house officers ( Finanzieri ) 
 arrest and drag to prison a poor man for having 
 endeavoured to conceal from their vigilance the bread 
 destined for his children. 
 
 The tax on handicraft trades and commerce is far 
 heavier than it was under Napoleon.
 
 37 
 
 The system which regulates industry consists in prohi- 
 biting all French and English goods, whilstfree entrance 
 is allowed to German manufactures ; it possesses all the 
 inconveniences of the protective system, without any 
 of the advantages. The expense of collecting and 
 organizing the Customs is enormous ; the number of 
 people employed, guards of the confines, guards of 
 Finanza, &c, is excessive : the latter alone amount to 
 2,342. These guards, chosen from the dregs of the 
 people, lead an idle and depraved life : invested with 
 uncontrolled authority in all that relates to smug- 
 gling, they are a real scourge to the places in which 
 they are stationed, where they commit a host of abuses 
 and spread immorality. As regards smuggling, 
 they do very little to repress it — they sometimes par- 
 ticipate in it themselves : it is carried on both in 
 Lombardy and at Vienna, whence they send foreign 
 goods to Milan certificated as home manufactures*. 
 On the other hand, however, they discharge the 
 functions of political spies for Government extremely 
 well. The custom-house regulations and enactments 
 are models of confusion and obscurity. 
 
 Salt, tobacco, and nitre, are monopolized ; the 
 manufacture of them is prohibited to private individuals. 
 The Government Factors gain 6. fl. 40. kr. (Austrian 
 currency ) upon every ten pounds weight of salt. 
 We have the privilege of buying our salt twice as dear 
 as it can be bought in the Archduchv of Austria, and 
 three times dearer than in Istria or Dalmatia. Yet 
 the salt that comes from Sicily and serves for the con- 
 
 * The high functionaries at Vienna have meddled in smug- 
 gling transactions. Every hody in Lombardy can recollect the pro- 
 secution that was instituted against the Baron de Mengs, the 
 Director of Finance, for participating in the contraband trade.
 
 38 
 
 sumption of Lombardy, as well as that brought from 
 Istria for the consumers in the Venetian states, stands 
 the Government in nearly the same cost as that de- 
 rived from the salt-works of the Empire. In Italian 
 Switzerland, whither Austria sends this com- 
 modity, salt is sold at less than one half the price 
 we can purchase it at; which of course produces 
 constant smuggling into Lombardy- 
 
 I have no need to point out the immorality of lot- 
 teries as a source of revenue. 
 
 The amount placed against the proceeds of the tax 
 on stamps arises from the regulation, now super- 
 seded by the law of the 27th January 1840, published 
 the 1st September of the same year. It has been impos- 
 sible for me, writing in this country, to ascertain 
 the numerical result of the recent act. But a 
 glance at the law itself will be sufficient to shew that 
 the revenue must have been considerably increased 
 from itf . The law touches especially the middle classes, 
 those employed in offices, the clergy, and those en- 
 gaged in industry and commerce. All writings are 
 subjected to a stamp that are necessary to an engage- 
 ment, understood, fulfilled, or cancelled ; all writings 
 which are to confer, to sustain, or to oppose a claim, 
 as well as bills of exchange, letters of credit, or other 
 negotiable documents. The scale established in 
 this class of duty remains fixed after 24,000 
 lires of value ; in which case the duty re- 
 
 f I have since received a confirmation of my statement. The 
 following is the result of the new law in the first year of its work- 
 ing. Lire 
 
 1841. — Stamps, Mortgages, and Taxes 4,300,000 
 
 Difference in excess of the preceding year (see 
 the foregoing table) 2,001,000
 
 39 
 
 quired by the stamp is 60 lires. Even agreements for 
 the day are embraced by this tax. Stamps are required 
 on all accounts between commercial men, manufactu- 
 rers, apothecaries, those exercising a trade, scholastic 
 certificates, and certificates of admission to professions ; 
 applications for employment, for examination, for 
 licence to exercise any branch of trade or commerce 
 whatever ; passports, and the certificates of workmen 
 (livrets) ; appointments to place — these were formerly 
 charged with a tax equal to one third of the salary for 
 the first appointment, and an additional third for each 
 successive increase *; foreign and domestic newspa- 
 pers, even down to the almanacs, whose prime cost is 
 often less than the value of the stamp. The rapa- 
 city which has presided over this law is so little dis- 
 guised, that if an old document unstamped is presented 
 to an authority, the party is obliged ( by article 
 88) to attach to it a blank sheet of stamped paper, 
 upon which must be written an extract of the object 
 of the document. A stamp duty not paid is visited by 
 a judicial execution or a distraint of goods. The law 
 has been designedly drawn up with so much obscurity 
 that all the offices have been obliged to apply to 
 Government for instructions how to carry it into 
 effect. The distinguishing characteristic of this law is, 
 
 * Similar taxes also press heavily on the collation to prebends 
 and ecclesiastical benefices : they are in proportion to the annual 
 value, and in some cases they absorb one year's entire income ; in 
 others the half of the income every year. The Austrian tendency 
 to pillage betrays itself after a very shabby fashion in the taxes 
 which accompany the titles or decorations spontaneously granted by 
 the Emperor. The diploma of prince costs 36,000 Austrian lires. 
 that of count, 18,000 ; that of baron, 9,000 ; that of chevalier 
 4,500; a patent of nobility, 3,000; that of privy-conncillor, 1,800, &c.
 
 40 
 
 as may have been perceived, to press heavily and 
 vexatiously on small property and petty commerce. 
 
 But more than this. Not only, as we have seen, is 
 Austrian Italy positively burdened, but it is compara- 
 tively more so than are the other parts of the Empire. 
 
 It has been stated in a work of importance on Austria, 
 well deserving translation into English*, that the 
 Lombardo-Venetian Provinces are more indulgently 
 treated than other portions of the Austrian mon- 
 archy. The generally well-informed author is, how- 
 ever, wanting on this point ; for the contrary is the 
 truth. Thus, the only two imposts that have been 
 abolished by Austria since 1815, the tax on succession 
 to an inheritance and the personal or capitation tax, 
 were so — and of this the author seems to be ignorant 
 — for the other portions of the empire, but not for 
 Italy. The capitation tax (Testatico) is still in force 
 against us; and the tax on succession, abolished in 1829 
 in all the Austrian provinces, has been retained in Dal- 
 matia and the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom ; where it 
 is, not 30 kreutzers, as this author says, speaking of 
 the past, but rather 2 florins 13 kreutzers. To avoid 
 tedious details, I will now give, drawn from semi- 
 official documents and books written in defence of the 
 Austrian Government, a table of the annual amount 
 that the Italian Provinces produce to the state, com- 
 pared with other parts of the monarchy. 
 
 * Oestreich und (lessen Zukunft. — By an Austrian Subject, 1842.
 
 41 
 
 Pbovincks. 
 
 Population. 
 
 Contributions. 
 (Florins.) 
 
 For each indi- 
 vidual. 
 
 Austria (Lower). . . . 
 " (Upper).... 
 
 Moravia and Silesia 
 
 Styria 
 
 Carinthia & Carniola 
 
 Tyrol 
 
 Littorale 
 
 Military Frontiers . . 
 
 Total 
 
 Lombardy 
 
 Venetian States. . . . 
 
 * Total • 
 
 1,369,000 
 
 851,000 
 
 11,973,000 
 
 4,133,000 
 
 4,714,000 
 
 2,154 000 
 
 964,000 
 
 755,000 
 
 2,056,000 
 
 836,000 
 
 480,000 
 
 1,192,000 
 
 392,000 
 
 19,490,000 
 
 5,040,000 
 
 16,990,000 
 
 16,050,000 
 
 12,647,000 
 
 9,160,000 
 
 4.321,000 
 
 3.981,000 
 
 3.867,000 
 
 3,242.000 
 
 2,864,000 
 
 2,639,000 
 
 921,000 
 
 flor. 14 kr. 14 
 " 5 " 55 
 " 1 " 25 
 " 3 " 53 
 " 2 " 41 
 " 4 " 15 
 " 4 " 29 
 " 5 " 16 
 '* 1 " 52 
 " 3 " 52 
 " 5 " 58 
 " 3 " 13 
 " 2 " 21 
 
 31,869,000 
 
 101,212,000 
 
 Aver. 3 " 10 
 
 2,532,000 
 2,148,000 
 
 19.200,000 
 15,040,000 
 
 " 7 " 34 
 " 7 " 00 
 
 4,680,000 
 
 34,240,000 
 
 Aver. 7 " 14 
 
 It results from this table : 
 
 1st, That the Lombardo -Venetian Kingdom, though 
 containing a population amounting to not quite an eighth 
 of the Empire, pays more than a fourth of the total 
 revenue ; and that comparing the average paved by 
 each individual of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom 
 with the average payed by individuals belonging to the 
 
 * In comparing these figures with those of the preceding table, 
 it must not be forgotten that this gives the gross revenue, while the 
 former presents only the net revenue. Add to the total of the Fiscal, 
 reduced to florins, the amount of the Communal taxes, ( not inclu- 
 ded,) and that of the salaries to employes, which will be found be- 
 low, and there remains a difference of a few millions of florins that 
 the Government expend? otherwise than in salaries.
 
 42 
 
 other provinces collectively taken, we pay something 
 more than double the other subjects of Austria. 
 
 2nd. That even taking the different provinces sepa- 
 rately, Lower Austria is the only one that presents to 
 the eye a larger contribution than that paid by us. 
 But this excess is only apparent; for that province, 
 being the seat of Government, the centre of every 
 office, and the residence of the Imperial Court, in reality 
 receives more from the state than it pays. The fol- 
 lowing table, which is only approximate, will better 
 show this result. 
 
 Provinces. 
 
 Revenue. 
 
 Number of 
 Employes. 
 
 Salaries. 
 
 Lower Austria 
 
 Lombardy 
 
 19,490,000 
 19,200,000 
 15,040,000 
 
 24,497 
 9,481 
 8,383 
 
 20,661,944 
 4,320,659 
 
 
 3,942,214 
 
 It will be seen, that the amount of salaries compared 
 to that of revenue, gives for Lower Austria 105 florins 
 30 kr. of expenditure for every 1 00 florins of receipt ; 
 thus leaving a deficit of 5 fl. 30 kr. to be borne by the 
 state at large. The same comparison applied to Lom- 
 bardy gives 22 fl. 30 kr. of expenditure to every 100 
 of receipt, yielding the state an excess of 77 fl. 30 kr. ; 
 and applied to the Venetian Provinces, 26 fl. 12 kr. of 
 expenditure, and 70 fl. 48 kr. of excess. 
 
 I say once more, the sun, the climate, the extraor- 
 dinary fertility of the soil, the intelligent, active, and 
 victorious genius of the Lombard people, struggle in 
 our favour. Some reforms which the Revolution be- 
 stowed, and which the Restoration could not take
 
 43 
 
 away, twenty-nine years of peace, and the natural 
 progress of things, help the struggle in its slow success; 
 but I say that wherever the hand of Government is 
 seen, there also is to be found an obstacle and a hin- 
 drance. The hand of the Austrian Government is to be 
 seen in the enormous import duty on colonial produce, 
 on wines and spirits, upon skins either raw or dressed, 
 on spun cotton, &c, which creates the contraband 
 trade, and ruins Milan, the great emporium for the mer- 
 chandise of the country, by ordering matters so that 
 similar articles cost less in those provinces which 
 border on the frontiers : the prohibition of foreign 
 manufactures of silk, cotton, and wool, produce the same 
 result, owing to the insufficiency of the supply manu- 
 factured by the State, the immoderate competition of 
 the dealers, and the low prices asked for contraband 
 goods brought in from without. Confined within narrow 
 territorial limits, debarred entrance into the other 
 Italian countries which are a market for foreign manu- 
 factures, wanting the direction of an Institute for 
 industrial instruction, the Lombardo-Venetian manu- 
 facturers cannot satisfy the demand either with regard to 
 quantity, variety, or beauty, nor produce goods on equal 
 terms with other countries. The hand of the Austrian 
 Government means a system of laws and custom- 
 house regulations which impedes the free circulation 
 of manufactures and colonial produce, even within the 
 country, and inflicts a fine on the proprietor of a 
 manufacture, every time a few kilogrammes are sur- 
 prised in their transit from one town of the state to 
 another, without a licence taken out from the place 
 of starting ; subjecting the merchants, in the frontier 
 districts especially, to the liability of having both 
 their warehouses and dwellings searched by day and
 
 44 
 
 night, and often several times a week. The hand of 
 the Austrian Government means a code of finance 
 so involved and so obscure * that chance and caprice 
 reign absolute sovereigns in the Lombardo -Venetian 
 Provinces, imposing taxes upon arts and industry 
 at random, to be extorted by violence ; to which for the 
 commercial man is added the Mercantile tax, imposed 
 by the Camera di Commercio: it means the increase of the 
 expense of protesting bills of exchange, the minimum 
 of which is in Austrian lires 8. 64, even for an amount 
 below a hundred lires; by which means the Govern- 
 ment fattens upon poverty, since the number of protested 
 bills increases in proportion to the badness of trade. 
 The hand of the Austrian Government means that unjus- 
 tifiable act by which, in 1840, the Lombardo- Venetian 
 public debt, known as the Monte Lombardo-Veneto , 
 was increased by nearly twenty-five millions f, to ob- 
 tain a heavy loan from the greatest usurer in Europe 
 and some of his colleagues — an act which spread 
 distrust among the holders of coupons in our Monte, 
 and knocked down to 1 1 1 ( and at first even to 106) a 
 five per cent stock which was before selling at about 
 118. The hand of the Austrian Government means the 
 enormous tax on postage, (40 centimes from Milan to 
 
 * So obscure in fact that the Aulic Council by whose 
 agency the Code was issued, was obliged some seven or eight years 
 ago to call in the assistance of a Royal Lombard Commission, to 
 settle the best interpretation to be put on certain clauses. 
 
 f The debt known as the Monte Lombardo-Veneto, which de- 
 volved on Austria with our provinces in 1815, was the quota 
 falling to us, on a proportional division with other Italian states, 
 of the public debt of the Kingdom of Italy, known [as the Monte Napo- 
 leone ; which in its turn partly arose from the recognition and trans- 
 mutation of the old provincial debts. There is now talk of a 
 projected addition of fifteen millions more.
 
 Piacenza, fourteen leagues distant from each other, 60 
 for Reggio and Modena, 80 for Bologna and Florence, 
 &c. ) thus restricting more and more the intercourse 
 between Lombardy and Central Italy, already so cir- 
 cumscribed by custom-house regulations *: it means the 
 entire absence of a Jury or Tribunal of Arbitration, to 
 decide disputes conscientiously and with local know- 
 ledge, tedious process, and a faulty organization of 
 the Commercial Tribunal, before which the pleadings 
 can only be through an advocate, and where facts are 
 always neglected for forms. What between the 
 system which prohibits the introduction of raw mate- 
 rial, and the restricted market, we are forced in Lom- 
 bardy to export our raw produce and to receive in 
 return manufactured goods at high prices. The care- 
 less traveller, passing rapidly through our populous 
 towns, is astonished at the luxury displayed in them : 
 he does not know that in winter the hospitals are filled 
 with men who feign themselves ill, in order that may 
 receive there the means of sustenance thev could not 
 find elsewhere : he sees with admiration houses and 
 palaces rise as by magic ; but he does not know that 
 those are no signs of prosperity, but only an investment 
 forced upon capital, which cannot run the hazard of 
 any enterprise of commerce, whilst trade is so 
 hampered and stationary. What has the Austrian 
 Government ever done to establish harmony and unity 
 in the relations of commercial and industrial policy ? It 
 has adopted the decimal system in its relations with 
 the governed ; but at the same time permitting the 
 governed themselves to make use of ancient systems 
 
 * For the convenience of a private letter-box, commercial men pay 
 five centimes extra for every letter.
 
 46 
 
 in their reciprocal dealings : so that a few leagues 
 distance between town and town causes a difference in 
 the circulation of money and makes a variation in the 
 weights and measures. What has the Austrian Go- 
 vernment done towards turning to practical use, by 
 large hydraulic works for the benefit of agriculture, 
 the copious streams which flow through Lombardy ? What 
 has it done towards making roads to communicate 
 between place and place ? Faithful to its rule of im- 
 peding progress as much as possible, except so far as 
 to take the direction of every enterprise it cannot suc- 
 ceed in hindering, it has done its best to throw 
 delays in the way of the numerous projected lines 
 of railroad ; but so soon as the Monza railroad was 
 finished, it hastened to share the success by levying a 
 percentage on the profits, through a new postal duty, 
 and by claiming for its own benefit the whole under- 
 taking as soon as the lease expires : it has done the 
 same by the velociferi. Perhaps, Sir, you say 
 undertakings like these ought not to be instigated 
 by Government, but that they ought to be left to 
 private enterprise. I have not much faith in the 
 miracles of laissez faire, laissez passer ; but however 
 that may be, recollect, Sir, that I am speaking of a 
 country despotically governed, where the spirit of 
 association is seen with an eye of suspicion ; I am 
 speaking of a country where individual activity is 
 checked and crushed in a thousand ways. When Go- 
 vernment declares that the citizens of a country are to 
 be kept in the perpetual tutelage of slaves, it implicitly 
 undertakes to act for them and to direct their affairs. 
 In Venice, out of a population of little more than 
 100,000 persons, 52,000 are inscribed on the list of 
 those who under one title or another claim charitable
 
 47 
 
 aid : this single fact, acknowledged by Von Raumer, 
 sums up marvellously well the advantages we derive 
 from Austrian domination in a financial point of view. 
 
 Now let us examine whether the administration of 
 justice is any better. 
 
 The device assumed by the House of Austria, 
 " Justitia Regnorum Fundamentum, ' has often been 
 quoted : it has practically the same value that the 
 inviolability of private correspondence has with you, 
 Sir James. 
 
 Much has been said of the impartiality which 
 characterizes the administration of justice under the 
 Austrian system : the Lombard people have long since 
 answered this by a proverb known to them all — " Hin 
 semper istrasc che va alia folia " (it is always the rags 
 that are beaten small) . The equality of all in the 
 eye of the law as relates to justice, is and will 
 always be a bitter irony wherever the remedies of the 
 civil law are not accessible to the poor as easily as to 
 the rich, — wherever the substance of the penal code is 
 not imprinted by means of national instruction on all 
 the members of the community. But it is not alone 
 this — a vice common to all European communities — 
 which 1 lay to the charge of the Austrian method of 
 administering justice. What every man has a right 
 to complain of is, the complexity and tardiness of its 
 proceedings, which is an aggravation of this common 
 vice ; the difficulty of learning the forms, which 
 renders the assistance of an advocate indispensable in 
 the most insignificant affairs ; the multiplicity 
 of laws, the enormity of judicial expenses, the 
 bad arrangement of the prisons, the defective organi- 
 zation of the magistracy. Eighty to ninety volumes 
 form the Government collection of laws ; to
 
 48 
 
 which must be added the codes civil and criminal, the 
 code of those misdemeanours of which the Police takes 
 cognizance, the code of custom-house dues and regu- 
 lations : where is the one man who can comprehend 
 them all ? Where is the man who can spur himself 
 up to attempt it ? The general system of the Austrian 
 Government consists in paying very few people to 
 work, and in obtaining as much gratuitous labour as 
 possible. In the distant and uncertain hope of a 
 future gain, a fund has been established, from which 
 half the number of those occupying judicial posts and 
 at least two thirds of those employed in the executive 
 and financial departments are paid. Unless this path 
 be smoothed by relationship or connexion with those 
 who have the disposal of offices, or for secret services 
 of a base nature rendered to Government, a young man 
 may think himself fortunate if after long and costly 
 legal study, and eight or nine years of consecutive 
 gratuitous labour, he succeeds in obtaining a situation 
 which brings him in six or seven hundred florins a 
 year at the outside. The number of persons employed 
 is after all very few, compared to the amount of work 
 required. There are infinite grades in these situa- 
 tions ; the persons holding them are almost every year 
 removed from place to place : and although these 
 continual changes form evidently part of the political 
 system, they act not the less fatally on the administra- 
 tion of justice : they oppress the functionaries with 
 useless expenses ; impede the course of business, and 
 almost render it impracticable to obtain that thorough 
 knowledge of the questions brought before them, by 
 which alone they would be able to decide con- 
 scientiously. The high degrees of the judicial hie- 
 rarchy — that is to say where they who preside in the
 
 49 
 
 courts have to decide on questions wherein a perfect 
 knowledge of the Italian and its dialects is indis- 
 pensable — are filled by Germans who can hardly 
 stammer the language. 
 
 From the causes I have indicated, and which I have 
 been contented with simply asserting — since every one 
 may verify for himself the fact of the extravagance of 
 judicial charges, and the perplexed enactments of the 
 codes and regulations — it inevitably follows, that the 
 dispatch of business must be both costly and tedious. 
 Those concerned in civil suits are often wearied 
 out, and renounce their claim, resigning them- 
 selves to the first loss. But these defects have a more 
 serious influence in criminal causes. On the third of 
 September 1840, an individual was brought up from the 
 prison of Como, who had been confined there for two 
 years without having being examined. But not to 
 dwell longer on special cases, the occurrence of 
 which however rarely is sufficient to condemn the 
 system, I assert that criminal causes generally last for 
 years. Ill clothed, ill fed, the accused languish all the 
 time in prisons which usually are unhealthy; and 
 where, if they do not die of scurvy, they often come out 
 imbecile, unable to work, or at least utterly unable to 
 procure any : crowded, ten, fifteen, twenty together in 
 the same prison, where the innocent perhaps, or those 
 guilty of very slight crimes, are mingled with ruffians 
 and assassins, they come out as from a school of in- 
 famy, utterly depraved. And I say, that when the 
 system by virtue of which these men are placed there, re- 
 lies on such a basis as secrecy in the proceedings, and the 
 fate of the accused is placed in the hands of a Councillor 
 invested at the same time with the functions of defen- 
 der and judge, one can neither conceive nor understand
 
 50 
 
 eulogiums bestowed on the administration of Austrian 
 justice, unless they are dictated by bad faith or an 
 unpardonable ignorance on a point in which millions 
 of men are concerned. 
 
 Education, intellectual development, administration, 
 justice, finances, all are corrupted, shackled, ill-or- 
 ganized, in the Austrian regime which governs the 
 Lombardo-Venetian Provinces ; and the little progress 
 that is made there, is made not through it, but in spite 
 of it — by the strength inherent in us, by the struggle 
 that overbears us. 
 
 It would signify but little were it otherwise. In 
 tracing the foregoing pages I have paid tribute to the 
 disease of the age. I have laid the cause at the 
 door of those who have substituted one piece of 
 mechanism in place of the heart, another for the 
 head, exclaiming — " Behold, man ! the great problem 
 of statesmanship consists in oiling the wheels, in order 
 that the circular motion may go on. " But that is not 
 the ground I take: it is not a circular motion that is in 
 question, but a progressive motion, which can only 
 be accomplished in liberty and love. It is not a few 
 millions, a few taxes more or less, that can decide the 
 character of a people's life. We are not, thank God, of 
 a nature to content ourselves with panem et circenses, in 
 whatever abundance. 
 
 It is the Soul of the Italian Nation, its thought, its 
 mission, its conscience, which is at stake. It is that 
 which they are endeavouring to destroy there; it 
 is that which lifts up its voice and appeals through its 
 martyrs, its exiles, its apostles, from tyranny to God. 
 Are you at that pitch of materialism as to be capable 
 of appreciating nothing but what can be weighed in 
 gold or valued in commodities ? There are over there
 
 51 
 
 from four to five millions of human creatures, gifted — 
 think of this, you who call yourselves religious — with 
 an immortal soul, with powerful faculties, with 
 energetic thoughts, with ardent and generous passions; 
 with aspirations towards free agency, towards the 
 ideal which their fathers had a glimpse of, which 
 nature and tradition point out to them ; towards a 
 national union with other millions of brother souls, in 
 order to attain it : from four to five millions of men, 
 desiring to live, and advance, under the eye of God the 
 only Master, towards the accomplishment of a social 
 task which they have in common with sixteen or se- 
 venteen millions of other men speaking the same 
 language, treading the same earth, cradled in their 
 infancy with the same maternal songs, strengthened in 
 their youth by the same sun, inspired by the same 
 memories, the same sources of literary genius. Coun- 
 try, liberty, brotherhood, vocation, all is wrested from 
 them : their faculties are mutilated, curbed, chained 
 within a narrow circle traced for them by men who 
 are strangers to their tendencies, to their wants, to 
 their wishes : their tradition is broken under the cane 
 of an Austrian corporal s their immortal soul feudatory 
 to the stupid caprices of a man seated on a throne at 
 Vienna, to the caprices of his Tyrolese agents ; and you 
 go on indifferent, coolly inquiring if these men be sub- 
 ject to this or that other tariff, if the bread that they eat 
 cost them a halfpenny more or less ! That tariff, what- 
 ever it be, is too high : it is not they who have had the 
 ordering of it : that bread, dear or not, is moistened with 
 tears, for it is the bread of slaves. Have you an 
 arithmetical figure in your statistics which is the equiva- 
 lent of slavery ? Slavery, I say : not only national 
 slavery — (which is death to us as a country; which in- 
 
 d 2
 
 52 
 
 scribes a foreign name on the old flag of our fathers ; 
 which, in vitiating the implements and the workplace, effa- 
 ces the idea of the w;or/c to be done, and dissolves the 
 brotherhood of millions : there are persons who under- 
 stand nothing of all this, who deny all collective mission, 
 and are ignorant that the national idea is the Word of a 
 people) — but moral slavery, that which enervates andcor- 
 rupts, the yokeof the mind, the leprosy of the soul. What 
 matters it to us that they allow us to open schools for 
 our children, if it be to teach these ignoble phrases — 
 " Subjects ought to conduct themselves as faithful 
 
 slaves towards their masters whose power extends 
 
 over their goods as well as over their persons ? " What 
 matters it to us, that two Universities are tolerated, if 
 their Professors must send to Vienna their historical 
 course, to have it interpolated with I know not what 
 eulogy on the House of Austria ? And what matters 
 to us some few economical developments, some progress 
 in material well-being, whilst, in the absence of all 
 social aim, all public life, all noble activity, this progress 
 in material comforts, precious for a free people, would 
 only serve to stir up egoism, to drown the aspira- 
 tions of our Italian soul in a gross sensuality ? Better 
 a hundred times were honest dull ignorance and po- 
 verty, than this phantom of science and prosperity in 
 the service of a Lie. 
 
 Happily, if we go forwards, if some signs of progress 
 manifest themselves amongst us, it is not, I repeat, by 
 them ; it is in spite of them, and consequently against 
 
 them. 
 
 They know this well ; and hence, from that mute but 
 incessant contest arises another series of evil, intri- 
 gue, and persecution, which Lombardy endures in 
 common with all the rest of Italy.
 
 53 
 
 There are in Lombardy alone, 300 Police agents, 872 
 gendarmes, 1,233 Police guards, ( total 2,405, ) with 
 a whole army of guardians, under-guardians, gaolers, 
 secondini, guards of fortified places, &c. There are guards 
 of the frontiers, of the communes, of the woods and 
 forests, of the towns, all under the control of the Police. 
 There are spies of the Viceroy, of the Governor, of the 
 Director of Police, of the Commissaries, of the Delegates, 
 of the District-Commissaries, of the Bishops, of the 
 Provosts, acting independently of each other, butalljoin- 
 ing the main root of the SupremePolice at Vienna. And 
 all this mass, all this iniquitous mob, (I do not include 
 the army, though that also is a tool of the Police,) 
 has for its principal object the search after and sup- 
 pression of national opinion. With this end, in a 
 political regard, every thing it can do is right, 
 every thing is permitted to it. Every outrage is allowed; 
 the citizen has no longer even the shadow of 
 protection. It is a warfare, a dishonest warfare, without 
 pity, without shame, carried on in darkness, by agents 
 who combine all the tricks of chicane with the cold- 
 blooded cruelty of an Iroquois. 
 
 Have you ever read, Sir, two books from the pens of 
 political sufferers at the Austrian Spielberg, Silvio 
 Pellico and Andryane, — containing the account of 
 their sufferings ? written with so much moderation that 
 one of them has been allowed to be printed and re- 
 printed in Italy. If you have not, Sir, endeavour to 
 find time, between the issuing of one warrant and an- 
 other, to glance over them. Perhaps when you learn 
 the vengeance that overtakes politica offenders in 
 Austrian Italy * — when you see, beside the hor- 
 
 * " The condemned shall be confined in a dungeon, secluded from 
 all communication, with only so much light and »pace as is neces-
 
 54 
 
 rors alluded to in the note, the torture of hunger, lite- 
 rally of hunger, inflicted upon them ; when you see 
 Pietro Maroncelli losing his left leg in consequence of 
 the weight and pressure of his fetters — losing it by 
 amputation at the upper part of the thigh, be- 
 cause the Governor of Spielberg, having received his 
 prisoner with two legs, was obliged to give him up in 
 the same condition, and therefore could not allow the 
 operation to take place until he had received a 
 sanction from Vienna ; perhaps, I say, you will then have 
 a glimmering perception of the terrible responsibility 
 which is attached to the communication of intelligence 
 obtained from the correspondence of any foreigner over 
 whom you may play the spy on behalf of Austria. 
 
 And do you know, Sir, how people reach Spielberg 
 from Lombardy ? Are you aware how slight a matter, 
 when once the suspicions of Austria are excited, 
 is sufficient to precipitate the victim thither? 
 Take the trials of 1 820-2 1 , they will tell you. They will 
 tell you how Colonel Silvio Moretti was condemned 
 to fifteen years of the car cere duro, upon what were 
 
 sary to sustain life ; he shall be constantly loaded with heavy 
 fetters on the hands and feet ; he shall never, except during the 
 hours of labour, be without a chain attached to a circle of iron round 
 his body ; his diet shall be bread and water, a hot ration every second 
 day ; but never any animal food — his bed to be composed of naked 
 planks, and he shall be forbidden to see any one — without excep- 
 tion. " — Such is the definition of the car cere durissimo in the Penal 
 
 Code, § 14. 
 
 The hot ration (cibo caldo) consists of slices of bread steeped in 
 hot water, and flavoured with tallow. It is a common thing for 
 those condemned to the carcere duro to wear twenty- pounds weight 
 of chains ; they are worked like galley-slaves, and have neither 
 light nor paper nor books: never, except sometimes by an ex- 
 traordinary favour on Sundays, (to attend mass,) leaving their cold 
 and humid cells.
 
 55 
 
 called indicial proofs, founded on false state- 
 ments made against him by some of his fellow-accused, 
 when, in consequence of a report of his suicide 
 spread through the prisons by the Government, they 
 believed him past danger ; but retracted by them when 
 they saw him alive before the Court. They will tell 
 you of Lieutenant Giovanni Bachiega sentenced to 
 fifteen years of the carcere duro, as convicted not only of 
 avowed hostile intentions towards the Imperial House 
 of Austria, but as disposed to resist it arms in hand : 
 and this because he replied " Certainly " to the 
 judge's demand, " Would you bear arms for Italy, if 
 some day she should rise Nationally ? They will tell 
 you of Rezia, an Ex-Captain of Engineers, condemned 
 to three years of the carcere duro in the castle of 
 Lay bach, because he gave an ambiguous reply to 
 the judge's question of " whether he would have 
 denounced a Carbonaro if he had known him 
 to be such " ; and this was ruled to be an answer in 
 the negative. 
 
 Do not fancy, Sir, that these are exceptional cases, 
 which might have been produced from the terror excited 
 in Austria by the insurrections of Naples and Pied- 
 mont : I could show many similar examples in the 
 trials of 1831 and 1833. 
 
 But it is not in these iniquitous condemnations to 
 Spielberg, these coups d'eclat of Austrian justice, that 
 lies the wound which festers in Lombardy : it is pos- 
 sible, when nationality is a belief, not a reaction, to 
 leave Spielberg, like my estimable friend Dr. Foresti, 
 calm, unmoved, the same as the man of fifteen years 
 before. It is the general system, at work round each 
 individual — at work each day of the year, each hour of 
 the day — endeavouring to crush under mistrust, suspi-
 
 56 
 
 cion, and fear, the moral faculties of our youth, to 
 which I would point : it is the brutal exhibition of 
 physical force, from the levelled cannons on the Duomo 
 at Milan, mute but eloquent symbols, down 
 to the insolence of the police-guards who encum- 
 ber the streets day and night — from the base and brutal 
 manner in which the Austrian officers treat the young 
 men of the University of Pavia on the least appearance 
 of disorder, down to the liberty granted to custom- 
 house officers to fire on smugglers in their flight : it is 
 the arbitrary and frequent refusal of passports for 
 foreign countries, and even for the interior, combined 
 with the enormous penalties on those who dare to do 
 without them ; the unlimited and irresponsible power 
 of arrest given to the police ; the prohibition of invi- 
 ting one's friends to a ball without previously giving no- 
 tice to the police : it is the habitual violation of govern- 
 ment amnesties, such as for instance caused De Lui- 
 gi to be refused permission to exercise his profession 
 of advocate, although the words of the decree in the faith 
 of which he returned did not contain any such re- 
 striction ; such as threw in prison Lancetti, another 
 amnestied emigrant, w T ho, at the end of two years, 
 ruined by his hard treatment, was set at liberty to die, 
 invoking curses on his persecutors : it is the omnipo- 
 tence granted to the superior agents of the police, going 
 even to impiety, and producing, in what concerns 
 political cases, such monstrous facts as that of the 
 Count Bolza forcing a sacristan to give him a con- 
 secrated wafer, which he administered himself in 1833 
 to one Bianchi, who was in prison and dying, to do away 
 with all excuse for admitting within the walls even 
 a priest ; the violation — but that will not strike you, 
 Sir James, as any thing very immoral — the violation
 
 57 
 
 of private correspondence ; the precetto in the 
 name of the police and without any interference on 
 the part of the tribunals, forbidding hundreds of indivi- 
 duals from leaving the town for an indefinite time : and 
 beyond all this, it is the system of espionage, organized 
 on such a scale that in the city of Milan alone it costs 
 the sum of near 200,000 Austrian lires a month, inva- 
 ding the peace of families, breaking the bonds of 
 friendship, scattering the seeds of selfism and cor- 
 ruption, gaining its ends by calumny, going even the 
 length of provoking crime when it can discover none 
 to reveal — distributing revolutionary documents with 
 one hand and signing a denunciation with the other. 
 In 1833, there was a man amongst our exiles who 
 was proscribed by Austria for having belonged to our 
 national association of La Giovine Italia : he had 
 bravely fought and suffered in 1821 for the Italian 
 cause. By this he had earned a title to our fraternal 
 esteem ; he was besides bound by the ties of intimate 
 friendship tc many amongst us : but he was one of 
 those passionate sensual natures, devoid of all reli- 
 gious faith, who combat from reaction and from pride 
 rather than from a profound sense of duty — who are 
 capable of exhibiting by starts every virtue except that 
 of constancy. He was assailed by poverty; he had 
 recourse to us, and was assisted ; but the temporary aid 
 which his friends, poor and exiled like himself, were 
 able to afford, was not sufficient to cope with neces- 
 sities perpetually recurring : without employment, 
 without resources, he was reduced to despair. The 
 Austrian Police kept a watchful eye on its victim, and 
 at this crisis offered him through its agents a monthly 
 salary, if he would consent to be the Judas of his 
 brethren : he yielded : he believed he should be able
 
 58 
 
 to satisfy his necessities by playing a low but in- 
 offensive part ; and that he might earn his wages with- 
 out compromising a living soul, and so cheat the 
 Austrian Government. This was in 1842 ; and all his 
 first vague depositions, which barely glanced on 
 supposititious intrigues of some few exiles who could 
 thereby incur no personal risk, accorded marvellously 
 well with the mystification he proposed to himself. But 
 the vortex of crime began to draw his soul within its 
 circle, and proved stronger than he. Bitter reproaches, 
 accompanied at the same time with seductive offers of 
 as much money as he wanted, to induce him to ac- 
 complish his diabolical mission, came to him from the 
 Director of the Lombard police, the Baron Torresani, 
 and also from the Austrian Embassy at Paris, where he 
 resided. He was in the power of fiends. Degraded in 
 his own eyes, lost with his compatriots if the agents of 
 Austria uttered the least whisper as to his conduct, he 
 felt as if fascinated : he subscribed to all that was de- 
 sired of him : he began to mingle falsehood with truth, 
 Afterwards, when the troubles in the Papal States 
 grew threatening, he plunged into crime with all the 
 fury of intoxication : he became at once a denouncer 
 and an instigator. He connected himself with some 
 parties who had certain relations with the interior of 
 Italy, but who suffered them to slumber for want of 
 funds : he said to them — " I have money ; I will 
 manage for you. " Other parties travelling in France 
 were by him persuaded to take with them into Italy 
 proscribed works : with one hand he furnished them 
 with these, and with the other he signed their denun- 
 ciation. They still languish in prison. 
 
 In 1844, the Austrian Government required that he 
 should avail himself of an old personal acquaintance,
 
 59 
 
 to become a close spy upon me. This the wretched 
 man did not dare ; partly from instinct, partly from the 
 consciousness that I was acquainted with certain ill- 
 conduct he had been guilty of in his own country, 
 and had broken off all intercourse with him : he feared 
 to meet my eye, and did not come near me. But he 
 shut himself up in a garret in Paris, and did not leave 
 it for some time ; during which he fabricated his report 
 of conversations held with me in London — confidences 
 which I had communicated to him — insurrectional 
 plans of which I was at the head ; a tissue of absur- 
 dities, detailing an enormous amount of arms and 
 money which had been furnished me by unknown 
 Englishmen ; promises from the existing government 
 of England in case of an Italian movement, transmitted 
 to me, as he declared, by the Private Secretary of Sir 
 Robert Peel. This information was liberally paid for, 
 and he thanked Baron Torresani for the same by 
 letter. But if as regarded me he mystified the Aus- 
 trian police, he did not the less pursue his diabolical 
 machinations against others : he gave to certain 
 Italians who were travelling in Europe letters of intro- 
 duction to me, and then he wrote word that they were 
 gone to hold personal communication with the director 
 of the revolutionary movement. He was employed 
 in his last moments in the fabrication of 
 false passports, which he intended for exiles who 
 desired to go and verify for themselves the actual 
 state of things in Italy ; victims whom he doomed to a 
 perpetual prison or death. He died towards the end 
 of last year : his name was Attilio Partesotti, of Man- 
 tua. I possess a copy of the whole of his correspon- 
 dence. The unhappy being, for fear of contradicting 
 himself, was obliged to keep an exact register of his
 
 
 60 
 
 inventions, which he had not time to burn. 
 
 This is a specimen of Austrian espionage. These, 
 Sir, are the proceedings to which you have lent the 
 sanction of England, though, I would fain believe, 
 without being aware of the bearing of your acts. 
 
 I have cited this fact, because the representations 
 coming from high sources which brought you to your 
 meanness, were not improbably founded on the lies 
 uttered by this, man ; but your fellow-countrymen will, 
 I trust, see therein the characteristic of many other 
 facts which I could easily quote, and the opinion that 
 ought to be formed of a government which makes use 
 of such crimes to maintain itself, and the state of the 
 country which is subject to it. 
 
 But why bring detached facts to prove the iniquity 
 of the Austrian government in Italy ? How can it be 
 otherwise? In Lombardy there are Germany and 
 Italy ; that is to say, two races, having nothing in 
 common — neither origin, nor language, nor manners, 
 nor literature, nor belief, nor vocation ; that is 
 a race of conquerors, of usurpers more properly 
 speaking — for Austria has never conquered except 
 by treaties and marriages — and a race of subjects ; 
 that is, two distinct and hostile elements, which 
 nothing, as is admitted on both sides, has been able 
 to fuse together ; the antagonism of which is mani- 
 fested in crises almost periodical ; the inarticulate 
 ceaseless conflict of which racks with pain every joint 
 and member of the nation, and renders of no avail, often 
 dangerous, whatever progression the activity of the sub- 
 ject or the policy of the masters may bring about. 
 What country is there in which this phenomenon can 
 exist without condemning to crime the government 
 that upholds it ? How can it maintain itself on this
 
 01 
 
 unsteady soil, in the bosom of an unfriendly popu- 
 lation, unless it be by scattering terror, by the display 
 of brute force, by sowing division and mistrust through a 
 system of espionage ? Yes ; the Austrian government is 
 obliged to keep Partesottis in its pay to infuse treachery 
 amongst friends wherever it can, and to take as truth the 
 lies which these spies utter to gain their wages ; it is 
 obliged to recommend the exiles who regain their homes 
 to amuse themselves ; it is obliged to say by its censors to 
 those young men who present themselves with a ma- 
 nuscript in their hand — " Why, you sons of wealthy 
 " families, do you wear out your brains in literary 
 " labour? * " it is obliged to maintain in Lombardy 
 at our expense an army of 80,000 Germans, whilst it 
 sends our Italian conscripts to ruin their health for 
 eight or nine years in Hungary, Bohemia, and Galicia ; 
 it is obliged to deprive our soldiers of all advancement : 
 it is reduced to do all that which in the preceding 
 pages I have depicted to my readers : it stands as upon 
 a field of slaughter, with wary eye, with ear to the 
 wind, snuffing the battle. The great immorality (sav- 
 ing the first step — the unlawful possession of 
 that which belongs to others) is not now upon the side 
 of Austria. It is, I am bound to say it, on the side of 
 Europe, which looks upon this crying injustice as a 
 normal fact ; it is on the side of those who endeavour 
 to avert the attention of the good of all countries by 
 fallacious assertions as to the material prosperity which 
 the victims of this injustice may enjoy ; on your side, 
 Sir James, who broke the seal of my letters for its pro- 
 tection ; on the side of that Parliamentary majority, 
 
 * Cesare Balbo, a witness above suspicion, and my opponent in 
 all things.
 
 62 
 
 that — doubtless, for want of information on these 
 points — sanctioned such a proceeding by its vote. 
 
 I have sketched a few traits of the best government 
 existing in Italy. I shall now give, still more 
 briefly, the characteristic traits of the worst, the States 
 of the Pope. I could not analyze the seven Italian 
 Governments that, like the seven heads of the Beast in 
 the Apocalypse, blaspheme the mission of Italy, with- 
 out enlarging to a volume. But I may state, that they 
 all pendulate between the two of which I am writing, 
 over a common ground, that of the political question. 
 
 Central despotism is the characteristic of the Aus- 
 trian Government : organized anarchy, to the extent 
 such a thing is possible, is the characteristic of the 
 Papal. And this anarchy, an inevitable con- 
 sequence of the constitutional nucleus of the go- 
 vernment, cannot be modified by written laws or by 
 essays of partial reform, come from what quarter they 
 may. 
 
 The government is elective and despotic : it is vested 
 in a man who is Pope and King at the same time, and 
 who proclaims himself to be infallible. No rule is 
 prescribed, none can be prescribed, to the Sovereign. His 
 electors, all and alone eligible, believing themselves 
 clothed with a divine character, divide among them the 
 direction of affairs. The chief offices in the different 
 departments of administration are all filled by priests. 
 Very many of them are totally irresponsible, not merely 
 in fact, but of right. 
 
 The Pope, generally a creature of the faction opposed 
 to that which elected his predecessor, overturns the 
 system in operation prior to his accession, and by a 
 Motu-proprio substitutes his own. His electors, the 
 Cardinals, each eligible after him and feeling them-
 
 G3 
 
 selves his equals, substitute their pleasure for his, 
 every one in his sphere. The Bishops, also partaking in 
 this divine character and in irresponsible authority, 
 exercise a wide and almost entirely independent power. 
 The same, too, with the chiefs of the Holy Inquisition. 
 The ecclesiastics, holders of the principal offices, incom- 
 petent from past habits and studies to undertake their 
 administration, discharge their duties by the aid of 
 inferior employes ; who in turn, feeling their position 
 uncertain, as dependent on a necessarily short-lived 
 patronage, are guilty of every possible malversation, 
 and aim solely at self-enrichment. Beneath all, the 
 weary people, borne down by all, reacting against all, 
 are initiated into a corruption the example of which 
 is set by their superiors ; or avenge themselves as they 
 may, by revolt or the poniard. Such, abridged, is the 
 normal state of Papal Italy. 
 
 In such a system there is not, there cannot be, any 
 place for general, social interests, but place for the 
 interests of self alone. The priests who govern have 
 nothing in common with the governed : they may have 
 mistresses — they cannot have wives : their children, 
 if they have any, are not legitimate, and have nothing 
 to hope for but from intrigue and favouritism. The 
 love of glory, the ambition of doing good — the last 
 stimulant left to individuals when every other is want- 
 ing — exists not for them. The absence of all unity of 
 system, the instability of all principle of government, 
 as evidenced at Rome under each new Pope, and in the 
 provinces under each new Legate, wholly destroys the 
 possibility of such an impulse : how should men de- 
 vote themselves to amendments that can be in force but a 
 few years, that must pass away ere they can bear fruit? 
 Besides, as I have before said, the ecclesiastics are
 
 64 
 
 driven, by their want of political aptitude, to govern by 
 Auditors, Assessors, or Secretaries : why should these 
 last labour for good, when the glory would all go to 
 their chiefs? why should they not labour for evil, 
 when the dishonour will fall there also ? Fear has no 
 hold on the subalterns ; for, not acting in their own 
 name, they have nothing to dread save from their 
 patrons. Fear has no hold on the heads ; for as to 
 some, their power and the part taken in the election 
 of the reigning Pope, as to others, the Apostolic Con- 
 stitutions or the traditions of the Church, establish an 
 irresponsibility in fact or law. In the Papal States, 
 the Minister of Finance {Treasurer-General) has no ac- 
 count to render : he may rob the Government with 
 impunity ; and he can be removed from his office only 
 by promotion to the Cardinalate. From this single fact 
 judge of the rest. Consequent on this irresponsibility, 
 in combination with the absence of distinctive limita- 
 tions to official authority, no irregularity is too extrava- 
 gant for the Popedom. The Cardinal-Datario claims the 
 right of setting aside the ordinances of the Pope, 
 whenever it seems good to him. A law of Benedict 
 the Fourteenth, confirmed by Pius the Seventh and 
 Leo the Twelfth, ordains that every farming of duties 
 and every contract relating to the exchequer should 
 be effected by public competition ; and that after the first 
 auction, a certain time should elapse, to see if any 
 party will advance on the highest bidding : and yet the 
 Secretary of State and the Treasurer constantly violate 
 this prudent regulation, and, for a sum in hand, with- 
 out the slightest formality, assign such contracts to 
 whomsoever they please. Cardinal Albani published 
 at Bologna, on the 1st February, certain ordinances of 
 Gregory the Sixteenth, of the 8th October 1831, to
 
 65 
 
 the effect that for the future no man should be taken 
 out of the hands of his native judges ; and twenty 
 days later, he created a Provost's court, that treated as 
 crimes acts not before obnoxious to the law. The 
 Cardinal-Treasurer and the Cardinal-Camerlengo 
 promulgated at the same time (1828) two opposing re- 
 gulations relating to the posts. The functions of the pro- 
 vincial heads are laid down by law ; but the Pope re- 
 serves to himself the gift of a letter or Brief of In- 
 struction, by which he extends their power to what 
 limit he pleases, and often invests them with the exer- 
 cise of a portion of legal jurisdiction in civil matters : 
 they may abuse these powers according to caprice, for, 
 whatever they may do, they cannot be recalled till the 
 expiration of three years. But why cite facts which 
 may be increased to infinity ? Who is there to whom 
 the enormities of the Papal Government are un- 
 known ? Is not their best proof that general agitation 
 which for the last twenty years has been ever spread- 
 ing in those provinces ? Were they not recognized 
 by the five Courts themselves in the Memorandum 
 they presented to the Pope on the 2 1 st May 1 83 1 ? 
 And can I not — here in England, at least — appeal to the 
 declarations of Sir Hamilton Seymour, in his official 
 correspondence in 1832 with the Austrian Ambas- 
 sador at Rome ? 
 
 Under this anarchy of fleeting and ephemeral 
 powers, all in arbitrary action, all in conflict, all moved 
 by individual passions — in this den of abuse, of pa- 
 tronage, of venality, and of corruption, its inevitable 
 consequence — the sources of material prosperity are 
 one by one withering. The uncertainty of the law, 
 the confused state of the regulations respecting mort- 
 gages, the "repudiation" often granted to debtors by the 
 
 E
 
 66 
 
 Pope unknown to creditors, the tediousness of legal 
 process, the delays arbitrarily accorded to influential 
 debtors, the privileges belonging to the Tribunale della 
 Fabbrica di San Pietro, charged to search in wills and 
 other deeds, ancient and modern, for the existence of 
 pious legacies unfulfilled — all these tend to the depre- 
 ciation of property. From the same causes, and from 
 the frequent variation of the always extravagantly high 
 scale of duties, commerce is swallowed up between the 
 monopolist and the smuggler. Industry is shackled 
 by exclusive privileges, by restrictions, by a vexatious 
 excise, and above all, by intriguej which is favoured 
 by the officials, who are linked to Rome as against 
 every provincial manufacture that may likewise be 
 carried on in the metropolis. The enormous weight 
 of taxation, bearing not merely indirectly, but, under 
 the name of Focatico and the contribution for military 
 purposes, also directly on the peasant, hinders all pro- 
 gress in agriculture. The Treasury, when not plun- 
 dered by the irresponsible Treasurer, is exhausted in 
 pensions scandalously lavished on idle Prelates — on in- 
 ferior proteges, whom it has been necessary to deprive 
 of their employments, but whom it is hazardous to 
 bring to justice or ignominiously dismiss — on women 
 of ill life, courtezans to the Cardinals — or on such as have 
 rendered secret services to the Government or any one 
 of its members.* It maintains a large part of the Con- 
 gregation of the Propaganda ; it foments political plots, 
 in Spain, in Portugal, and elsewhere ; it every where 
 keeps alive, by secret agents, Jesuits or others, the as- 
 
 * Large pensions have often been granted to the brigand chiefs of 
 the Campagna, who covenanted with the Government for a life-in- 
 come, proportionate to the profit they drew from their murderous 
 calling.
 
 67 
 
 sailant spirit of Papistry ; it feeds the luxury of the 
 most demoralized court in Europe, in the midst of a 
 famishing population. Before 1831, the public debt 
 was nearly 600,000,000 Italian lire, but is now much 
 augmented. In 1831-2 — such was the exhausted 
 state of the Treasury — a foreign loan was negociated, 
 one was imposed on the cities of the Legations, the funds 
 of the charitable institutions of Bologna were seized 
 on,*and the land-tax was increased a third. Other loans 
 were effected in succeeding years. No variety of expe- 
 dient has been left untried ; and yet the financial 
 position of the government becomes daily more 
 critical. 
 
 And now. Sir, shall I speak to you of the intel- 
 lectual status to which the institutions and habits of 
 the Court of Rome condemn the mass of the popula- 
 tion ? No ; all that must be known even here. Num- 
 bers of your countrymen traverse those provinces of 
 Italy governed by the Pope : how many peasants do 
 they meet with that can read and write? Sure I am they 
 will count them by units. Many of your philosophers 
 attend those congresses of science — feeble but symp- 
 tomatic efforts of our savans — that have for some years 
 assembled in Lombardy, Tuscany, or elsewhere : did 
 they ever meet there a single Professor from the Papal 
 States ? The simple fact of this interdiction and a 
 cursory survey of the Index suffice to measure the po- 
 sition there accorded to intellect. 
 
 And all this — the mass of material and moral pesti- 
 lence afflicting this wretched population — is based on 
 what ? On a Phantom no longer believed in, that has 
 ceased to have faith in itself. Conceive the state of a 
 creed-distrusting people, curbed, domineered, over- 
 burdened, by an army of priests manifesting faith only 
 
 k 2
 
 68 
 
 in force, who surround themselves with Swiss and 
 Austrian bayonets, or, in the name of Christ, muster 
 brigands from the galleys ! Religion — I speak of 
 Papal Catholicism — is, in the Roman States more 
 than elsewhere, lifeless: lifeless in the educated classes 
 as a consequence of the enlightened age ; lifeless in the 
 people as wanting a symbol — as wanting a something 
 representative. Who in that country is ignorant that 
 the nomination of Christ's Vicar depends on Ambas- 
 sadorial intrigue, and that the direct or indirect Veto 
 of Austria, of France, or some other Power, throws 
 into Conclavial nonentity the so termed chosen of 
 the Holy Spirit ? Who is ignorant that long since the 
 King strangled the Pope ; that diplomacy masters theo- 
 logy ; that the Notes of foreign Plenipotentiaries have 
 inspired Briefs to the clergy of Poland, to the Bishops 
 of Ireland ? Which Motu-proprio of a Pope but in- 
 sults the infallibility of his predecessor ? Who at 
 Rome but can point out the mistresses of the 
 Cardinals ? or who in the provinces but can point to 
 the agents of the Prelate-Governors, shamelessly 
 trafficking in all that can bring money to themselves or 
 their masters ? How, dizzied in this whirlpool of 
 scandal, of hypocrisy, of dilapidation, can man preserve 
 his faith intact ? By a deplorable but too natural re- 
 action, negation, materialism, doubt, day by day in- 
 gulf fresh souls. Nought of religion survives but 
 forms, outward shows, and observances compelled by 
 law. It is compulsory that men should communicate 
 at Easter : it is compulsory that the youth of the 
 schools and universities should be present at mass 
 each day, and communicate once a month ; it is com- 
 pulsory that public officers should take part in cere- 
 monies -termed religious. Such is religion in the
 
 69 
 
 Roman states. The junction of temporal interests 
 with the duties of the central power of the Church 
 has stifled religion : it will revive only by their 
 disjunction — in other words, only by a political revo- 
 lution, that shall pluck the Roman provinces from the 
 Pope to give them to Italy. 
 
 In 1831, an insurrection, internally victorious, was 
 quieted by Austrian intervention ; but the insurgents 
 remained in possession of their arms, their position and 
 places of strength. A capitulation was signed at 
 Ancona on the 26th March, between the members of 
 the Provisional Government on one side and Cardinal 
 Benvenuti on the other, covenanting a full and entire 
 amnesty for all those implicated in the rising. The 
 Cardinal was Legate a latere ; that is to say, clothed 
 with every power — an alter ego — in the language of 
 Rome, Deo et non nobis rationem redditurus. The 
 26th might have furnished a pretext for parties 
 who would have been glad to look upon him as at that 
 date still in the power of the insurgents : on the 27th, 
 free, and invested with supreme authority, he sponta- 
 neously ratified the capitulation. Ninety-nine of the 
 most compromised of the insurgents, with the conni- 
 vance of Benvenuti himself, who for the purpose per- 
 suaded the captain to break a contract, embarked on 
 board the Isotta, under the Papal flag, furnished with 
 regular passports, signed by the Pontifical authorities 
 and by the Consul of France. The rest remained, on 
 the faith of the capitulation. On the part of the in- 
 surgents, every article was observed ; they surrendered 
 their arms, the fortified places were given up, the in- 
 surrectionary flag pulled down. On the 5th April, 
 when the country was entirely at the Papal mercy, the 
 Pope declared the capitulation null as far as regarded
 
 70 
 
 himself. Ordinances of the 14th and 20th April or- 
 ganized a bitter prosecution against those who had 
 been, however slightly, accomplices, favourers, or ap- 
 provers of the insurrection. The ninety-nine pas- 
 sengers of the Isotta were stopped on the high sea, 
 by the Austrian Admiral Bandiera — (whose two sons 
 expiated their father's wrong against the Italian 
 cause, by pouring out their blood in martyrdom, on the 
 25th July, 1844, atCosenza) — taken back to Ancona, 
 and from thence to Venice, to the prisons ofAustria, 
 against whom they had committed no attack ; from 
 which they were released after two months ill-treat- 
 ment, by the intervention of France. After facts so 
 revolting to good faith and morality, how can men 
 believe in the religion of the court of Rome ? 
 
 Misgovern ment and foreign despotism in Lom- 
 bardy — misgovernment and the worship of an Impos- 
 ture in the Popedom — you have only, Sir, to apply 
 these three things to entire Italy, and you will have got 
 the truth. The Pope is the cross, the pommel of a 
 sword, of which Austria is the point ; and this sword 
 hangs over all Italy. The Pope clutches the soul of 
 the Italian nation ; Austria the body — whenever it 
 shows signs of life ; and on every member of that body is 
 enthroned a petty absolute prince, viceroy in turn under 
 either of these powers. Three despotisms in place of 
 one ! — without any of the advantages that sometimes 
 accompany despotism, when national, and when opera- 
 ting on a grand scale. 
 
 In the Duchy of Tuscany — the only Italian state in 
 which the corruption of a mild despotism has been 
 preferred to the system of terror elsewhere dominant 
 — one of our first authors, Nicolini, published his 
 tragedy of Arnaldo da Brescia : for two days it had a
 
 71 
 
 free sale ; on the third the whole impression was 
 seized, at the instance of the court of Rome. In the 
 same Duchy, a native restored the house formerly in- 
 habited by Alfieri, and added an inscription, lauding 
 the great poet for his love of Italy : the Tuscan cen- 
 sorship found in it nothing objectionable ; but the 
 Austrian Ambassador demanded its obliteration, and 
 the Government obeyed. These two facts, almost in- 
 significant in themselves, furnish a practical commen- 
 tary on the preceding paragraph. 
 
 It is time that I should return to the general ques- 
 tion. I shall put it as simply as possible, and in ge- 
 neral terms, common to the whole of Italy — from the 
 Alps to the sea, from the Lombardo-Venetian King- 
 dom to Sicily. 
 
 We are a people of from one-and- twenty to two- 
 and-twenty millions of men, known from time imme- 
 morial by the same name, as the people of Italy ; en- 
 closed by natural limits the clearest ever marked out 
 by the Deity — the sea and the highest mountains in 
 Europe ; speaking the same language, modified by 
 dialects varying from each other less than do the 
 Scotch and the English ; having the same creeds, the 
 same manners, the same habits, with modifications not 
 greater than those which in France, the most homoge- 
 neous country on the earth, distinguish the Basque race 
 from the Breton; proud of the noblest tradition in politics, 
 science, and art, that adorns European history \ having 
 twice given to Humanity a tie, a watchword of Unity — 
 once, in the Rome of the Emperors, again, ere they 
 had betrayed their mission, in the Rome of the Popes; 
 gifted with active, ready, and brilliant faculties, is not 
 denied even by our calumniators ; rich in every source 
 of material well-being that, fraternally and liberally
 
 72 
 
 worked, could make ourselves happy, and open to 
 sister nations the brightest prospect in the world. 
 
 We have no flag, no political name, no rank among 
 European nations. We have no common centre, no 
 common pact, no common market. We are dismembered 
 into eight states — Lombardy, Parma,Tuscany, Modena, 
 Lucca, the Popedom, Piedmont, the Kingdom of 
 Naples — all independent one of another, without alli- 
 ance, without unity of aim, without organized con- 
 nexion between them. Eight lines of custom-houses, 
 without counting the impediments appertaining to the 
 internal administration of each state, sever our mate- 
 rial interests, oppose our advancement, and forbid us 
 large manufactures, large commercial activity, and all 
 those encouragements to our capabilities that a centre 
 of impulse would afford. Prohibitions or enormous 
 duties check the import and export of articles of the 
 first necessity in each state of Italy. Territorial and 
 industrial products abound in one province that are 
 deficient in another ; and we may not freely sell the su- 
 perfluities or exchange among ourselves the neces- 
 sities. Eight different systems of currency, of weights 
 and measures, of civil, commercial, and penal legisla- 
 tion, of administrative organization, and of police re- 
 striction, divide us, and render us as much as possible 
 strangers to each other. And all these states among 
 which we are partitioned are ruled by despotic govern- 
 ments, in whose working the country has no agency 
 whatever. These exists not in any of these states, 
 either liberty of the press, or of united action, or of 
 speech, or of collective petition, or of the introduction 
 of foreign books, or of education, or of anything. One 
 of these states, comprising nearly a fourth of the Ita- 
 lian population, belongs to the foreigner — to Austria ;
 
 73 
 
 the others, some from family ties, some from a conscious 
 feebleness, tamely submit to her influence. 
 
 From this contrast between the actual condition and 
 the aspirations of the country was' produced the 
 National party ; to which, Sir, I have the honour to 
 belong. 
 
 The National party dates a long time back in Italy. 
 It dates from Rome — from that law of the Empire that 
 admitted every Italian to the righto of citizenship in 
 the capital of the known world. The work of assimi- 
 lation which then instinctively began, was interrupted 
 or rather complicated by a new task, by the inva- 
 sion of the Northern hordes. It was necessary to 
 assimilate to ourselves by degrees these foreign ele- 
 ments, before resuming the work of internal homoge- 
 neization. Two or three centuries sufficed for this 
 business of preparation; and when our Communes were 
 established, the work was resumed. The national 
 tendences, hitherto pursued unconsciously, took a con- 
 densed form and existence in the conception of our 
 great men of thought or action. From the Consul 
 Crescenzio to Julius the Second, or to our agitators 
 of the sixteenth century — from Dante to Machiavel — you 
 will not find one, Sir, who did not adore the oneness of 
 this nation, this ITALY that we adore, and for which 
 the sons of an Austrian admiral died last year. Then, 
 thanks to Charles the Fifth and Clement the Seventh, 
 thanks to the Pope and the Empire, slavery fell upon 
 us — a common slavery, that crumbled all our old hosti- 
 lities and bent our restive heads under one yoke. 
 When, after nearly three centuries of this common 
 infliction, the French Revolution burst on Europe, the 
 National party in Italy was found quite formed, and 
 ready to appear on the political arena. As if to af-
 
 74 
 
 ford a practical proof that we were ripe for union^ 
 Napoleon ran a line across Italy, placed Ancona and 
 Venice, Bologna and Milan, under the same govern- 
 ment, and founded the Kingdom of Italy. The essay 
 succeeded. The intellectual rise, the rapid increase 
 of material prosperity, the burst of fraternization, that 
 were manifested in all those very provinces that short- 
 sighted politicians, on the faith of a few popular 
 phrases and petty jealousies, would a few days before 
 have declared ready to cut each other's throats, are 
 facts, especially in the period from 1805 to 1813, irre- 
 vocably committed to history. Notwithstanding our 
 dependence on the French Empire, under political 
 despotism and despite war, the feeling of nationa- 
 lity, specially incorporated in our brave army, elevated 
 our souls, picturing in the distance the oneness of Italy, 
 the object of all our efforts. The strength of the National 
 party was so entirely recognized, that when the time 
 came for the fall of Napoleon, it was in the name of 
 this party that the European governments sought to 
 arouse us against the domination of France. As far 
 back as 1809, Austria spoke to us by his Imperial 
 Highness the Archduke John, of glory, of liberty, of 
 independence, and of a Constitution based on the 
 immutable nature of things *. Four years later, Ge- 
 neral Nugent promised us an independent Kingdom of 
 Italy f. And in the following year, your England, 
 Sir, proclaimed by the mouth of Bentinck the liberty 
 and independence of the Italian people % : you inscribed 
 these words ( Liberia e Indipendenza Italica ) on the 
 
 * Invito dell' Arciduca Giovanni al Popolo d' Italia. 1809. 
 f Proclamation of the 10th December 1813. 
 X Manifesto of the 14th March, as above.
 
 75 
 
 standards of the Legion, itself also called Italica, that 
 was organized in Sicily to be employed in Tuscany : 
 you everywhere disseminated by the officers of this 
 Legion copies of the Sicilian Constitution — of that 
 Constitution, by the by, which was given to Sicily 
 when that island ivas important as a military position *, 
 and was disgracefully abandoned, your purpose once 
 answered, in spite of promises in which the honour of 
 the country was involved f . 
 
 Napoleon fallen, all these promises were forgotten 
 and broken. The meaning they conveyed was more 
 permanent, and was confirmed, even diplomatically, 
 by the National party. The hopes of the army and the 
 National Guard were evidenced in addresses. A de- 
 putation of commerce had an interview at Genoa with 
 Lord William Bentinck. Active efforts were made 
 about Prince Metternich and the Emperor of Austria. 
 Interviews took place at Paris between the deputies of 
 the Kingdom of Italy and the English Plenipotentiaries', 
 the Earl of Aberdeen and Lord Castlereagh j>. We 
 then had faith in diplomacy, and specially in England. 
 All was unavailing. Your country, said the Emperor 
 Francis to the Italian deputies, is mine by right of 
 conquest. And three months after Lord Castlereagh's 
 assurances that the Austrian Government would be 
 altogether paternal, Italian officers and civilians of every 
 rank, in considerable numbers, and under pretext of 
 
 * Lord Castlereagh (Marquis of Londonderry ) in the House of 
 Commons, 21st June 1821. 
 
 t Lord William Bentinck — same debate. See also the noble 
 and generous sentiments uttered on that occasion by Sir James 
 Mackintosh. 
 
 X I print, appended to this pamphlet, a report of one of these 
 conferences— a valuable document, hitherto unpublished.
 
 76 
 
 a conspiracy against the Austrians — at a time when 
 they had not been declared masters by the Congress — 
 were arrested at Milan and elsewhere, and thrown into 
 military prisons, where all communication and every 
 means of defence were withheld. These arrests took 
 place at Milan almost regularly every Saturday night 
 from November 1 8 1 4 to the end of January 1815. 
 After several months of secret investigation, the pri- 
 soners were refused the choice of advocates, and their 
 counsel were nominated by the Austrians. Tried in 
 the citadel of Mantua by a sort of half civil, half mili- 
 tary, but wholly inquisitorial court, some were sen- 
 tenced to three years'imprisonment, others condemned 
 for life to the fortresses of Hungary. In Piedmont, 
 in the States of the Pope, in Sicily, throughout Italy, 
 one stroke of the pen erased all our liberties, all our 
 reforms, all our hopes. The old regime reappeared, 
 pernicious as before but surcharged with vengeance. 
 
 From the frauds of the Congress of Vienna 
 sprang the insurrections of 1820, 1821, and 1831. 
 
 The insurrection of 1820 (July) took place in the 
 Kingdom of Naples, embracing the whole of it. The 
 absolute government was everywhere overturned, with- 
 out resistance, without bloodshed. The King yielded 
 to the desire of the people and the army, and pro- 
 claimed on the 6th— for this was all done in six days — 
 constitutional forms, demanded, as expressed in his 
 edict, by the general will. 
 
 The insurrection of 1821 (March) had Piedmont 
 and Liguria for its theatre. Almost the entire nobi- 
 lity took part in this movement, the initiative being 
 with the army. The National party had even gained 
 over the Prince of Carignano, heir to the Crown. It 
 matters little that this Prince, unequal to his task,
 
 77 
 
 betrayed his party from fear, and now reigns an ab- 
 solute sovereign in Piedmont: his accession to the 
 combination does not the less prove how high the 
 National party had pushed their proselytism. This mo- 
 vement, commenced on the 10th, was complete on 
 the 13th, a bloodless victory. The King, Victor 
 Emanuel, bound by oaths to Austria, abdicated, ap- 
 pointing a Regent ; who, on the 14th, took the oath to 
 the constitutional system proclaimed. 
 
 The insurrection of 1831 (February) comprised in 
 its action the Duchy of Parma, the Duchy of Mo- 
 dena, and the States of the Pope. It travelled from 
 one city to another as it were by mail : the news of a 
 rising effected in one locality was sufficient to deter- 
 mine that next on the line. It had a double difficulty 
 to surmount — the Pope being an authority both 
 spiritual and temporal. However, the insurrection 
 triumphed without obstacle, without the least disorder. 
 The Pope beheld his temporal power abolished by 
 decree ; and never thought, so thoroughly conscious 
 was he of its impotence, of bringing into play his spi- 
 ritual authority. 
 
 But, since this protest of the National party 
 embraced successively all Italy not Austrian, how was 
 it stifled ? How, triumphant in almost every Italian 
 state one by one, were these insurrections put down ? 
 
 By Austria — by the immediate and unexpected 
 intervention of Austrian armies. 
 
 I share with many of my countrymen the opinion, 
 that by acting in a certain course and in a certain 
 mode, an Italian insurrection might successfully brave 
 Austrian intervention. I think that serious faults of 
 management were committed by our leaders ; and that 
 no one of them hitherto has been equal to those ele-
 
 78 
 
 merits of action that we possess. But this opinion, 
 right or wrong, has nothing to do with my present 
 argument, My present argument, which you, Sir, 
 cannot refute, based as it is on unassailable historical 
 facts, is simply this — That the National party in 
 Italy comprehends the immense majority of my fellow- 
 citizens ; that it has been, and would be now more than 
 ever, master at home, were it not for the immediate armed 
 intervention of a Foreign Power. 
 
 Sir, ours is the only country in Europe that is de- 
 prived, thanks to the Diplomacy you personally so 
 well represent, of the right of managing its own busi- 
 ness in its own way ; the only country in Europe that 
 cannot ask for a common life, a common bond, or even 
 a mere partial amelioration of its laws, without a 
 foreign army pouring into it, and contesting by brutal 
 force its right to progression ; the only country in 
 Europe in which an admitted unanimity of opinion 
 does not constitute acknowledged right. 
 
 Sir, I say that in this there is great injustice — a 
 great crime chargeable on European society ; and that 
 it is the duty of every Italian to protest by word and 
 deed, through life and through death, against this 
 great injustice. 
 
 So I have done ; so I shall do. You may open my 
 correspondence, or calumniate my life ; you may dis- 
 grace the land that grants me hospitality by reviving 
 the Alien-Bill : but I doubt strongly, Sir, whether you 
 will ever make me deviate one breadth from the course 
 which my duties as a man and an Italian long since 
 marked out, whose consciousness accompanies me 
 wherever I go, and which will be in no wise affected 
 by the degree of latitude and longitude under which 1 
 may find myself.
 
 79 
 
 There are men who love us and confess the injustice 
 of our present condition, but believe not in the possi- 
 bility of immediate remedy, that say to us — " Waste 
 not your strength in vain efforts : outflank the difficulty 
 that you cannot surmount. Try legal methods. Pre- 
 pare your ground before you pretend to build on it. 
 You have abundance of prejudices, of superstitions, 
 and of ignorance, to be knocked down in another 
 fashion than by cannon-balls; bringy ourselves to combat 
 some time longer through the means of ideas : you 
 will be the stronger for the march when, dictated by 
 the circumstances of Europe, your country's time 
 shall come. Better your condition by degrees ; pro- 
 gress morally and intellectually, since politically you 
 cannot. It will be long yet ere you will have liberty ; 
 but peace is in your power — peace the best of a 
 people's benefits. In now obstinately persisting in a 
 system of revolt and physical force, you sacrifice the 
 worthiest among you, and you degrade your cause in 
 seeking to attain a noble end by means that are 
 incontestably beneath it. " 
 
 I have not understated, I hope, these objections ; 
 and I entreat my readers to well weigh the reply. 
 
 In all this, one especial and great error is predomi- 
 nant; for it supposes that every disturbance or outbreak 
 that shows a head in Italy, is the result of an orga- 
 nized effort, of a fixed plan, unflinchingly carried out 
 by concealed and secret means, and under the direc- 
 tion of certain individuals acknowledged as chiefs. Un- 
 questionably, Sir, it is very natural that you, for your 
 own purposes and those of the foreign absolute go- 
 vernments you love so much, should desire to gain 
 credit for this error : but it would be strange if, with 
 the practical common sense that distinguishes your
 
 80 
 
 countrymen, they should long suffer it to mislead 
 them. There is no centre in Italy — would to God 
 there were one — for aught that agitates, conspires, 
 or is insurrectionary. General discontent there is : 
 and from this discontent, met by our governments 
 with violent reaction whenever their suspicions are at- 
 tracted to its extent, naturally arise those manifesta- 
 tions that from time to time arrest the attention of 
 Europe. Without doubt, associations do exist in the 
 bosom of the country ; but the vastest and most dange- 
 rous association is that — without union, without organi- 
 zation, without oaths — of all men of soul, conscious of 
 the evil, and earnestly desiring to see its end. These 
 men know each other, divine each other, in every 
 city, in every province : they fall into communication 
 when some event, abroad or at home, cheers their 
 hopes ; then, terror and espionage magnify these com- 
 munications to the eyes of their masters ; arrests are 
 rife — extraordinary measures of safety are put in 
 force ; till the hot-headed and those most in danger 
 spring into the arena, sometimes to set action an 
 example, sometimes in an energetic endeavour to find 
 safety. Without doubt, certain men exercise an in- 
 fluence in the ranks of the National party ; but rather 
 a moral influence than a substantive power — an in- 
 fluence imprinting a tendence and giving a colour to 
 manifestations that it neither organized nor suggested. 
 Since 1832, this has principally been the part of La 
 Criovine Italia. Young Italy is a standard. By oral 
 instruction and the press it has enunciated and dif- 
 fused principles, that have sunk into the heart of men 
 of action. It has done what I am in part doing at 
 this moment — pleaded the cause of the Italian Na- 
 tion, and sought, with some degree of success, to
 
 81 
 
 unify its tendencies. So that its seal has been 
 impressed as it were on many events that have 
 occurred in Italy, though the events themselves, I 
 reassert, arose spontaneously, unforeseen, and almost 
 instantly, from the state of things, from the measures 
 of Government, from feelings natural to a people 
 oppressed, with no chance of alleviation for their suf- 
 ferings save by the path of insurrection. 
 
 You may preach then as much as you like to those 
 individuals on whom you have fixed the appellation of 
 chiefs, but you will put no stop to Italian agitation. 
 Never — not even with the concurrence of those 
 chiefs if you could obtain it — will you succeed in re- 
 establishing in Italy what you are pleased to call peace, 
 as long as things remain as they are. 
 
 In a preceding page I referred to the three insur- 
 rections of 1820, 1821, and 1831. Those are the 
 three most striking facts of the struggle. But, 1 ask, 
 has it for an instant ceased between and since these 
 dates ? Has there been, I may inquire, a single year 
 since 1820 that has not furnished us its contingent of 
 resistance, of conspiracy, of outbreak, of terror, and 
 of victims ? In 1825, four years after the prosecu- 
 tions of 1821 appeared to have annihilated the party, 
 the condition of Romagna drew down the proscrip- 
 tions of Cardinal Rivarola. In 1827, political prose- 
 cutions recommenced at Naples and in Calabria. In 
 1828, the insurrection organized in the province of 
 Salerno by the Canon De-Luca was whelmed in blood : 
 three patriots were executed at Naples, eleven at 
 Salerno, twenty at Bosco ; fifty-two were condemned 
 to the galleys for life, and a crowd of others to minor 
 punishments. In 1833, only two years after the in- 
 surrection of 1 83 1 , Italy seemed trembling on a volcano 
 
 F
 
 82 
 
 from one extremity to the other. Three different 
 plots were discovered at Naples ; the Cavaliere Ricci, 
 of the Duke's body-guard, perished on the scaffold at 
 Modena ; thirteen individuals were shot at Palermo ; 
 thirteen, officers and others, in the Sardinian States; 
 condemnations to Spielberg took place at Milan ; a 
 number of citizens in various parts, even in Tuscany, 
 underwent a long imprisonment, or were driven to 
 seek safety in flight. Twenty-nine death-sentences 
 at Modena, eight at Penne in the Abruzzi, eight at 
 Catania, twelve in different parts of Sicily, mark the 
 year 1837. I am here, of course, speaking of political 
 sentences only. Prices were set on a hundred and 
 fifty heads in Sicily in that year, but for crimes com- 
 mitted on occasion of the cholera. Three years scarcely 
 pass, ere, in 1841, the city of Aquila witnessed five 
 condemnations to the ergastolo, forty-one to irons for 
 twenty-five or thirty years, and nine to death. The 
 guerilla of the brothers Muratori appeared in the Bo- 
 lognese district in 1843. It will be unnecessary, I 
 expect, Sir, to recall to your memory Bologna and 
 Cosenza in 1844. 
 
 Such is the peace of Italy. And observe, Sir, I 
 speak solely of those years when a commencement of 
 active operations, or the dread of an imminent activity, 
 impelled our governments to sanguinary reaction : if I 
 were speaking of imprisonment and exile, I should 
 have to count not by years but by months. 
 
 Can men be in earnest, then, in the face of these 
 dates, when they persist in talking of faction, of Com- 
 mittees, of a few persons residing in London, in Paris, 
 or elsewhere, as an explanation for such a state of 
 things ? Is there a single impartial Englishman who 
 cannot see in this agitation, in this feverish disturbance
 
 83 
 
 exhibited year by year at twenty different points, an 
 incontrovertible proof that there exists in Italy a great 
 Injustice to destroy, that the Italians know it, and that 
 peace is no longer possible between those who maintain 
 that Injustice and those who abjure it ? 
 
 I mentioned above the persecutions carried on in 
 Romagna, in 1825, by Cardinal Rivarola. I would I 
 could reprint the sentence that concluded them, for the 
 benefit of all persons who may still be disposed, Sir, 
 to put their faith in your statements *. It was issued 
 on the 3 1st of August, against Jive hundred and eight 
 persons ; and these 508 individuals, — nobles, land- 
 owners, military men, and commercial men —belonged 
 almost all to four cities, Ravenna, Cesena, Faenza and 
 Forli. Moreover, this is not the only Italian monster- 
 trial : the Rubiera trials, (Duchy of Modena, 1 822,) 
 collected and published by Signore A. Panizzi, of the 
 British Museum, literally did not leave a single family 
 in Modena untouched. And now take a fact of a 
 different order. In 1831, at Parma, the state being 
 in the hands of the insurgents, a Major Rota made an 
 effort at counter-revolution. In the midst of the 
 tumult, and in presence of some thousands of specta- 
 tors, a Doctor Fochi rushed on the Major with a po- 
 niard : he was with some difficulty held back, and the 
 life of the officer was saved. After the insurgents 
 were put down, Fochi was arrested and put on his 
 trial : but not a single witness could be brought to 
 support the charge, and they were compelled to acquit 
 him. In juxtaposition with those lists so eloquent in 
 figures — in juxtaposition with the sentences of 1821, 
 
 * Published at Ravenna, by A. Rovc-ri and son, 1825, (with 
 privilege). 
 
 F 2
 
 84 
 
 affecting the most aristocratic families in Lombardy 
 and Piedmont — place facts like the one I have just 
 related, facts which I could multiply to any extent, 
 and then talk, if you can, of Committees and a petty 
 fraction of agitators. 
 
 Those persons, therefore, who tell us, individuals 
 exiled for the cause of our country, to think of the 
 benefits of peace and to abstain from all participation 
 in the struggle, advise us, unwittingly, to withhold 
 assistance from a combat which no human power can 
 now prevent : they advise us to leave our young men 
 to their headstrong and fervid impulses, in place of 
 seeking to systematize their efforts ; they advise us to 
 give carte blanche to our governments, and to permit 
 victims annually to be told off, in place of seeing 
 whether there be not some way of putting a finish, 
 by a vigorous union of all our strength, to this fright- 
 ful state of things ; they advise us to look coolly on at 
 the convulsions of those we love dearest, and to hold 
 at the sufferer's bedside a Parliamentary conversation 
 on the advantages of a normal state of health and the 
 ill consequences of fever. 
 
 Yet, if another path could lead towards the goal — if 
 efforts conceived in a pacific spirit could advance our 
 country towards the conquest of its nationality — the 
 existence of that path, how narrow soever, how pain- 
 ful soever the progress, might make it a duty in the 
 individual to bury within him that sentiment of con- 
 solidation that now impels us to the arena on which 
 our brothers are doing battle, and to talk of the sub- 
 ject with calmness and resignation. But where is this 
 path to be found ? I ask in vain an answer to this 
 question. I cannot bring myself to imagine that you 
 expect a man to walk who is tied hand and foot, with-
 
 85 
 
 out first severing the cords that bind him. 
 
 When you Englismen have a reasonable object to 
 attain, you have the great highway of public opinion 
 open to your steps : why should you digress into the 
 by-lanes of conspiracy or into the dangerous morass 
 of insurrection ? You put your trust in the all-pow r er- 
 fulness of Truth, and you do well: but you can pro- 
 pagate this truth by the press — you can preach it 
 morning and evening in your journals, — you can 
 insist upon it in lectures — you can popularize it in 
 meetings ; in a little while, it stands menacingly on 
 the hustings, whence you send it to your Parliament, 
 seated in the majority. We Italians have neither 
 Parliament, nor hustings, nor liberty of the press, nor 
 liberty of speech, nor possibility of lawful public as- 
 semblage, nor a single means of expressing the opinion 
 stirring within us. 
 
 Italy is a vast prison, guarded by a certain number 
 of gaolers and gendarmes, supported in case of need 
 by the bayonets of men whom we don't understand and 
 who don't understand us. If we speak, they thrust a 
 gag on our mouths ; if we make a show of action, they 
 platoon us. A petition, signed collectively, consti* 
 tutes a crime against the State. Nothing is left us 
 but the endeavour to agree in secret to wrench the 
 bars from the doors and windows of our prison — to 
 knock down gates and gaolers, that we may breathe the 
 fresh life-giving air of liberty, the air of God. Then, a 
 career by pacific means of progress will be open to us ; 
 then will begin our guilt and condemnation if we can- 
 not bring ourselves to be content with it. 
 
 I am no partisan of that Jesuitical maxim, the end jus* 
 tifies the ?n<?a?ts;butImustconfess, it seems to me equally 
 absurd, equally unjust, to exalt into an axiom the opinion
 
 86 
 
 that on all occasions and at all times censures the appli- 
 cation of physical force. It appears to me more rational 
 to say — Whenever a way remains open to you in a just 
 cause for the employment of moral force, never have 
 recourse to violence ; but when every moral force is 
 seared up — when tyranny stretches so far as formally 
 to deny you the right of expressing in any manner 
 soever what you conceive to be the truth, — when ideas 
 are put down by bayonets, — then, reckon with your- 
 self: if, though convinced justice is on your side, you 
 are still in a weak minority, fold your arms and bear 
 witness to your faith in prison or on the scaffold — you 
 have no right to imbrue your country in a hopeless 
 civil war : but if you form the majority, if your feeling 
 prove to be the feeling of millions, rouse yourselves, 
 and beat down the oppression by force. Cowardly to 
 bow the head before brutal violence upholding injustice, 
 when the arms that God has given you suffice for its 
 overthrow, is to degrade yourself to the passive con- 
 dition of the animal — to betray the sacred cause of 
 Truth and of God — to enthrone tyranny for ever, 
 under the pretext of abhorring physical force. It is 
 not the country that honours the memory of Hamp- 
 den, ofPym, of Vane, and of other great republicans, 
 that can successfully adduce against us a theory of 
 Oriental submission. 
 
 When you tell us, Sir, that our publications incite to 
 insurrection, I reply — Yes ; that may be true : but at 
 home we have neither liberty of press or liberty of 
 speech. When you tell us that our secret associations 
 are illegal, I answer, that the right of association for 
 good is legal, and that the exercise of this right be- 
 comes illegal from secrecy only where public associa- 
 tion is permitted. When the Christians were pro-
 
 87 
 
 scribed, they had their meetings in the Catacombs — 
 solely for prayers ? No : 'twas to consult together on 
 the means of promulgating the word of Jesus, and of 
 gaining proselytes in the ranks of the enemy, even 
 among the centurions and dependants of the Pagan 
 official world. You cannot in conscience apply the 
 principles of your normal state to our peculiar condi- 
 tion. You cannot censure or repudiate our means of 
 action, the only ones left us, without declaring by 
 implication that despotism is a good thing, that the 
 liberty of which England boasts is an evil. 
 
 In 1818, a knot of men influential from their social 
 position or their intellectual faculties — Count Frede- 
 rick Confalonieri, Count Porro, Count Pecchio, the 
 Marquis de Breme, Pellico, Borsieri, Romagnosi, and 
 others, determined on trying if there were in Lom- 
 bardy a means of peaceful realization for the cause of 
 Italian progress. They established a literary journal, 
 the Conciliatore, whose aim was, with all the modera- 
 tion that could make it acceptable to the Censorship, 
 to advocate ameliorating tendencies, material impro- 
 vements, with liberal, large, and unprejudiced views in 
 literature and education. They made an effort to 
 practise what they taught : they founded schools ; 
 they placed themselves at the head of some industrial 
 undertakings. In 1819 this journal was suppressed, 
 and its founders enrolled in the Austrian black-book *. 
 
 * The suppression of periodicals entirely literary, whose every 
 line undergoes the supervision of Censors ecclesiastical and political, 
 would appear a fact inexplicable ; hut it has often occurred in Italy. 
 The " Indicatore " of Genoa, the " Indicatore " of Leghorn, the 
 " Antolosria " of Florence, all in turn suffered this fate. Other 
 literary miscellanies, such as the " Suhalpino " of Turin, were com* 
 pelled to insert from time to time, as if from the editor, a political 
 article furnished by the Government.
 
 88 
 
 In 1822, they were almost all at Spielberg. They 
 were compromised, you will say, in the conspiracy of 
 1821. Possibly : but do you think these men would 
 have become conspirators, if they could have been 
 aught else — if every avenue of peaceful and gradual 
 progression had not been closed against them ? 
 
 In 1833, when the insurgents in the Papal States 
 had succumbed to Austrian intervention, the provinces 
 of Romagna and Bologna — encouraged by the Memo- 
 randum which the five Powers had addressed to the 
 Pope on the 2 1st May, pointing out to him the neces- 
 sity of reform — resolved on essaying whether it were 
 possible to obtain a few administrative ameliorations 
 by legal routes, by a peaceful expression of their 
 requirements. On evacuating the States, Austria had 
 handed over the Marches of Pesaro and Ancona to 
 the Papal troops ; and Romagna and Bologna to the Na- 
 tional Guard, on whom the Pope had himself imposed 
 the maintenance of public order. That portion of this 
 Guard representing the city and province of Bologna, 
 numbering more than sixty thousand, through the 
 hands of their General-in-chief Giuseppe Patuzzi, 
 addressed to the Cardinal-Secretary of State Bernetti a 
 petition raisonnee, setting forth their grievances and 
 indicating the remedies. Anothei petition, more or less 
 to the same purpose, was presented on the part of the 
 Magistrates and the Municipal Corps of Perugia ; 
 another by the Provincial Council of Ravenna, com- 
 posed of men known for their devotion to the Go- 
 vernment, with a Pro-Legate for President ; another 
 from the city of Forli, bearing thousands of signatures, 
 and among them those of the Municipal Corps and the 
 Bishop's Vicar ; more followed from different districts, 
 town and country. The Judges and advocates of
 
 89 
 
 Bologna subscribed a separate petition confined to 
 judicial matters, addressed to the Pro-Legate Count 
 Grassi. Finally, a deputation, chosen by the heads of 
 the provincial magistracies, assembled at Bologna on 
 the 25th January 1832, to press on the Pro-Legates 
 the prayers of these petitions. In conformity with 
 the Memorandum of the Five Powers, they prayed the 
 admission of laymen into all the offices of Government, 
 the participation of the people in the election of the 
 Councils, and the establishment of a central Junta, to 
 watch over the higher branches of administration. The 
 Secretary of State replied, that no deputation would 
 be attended to ; the petitions received no answer ; the 
 dissolution of the civic guards was announced. With 
 the aid of a loan facilitated by Austria, the Government 
 formed a corps of five thousand men, principally raised 
 from the prisons of Civita Castellana, San Leo, and 
 Sant' Angelo. They poured into the Romagna, where 
 the aged, women, and unresisting men were horribly 
 massacred. And when, exasperated at these cruelties, 
 the younger population of certain cities flew to arms, 
 for the second time Austria intervened, in July 1832. 
 In 1834, shortly after the wholesale slaughters at 
 Genoa, Alexandria, and Chambery, efforts on the path 
 of popular education, similar to those in Lombardy of 
 1818, were made in Piedmont. Some praiseworthy 
 young men advocated the necessity of gradually en- 
 lightening the children of the poor ; they entreated 
 means for this end ; they received subscriptions, and 
 proposed gratuitous schools. Such was the list of 
 promoters appended, that it was impossible openly to 
 discountenance the project without exciting a dangerous 
 spirit of discontent. The Government assented, but, 
 to have its own share in the undertaking, handed over
 
 90 
 
 the direction of the schools to the Jesuits, or to 
 religious associations formed under their auspices. 
 Two years of effort and sacrifice on the side of the 
 National Party resulted in the surrender of some 
 hundreds of young souls to the enervating, mind- 
 strangling corruption of Jesuitism. 
 
 I ask then of every true Englisman — After these 
 facts, after this experience, can we entertain hopes of 
 our future through means peaceful and legal ? 
 
 I put to every true Englishman this simple question 
 ■ — Imagine eighty thousand French soldiers stationed 
 in Ireland or Scotland ; imagine that, whenever the 
 people in that portion of the English territory remain- 
 ing free called for improvement, advancement, or 
 change in their internal laws, the eighty thousand 
 foreigners should intrude the points of their bayonets, 
 and say, " In the name of brute force, stir not;" 
 what would you do ? 
 
 What you would do, we have made up our minds 
 to do : and we are trying to understand each other, so 
 as to be able to do it. 
 
 That sums up the Italian question : in that consists 
 what to-day you brand with the name of conspiracy-— 
 what you would hail to-morrow, should we triumph, 
 with the title of glorious victory. 
 
 But further — for I aim at exhausting all concei- 
 vable objections — if we had on one side governments 
 despotic, but humane, frank, and moderate in the 
 exercise of absolute power ; on the other, masses de- 
 graded, barbarous, cruel, parching for vengeance 
 and sanguinary reaction ; would it possibly be our duty 
 still to reflect on the route we are pursuing, still to 
 balance present evils against the dangers of destroying 
 them — to ask ourselves, "Have you the right to inundate
 
 91 
 
 your country with kindred blood, in the hope that blood 
 will moisten the tree of your liberty ? 
 
 I said jjossibly : for, in truth, -I know not if there be 
 an evil graver than despotism ; I know not but that 
 life even by gasps is to be preferred to death ; and I 
 confess, that whenever my thoughts turn to the in- 
 violability of the human soul rather than to its ter- 
 restrial envelope, on the mission of incessant labour 
 assigned us rather than on the theory of material 
 wellbeing invented by a depraved world, I feel myself 
 compelled mentally to reiterate, " Malo periculosam 
 libertatem quam tutum servitium. " 
 
 But most happily, we have not the slightest ground 
 for the doubt. The unanimity of opinion amongst us 
 puts an end to those internal dangers that might cause 
 timid and scrupulous spirits to hesitate. 
 
 We admit that serious individual acts have from 
 time to time occurred in Italy, particularly in Ro- 
 magna, where anarclry and arbitrariness render the sub- 
 ordinates of the government principle more than else- 
 where personally responsible. Commissaries of Police 
 discharging their odious mission with refinements in 
 cruelty have sometimes fallen under the poniard : 
 incendiary spies insinuating themselves into the ranks 
 of Liberal associations to throw their members to the 
 vengeance of the executive, have sometimes been 
 stopped in the midst of their infernal work by the 
 vengeance of the men they were betraying. But when- 
 ever the National party appeared openly in the arena, 
 not a single excess, not a thought of reaction against 
 the inflicters of so much suffering, sullied its standard. 
 
 I have already said : Thrice have we been triumphant; 
 thrice have we had the power in our own hands: did we 
 abuse it ? was there a single drop of blood spilt ? — a
 
 92 
 
 single persecution begun against the men of the de- 
 posed Government ? I appeal to our enemies : was 
 there a single person in 1820, 1821, or 1831, who 
 conceived a necessity for expatriating or concealing 
 himself? 
 
 Such, thank God, has hitherto been our mode of 
 carrying on the war : such it will continue to be, I 
 hope, whatever may be our sufferings in the interval 
 yet interposing between us and victory. 
 
 I would, for the honour of my country and of the 
 human race, that I could say as much for the Powers 
 we combat with ; for, whatever might be their mode- 
 ration in the incidents of the struggle, our right to 
 their overthrow would not be diminished. But the 
 page of their history that remains to be exposed is the 
 gloomiest, the most disgusting I know in the annals of 
 contemporary Europe. I am not one of those who 
 claim a kind of impunity for our party, and who cry 
 out : " Assassination ! " as each of the vanquished is 
 led to the scaffold. I firmly believe in the immorality 
 of the punishment of death ; and it seems to assume a 
 colour yet more degrading to our age, when visited on 
 political offences ; but I cannot look for the initiative 
 in this great reform from governments like ours, 
 placed in extreme danger. There is war between 
 them and us ; and I am willing that every sad necessity 
 arising thence should be borne calmly and without 
 exaggerated reaction. But I say, that in Italy they are 
 waging a war of barbarians, and not of civilized Euro- 
 peans ; I say that the way in which political prosecu- 
 tions are conducted among us would suffice, if there 
 remained a spark of humanity in the breasts of nations, 
 to impress on Europe that a supremacy daring to make 
 use of such processes must necessarily be founded on 
 a vast injustice.
 
 91 
 
 I recounted further back a few facts that were enough 
 to indicate, I thought, the style in which they managed 
 political prosecutions in that part of Italy subjected to 
 Austria. The three I am about to add will give the 
 measure of the injustice, the rage, and the iniquity, 
 that influence the spirit of our Austrian rulers towards 
 the National party. 
 
 In 1821, Count Frederic Confalonieri was con- 
 demned to death ; which sentence, as an act of high 
 clemency, was commuted into the carcere duro for life. 
 The only thing proved against him was a letter written 
 to the General-Minister of War Santa Rosa, at the 
 period of the Piedmontese insurrection, and when the 
 revolutionary troops, encamped on the Ticino, were 
 preparing to pour into the plains of Lombardy. Here 
 is the letter : 
 
 " General — If I ever possessed any influence with 
 you, let this be the occasion for evincing it. I plead 
 our old friendship — I plead the good opinion you 
 formerly honoured me with, to beg of you not to pass 
 the Ticino. Lombardy is not prepared to receive you. 
 Your advance would only compromise those who 
 should declare for you, who would have no force to 
 support you. Spare this province the evils of a con- 
 test in which you could not be victorious. " 
 
 This letter, written to a revolutionary General, was 
 held to be a crime against the State *. 
 
 Ciro Menotti, a young and rich banker of Modena, 
 was at the head of those who in 1831 organized an 
 insurrectionary movement in that city. Attached in 
 his palazzo before the hour fixed on for the outburst, 
 
 * After fourteen or fifteen years residence at Spielberg, Confalo- 
 nieri was amnestied.
 
 94 
 
 after a contest heroically sustained for a whole night by 
 thirty young men who happened to be with him, he fell 
 wounded into the hands of the Duke. Shortly after, 
 when the insurgents were successful, the Duke took to 
 flight, and carried with him his prisoner, bound, into the 
 Austrian territory ; into the territory thus spoken of in 
 an Imperial and Royal order of the l4th September 
 1826 — " Every slave is free from the moment he sets 
 foot on Austrian territory or even on board an Austrian 
 vessel. " Menotti was thrown into a prison at 
 Mantua. A deputation from Modena made ineffectual 
 claims for his liberty. The new state of things having 
 been subverted by an Austrian army, the Duke re- 
 conveyed his prisonner to Modena, and there hanged 
 him on the 26th August. It may be that, as an 
 Italian, I exaggerate the importance of this fact ; but I 
 know, if I were an Englishman, I should feel my cheeks 
 redden at the mere thought that the correspondance of 
 an Italian patriot has been covertly violated for a period 
 of five months, by a Secretary of State for England, to 
 gratify the Ambassador of a government on whose ter- 
 ritory a foreign Prince was allowed to drag after him 
 one of his subjects in fetters, and to deposit him in 
 prison as a reserve for the scaffold. 
 
 Some months afterwards, the Austrian Executive 
 gave the following answer to a petition from Celeste 
 Menotti # , the victim's brother. Celeste had been 
 himself captured at sea with other patriots on board 
 the Isotta, the vessel before mentioned; and the 
 petition claimed his liberty, for, though a Modenese 
 subject, he was then in an Austrian prison at Venice. 
 The answer is, in my opinion, a chef d'ceuvre of 
 immorality. 
 
 * Now living at Paris.
 
 95 
 
 " His Imperial and Royal Majesty, far from wishing 
 to pronounce judgement against Celeste Menotti, re- 
 cognizes an obligation towards his Royal Highness the 
 Duke of Modena to give up the subject of that 
 Sovereign to the competent authorities. But the 
 petitioner being in custody of the Imperial and Royal 
 authority of Austria, and his Majesty being desirous 
 to afford him an opportunity of serving the cause of 
 public tranquillity, it his is Sovereign pleasure that 
 the petitioner should be prevailed on to declare all that 
 he knows of political events and revolutionary plots, 
 and particularly of the origin and carrying out of the 
 late revolution in Italy, and other objects relating 
 thereto ; his Majesty deciding on his treatment accord- 
 ing to the conduct the petitioner may adopt in this 
 affair. Consequently, if the revelations of the detenu are 
 recognized as true, his Majesty is disposed to hold out 
 to him the promise not to hand him over to the Mode- 
 nese Government, and moreover, to set him at liberty, 
 if he merits it ; adding, that in case his declarations 
 should be of such a nature as to be considered im- 
 portant, the petitioner would acquire a peculiar claim 
 on his Majesty's consideration. " 
 
 I need not say, that the invitation to turn traitor met 
 with the contempt it deserved. 
 
 I think I have said enough of Austria : her Italian 
 Viceroys, however, have found a way of surpassing her. 
 
 In this respect, the Duke of Modena has achieved 
 a European and well-earned reputation. I readily 
 refer those of my readers conversant with Italian and 
 who are able to procure the work, to a little book 
 which I have already quoted — a precious book, now 
 too scarce, containing the history of the proceeding 
 instituted at Rubiera against those accused of belonging
 
 96 
 
 to secret societies. But contemporaneously with these 
 proceedings — conducted by a Commission of State, 
 (Stataria) in consequence of a law promulgated in 
 1821 # ; which, notwithstanding the principle denying 
 
 law any retrospective effect, was applied to such as 
 were already detained in the prisons of Rubiera — 
 the proceedings on the assassination of Besini 
 sum up marvellously the theories of justice 
 presiding in that province of Italy. Giulio Besini, 
 a ci-devant Carbonaro, but then a Director of 
 Police discharging his functions with the full persecut- 
 ing energy of an apostate, was poniarded in the street 
 on the evening of the 15th May 1822. Arrests took 
 place on the same night ; a Commission of State was 
 appointed by the Duke ; and, as if hinting, you must 
 find me the guiltij among those prisoners, a decree, (pub- 
 lished afterwards, at the close of the sentence, but with 
 this date, ) was signed, fixing the place where those 
 capital punishments should be carried into effect 
 which would be awarded by the Commissioners to the 
 authors of the crime. Gioachino Zanoli and Pietro 
 Zoccoli were among those chiefly inculpated. After 
 two months and a half of investigation, the Commis- 
 sion, composed of the Advocate-President Alessan- 
 drini, the Judges Zerbini and Martinelli, the Advocate 
 Fiscal Angiolini, and the Chancellor Cremonini, 
 acquitted them both. They were, however, retained 
 
 * This law took out of the ordinary jurisdiction and submit to 
 the power of Commissioners of State, appointed by the Sovereign 
 " ad hoc, " incendiaries, those accused of plotting against the 
 Government, and all persons suspected of enrolling themselves in 
 secret societies. The prisons of Rubiera were already overgorged 
 with prisoners whose arrest and connexion with the societies had 
 preceded this law ; to which however they were made amenable.
 
 97 
 
 in prison, at the disposal of the Police, till the middle 
 — will it be believed ? — of 1827. For a year and a 
 half, Zanoli was confined successively in two wretched 
 prisons called La Mantovana and U Orba : from thence 
 he was transferred to the Camerone, a prison with bare 
 apertures for windows The air, the cold, and the 
 damp lodged in his joints, and he pined in sickness 
 isolated and unattended for more than eighteen months. 
 At length the surgeon of the prison, Giovanni Gan- 
 zerli, made a report to the Government, declaring that 
 he could no longer answer for the life of his prisoner 
 iftheydidnot remove him to another prison: the 
 reply was, they did not know where to put him. The 
 surgeon was soon afterwards dismissed. Zoccoli, 
 shut up in solitary confinement, sometimes in La Man- 
 tovana, sometimes in a prison known as La Carbonara, 
 received so much ill-treatment, that in despair, he 
 resolved to die of starvation; but his keepers pre- 
 vents! him, by placing an instrument in his mouth to 
 hold it open, and then administering nourishment. On 
 the 1 5th July 1^26, anew Commission of State was 
 appointed, and a fresh investigation commenced. The 
 examinations, almost entirely by night, began in Sep- 
 tember, and concluckd in April 1827 by a dec- 
 ordering the restoration of the accused to liberty. This 
 was at length carried into effect; but accompanied ;i< 
 to Zoccoli, pursuant to decision of the Supr 
 Council of Justice, by the surveillance of the Police. 
 With the two 1 have been, speaking of, there w T as 
 arrested, on the night of Besini's death, another 
 Modenese, named Gaetano Ponzoni. When pressed 
 in his death-bed, Besini had said that if any individual 
 could be suspected, it was Ponzoni ; whom four months 
 before, he had caused to be deprived of an office under 
 
 G
 
 98 
 
 the Congregation of Charity. The Marquis Coccapani, 
 a creature of the Duke and Governor of Modena, or- 
 dered the Cancelliere Solmi, who was receiving the 
 deposition of the dying man, to suppress all that was 
 mere suspicion, and to write that Besini had indicated 
 Ponzoni as the murderer. Solmi refused ; and the day 
 after he was dismissed. Arraigned before the State 
 Commission, no conviction could be procured against 
 the accused. One of the Judges, Zerbini, gave 
 judgment for death ; another, Alessandrini, the galleys 
 for life ; the third, Martinelli, an acquittal: this last, 
 also, was soon after dismissed. Ponzoni remained in 
 prison, at the disposal of the Government, till 1826. 
 Then brought before another Commission, he was 
 condemned to imprisonment for life — an imprison- 
 ment aggravated with every severity by the Government 
 officers : in 1829, he was transferred to a prison at 
 the back of which were cells full of mephitic exhala- 
 tions, tenanted by those condemned for crimes on the 
 highway ; and the only aperture for light was boarded 
 up. In 1831, the insurrection restored him to liberty. 
 
 Sentences were given, besides, against some forty 
 individuals — nine for death, the rest for various 
 terms of imprisonment. Of the nine condemned to 
 death, eight, fortunately, made their escape : one alone 
 suffered — Giuseppe Andreoli, an ecclesiastic, who 
 ascended the scaffold with the calmness and resignation 
 of a saint, thanking Heaven aloud that he was the only 
 one to die. 
 
 Now, listen ! Zuccoli, Zanoli, Ponzoni, — all the 
 men martyred during these long years, were complete- 
 ly innocent : they did not even know the murderer of 
 Besini. A young student it was, who, revolting at the 
 cruelties exercised by a man that had once belonged to
 
 99 
 
 the National party, took upon himself, without sug- 
 gestion, without accomplice, to strike the blow. This 
 person, living to this day, had left Italy. During the 
 trial of Ponzoni, he sent from London to the Mode- 
 nese authorities a declaration, backed by proofs, and 
 legally authenticated according to English forms. But 
 the Duke, irritated that the guilty individual wasoutofhis 
 power, determined at least to make the responsbility 
 of the act fall on the whole party. The Judges, se- 
 lected by him, knew this : they knew, were it only by 
 the dismissals I have recorded, that they had been ap- 
 pointed to condemn. Had not the Duke their master 
 chosen the place of execution on the very night of 
 the murder ? Had he not replied to an observation 
 that Ponzoni was evidently innocent : — " Well ! Let 
 him bide in prison till the real culprit be found. " — 
 
 I have spoken of the cruelties of Besini. I will only 
 mention one — practised by others beside, belonging 
 in short to the system, but carried to an extreme 
 under his administration. I mean, the infusion of 
 belladonna ( atropos belladonna ) into the aliment 
 destined for certain detenus, so as to wrest from them 
 revelations by weakening the nervous system. I will 
 name as among those to whom this potion was admi- 
 nistered — Giovanni Manzotti, Secretary of the com- 
 mune of St. Tlario, the advocate Antonio Rampari of 
 Montecchio, Doctor J. B. Cavandoli, of Canossa, Ex- 
 Cancelliere of the Archives at Brescello, and the Jew 
 Latis of Modena. The dread among the~detenus was 
 such that the Cassiere Toschi starved himself to 
 death in prison. 
 
 I referred above to the execution of Menotti. An- 
 other perished with him on the scaffold — one Bore Hi, 
 a notary. He had never meddled with any plots ; he
 
 100 
 
 had never belonged actively to the national party : but 
 he had been called on in his quality of notary, by the 
 Provisional Government of 1831, who would have sent 
 a file of gendarmes for him if he had refused, to certify 
 the signatures of those individuals who drew up the act 
 announcing the Duke's deposition. 
 
 Equally, nay more innocent, as the sequel has proved, 
 was the Cavaliere Ricci, executed in 1831 for conspiring 
 against the life of the Duke : innocent or guilty, the 
 proceedings were conducted after an infamous fashion, 
 tit parallel for those following the murder of Besini. 
 The accused were seven in number. A Military Com- 
 mission was appointed for their trial composed of eight 
 persons, among whom was a sergeant, a corporal, a 
 sub-corporal, and a private. Now, to those who know T 
 the authority over subalterns which the State permits 
 to the superior officer, who can murder them under 
 the baton with impunity for the slightest transgression, 
 it is clear that the President of the Commission, 
 master of five votes including his own, had in his hands 
 the fate of the destined victim. The Commission was 
 appointed on the 5th July ; and judgment w r as given 
 on the 1 1 th — six days sufficing for a necessarily 
 complicated process embracing seven persons. Doctor 
 Carlo Bonazzi was added to the Commission as Judge 
 Assessor and Fiscal — that is, judge and accuser at the 
 same time. Counsel for the defendants were nomi- 
 nated ex-cfficio ; a mode, by the by, which was also 
 adopted in the Rubiera proceedings, in which the more 
 than fifty parties implicated were deprived of free 
 choice of counsel. The Commission never confronted 
 the accused with their accusers, never examined them, 
 never saw them : they came to a decision on the written 
 process, based, according to the language of the sen-
 
 101 
 
 tence itself, " on special indications furnished by the 
 Government "*. The decree sets forth " that on a 
 certain evening of a certain day in the first week of 
 March, Ricci, Montanari, Tosi, Piva, Guicciardi, Gas- 
 parini, with two others who had fled, had devised to 
 slay with fire-arms or with the sword, and with the 
 assistance of a numerous troop of armed conspirators, 
 the Duke Francis the Fourth, on a certain day of the 
 month • * • • to seize on the person of the Duchess at 
 the same time, byway of hostage, and so obtain pos- 
 session of the State that two hundred louisdors 
 
 were to be advanced the day before to Montanari and 
 
 Tosi as the price of the murder that Ricci was 
 
 to be present at the consummation of the crime. " The 
 pretended conspirators were not apprehended till the 
 end of the month of May : no overt act, no indicative 
 of preparation, had been manifested at that date of a deed 
 that was to have been committed in March; not a man 
 suspected of belonging to the numerous troop of armed 
 conspirators had been arrested ; not a single weapon 
 had been discovered. It would have been natural to 
 suppose that the project, if it ever existed, had been 
 abandoned, and could furnish no ground for a pena] 
 process. But, setting that aside, would Ricci, who 
 must have been troubled with very little misgiving, 
 since he was to be present at the event, — Ricci, at the 
 head of a numerous armed band, master of the Duke's 
 life by himself or his subalterns, — would he have 
 sought an assassin at the price of two hundred louis- 
 
 * At the Rubiera prosecutions in 1821, two of the members of 
 the Tribunal, the Advocates Bavelli and Mazzoli, refused to found 
 their judgment on depositions drawn up by the Police : they were 
 suspended from the exercise of their profession.
 
 102 
 
 dors ? Above all, would he have chosen a man whom, 
 according to the decree, he had never seen before ? 
 The only proof adduced in this document to establish 
 such a tissue of absurdity was the declaration of two 
 of the accused, Montanari and Tosi ; the other five 
 persisting in an absolute denial of every thing imputed 
 to them. Now, Tosi, aged fifty-eight, had passed 
 thirty years of his life in the prisons of Mantua and 
 Modena, for thefts of various kinds : Montanari was 
 only thirty-seven ; but, the son of a criminal, he had 
 already passed six years in confinement, for theft ; no 
 sooner was that punishment complete than he was 
 implicated in a case of assassination, and he was only 
 released at the end of two years by a verdict hardly 
 amounting to not proved. Both had been some time in 
 prison for stealing of cheese, when Ricci was arrested ; 
 and there they concocted their evidence. Yet, so 
 entirely were their fabrications aimed at the life of 
 Ricci alone, that though they related to a single fact, 
 touching equally all the accused, by I know not what 
 horrible contradiction, they were treated as forming a 
 complete proof against one and not so against the 
 others. Ricci was condemned to death, the others to 
 minor punishments. The family of this unfortunate 
 man threw themselves at the feet of the Duke to im- 
 plore his favour : he made a display of sovereign cle- 
 mency by ordering him to be shot, in place of being 
 hanged. 
 
 Thus, Sir, do they manage political prosecutions in 
 Italy. 
 
 Neither must it be said that these facts are peculiar, 
 and appertain exclusively to the Duchy of Modena. 
 I can produce analogous incidents from the Southern 
 extremity of the Peninsula. I can find in the Kingdom
 
 103 
 
 of Naples a man to place beside the Duke — the 
 Marquis del Carretto, Minister of Police. The deeds 
 committed by him in 1828 in the province of Salerno, 
 at Catania in Sicily in 1837, the Aquila proceedings 
 in 1842 — the entire story of the inquisitorial policy, 
 of the debaucheries and cruelties exercised by the 
 Neapolitan Government, especially in the live years 
 1825-30, rival the infamies I have just narrated. But 
 I would rather conclude these sad recitals, for the 
 subject weighs heavily on my soul as I write, by a few 
 words on the political trials of 1833 in Piedmont. 
 These are the trials, Sir, of which an agent of the 
 English Government asserts, — in one fragment of 
 those despatches that you so amiably put together and 
 laid on the table of the House to excite detestation 
 against myself — " that they had been fairly managed. " 
 The few facts I am about to detail may perhaps prove 
 to you how little faith should generally be bestowed 
 in the reports of men who come into contact only with 
 official persons, naturally most interested in conceal- 
 ing the truth. 
 
 In 1833, the general discontent had reached the 
 Piedmontese army : vague rumours were in circula 
 tion announcing an insurrection at hand ; and whatever 
 might have been the extent of preparation, 1 doubt not 
 but that if the initiative had risen promptly from the 
 bosom of the middle classes, at Genoa, Turin, or else- 
 where, a great portion of the troops would have ac- 
 ceded. Through unforeseen circumstances, the moment 
 was lost. The Government, regaining courage, seized 
 the opportunity in its turn, and determined on strik- 
 ing decisive blows. Numerous arrests took place 
 both among the army and civilians, at all the important 
 points in the kingdom. Searches were made, with the
 
 104 
 
 object, it was said, of discovering depots of arms, or 
 something which might bring to light the existence 
 and the ramifications of the conspiracy. So far the 
 Government was acting on the right of defence : but 
 in proportion as danger disappeared, they commenced 
 the attack, and by frightful means. To calm the fer- 
 mentation, and to deprive the arrested of public 
 sympathy, the authorities did not hesitate to publish a 
 proclamation affirming that the plan of the conspira- 
 tors had been discovered, and that it consisted in 
 blowing up by mines the various barracks, situated in 
 populous quarters, as the commencement of mani- 
 fold horror. Every species of terror and seduction 
 was set at work in the prisons, not to confirm this 
 shameless statement — that was not attempted — but 
 to justify as far as possible the acts of vengeance me- 
 ditated. To some they promised life, to others gold ; 
 whilst on young men of lively and susceptible imagi- 
 nation, they brought into play all the resources of a 
 system of moral torture often more stringent than 
 physical. * The search had been entirely ineffectual : 
 but they found informers in the prisons. The trials 
 and death-sentences had no other groundwork. At 
 Genoa, of which I am now particularly speaking, as in 
 other cities, a court-martial or Military Commission 
 was appointed to try both soldiers and civilians. These 
 latter protested. A representation addressed to the 
 Monarch by five Genoese advocates unconnected with 
 the proceedings, appeared on the 1 7th July, to back 
 this protest, and to demand that civilians should 
 
 * At the end of this pamphlet I print some fragments of a de- 
 claration placed in my hands, signed by one of the unfortunates 
 who succumbed at Alexandria and made partial revelations.
 
 105 
 
 be remitted to the ordinary tribunals: this was an- 
 swered negatively on the 25th. It was demanded, that 
 at least the civilians might choose their advocate for 
 the defence : this also was refused. The informers, 
 who were promised a pardon, contradicted each other 
 in their depositions. On the 12th May, two were 
 lodged in the same prison; on the 23d, three; and on 
 the 30th, the whole four were thrown together. Now 
 they agreed as they could ; and the public heard, for 
 example, one sergeant Turff declare, in confirmation of 
 the evidence of another soldier, Piacenza, that he had 
 himself given to the Association the detail as to the 
 Artillery, though he had never made mention of this 
 important circumstance in seven preceding examina- 
 tions, that had exhausted all he pretended to know. 
 As to the time fixed for the insurrection, the heads of 
 the conspiracy, and the object aimed at, the contradictions 
 recorded in their separate examinations remained inef- 
 faceable, completely destroying the identity of thflkfact 
 they laboured to establish. One of the four went so 
 far as to declare that he had been affiliated to the 
 Association (Giovine Italia ) in 1 830, when it was not 
 yet in existence. Well, it was solely on the assertions 
 of these men, to whom immunity had been promised 
 — on the contradictory denunciations of persons who 
 had been told, There is no way of saving your life but 
 by becoming informers against your brethren — and on a 
 pencil note addressed to one of them, which I insert 
 below, to show its insignificance, * that the military 
 
 * This will prove to you that we were at the place of meeting ; 
 not being able to wait longer, we acquaint you that we will talk 
 to-morrow of all that you have been speaking about to Oi. Endea- 
 vour to be to-morrow at the Gaffe delle Quattro Stagioni, where you 
 shall have an answer. Be sure to bring with you the note or list 
 agreed on, " Yours Ni. Oi. " 
 
 The names were interpreted to be those of Noli and Orsini.
 
 106 
 
 tribunal declared the existence of a conspiracy to be 
 established ; awarded I know not how many sentences 
 of imprisonment for five, ten, or twelve years ; and on 
 the 15th May sent to death Francesco Miglio*, sergeant 
 of Sappers, Giuseppe Biglia, sergeant of the Guards, 
 and Antonio Gavctti, fencing-master. Similar occur- 
 rences were taking place at Turin, Alexandria, and 
 Chambery. General Morra at Chambery, Governor 
 Galateri at Alexandria, added revolting cruelty in the 
 punishment to the iniquity of the trials. At Alexandria, 
 one Vochieri, condemned to death after having suffered 
 the most brutal treatment from the Governor, en- 
 treated as a favour that they would not take him past 
 the windows of the house where his wife, then in a 
 state to create sympathy, and his family, were residing. 
 Hewas refused : the mournful procession stopped before 
 the door on its way to the place of suffering. This was 
 the Reign of monarchical Terror. In one town they 
 shototfheir victims as assassins murder, almost in the 
 dark, at the very dawn of day : in another, the troops 
 refusing the horrid service, convicts were set to 
 slaughter honest men. And as if the scaffold did not 
 satiate vengeance, they sought to slay the soul before 
 assaulting the body. At Genoa, Jacopo Ruffini, a 
 young surgeon, had resisted every temptation to lead 
 him to dishonourable inculpations. One day the War- 
 Auditor called him before him: " You are " said he "a 
 noble but misled young man. You thought you were 
 proceeding with companions worthy of you to the 
 achievement of a generous aim ; you refuse now to save 
 your life by confessions, that, by the by, will teach the 
 Government nothing : but I feel pity for you and for 
 
 * Miglio made a will in favour of the indigent family of his fellow 
 sufferer Gavotti.
 
 107 
 
 your aged mother. See here, what the men are for 
 whom you are braving martyrdom ! ' Papers were 
 placed before him : they were informations against 
 himself; and at the bottom was the forged name of one 
 of his most intimate companions. In such a moment 
 the young man could make no very critical exami- 
 nation. Deceived, stupefied, grief-stricken, he asked 
 till the morrow morning to take his resolution. Re- 
 conducted to prison, he tore out with his fingers a 
 nail from the door of his cell, and opened with it a 
 vein in his throat. On the wall was found written in 
 blood, " Behold my answer. I bequeath the avenging to 
 my brethren. " He was my earliest and best friend. 
 Never would he have forgotten me : neither will I ever 
 forget him, or his last words. 
 
 And to crush such spirits — to uphold such Go- 
 vernments and such horrors — you, Sir James, have 
 descended to arts so low that not the purest purpose 
 could justify them ! To uphold such governments 
 against the recognized will of a suffering people, you 
 sought to extenuate your first mistake by calumny ! 
 To uphold such Governments, falsehoods have been 
 alleged, perhaps for the first time in full Parliament, 
 by persons charged with august duties ! To uphold 
 such Governments, you, Ministers of a free and con- 
 stitutional nation, have extorted from a Parliamentary 
 majority politically bound to you, the disgraceful de- 
 claration " that it did not regret what had occurred." 
 
 In commencing, I promised myself to abstain from 
 all detailed inquiry into the manner in which for four 
 or five months I was the object of a detestable espion- 
 age, and into the conduct of the Cabinet and the House 
 of Commons pending the debates the question gave 
 rise to. 1 am pleading a cause too exalted for descend-
 
 108 
 
 ing to the narrow limits of a private matter. But I 
 say, there has been something deeply to be deplored, 
 something deeply afflicting, not only in the fact of the 
 espionage itself, but in the purpose of that espionage — 
 in the manner in which it was endeavoured to be de- 
 fended — in the painful indifference of the language used 
 by Committeesappointedto report, — in the justifications 
 advanced by the Ministers of England, altogether based 
 on assertions proved to be false — in the assent blindly 
 given to those justifications by a Parlamentary 
 majority, — in the votes that successively rejected 
 all those motions by which good men sought 
 to restore England to the esteem of nations, 
 debased as she had been by her statesmen to the level 
 of the Papal Government, or that of Naples. I say, 
 that indifference on a question of public morality is a 
 serious symptom for a nation's heart, and that every 
 Englishman who sincerely loves his country should 
 ponder anxiously on it. 
 
 I have replied by facts, that appear to me conclusive, 
 to the pacific counsels of the men who wish us well. 
 In reality, these counsels flow from despondency 
 rather than from any other source : and this despon- 
 dency results from an inaccurate conception of our 
 history and of our present tendencies. The story of 
 our divisions, of our intestine quarrels of the Middle 
 Ages, has been so often repeated to the world, that we 
 are habitually judged by that standard. Beneath every 
 objection to our watchword, I have almost always de- 
 tected in men of sincerity, not so much a belief in the 
 impossibility of success, as a disbelief in the possibility 
 of a national organization for us, that success once 
 obtained. The external manifestations of our political 
 life ceasing in the sixteenth century, at the fall of
 
 109 
 
 Florence, the observation of those who judge us from 
 a distance halts 
 
 There is no true period of cessation for nations so 
 long as the purpose to which their historically-national 
 tendence impels them, has not been attained ; so long 
 as the faculties and powers whose germ they bear 
 within them have not reached the highest degree of 
 possible development ; so long, in a word — to avail 
 myself of a phrase scarcely current in England, but 
 that perfectly expresses my view of the subject — so 
 long as their mission in Humanity is unaccomplished. 
 To that period Italy has not arrived. What she has 
 done in the world, once by material force, by conquest 
 — once bv moral force, bv the word — she has done 
 in the name of a city or a man ; in the name of a 
 power or a principle incarnate in that man or in that 
 city, never in the name of the entire nation. The 
 nation has never yet existed in action. There has been 
 a Rome of the Cassars ; there has been a Rome of the 
 Popes ; the Rome of the Italian people has yet to 
 hurst forth. But everything has hitherto converged 
 towards this point. The internal crisis that 
 so long vexed Italy has its meaning, its historical 
 explanation in this : it was the working of the Italian 
 element, taking up substance by substance, reducing, 
 absorbing, all the foreign elements, races, and castes, 
 that came from every quarter of Europe to pour like 
 a flood on the Peninsula. All that function of fermen- 
 tation and ebullition that constitutes our Middle Age 
 was a work of fusion : it elaborated as it were the me- 
 dium adapted for the development of that unifying 
 Italian 2;erm that still broods under the accumulated 
 ruin of the Capitol and the Vatican. Moreover, this 
 work has never been discontinued. It went on, less
 
 110 
 
 strikingly because less varied, but with twofold efficacy, 
 during the times that followed the fall of the latter re- 
 publics — times that appeared to the eyes of the super- 
 ficial observer as swallowed up in inertness and insen- 
 sibility. When civic liberty fell, the work of equali- 
 zation progressed the faster : if it were less apparent, 
 it was precisely that it was acting on the nation's viscera. 
 Whether before or during the revolutionary move- 
 ments that at a later period came from without to agi- 
 tate Italy, the people gained ground far more than the 
 educated classes : in fact, if from time to time there 
 were manifestations crowned with success, they were 
 popular manifestations, such as those of 1 746 at Genoa, 
 such as those, hitherto so misunderstood, of Naples 
 in 1799. 
 
 This grand general fact of the Italian People be- 
 coming by degrees substituted for every partial ele- 
 ment, influencing hereafter every question, and forming 
 the necessary and only point of departure for every 
 endeavour at action, has completely escaped all those 
 who have taken up the Italian question. The book of 
 the nation has been sealed to them all — to the historian 
 Botta, as well as to the revolutionists Santarosa and 
 Menotti ; to M. De Sismondi, as well as to the Provi- 
 sional Governments of 1831. Among writers, Ro- 
 magnosi alone has caught it ; but the deduction of all 
 the consequences was beyond him. Among men of 
 action, Napoleon alone, himself an Italian, compre- 
 hended it ; but he did not choose to apply it. France 
 — perhaps because he felt more sure of her obedience 
 — was his lever of action, and he would give her no 
 rival. 'Twas not till St. Helena, when there was no 
 longer a motive for silence, that he could declare — 
 " Unity of manners, of language, of literature, must, at
 
 Ill 
 
 a future more or less remote, end in bringing her inha- 
 bitants under one government." Memoirs, Vol. 3. 
 
 Thanks to this fact, all is now changed in Italy. 
 The absorbing power of the Italian element — so absorb- 
 ing that races possessing the unevennesses of the Goth 
 and the Lombard could retain them but one or two 
 centuries — has smoothed, has levelled everything. 
 Race is extinct in Italy : from one end to the other all 
 is Italian ; and 1 would cheerfully ask such as still 
 amuse themselves, perchance to parade a slender eru- 
 dition, with painting in terror em the sects inevitably 
 to teem from the bosom of Italy on the day of her 
 emancipation, to lay the finger, in that land where 
 from their verv entrance all these races have been 
 crossed, mingled, and confused, on the precise spot 
 now occupied by this or that : I would ask them to 
 point out a single difference between the Lombard, the 
 Romagnese, and the Neapolitan,* which, as I said 
 before, is not equally marked in France between the 
 Basque, Breton, and Norman families. The Middle 
 Age is dead : the Guelphs and Ghibellines have passed 
 away with it ; and those who dream of them full of 
 life, and prepared to revive and rekindle bitter dissen- 
 sions between province and province, deal in romance 
 and not in history. The factions have lost their stan- 
 dards : the Pope and the Emperor tore them from 
 their hands on the day they signed their treaty of 
 union. Three centuries of an oppression exercised 
 towards all in the name of the two, have placed the 
 pair on exactly the same footing, and devoted them to 
 the same conditions of life and death. No more wars ; 
 
 * The islands alone present a physiognomy decidedly peculiar ; 
 and no system of consolidation ever aimed at withholding from them 
 a special administration.
 
 112 
 
 no more rivalries : as regards the elements of nation 
 ality, there exists no longer Genoese, nor Tuscan, nor 
 Bolognese, nor Roman : there exist — in Italy as every- 
 where else, — elements for the Commune, none for the 
 Province. By an apparent contradiction that the va- 
 nity inherent to mediocrity sufficiently explains, it is 
 just among thej class of semi-thinkers, of semi-gifted 
 litterateurs, political or professional — the superficial 
 crust thrown over Italy by foreign influences and foreign 
 schools, offering itself first to the sight, and not worth 
 the probing — it is among that class that the distrusts 
 and jealousies talked of are still exhibited : among that 
 class at least is to be found a disposition to admit and 
 exaggerate these jealousies, little reflected elsewhere. 
 The people, the grand Italian mass, know nothing of 
 them. How should they feel them ? * Wretched 
 slaves that they are, where should they find elements 
 ofrivalry, local influences to pander to, vanities to satisfy ? 
 Admitted, that there is in the bosom of this mass a pro- 
 found leaven of hostility, of distrust, of reaction : the 
 spirit of individualism, as produced by the scantiness, 
 the want of education — by the irritation of suffering, 
 the void of all social interest, and the depraving sys- 
 tem of powers based on terror and espionage — yet per- 
 vades that mass to a very high degree ; but to con- 
 found individualism and federalism is to change men 
 into provinces. In fact, it is among inhabitants, 
 among classes, among districts of the same city, that 
 these rancours, these envies still feed and flourish : they 
 are with difficulty found between city and city, still less 
 between province and province. There is enough in 
 the distrustful habits of the Italians of the present day 
 to render extremely difficult and perilous the under- 
 standing that must necessarily precede any movement ;
 
 113 
 
 but that movement successful, there is little or nothing to 
 hinder the unification of Italy : unification, I say, and not 
 centralization, such as it seems to be too often under- 
 stood, pushed to those farthest limits where it passes 
 into despotism. These two things, so essentially 
 distinct, have, however, by a strange forgetfulness of 
 first principles, been almost always confounded in this 
 question. Many elements existing in Italy, and be- 
 yond all, the strength of individualism that I have just 
 signalized, will, for a long time perhaps, oppose obstacles 
 to every essay towards too great an administrative cen- 
 tralization : but what has administrative centralization 
 in common with political union ? In that love of inde- 
 pendent activity, in that excess of vitality, that cha- 
 racterizes the individual Italian, and the true aggrega- 
 tion — that is to say, the Commune — in which he acts, 
 there is wherewith to furnish legislative genius the 
 means of creating an effective guarantee for liberty, 
 by organizing in the Commune itself an instrument of 
 control and defence against every effort of usurpation 
 coming from the centre : it is no more than this ; and 
 it would be a misapprehension to wish to deduce from 
 it a necessity for the existence of another series of fic- 
 titious aggregations. Fictitious, most certainly ; for, 
 on the one hand, almost all the States into which 
 Italy is now divided, are not of popular na- 
 tional formation — they have been made what they 
 are by foreign diplomacy or usurpation : on the other 
 hand, there is not, there never has been, historically 
 speaking, a settled, active antipathy of province against 
 province. Scarcely do you find that the boundary of 
 one of those provinces, as now traced, resulted from 
 the wars that attended the period of Italian vigour. 
 Those wars, when thev were not between citizens of 
 
 TI
 
 114 
 
 the same city — " tra quei che un muro e una fossa 
 serra, " as Dante expresses it — raged between one 
 city and another : Pavia, Como, Milan ; Pisa, Sienna, 
 Florence, and so on. But all these rival cities have 
 long since been engulfed into one vortex of power ; 
 their hatreds have been deadened by ages of common 
 slavery. What remains of them — if indeed aught 
 remains — is barely enough to furnish a proverbial 
 expression for household gossip, and is too feeble to 
 reach the forum of national regeneration. Prisoners 
 may sometimes give a turn to sorrow by quarrelling in 
 their chains ; but the first grand impulse towards 
 general deliverance will stifle in enthusiasm this relic 
 of the old leaven. The tocsin of the nation imposes 
 silence on the gossip of the household : and the slight 
 differences existing may become, under the hands of 
 able and popular men, an excellent stimulus to emulat- 
 ing efforts. 
 
 Let me not be accused of neglecting facts, and 
 of opposing hasty negatives to the deductions from a 
 calm study of realities and to the lessons of expe- 
 rience : for I should be tempted to reply somewhat 
 tartly to those grave and calm studies that are limited to 
 a given epoch, and to that pretended experience that 
 breaks tradition in place of continuing it, and nullifies 
 the present for a past often ill-understood. Why 
 should the recent immediate fact always be sacrificed 
 to the ancient ? Why, in favour to the middle ages, 
 are we always to shut our eyes to what the last forty 
 years have been incessantly repeating as to the inevit- 
 able effects of the impulse I have been describing on 
 the Italian masses ? If those who nourish these fears 
 for our future had seen, as we did, the wives and 
 daughters of the people at Genoa, who a few days
 
 115 
 
 before, in the bitterness of common misery, were sing- 
 ing old snatches of song against the Piedmontese, 
 now lavishing flowers and acclamations, as they accom- 
 panied them on their route, on regiments of these 
 same Piedmontese, that, after having worked out the 
 movement of 1821, were quitting the city to march — at 
 least so it was thought — against Austria ; if they had 
 seen the spirit of fusion and warm fraternity that 
 actuated the youth of the most rival cities of the Pope- 
 dom at the time of the insurrection of 1831; if they 
 had followed, as we have done, the phases of Italian 
 opinion throughout the inconceivable efforts of suc- 
 ceeding years — then they might comprehend what a 
 feeling of Country, reduced to a frank and energetic 
 formula, could accomplish in a land all the districts of 
 which have been cementing their brotherhood for half 
 a century by the blood of martyrs ; they could more 
 easily calculate the progress, what between its con- 
 secration on the battle-field and on the scaffold, 
 that must have been made in Italy by an 
 idea reechoed for fifty years, half from conviction half 
 from imitation, by our literature, and diffused, filtered, 
 through all classes, by an uninterrupted chain of secret 
 associations. 
 
 Italy, then, wills to be a nation ; and one she must 
 become, happen as it may. As certain as I am writing 
 these words, this age will not pass away ere the pro- 
 tocols of the treaty of Vienna shall have served for 
 wadding — perhaps on the inarch to Vienna itself — for 
 the muskets of our Italian soldiery. 
 
 And now, if 1 were an Englishman — if the prejudice 
 of distrust that still clings too much in this country to 
 the name of foreigner, ( a term that should have had 
 no meaning since Christ spoke, ) does not abstract 
 
 ii 2
 
 1 10 
 
 weight from the truths that fall from my lips — this 
 is the language, my hand on my heart, that I would 
 hold, not to you, Sir James, but to your countrymen, 
 to whom I am writing under your name. 
 
 Before all things, hasten to wipe from your foreheads 
 the burning stain of dishonour that your statesmen 
 have planted there. You have, truckling to the 
 foreign absolutist police, in the persons of your states- 
 men, played the spy for five months in most ignoble 
 fashion, on patriots who are seeking to raise from 
 Papal-Austrian mud the land in which their mothers 
 live and suffer. Hasten to throw off, by blotting from 
 your laws an odious and useless power, all identifica- 
 tion between you and your statesmen. Do not suffer 
 it to be said by the world, that the nation which 
 abolished the slavery of the Negro tolerates with indif- 
 ference the slavery of the White ; and that besotted 
 with calculations of immediate material gain, or blinded 
 by the sordid divisions of political party, she has lost 
 the moral sense or the courage to carry out such inspi- 
 rations and their logical application. 1 know many 
 men among you, deploring from the bottom of their 
 hearts what has passed with regard to myself as im- 
 moral and unworthy of England, who gave their vote 
 in favour of Ministers, not to shake a power already 
 too much threatened. These, in my opinion, are the 
 true culprits. They have forgotten that they are in 
 their places not to support such and such men under 
 all circumstances, but to support what is just, to over- 
 throw what is unjust, without reference to secondary 
 calculations. They have forgotten that the safety of 
 England is not linked with individuals whatever name 
 they may bear, but with the degree of morality she 
 possesses, and which her representatives are bound to
 
 make fruitful. Never has a moral people wanted a 
 government worthy of it. 
 
 Reflect, then, seriously, on the character of your in- 
 ternational policy, for the honour and future of your 
 land are entirely dependent on it. There are men who 
 think • they have accomplished their mission towards 
 their country, when they have contracted a petty treaty 
 of commerce with a government that to-morrow may 
 not see, or put back for a few years, by base compli- 
 ances, a situation of difficulty that must inevitably 
 arise. These may be clever men for a time, influential 
 party-chiefs : but they are not statesmen. They avert 
 for an instant tempests that must fall hereafter, the 
 more terrible for the accumulation of destructive ele- 
 ments. They prop with the labour of a day old build- 
 ings irrevocably condemned to perish ; they do not 
 prepare a site, firm and free, for an erection truly 
 great and permanent, that may give shelter throughout 
 long ages to future generations. The statesman is he 
 whose practice is a comment on the saying of Leibnitz 
 — The present, son of the past, is parent of the future. 
 The present must be for him a point of departure : 
 the goal lies in the times that are to come. For his 
 operations, England must be the fulcrum of the lever, 
 whose power is to be felt abroad. He who undertakes 
 to mould the power and the well-being of England 
 without reference to a study of the European future, 
 whatever he may do, will never be a great man nor 
 the benefactor of his country. 
 
 This, however, is the problem that has been pursued, 
 for I know not how many long years, by the men who 
 direct your international policy. 
 
 The map of Europe is to redraw. The system ot 
 old monarchical nationalities, of the treaty of Westpha-
 
 118 
 
 Ha, is decayed. The popular element has dissolved it, 
 and is preparing a new system. The Treaty of Vienna, 
 in organizing a tyranny of the Great Powers over the 
 smaller states, explicitly avowed the danger without 
 succeeding in averting it. All that has occurred since 
 then has been in contradiction to that treaty. Europe 
 is tending to recompose itself in great uniform masses, 
 resulting from a spontaneous popular impulse, — 
 creating a mutual equilibrium as respects guarantees 
 of internal independence — harmonizing themselves 
 to a common aim, pursued under various systems, for 
 the civilization of the world. Who among you scans this 
 map of future Europe ? New nationalities prepare every- 
 where to form. In a period more or less distant, but 
 inevitable, Spain and Portugal will found one Iberian 
 power ; Poland will revive, a nucleus for Slavonian organi- 
 zation; Greece will outstep herexistingboundaries, to in- 
 corporate all those colonies kindred in language and belief; 
 Italy and the southern Slavonians will cause the empire 
 of Austria to vanish : and which statesman of yours oc- 
 cupies his thoughts with these configurations of the fu- 
 ture, whose signs are already visible on the horizon? 
 Which of your statesmen asks himself — What will be 
 the character and the power of England when these things 
 come to pass, if, revolving in the egotistical circle of her 
 policy of a day, she shall have prepared for herself and 
 these new nationalities neither homogeneity oftendences, 
 recollections of gratitude, or germs of sympathy ? 
 
 Before this problem, the statesman truly great and 
 who really loves his country, will feel that nothing less 
 is at stake than this alternative — either to be almost 
 at the summit of the European edifice, or a power of 
 the third rank. 
 
 Twenty-two years ago there was a man who, if he
 
 119 
 
 hail not a just conception of the mission of England, 
 had at least a clear intuition of the state of things. 
 Mr. Canning told you within the venerable walls of 
 Westminster (28th April 1 823) — It is perfectly true 
 ' * * 'that there is a contest going on in the world between 
 the spirit of unlimited Monarchy and the spirit of unlimited 
 Democracy. Between these two spirits, it may be said that 
 strife is either openly in action or covertly at work 
 throughout the greatest portion of Europe. It is true, 
 that in no former period in history is there so close a 
 resemblance to the present as in that of the Reforma- 
 tion. It is true — it is, I own I think, a formidable 
 truth — that in this respect the two periods do resemble each 
 other. Then with this spectacle before him, with Europe 
 before him in arms for Evil and for Good, he coldly 
 concludes — Our station is essentially neutral — neutral 
 not only between contending nations, but between con- 
 flicting principles. This was precisely contrary to the 
 conclusion drawn in analogous times by Elizabeth and 
 Cromwell. 
 
 Since 1823, this contest has but enlarged. The 
 efforts of nationalities — for that is my only ground 
 in this debate — suppressed or unrecognized in the 
 Treaties of Vienna, in some parts already victorious, 
 elsewhere not yet so, have proved, do each day prove, 
 that this contest is not a transitory effervescence, but 
 a sacred war between Fact and Right, between the will 
 of millions and the protoeols of the old diplomacy. 
 Your policy has been the same. Now as then, you 
 pretend to stand calm, immoveable, in the midst of the 
 European ferment ; now as then, you declare your- 
 selves neuter between two opposite principles. That 
 is to say, you, a Christian nation, declare yourselves 
 indifferent between the Good and the Evil, the Just 
 and the Unjust ; you, a people believing in the unity
 
 120 
 
 of the human race the creation of the Deity, deny all 
 oneness with it, all duty towards it ; you, the emanci- 
 pators of the Blacks, you say — Despotism or liberty, 
 Austria or Italy, it matters not to us : we give alms to 
 the exiled Poles — we give fetes to their persecutor : we 
 serve God and the Devil — and that is our part. 
 
 But this part — this degrading, selfish, and atheistic 
 part — you cannot sustain. Thank God, the force of 
 principles is so great, that you must elect for one or 
 the other — to ascend or descend. You deduced the 
 sole logical consequence of your pretended neutrality 
 when you said — Let every one look at home : there 
 shall be no intervention on our part anywhere ; let there 
 be no intervention from any one else. And yet you were 
 obliged to look on quietly upon French intervention in 
 Spain, upon Austrian in Italy. You said — In virtue 
 of our neutrality, we afford hospitality to all the pro- 
 scribed, come from what part they may j and see what 
 your Government adds to this proud declaration — 
 Good; but upon condition of opening their letters, for 
 the convenience of Baron Neumann, or any other agent 
 of a foreign despotic power. You, men constitution- 
 ally governed, who say that liberty is a holy thing, 
 lower yourselves to the footing of spies, to crush this 
 holy thing elsewhere and confirm tyranny on the Con- 
 tinent as long as possible. 
 
 I would not be misunderstood. I do not invoke the 
 French propagandist army of 1793: I do not wish it 
 for my country, for it is not the fact, it is the conscience 
 of liberty that we want ; and we can acquire that but 
 by emancipating ourselves through our own efforts. 
 But I do wish that there should be at least one nation 
 in the world to set an example of public morality ; 
 one nation professing a belief, whose language and 
 acts should continually harmonize with that belief ;
 
 121 
 
 one nation whose international policy should not be an 
 insult to its internal policy. And I would wish, that 
 cheared by active manifestations of sympathy here 
 afforded us for our misfortunes and our efforts, my 
 countrymen, who now sorrowfully say — We have all 
 the world against us, even free England, might repeat 
 encouragingly to each other — If we succeed, we shall 
 have friends and allies ; if we fall, we shall be lamented 
 and admired. 
 
 As for myself, Sir James, whom you have selected 
 for the object of your diplomatic amiability, all that I 
 have hitherto written must teach you what I think it 
 my duty to do during the years of life that remain to 
 me — to speak, to write, to act, by every fair means 
 that are or may be in my power, for the emancipation 
 of my unhappy country. I have had it said to me, 
 that in affording hospitality, England did not intend to 
 grant me the right of labouring on her soil for the 
 wellbeing of my country, for the destruction of a great 
 Injustice. 1 reject such language with all my energies ; 
 and in rejecting it, I believe myself to be more English 
 than those who proffer it. I do not believe that the 
 hospitality of England is limited to the body of the 
 exile : 'tis the soul — the soul with all its aspirations 
 towards the Just and the True, with all that constitutes 
 the human being — that she intended to welcome. 
 Otherwise, the hospitality she is so proud of would 
 be but a bitter irony. The man who sets foot on this 
 soil of England is free — free in thought as well as in 
 the instruments God has given him to realize that 
 thought. I am using, and I shall use, this privilege : 
 let him who would not do as much for his country 
 stand forth and condemn me.
 
 APPENDIX, 
 
 NOTE A.— Page 75. 
 
 Report of the Deputies of the Kingdom of Italy at Paris) 
 immediately after the Abdication of Napoleon. 
 
 To Count Verri, President of the Regency at Milan. 
 
 • • • • • 
 
 In the Report presented to the Regency, by means of 
 the courier Fiocchi, it is freely declared, that the Deputation 
 believes itself to have left nothing unattempted that could 
 lead to the accomplishment of the wishes of its nation, and 
 of the scope of its mission. But the Deputation having 
 nothing more at heart than that those who have made it the 
 depository of its wishes should receive the most convincing 
 proofs, by an exact relation, of its endeavours, thinks it 
 fitting that the President should be informed with the most 
 scrupulous confidence of every particular point in its opera- 
 tions. 
 
 The tenor of the first audience of the Emperor of Austria, 
 the conference with the Prince Metternich, the no answer 
 given by the High Allied Powers to the official notes directed 
 to them, as well as the information we gathered from indi- 
 viduals of high character, had given sufficient foundation for 
 believing that our country would be ceded in full property 
 to Austria. Nevertheless, penetrated with the idea that it 
 would have been a grievous fault on our parts not to have 
 recourse to all valid endeavours, to the end that every hope 
 might not be entirely lost to us, we did not desist until we 
 were assured that there remained no longer for us even a 
 possibility of success. 
 
 In sounding the dispositions of Russia, after repeated pri- 
 vate and confidential communications with MM. de Nessel- 
 rode and Pozzo di Borgo, there appeared nothing encouraging 
 for our cause. By separate conversations with Baron de 
 Humboldt, we were convinced that Prussia, being content 
 with the cessions made to her in Germany, views the aggran- 
 dizement of Austria on the side of Italy with a less jealous
 
 123 
 
 eye. The discourses and conduct of the English Generals 
 and agents in Italy, made known to us by your despatches 
 of the 9th instant, delivered to us by the courier Vcrri, seemed 
 to be, and were in fact, of a nature to fix our attention closely 
 on the dispositions of the British Cabinet. And, notwith- 
 standing the notices previously communicated to us were not 
 calculated to inspire any peculiar motives for confidence, we 
 thought it incumbent on us to commence the most direct 
 and active negociations with that Cabinet, now our only 
 remaining refuge. For this purpose, the Deputation charged 
 Count Frederick Confalonieri to address Viscount Castlereagh 
 and the Earl of Aberdeen in their name. 
 
 That Deputy being admitted into the presence of Lord 
 Castlereagh, thus addressed him : — 
 
 My Lord, 
 
 The Deputation of the Kingdom of Italy to the High 
 Allied Powers, of which I have the honour to be a member, 
 has received despatches from the Provisional Government of 
 that country, informing them that Generals Wilson, M'Far- 
 lane, and Lord W. Bentinck, gave to our nation the most 
 flattering hopes of the high protection of England towards 
 the restoration of the Kingdom of Italy; moreover asserting, 
 that our country was occupied in the name and on the 
 behalf of the allied Powers taken collectively. At the same 
 time we were informed, that Austria conducts herself towards 
 us as an absolute mistress, invading all powers, civil and 
 military ; and it is moreover apprehended, that our country is 
 already definitively given over to be subjected to her. I con- 
 sider it, nevertheless, as my duty to ask, in the name of the 
 Deputation and my country, whether, and to what degree, 
 we may rely on that high protection which we have been 
 taught to hope for from England? 
 
 Lord Castlereagh answered : — 
 
 I am of opinion that the first duty of an honest and en- 
 lightened Cabinet is not to deceive either individuals or 
 nations. I should deceive you, if I promised you support 
 in this matter. I ought honestly to confess, that our military 
 men often hold a course and language foreign from that of the 
 Cabinet: they, perhaps, would make national honour consist 
 in professions of protection ; and / maintain that it depends 
 on providing for the best interests of nations. 
 
 The Deputy. — The best interest of our nation requires and 
 demands a king ; and let this king be even an Austrian, our 
 wishes will be accomplished; all that we desire being to
 
 124 
 
 obtain an existence independent of other States, and a con- 
 stitution, or national representation. 
 
 Lord Castlereayh. — Constitutions are rising on every side 
 of Europe : Spain, France, Holland, Poland, Norway, and 
 others, all demand constitutions; I know not whether this 
 may be for their good — I should be sorry if, from their 
 own election, ******* 
 these nations should in the end be too late convinced of their 
 error. 
 
 The Deputy. — But England presents us with an illustri- 
 ous and enviable example of the utility of a wise constitu- 
 tion. 
 
 Lord Castlereayh. — If we have been fortunate enough to 
 found and sustain a work so difficult, it does not follow that 
 all people, in all ages, are formed to prosper under a similar 
 system. We do not adopt the maxim of Buonaparte, who 
 thought proper to introduce his code into the most uncul- 
 tivated nations. We have had recent experience in Sicily 
 how mistaken is such a principle. Our constitution will never 
 take root in that country ; and we must alter it. Then the 
 Austrian is a government against which its subjects have less 
 need of fortifying themselves than any other. In the history 
 of that house to the present time, we discover no traces of 
 the abuse of power or violence. It never fails by the excess 
 of these qualities, but now and then by a deficiency in them. 
 I now speak to you in full confidence. I would afford you 
 all the support, all the assistance in my power, if I believed 
 that it were to free you from an iron yoke like that of France, 
 from which you have so lately been liberated. If you had 
 formerly demanded my aid against France, I would have pro- 
 mised it, and lent my whole powers to your success. I will 
 say more. When, in the negotiations at Parga, the ci-devant 
 Emperor was treated with to renounce the kingdom of Italy 
 in favour of one of his own family, the first basis on which I 
 insisted, was, that a constitution should be afforded you the 
 most fit to restrain the abuses of power; but from the 
 paternal government of Austria, I repeat that you have none 
 to dread. I do not dissemble; and I believe that your 
 interests will be sufficiently secured without your insisting 
 on a constitution, which, when it is useless, is always mis- 
 chievous. 
 
 The Deputy. — Neither will I dissemble ; and I would not 
 that our country, oppressed as she has been by the iron ser- 
 vitude from which she has now escaped, should under the
 
 125 
 
 new order of tilings be bo ill-fated as to look hark -with regret 
 to the comparative happiness of her past existence. 
 
 Lord Castlereagh. — And how should that be ? 
 
 The Deputy. — Although our country has never tasted the 
 advantage of a political and national existence, she has been 
 taught these twenty yeaws to desire such an existence. The 
 sheer hope and the bare name of Nation have impelled her to 
 sacrifices of all kinds; and these sacrifices, this use, or even 
 abuse, if you will, of its means and strength have carried her 
 to a pitch of energy, of vigour, and power, that she never 
 before attained. Seventy thousand armed Italians perished 
 in Russia for a cause entirely alien to them ; and the enemy 
 themselves did justice to their discipline and bravery. All 
 branches of the administration assumed a vigour and a life 
 they had never before possessed. Public institutions sprang 
 up ; manufactures increased and improved ; greater comfort 
 was diffused ; on the one hand, we saw a growing number of 
 places of instruction, and on the other, a multiplicity of 
 gardens and places of amusement : so well did energy and a 
 kind of national vitality support this machine against the too 
 often despotic and ruinous measures of the Government. 
 I wish, my Lord, to see you thoroughly convinced of the truth 
 of what I have the honour to assert, — that is, that we are not 
 the men of twenty years ago, and that it is impossible for us 
 to become so but by renouncing habits and sentiments grown 
 part of our system, and dear to a nation endowed with intel- 
 ligence, energy, and passions, that has acquired a large expe- 
 rience of political matters, a deeper love of country, and that 
 has learnt also to war. And if we are no lono-cr the men 
 who twenty years ago enjoyed in drowsy content the paternal 
 government of Austria, I do not think I risk too much if I 
 proclaim my fears that neither will the Austrian government 
 be what it was in times past. It must at least be admitted 
 that the great pest of paper money — of a paper that has been 
 ever depreciating, even in the course of a successful war, as 
 this has been — cannot but have a very sinister influence also 
 on any state,having itself so many wounds to heal, that should 
 be incorporated with that monarchy. Moreover, it will not 
 have escaped your sagacity, my Lord, that all countries have 
 certain limits fixed by nature, by language, and by customs, 
 that prescribe bounds and special laws to diverse nations. 
 We have too well seen for many ages how uncertain has been 
 the possession of Italy to foreign powers, who, in consequence 
 of this opposition in language, character, and habits, may
 
 126 
 
 have found there slaves and venal partisans, but never friends. 
 Lastly, the history of late years shows us how indifferently 
 Austria can guarantee our soil from invasion — it has been 
 unceasingly her battle-field. These, my Lord, are the real 
 reasons why my nation will regard as a calamity its incorpo- 
 ration with Austria, or with any other power, in the quality 
 of a province, to the sacrifice of its own political existence. 
 These wishes, these ideas, are not the offspring of an excited 
 brain, but the matured feeling of the soundest part of the 
 nation and the result of a long experience. 
 
 During this statement, the Minister appeared strongly to 
 feel the truth and importance of the arguments ; and after 
 having demanded several details, he concluded by these 
 words — " That the lot of your country may be happy, is a 
 matter of deep interest with my nation. I am sure that 
 Austria will do all that is possible effectively to contribute to 
 that result. Most undoubtedly her intentions are liberal ; 
 and I will give you all the support I can to that end. I 
 repeat, that I do not wish to mislead you : I will not do any- 
 thing, I cannot do anything, in a course opposed to Austria ; 
 I will do everything to put you at one, to place you on the 
 best footing with her ; and I advise you, on your own parts, 
 to do your utmost in that view." 
 
 This, Mr. President, was the result of a conference that 
 lasted three quarters of an hour. The interview with Lord 
 Aberdeen was much shorter ; his response was to a similar 
 purport. The frankness with which these announcements 
 fell from the most important negotiators in Europe appears to 
 me to leave no doubt as to our destiny, and indicates the path 
 
 we shall have henceforth to pursue 
 
 (Signed) 
 
 COUNT FREDERICK CONFALONIERI. 
 
 NOTE B.— Paire 104 
 
 ,- v 
 
 " They now shifted the prisoners from 
 
 one prison to another, progressively aggravating their posi- 
 tion. Chains were placed on their legs ; a knife and fork was 
 denied them ; the ordinai-y was altered to a carte de restau- 
 rant, with prices fixed at more than double the value ; the 
 prayer-books previously conceded were withdrawn ; and 
 letters were to be confined to family affairs, so that it might
 
 12; 
 
 be thought without that our treatment was very different. 
 The sentinels at the door of each cell were sometimes relieved 
 every two hours, sometimes every hour, and even every half- 
 hour. There was a constant noise of muskets, or of the 
 fetters of galley-slaves whom they compelled to parade the 
 passages, of sbirri and gendarmes opening and shutting doors, 
 creating a horrible confusion day and night, till the place 
 resembled hell. 
 
 The Military-Auditor Avenati, sometimes in obedience to 
 a summons, sometimes spontaneously, came to see the prison- 
 ers and note their moral state, to settle with the Governor 
 on the plan of treatment. 
 
 The art with which the Auditor shaped 
 
 his examination so as to harass my mind was incredible ; and 
 when, perceiving that he put illegal suggestive questions, I 
 endeavoured to avoid them, he made me reply to them, 
 threatening to retain as admitted everything that I did not 
 answer negatively. 
 
 Levi, the gaoler, who had been justly called the Governor's 
 skirt, seconded wonderfully the arbitrary and iniquitous 
 system observed towards us. He was thoroughly acquainted 
 with every proceeding ; and in fact, as I became sensible in 
 the end, there was nothing secret from the officers or turn- 
 keys of the prison; informed of all that appeared on the depo- 
 sitions, they had to conduct themselves towards the prisoners 
 according to respective instructions, and to give account each 
 day of what they had observed. 
 
 After the condemnation and execution of the sergeants, 
 they tried to make us believe in the sentence and execution 
 of the officer Pianavia. His cell was in the same passage as 
 mine. He had a habit of singing ; but one Saturday he 
 suddenly ceased. On the Sunday there was a coming and 
 going of people without end. A guard-party was placed on 
 the great staircase, and the sentinels at each cell were relieved 
 every half-hour with considerable noise. The Governor 
 arrived, and was engaged a long time in the cell of the sup- 
 posed condemned. At three in the afternoon, there came 
 into my cell the General commanding the citadel, followed 
 by several persons of his Staff, and a chaplain who had more 
 the look of an assassin than of a priest. All appeared sad and 
 almost in tears. The General accosted me, and asked in a 
 voice of emotion, if I was quiet; I replied, yes. He left, after 
 having made me exchange a few words with the chaplain.
 
 128 
 
 The noise continued the whole night. At the break of day, 
 I heard some one whom I thought to be Pianavia traverse the 
 passage with rapid steps, and a few moments after three shots 
 announced the execution of a sentence ; I wept bitterly for 
 the man who had already signed the ruin of so many of his 
 unfortunate brethren. 
 
 Two days later, the General came again to see me, and 
 told me that he thought matters were coming to a close. 
 On the morrow, Major Galimberti came to take away my 
 books, namely, a Bible, a book of prayers, and a work on the 
 illustrious men of Piedmont ; the day after, they changed my 
 cell and put irons on my leg. 
 
 My new cell was wretched and dark, having one window 
 with a double grating and a door with double bars. On 
 fixing my chain to the ring in the wall, Levi took care to 
 leave it long enough for me to approach the window ; and he 
 told me during the operation, that the law of the King was 
 the law of God, and that transgressors ought to await their 
 punishment with resignation. Opposite mine was the cell of 
 poor Vochieri, who was on the eve of his execution. They 
 had made three holes at the bottom of my door, that were 
 half closed up ; and as the door of Vochieri's cell was de- 
 signedly left open, I could not sit at my window without ob- 
 serving light beaming through these holes. On lookingthrough, 
 I saw poor Vochieri seated on a chair, a heavy chain on his 
 leg and two sentinels with drawn swords by his side ; from 
 time to time he changed his position, but his guards never 
 quitted him for an instant, and never exchanged a word. 
 Another soldier was at the door with a musket, and, standing 
 in the middle, he often intercepted this sad prospect. Two 
 capuchins sometimes came to talk with Vochieri. This 
 lasted nearly a week ; and I had always before my eyes this 
 spectacle of agony, till they took him out to die, shot by sbirri. 
 To complete this scene of horror and perfect my confusion, 
 there was a man ill in a cell contiguous to mine, who was 
 moaning the night long and calling loudly for assistance ; 
 which he never got, for the keys were in the hands of Levi, 
 whom no one dared to wake. 
 
 • •••••• 
 
 A few days afterwards, I was transferred to another cell, 
 damp and scarcely finished. The smell of the fresh mortar 
 was insupportable ; I was seized with pains in my limbs. 
 
 Then, my body and my mind enfeebled, the interrogations 
 were renewed.
 
 129 
 
 These were conducted in a manner cruelly calculated to 
 perplex my faculties. At every instant, as soon as I began 
 to enter into explanations, the Auditor interrupted me by 
 saying, that I should take care what I was uttering — that 
 I was evidently embarrassed — and that my explanations added 
 to the danger of my position. In a little while, he roughly 
 changed his tone, and declared that I was palpably guilty, 
 and that a note should be made of everything that made 
 against me, without taking the slightest account of anything 
 I advanced in my defence. 
 
 I grew convinced that my death was intended. 
 Then came, one after another and unlooked-for, the perusal 
 of depositions given by several of my fellow-prisoners, Segure, 
 Viora, Pianavia, and Girardenghi. I was overcome, be- 
 wildered. 
 
 However, I demanded a defender. Sacco, the Secretary 
 of the tribunal, suggested Captain Turrina ; but having heard 
 mention of one Vicino, I said that I should prefer him, as 
 belonging to a family of my acquaintance. 
 
 I obtained neither one nor the other. I thought of pre- 
 paring my defence myself; but though two days had gone 
 by since the close of all proceedings preliminary to the trial, 
 I had neither ink or paper. My relatives, who had arrived 
 in town, received an order for instant departure. 
 
 At length, Levi, my cerberus, proposed as my defender 
 Lieutenant Rap alio. Despairing of any other aid, I accepted 
 him. 
 
 He came ; but not to speak of my defence. He, the only 
 protector on whom I had to rely, declared to me that my 
 situation was extremely dangerous. He told me, that the 
 Government knew that I had been one of the most active 
 agents of the Association; that I could not flatter myself 
 with the slightest hope of escaping punishment ; and that he 
 saw but one path to safety. That, besides, my secret was no 
 longer one ; that everybody was divulging it ; that Stara 
 was on the eve of confessing everything, as he knew from his 
 advocate ; that Azario himself had entreated to be allowed 
 to make revelations, and that they only waited authority from 
 Turin to receive them ; that moreover, I might lay down very 
 liberal conditions, and they would be accepted. 
 
 Twice I repulsed these overtures. At the third interview 
 I yielded. ..........
 
 
 130 
 
 NOTE C — Page 70. 
 
 In the brief interval of time that has elapsed since I wrote 
 these pages on the Court of Rome, two executions have taken 
 place at Ravenna, accompanied by a number of sentences of 
 imprisonment for twenty years or for life. Likewise, two 
 decrees have made their appearance, characteristic of the 
 imbecility and brutal ferocity of the system ; the first, from 
 the Bishop of Sinigaglia, forbidding young men to frequent 
 a house in which there are young persons of the other sex, 
 unless there be a promise of marriage ; the second, from the 
 Archbishop of Ferrara, forbidding medical men to afford their 
 assistance to sick persons if they are not furnished, on the 
 third day of the malady, with a ticket of confession. 
 
 NOTE D. 
 
 I should feel myself culpably insensible with regard to the 
 noble efforts of Mr. Duncombe, in the matter of the Opening 
 of the Letters, if I did not here record, at the end of a publi- 
 cation having Italy for its object, two documents, that are at 
 once memorials of the sympathy his vivid oratory displayed 
 towards the Italian cause, and of the gratitude of those 
 Italians who have been enabled by circumstances to express 
 their feelings. 
 
 At a public meeting of Italians residing in London, held at 
 Cesarinr's Rooms, it was unanimously resolved, 
 
 "That the thanks of this meeting be conveyed to Thomas 
 Slingsby Duncombe, Esq., M.P., for his generous and spirited 
 conduct in Parliament respecting the violation of private 
 letters at the Post-office. 
 
 " That a medal, struck in commemoration of the brothers 
 Bandiera, and their fellow-sufferers at Cosenza, be presented 
 to the same honourable gentleman, as a testimonial of the 
 respect and gratitude of this meeting, and respectfully sub- 
 mitted to his acceptance by an appropriate address. 
 
 " That a deputation, composed of the Chairman, and two 
 other gentlemen, to be chosen by this meeting, wait upon the 
 honourable gentleman at his earliest convenience, charged 
 with the testimonial and address above mentioned." 
 
 Accordingly, L. Mariotti, H. Manara, and F. O. Beggi, 
 waited upon Mr. Thomas Duncombe, at the Albany, when
 
 131 
 
 the medal* was presented and the following address de- 
 livered : — 
 
 " Sir — We have the honour to appear before you, charged 
 with a mission from a large number of our countrymen resid- 
 ing in England. 
 
 " We are requested by them to tender their feelings of 
 profound respect and sincere gratitude to you for the up- 
 right and generous manner in which you vindicated the 
 honour of English hospitality, by loudly denouncing the 
 dark transactions of the government who disgracefully 
 violated it. 
 
 " Conscious of having performed a sacred duty to your 
 own country, you are, no doubt, equally aware that you have 
 also advocated the cause of an illustrious though unfortu- 
 nate nation; whilst the government you opposed basely pros- 
 tituted the power with which a free people invested them, 
 to make it subservient to the sanguinary views of foreign 
 despotism. 
 
 " Sir — We would request you to accept a medal which has 
 been struck in honour of nine Italians, lately shot at Cosenza 
 for the cause of the liberty, unity, and independence of their 
 country. 
 
 " It is with pain, Sir, that in our desire to do you honour, 
 we have nothing to offer but what is intended as a comme- 
 moration of a national disaster; but you, who have but 
 recently experienced how, even in a land of freedom, in- 
 justice may prevail to an alarming extent ; how espionage, 
 forgery, and calumny may be practised by men entrusted 
 with the highest authority, and (even whilst in their heart 
 disavowing such nefarious measures) sanctioned by a large 
 majority of other men chosen to exercise a salutary restraint 
 
 * The medal, an exquisite master-piece of engraving, by Benjamin 
 Wyon, Esq., is now exhibited at Messrs. Wiley and Putnam's, 6, Water- 
 loo-place. The one presented to Mr. Duncombe is laid in a mourning 
 frame, and bears an Italian inscription, of which the following is a literal 
 translation : — 
 
 " To Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, Esq., M.P. ; because he honoured 
 with generous words in Parliament the memory of their brethren slain for 
 the sake of Italian faith, at Cosenza, in 1844 ; because he manfully upheld 
 the rights of the exiles, basely, and with fell intent, violated in their pri- 
 vate correspondence by the English government ; because he hurled back 
 the slander aimed at one of their countrymen in palliation of that enor- 
 mous breach of hospitality — many Italians, in public meeting assembled, 
 voted this slight but dearest pledge of their gratitude aud applause." 
 
 " May 23rd, 1845."
 
 132 
 
 upon the former — you will be easily disponed to appreciate a 
 sacred cause rather from its justice than from its success — 
 you will feel that there is a depth of adversity bordering on 
 sublimity, and we are assured you will share our reverence for 
 the blood of our martyrs. 
 
 "In the name, then, of our slain brethren, in the name of 
 many thousands of our living countrymen who might 
 forfeit life or liberty by merely uniting with us in this 
 demonstration, receive, Sir, the thanks of all good Italians ; 
 and God speed the day when the whole emancipated coun- 
 try may be allowed the free expression of its debt of grati- 
 tude to you. 
 
 " We would likewise request you to thank, in our name, 
 such of the members of Parliament as seconded and supported 
 you during the numerous debates on this subject." 
 
 To which Mr. Duncombe made the following answer : — 
 
 " Gentlemen — I can assure you that you have only made 
 a fair estimate of my feelings when you say that I can appre- 
 ciate a sacred cause rather from its justice than from its 
 success. I do so appreciate it ; and sincerely trust, that the 
 day may not be far distant when your illustrious country, 
 unawed by the perfidy of a British Cabinet, undismayed by 
 domestic tyranny, and untrammelled by foreign despotism, 
 will avenge the national insult she has endured, and claim 
 satisfaction for her murdered martyrs, by proclaiming her 
 national independence and her oppressor's treason. 
 
 " Gentlemen — I accept the proffered testimony of your 
 approval of my humble services with a sorrowful pride. 
 Sorrow for the loss that you and Italy have sustained, and 
 pride that through my exertions the stain of the martyrs' 
 blood has been wiped from the English character, and 
 stamped upon the real perpetrators of the foul deed ; and 
 trifling though the gift may appear in your eyes, I shall 
 proudly preserve it as a valued testimony of good men's ap- 
 proval, and shall bequeath it as a relic commemorative of 
 what England was in the days of her rulers' perfidy, and as 
 a warning to rising generations of the imbecility of hoping 
 to arrest the progress of freedom by the terrors of the 
 scaffold. 
 
 " Gentlemen — In compliance with your wish, it will be 
 my duty to convey your thanks to those independent mem- 
 bers of Parliament who dared to exercise a constitutional
 
 133 
 
 privilege in spite of ministerial influence or state necessity. 
 And in once more thanking you for the honour you have 
 this day done me, I believe I am only expressing the senti- 
 ments of the great body of my countrymen, when I say that 
 they sincerely wish your noble cause may speedily be brought 
 to a successful and triumphant issue/ 
 
 » 
 
 At the very time that this manifestation took place, 
 another medal was struck in France, at the expense of the 
 Italian exiles, in honour of our political martyrs ; and, by 
 spontaneous impulse, the first copy was destined for Mr. 
 Duncombe. The presentation was intrusted to me ; and I 
 insert here the letter of Mr. Duncombe in acknowledgment, as 
 evidence that I have discharged my mission. 
 
 " My dear Sir, 
 
 " Pray do me the favour to assure 
 those distinguished members of * Young Italy' resident in 
 France, who have done me the honour to transmit through 
 you so beautiful a symbol of their national faith, how deeply 
 sensible I am of the compliment that they have been pleased 
 to pay me ; and that should an opportunity ever occur, that 
 I can in my place in the British Parliament aid the holy 
 cause of Italian freedom and independence, no exertions shall 
 be spared on my part to give effect to their wishes, or to do 
 justice to the sacred memory of the martyrs of Cosenza. 
 
 " I have the honour to remain, my dear Sir, 
 
 " Yours, very faithfully, 
 
 "Tuos. Duncombe." 
 
 " To Joseph Mazzini, Esq., 
 London." 
 
 The Medal presents on one side a figure crowned with thorns, 
 (Italy,) lighting a torch at a flame issuing from the urn that 
 encloses the ashes of the martyrs. On the urn is inscribed — 
 Nostris ex ossibvs ultor : on the pedestal — Shot at Cosenza on 
 the 25th Juhj 1844, under Ferdinand King. Behind the 
 tomb springs a cypress ; round the medal are the names of 
 the victims; at foot, the words — A memoria ed esempio — {To
 
 134 
 
 memory and example.) On the reverse, in the centre of a 
 garland of palm and laurel, is — Ora e sempre — (Now and 
 ever) — the device of Young Italy ; and then, the words of 
 the brothers Bandiera — E'fede nostra giovare Vitalica liberta 
 morti meglio che vivi — (It is our trust to aid Italian liberty 
 better dead than living. 
 
 The Medal struck at London contains on one side the 
 names of those members of the Association who have suffered 
 martyrdom for the cause and signed their faith with their 
 blood ; on the other a wreath of oak, palm, ivy, and cypress, 
 intermingled with the sacred words of the Association ; and 
 in the centre the legend — Ora e sempre : la Giovine Italia ai 
 suoi martiri — (Now and Ever : Young Italy to her Martyrs.) 
 
 NOTE E. 
 
 It may be necessary to remark, that the momentary terms 
 in this work refer to Austrian-Italian currency. The florin 
 is worth, say two shillings English ; and sixty kreutzers go 
 to the florin. The lira is worth, say eight-pence English.
 
 135 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 I base all that I have advanced as to Austrian Adminis- 
 tration on documents pertaining to the year 1840. Writing 
 in exile, at a distance from the country, and with the tomb- 
 like silence that envelops everything the Austrian Govern- 
 ment deems fit to do, it is difficult for me to keep up with the 
 petty changes that take place from year to year in those pro- 
 vinces of Italy under her yoke. So that I have to notify, 
 from information very recently received, slight modifications 
 in two or three of my statements. My readers may, however, 
 be assured, that these temporary and uncertain modifications 
 in nowise affect the basis of the judgment I have pronounced. 
 Thus, among the officials classed as Austrians or Tyrolese, in 
 the Table at p. 16-17, the Vice-President of the Giunta del 
 Censimento, and the President of the Court of Appeal at 
 Milan, must be erased : they are now Italians. By way of 
 compensation, the number of Austrian Councillors of the 
 Tribunal of First Instance is augmented. The President of 
 the Criminal Court at Milan is also an Austrian. I am 
 delighted, however, that these changes afford me an oppor- 
 tunity of correcting my Table by the insertion of some omis- 
 sions. I had not in fact mentioned the Supreme Senate of 
 Justice at Verona, of which the President and nearly two- 
 thirds of the Councillors arc never Italians ; nor the Pro- 
 vincial Delegates, of whom three at least are Germans ; nor 
 the higher clergy : a German is Archbishop of Milan, having 
 a revenue of 160,000 Austrian lire, of which he sends a gnat 
 part into Austria; German is the Archbishop of Venice; 
 German the Bishop of Verona, &c. 
 
 The Guards of the Confines mentioned p. 17 and elsewhere, 
 are now incorporated with the Guards di Finanza. 
 
 A master has been appointed in the Gymnasia, for religion, 
 p. 26, 1. 15. 
 
 The Velociferi, p. 46, have been very lately freed from 
 monopoly. 
 
 At page 40, line 12, an important correction is requisite. 
 Beginning at " Thus, the only two imposts," down to " 2 
 florins 13 kreutzers," the sentence should read in this way — 
 " Thus, of the only two imposts that have been abolished by 
 Austria since IS 15 — the tax on succession to an inheritance
 
 136 
 
 and the personal or capitation-tax — the capitation-tax 
 {testatico) has been so, and of this the author seems to be 
 ignorant, for the other portions of the empire, but not for 
 Italy. It is still in force against us, not amounting to 30 
 kreutzers, as this author says, but rather to nearly two florins 
 1 3 kreutzers. The tax on succession, maintained till 1 840 in 
 the Venetian provinces, has found its substitute in the new 
 tax on stamps of the same year." 
 
 Beside whatever imperfections may have been entailed on 
 my pamphlet from my own inacquaintance with the forms of 
 English typography, I may plead in extenuation of errors, 
 that my words have been put into type by one of my fellow- 
 countrymen. I subjoin some errata that seem to be import- 
 ant ; others the reader will detect at a glance. 
 
 P. 12, 1. 8, " it in consequence," dele " it." 
 
 P. 12, 1. 11, for " his immobility," read " its." 
 
 P. 16, 1. 29, for " Gymnastics," read " Gymnasiums." 
 
 P. 31, 1. 27, after " at Milan," add, " and at Venice." 
 
 P. 36, 1. 21, for " 17-7," read " 0,177." 
 
 P. 38, 1. 4, after " saltworks," add, " of the rest of." 
 
 P. 39, 1. 9, for " were formerly," read " are." 
 
 P. 48. 1. 9, for " In the distant," read " On the distant." 
 
 P ; 72, 1. 29, for " These," read " There." 
 
 P. 93, 1. 30, for " Attached," read " Attacked." 
 
 P. 95, 1. 9, for " his is," read " is his." 
 
 P. 96, first line of note, read " submitted" for " submit." 
 
 P. 97, 1. 32, for " in his deathbed," read " on his deathbed." 
 
 P. 102, 1. 15, for " proved," read " proven." 
 
 P. Ill, 1. 11, for " sects" read " septs." 
 
 Printed by Albanesi, s, yueen Street, Golden Square.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 
 Los Angeles 
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 mi JAN 3 1 1966 
 
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