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that the class whose rudeness would make it impervious to injury from the absence of delicacy in these works, is just the one in a position to profit by their rough and primitive teaching. For those who seek it, they contain a deeper moral, not the less important because the writer was unconscious of its existence. They are warnings against the too common error of confounding crime and sin. They are the histories of criminals, who remind us at every page that they are human beings just like ourselves; that the forms of sin are often the result merely of circumstances; and that the aberration of the will, not the injury done to society, is the measure of a man's sinfulness. They show us among thieves and harlots the very same struggles against new temptations, the same slow declension and self-enfeebling wiles, which we have to experience and contend against in ourselves. We are too apt to think of the criminal outcasts of society as of persons removed from the ordinary conditions of humanity, and given up to a reprobate condition totally different from our own. One day we shall probably be surprised to find that, while right and wrong continue to differ infinitely, the various degrees of human sinfulness lie within much narrower limits than we, who measure by the external act, are at all accustomed to conceive. De Foe is a great teacher of charity; he always paints the remaining good with the growing evil, and never dares to show the most degraded and abandoned of his wretches as beyond the pale of repentance, or unattended by the merciful providences of God; nay, he can never bear to quit them at last, except in tears and penitence and in the entrance-gate at least of reconciliation.

ART. VI.—ITALY.

Correspondence with Sardinia respecting the State of Affairs in Italy; presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty. 1856.

History of Piedmont. By Antonio Gallenga. London, Chapman and Hall.

The Subalpine Kingdom. By Bayle St. John. Same Publishers. A FULLY developed conscience is an awful and perilous blessing; and if the time of its highest sensitiveness arrives prematurely, the ultimate form of the character is likely to be prejudiced rather than benefited. It is better that some rough work should be got through in boyhood, before scruples are weighed and constant moral thoughtfulness exercised. Instinct has its place; and

it is to be regretted when a man has lost the opportunity of gaining that rude and imperious self-reliance, that sense of force, that power of flinging himself recklessly upon his object, which can hardly be acquired with a safe conscience when the judgment has begun to occupy itself with the problems of duty. In this respect nations are not unlike men. Europe is vastly indebted to those violent medieval periods when it was thought no sin to conquer, and when the predominances which appeared carried their own justification with them, and showed themselves to be natural and legitimate by effecting the fusion of many disconnected atoms into organic wholes. International police did not exist. Political society was disintegrated. The benefits of national union could only be secured in the first instance by force; and when once the coagulation into large masses had begun, small independences were swallowed up with increasing rapidity. There was no previous history to forget, no ancient constitution to lose. Race, language, geographical position, had their due respective shares in determining the divisions of mankind; and compressive power and natural elective affinities settled their disputes so far satisfactorily, as to render modern Europe first a possibility, and then a fact.

But the simple agencies which, after all, are most effectual in nation-making belong only to a rude and unconscious society. A nation once fully formed and organised becomes conscious of a new and precious possession,-its own nationality; and unorganised or half-organised nations acquire the rooted persuasion that certain indefeasible rights of man are withheld from them. A further fusion thus becomes in all cases more difficult, and in many impracticable. The nation whose attitude is aggressive, and the nation whose attitude is defensive, have both of them characteristics which neither will consent to sacrifice; for they not only have them, but know that they have them, and that such distinctions are always considered as marking different families of men. The national language has become something more than the only medium of communication known to the people. It has acquired a sacredness of its own. Thoughts have been expressed in it which lose their full flavour if they are rendered into other words. The greatest minds of the race have left their impress on it. The genius of the people is expressed in its images, its idioms, its very syntax. Laws have grown up like language. The habitudes of domestic life, the mode of enjoying property, the gradations of rank, which are usual, have acquired the force of law. It cannot be told who the lawgiver was, nor how the common agreement of the nation was attained. It is an ultimate fact, part of the definition of the nation, that the men who compose it enjoy property in particular modes, rever

ence particular badges of superiority, marry and are given in marriage according to certain regulations and conditions. They will not consent to speak of these things, to discuss matters affecting their social well-being, in a strange tongue, or in company with strangers. Their institutions are not arbitrary inventions, to be supported by argument, or to be modified by the logic of a cosmopolitan expediency. They are part of their nationality; and, as such, entwined with their affections. Names and phrases which belong to them are heard with a thrill which supersedes and transcends all argument; and he who is not born to their freemasonries shall not be heard to speak of them as a critic. Their history is first acted, and afterwards written. Memory recurs to deeds of ancestral valour, words of ancestral wisdom, instances of ancestral power or influence. All gathers round the national idea; till the nation is sensible of an individual soul, volition, and power, even as a single being is. The more gross and selfish elements of the conception are soon clothed and hidden by nobler ones. New duties grow up. The national ark is something not only to be defended for what it contains convenient and useful to the nation; it is to be raised aloft, and reverenced at home and abroad as a holy shrine sanctified by the protection of the gods. The national existence is to be exalted, beautified, perfected in every way. The deep-rooted instinct of seeking to make all work taken in hand as good as possible, receives its noblest and most fruitful development in the glori fication of the national life. Finally, the self-perfecting tendency blossoms out into the belief in a mission. The nation is now sacred indeed. Has not God set her on a hill, and filled her stores with corn and wine and oil, her ports with ships, and her houses with plenty? Is not His temple in the midst of her? Has He not set her apart, and distinguished her from all other nations? Have not her sons prophesied, and filled the whole earth with their singing, and beautified the place of their birth, so that the stranger comes many leagues to gaze at it? Is this all for naught? Has she not been set on this pinnacle for a purpose? Is there not a career before her, in which religion itself seems to sanction a less degree of humility than is required of the individual man, which has, in fact, something godlike about it, and which, being godlike, must, while preserving the national supremacy, transcend mere selfish ends? She is to teach the nations how to live. She is marching onward, with a history behind her and a destiny before her; and woe to him who shall seek to check her course!

It was the misfortune of Italy that its political conscience, or rather the political consciences of its component parts, came prematurely. That special and inestimable benefit of the age of

force the possibility of consolidating the scattered elements of a nation and establishing a central authority, without disturbing old institutions or perpetuating the distinction between conquering and conquered populations-was never enjoyed by that unhappy country,-unhappy even in the wealth of her life, her genius, and her traditions. She was not subjected to the beneficent agency of the barbarous military chief, who welds the populations of large rural tracts, stable in their inertness, into states where warlike strength and the stubborn persistency of vassal fidelity are the main objects of his own desire, and sufficient for his rude retainers. Her towns did not nourish a feeble existence behind the sevenhided shield of a strong feudality, till town and baron became collateral and friendly elements in a mixed commonwealth. Brilliant, turbulent, precocious, the national life was dissipated in a multitude of municipal republics, full-grown before their time, rapidly making separate histories each for itself, impatient of subjection, and in no way fitted for an age which was but preparing the way for a new civilisation. Other countries were raising dams against the encroaching ocean, and making the land on which their cities were to grow. Italy was building the cities without making the dams, and was pampering political self-consciousness in a thousand directions without providing the bulwarks of political strength.

Some traces, no doubt, there were of a wish to resist the purely disintegrating influences of the time. Unhappily such unity as was thought of was not a natural national unity consistent with freedom, but was a mere souvenir of the classical age, and had a fatal cosmopolitan taint. The Ghibelline who thought he saw a Roman empire beyond the Alps, the Guelph who connected his hopes and political faith with the cosmopolitan church of Rome, alike opened a path for the march of foreign armies, and helped to keep Italy from taking her place among the nations. It is fatal to mistake memories for hopes. The Roman empire was not to rise again as a temporal power. The majority of the small and isolated republics of Italy were soon to resign their brilliant and feverish independence, and the country was to be cut up into a multitude of divisions, perpetually dissentient, and perpetually the tools of foreign ambition. Glorious were some of their histories; but if Venice and Genoa, with their small appurtenances, could rank with the leading states of the world; if the house of Savoy, by the situation of its lands and the personal qualities of its chiefs, could so often play a great part in Europe,-what might not that country be which not only held Venice, Genoa, and Piedmont, but held also Lombardy, Florence, and Rome herself, with many other cities of ancient and modern fame, and which, as well as being the fairest terri

tory on which the sun shines, had one of the most commanding geographical positions in the world?

The ideal Italy is a conception which has grown from age to age in the minds of her more enlightened sons. It is purely ideal. The Italy alike of the impassioned Mazzini and the politic Cavour has never yet been organised or recognised. She is an abstraction from the history of ages. The Roman_republic is gone, and the Roman empire is gone after it; the Papacy is tottering; the republics of Venice, Genoa, Florence, are gone; Dante sleeps by the sand of the Adriatic, and Michael Angelo at home in Florence. But all these men and things, and more,— a crowd of great teachers, great warriors, and great saints,-all were Italian: yet Italy, to whom has been committed so much of the fire from heaven, still lives, still struggles heroically against barbarian force, and has never been allowed to stand alone and united, and has never had those rights and that position which the Frenchman, the Spaniard, and the Englishman (all of whom she has taught and inspired), regard as their birthright. This, she says, ought no longer to be. Is this longing for nationality a pampered brainsick fancy? or is it a healthy aspiration, with which we ought all to sympathise and in which we ought all to have faith?

There is a poetical sphere in politics. Let this be admitted with thankfulness and remembered, for it is too often forgotten. Every feeling of nationality is a great power. National aspirations move before vast bodies of men, a pillar of cloud in the daytime and a pillar of fire by night. A continuous national history has a real binding force, and guarantees a still prolonged stability. The trophies of the past are but the prophecies of the future. Was not Waterloo to be expected from the England of Agincourt? and shall the England of Agincourt and Waterloo. vail her pretensions because her servants have somewhat mismanaged matters in the Crimea? To destroy or smother a nationality is to root up a plant from God's garden, to diminish the variety and splendour of the world. It is true, that the world has not room for too many nationalities. It is necessary to the stability of the whole system that the independent parts should not be too numerous or too weak. It is sometimes even necessary to sacrifice small powers, or great nations with weak national instincts, to the glory and aggrandisement of some more potent political or national energy. But, as we have said, the time for this rough work, this founding of right upon might, was, so far as Europe is concerned, in the middle ages. We have now reached another period, when conquest does not involve assimilation; and conquest without assimilation is sheer destruction and ravage, unless the conquering

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