a conscientious aversion has been extracted, | off. By the help of that talismanic name he the caput mortuum that is left will be found has weathered storms under which any other mainly to consist of those valuable moral les- Government would have foundered. His exsons which are conveyed in the pages of an penditure might be extravagant; his hatred ordinary copybook. Such a mode of educat- of Reform might be transparent; his policy ing the people in religion will undoubtedly might be certainly leading to the utter disorsweep away the costliness and official incon-ganisation of the Liberal party; the Radicals venience of the denominational system. What its effect will be upon the Church of England-upon the purity of her creed and the influence of her ministrations-is best indicated by the fact that the Dissenters are the stoutest supporters that Mr. Lowe has in the House of Commons.

now move us much. The case of the little Mortara, which filled up to overflowing the wrath that had been accumulating against the Italian Governments, may possibly seem to future historians to have attracted more attention than its intrinsic importance deserved. But no one who knew the character of the English people could have doubted of the outburst of indignation which such a tale would provoke. It enlisted the two strongest forces in English society-all its Protestant earnestness and all its family affection-upon the side of the Italian patriots. To all these revolting stories, the Government of the Piedmontese presented an unmistakable contrast. It might be prodigal of money, and lavish in imposing taxes. It might be fastening round the neck of the people the yoke of the terrible conscription, of which they had hitherto been happily ignorant. It might be reckless of treaty obligations in its foreign policy, and rather too mindful of the gratitude which it owed to the Emperor of the French. But its internal administration, in the north of Italy at least, was mild and just, and presented no such individual cases of oppression as those of Poerio and Mortara. For the sake of this great merit and of the orderly freedom which the Italian Parliament has been successfully working out, men were willing to forget all pettier defects. The enormous changes which have followed each other so rapidly in Italy have naturally been very pleasing rerum novarum cupidis. But sympathy with the Italian movement has in no way been limited to them. Even the stern Conservatives of Essex, who are wont to cast out all change as in its nature evil, have hailed with cordial acclamations the return of freedom to Italy.

เ

the Roman people that it should be so, if they are really as anxious to change their allegi ance as they are confidently averred to be. But the fact, whatever colour we may put upon it, is a fact of the most stubborn kind. The result is that the Italian revolution, arrested in mid course, possessing neither the traditions which prop up an ancient political structure, nor the success which gives security to a new one, is at present in a most precarious position. The government of Turin is assailed on all sides by dangers which nothing but an amicable arrangement with the Pope can stem. The priests are persistently hostile to it, and if it were to fall would openly rejoice. Since Aspromonte, the party of action to which it owes its conquests have ceased to trust it. Though it is not quite clear what government it is that the rural districts of Southern Italy desire, it is abundantly manifest that they do not desire to be governed from Turin. The Emperor of Austria is becoming stronger every year, and more competent to hold Venetia against all comers; and the Emperor of the French appears to have definitely made up his mind, after many months of wavering, that during his lifetime at least Rome shall not become the capital of United Italy. On every side are dangers, and on no side is there any consoling ray of light. If the enemies of Italy do no more than stand still, they have it in their power to end her revolution, as most other successful revolutions have ended, in disorder worse than the tyranny it shook off. It has become equally impossible to conciliate the Pope, or to overbear him; and without one or the other it is impossible to obtain that crowning triumph for the revolution, which alone can justify to the Italians the enormous war taxation which all the various races are now bearing, and whose only result is to have widened the dominions of the Piedmontese and established the supremacy of Turin.

In this feeling the Quarterly Review' has always fully joined. But a desire for the happiness of Italy is by no means synonymous with an approval of the means which the Government have taken to secure it. To repreWho is to blame that so fair an enterprise sent the adversaries of Palmerston and the should have been brought to so perilous a enemies of Italy as convertible terms, has long pass? It is clear that the fountain of all the been a favourite device with ministerial advo- difficulties which threaten to overwhelm the cates. But the public in general are begin- Italian Government, is the impossibility of an ing to awake to the fallacy of that identifica- agreement between it and the Court of Rome. tion. It is impossible for the most hearty We cannot assume as a certainty that under partisan to ignore the fact that the tide of any circumstances such an agreement would enthusiasm flows more slackly than it did. have been attainable. But, considering the There is a vague feeling that all this is not events which marked the opening years of 80 easy as it was represented to be. The Pio Nono's Pontificate, it would be hardly idea of Italian unity is as beautiful as fair to conclude that his disposition was hopeever; but there are some stubborn, unma-lessly illiberal. There would have been great nageable obstacles lying across the path that leads to it. The chief of them is that the Catholic world cannot be persuaded to surrender Rome to the government which now rules from Turin. It seems hard upon

difficulties in the way, which the diplomatists of Turin might, or might not, have been able to surmount. But if these difficulties, already grave, were aggravated by needless elements of irritation, it was clear from the first that

they must certainly have become insuperable. | he can see Sir James Hudson occupying in Supposing for instance, that the desire for Turin a sort of Ministry sans portefeuille, unity cherished by a certain number of Ita- and not look upon every proposal of the Italians had been favoured by the ceaseless ef- lian Government as a masked attack from his forts of some foreign diplomatist, of authority most dangerous antagonist. It is equally imin revolutionary movements, so that it became possible to suppose that Napoleon and the an intense and uncontrollable passion, it is French people can watch England urging evident that in such a case the Italians would forward with all her energy the union of Italy have been far less disposed to a compromise per fas et nefas, and not suspect that a Unitor accommodation, than if the foreign power ed Italy must be very much in the interest of had never interfered. On the other hand, England, and very much to the detriment of suppose that intrusive power to be heretical France. If the Emperor and the Pope were in the Pope's eyes, his natural enemy, inte- two powerless individuals whose objections rested, for the purposes of its own internal might safely be despised, of course the policy government, in shortening his power; in such of the English Government would have been ina case the Pope, seeing that the Italians were telligible. We do not enter into the question acting wholly under its influence and advice, of its rectitude; but it could have been prosewould shrink naturally from any proposals cuted with a fair probability of success. But they might make, as from the will of a dead- they are not powerless. They could only be ly foe. He would dread their overtures of over-ridden at the risk of a quarrel with the reconciliation, even though they might seem whole Catholic world, and the master of the to be for his interest, even as Laocoon French army at their head. The devotion of dreaded the fatal horse. Supposing again, the English people to the Italian cause does that the Pope had a protector, the natural not go the length of a willingness to go to rival of the heretical power under whose ad- war on their behalf. The Pope, therefore, so vice the Italians were acting, each ever seek- long as he is backed by the Emperor, is arbiing in every diplomatic encounter to guard ter. absolutely and without appeal of the against and limit the ambition of the other. question whether Rome should or should not Suppose that protector to have power to soft- be brought into any kind of political union. en, if he thought fit, the opposition of the with the rest of Italy. It was important Pope to the schemes of the Italians. How above all things that his natural bias against would he be affected by finding that the Ita- any change in the traditional position of his lians were acting under his rival's advice, and throne should not have been needlessly intencarrying out his rival's schemes? Would sified. That the Emperor of the French the discovery incline him to favour the plans could have been accessible to any similar of the Italians? Or would he not rather be causes of irritation, it might be hazardous to disposed to suspect that they were inspired affirm but that his subjects are not superior by some interest hostile to his own? And in to such influences is evident from the prompt such a case would the interference of that notice which he took of the Garibaldi meetheretical and rival power have tended to pro-ings in England. And even if the Emperor mote or to hinder the indispensable accommodation between the Italians and the Pope? To question the measures of the Ministry which has so ostentatiously advertised its Italian sympathies is usually held to be treason to the Italian cause. But if any one will dismiss this presumption from his mind, and will examine the question simply from the point of view of one who desires the freedom and peace of the Italian peninsula, and as close a political union among its inhabitants as can be had, he will see fair grounds for a very different judgment. That moral support' concerning which there has been so much vaunting has been a deadly gift to the Italians. England's intrusive meddling has embittered every antagonism, and turned every small jealousy into a hopeless quarrel. It is idle to expect that the Pope should look on England as anything else than as the head of the half of Christendom which disowns him. It is ridiculous to imagine that

be impassible, Popes, at all events, are men, and Empresses are women. An English Minister who had been a true friend of Italy, if he was not prepared to fight for her, would have taken every precaution against creating a needless prejudice against her claims in the minds of those in whose hands her destiny lay. His first care would have been to avert by absolute and genuine neutrality the suspicions which England's active interference must excite. He would not have given to the Catholics reason to imagine that the Unity of Italy was a no-Popery contrivance; he would not have allowed the French to suspect that it was an English scheme for planting a new and formidable rival upon the south-eastern frontier of France. He would have known that the truest friendship to Italy in such a crisis was to avoid making her national cause, in appearance or in reality, the catspaw either of English politics or Protestant polemics. Complete abstinence from any

But it is conceivable that a very different view of the case should be taken by a Minister who had political reasons for desiring that his friendship for Italy should not be put under a bushel. So sensible a course would have seemed heartless and prosaic to the fervid imaginations of the Sentimental Radicals. They seem to have had a vague belief that noisy claptrap would cow the spirit of the priests and paralyse the arm of France. Accordingly they called for a policy of defiance, and their demand was promptly granted. To Lord Palmerston their wish upon such a subject, so far as mere words went, was law. The prosperity of the Italian Peninsula might be abstractedly desirable; but the first thing necessary was that the great Liberal party should not be broken up by any inconvenient mention of Reform. The louder, therefore, they shouted defiance to France, and menaces to the Pope, the louder he echoed their shouts, The zeal with which the Government were spurring on the Italian leaders to a full realization of the Mazzinian programme, and the antipathy with which they regarded the very existence of the Pope as a European potentate, were openly avowed in the House of Commons. Scarcely any pains was taken to conceal the joy with which they looked to the coming overthrow of Ultramontanism, and the establishment of a powerful counterpoise to the influence of France upon the Mediterrancan shores. The more Lord Palmerston vapoured and bullied, the more the Sentimental Radicals applauded; and the more they applauded, the more reckless became his language, and the more extreme his policy.

The

part, however masked, in such a controversy | content with nothing short of the absolute was the truest and most effective aid that and unconditional surrender of Rome. England could give to Italy. Roman Catholic Church, goaded by the defiant language of its opponents and their open alliance with the heretics, has rushed hastily to the conclusion that her spiritual strength depends on the mere accident of a temporal position. And the French Emperor -whose subjects never fully realised the strength which a strong Italian power might give to England in a European war, until the indiscreet eagerness of England impressed it upon their minds-now finds himself forced, both by their national jealousies and by the frantic terror of the Roman Catholics, to impose a veto that cannot be disobeyed upon the aggressive projects of Turin. Such is the ultimate fruit of the moral support' which we have so liberally and so cheaply lavished upon the Italians. So far as human eye can now discern, there is no escape for them from the labyrinth into which we have led them till France shall have become feeble, or Rome shall have become pliant. No doubt a policy of bluster has its advantages. It administers a pleasant and invigorating cordial to the national self-esteem, and produces for the Minister who employs it a temporary popularity which substantial victories have sometimes failed to win. But, like all human triumphs, it has its darker side. It does not impose on rulers who make their way by deeds and not by words, and it sometimes forces them in self-defence to retort phrases of menace by acts of defiance. It is not given to one dog to enjoy the pleasures that fall to the lot of Brag and the pleasures that are peculiar to Holdfast. The happy canine millennium has not yet arrived in which bark shall do the work of bite. At the close of a long life, chiefly passed in experiments in this line, Lord Palmerston is probably fully aware of this melancholy fact. But he has chosen the better part. Italy may be placed in a dilemma from which the wisdom of many statesmen and the devotion of many patriots may fail to extricate her; but Lord Palmerston has achieved the triumph of leading the Sentimental Radicals by the nose.

All this might have been very well if it had succeeded. We are no great admirers of the practice of expropriating sovereigns 'pour cause d'utilité publique ;' but still the ends the Government had in view were not incapable of mere argumentative support. But it was essential even to a plausible defence that they should have been attainable. Their efforts were much worse than useless if the end was an impossibility. It was abundantly clear that the result, if not triumphant, must be disastrous. If Napoleon aud the Pope were not to be bullied with success, it was quite evident that the attempt to bully them would not leave them in a milder and more malleable mood. And so the event has proved. Each of the three parties to this interminable contest has taken the most extreme and unconciliatory view of its own interests. The Italian leaders, harked on by England, have taught their followers to be

But these two sections, after all, are only the rank and file of discontent. Scarcely any of their special leaders in the House of Commons can make himself formidable except by his vote. Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden, both of them, occasionally do the Dissenters a good turn. They properly belong to a harder and sterner section, who well know, if any men do upon this earth, how to drive a hard bargain with those whom they employ. No one has had more experience of their capacity in this respect than the members of the Go

his Finance Minister and had changed his
finance principles as well. The celebrated
Budget of 1860 was the embodiment on an
enormous scale of the doctrine which Mr.
Gladstone had laid down and Lord Palmer-~
ston had defeated in 1857,-that the revenue
ought to be raised by heavy taxes upon a
few articles of universal consumption. Mr.
Gladstone's admirers allege that his object in
adopting this system was to make the reve-
nue so insecure as to ensure a speedy reduc-
tion of the expenditure. It is difficult to be-

vernment. Of all the Reformers they have
been the most liberally paid to forget the
hopes of Willis's Rooms, and let bygone
pledges be bygone; and of all they are still
the most extortionate in their demands.
Like a man who knows some fearful secret
affecting your fortune or honour, and whose
silence you have bought, each payment only
confirms their consciousness of power and in-
creases their rapacious exactions. It is in vain
that Lord Palmerston has lavished on them
donatives such as have never since the Lich-
field House compact been paid to buy in mu-lieve that any statesman could have con-
tinous partisans. It is in vain that he has sciously lent himself to SO insidious a
taken one of them into the Cabinet, and scheme; but there is no doubt that if he had
would, had Mr. Cobden been willing, have had such an end in view, he could not have
taken two; or that he has given them a selected means better fitted to attain it. Un-
Chancellor of the Exchequer after their own der his manipulation, the pressure of the in-
heart, who has placed unreservedly at their direct taxes has become as galling and their
disposal the small remaining Conservative yield as uncertain as it could be made. Fall-
influence and reputation he still, four years ing with enormous weight upon half-a-dozen
ago, possessed. To no purpose has the taxa- doomed interests, and sparing altogether all
tion of the country been recast in the moulds the rest of the commercial community, they
of their narrow philosophy and adjusted to are naturally the source of constaut discon-
favour their commercial undertakings. These tent, and present the best possible mark for
things only stayed their appetite for the mo- agitation. No oppression is so bitter to a
ment, and they are still asking for more. man's soul as that from which his neighbour
They have not, in their own estimation, yet is exempt. The deficiency which his great
received the full price for their connivance at financial changes necessarily left behind, he
the suppression of Reform, and they are has supplied by nearly doubling the Income-
loudly demanding to have the expenditure as tax; and the Income-tax, in its inquisitorial
well as the taxation remodelled according to form, in its profound injustice, and in the
their own ideal. Of all the bargains the in- harshness of its administration, is the most
solvent Ministry have had to make in the hateful tax the English people have to bear.
course of their private arrangements with their There is no doubt that the intentions ascribed
Reform creditors, this has been the hardest to Mr. Gladstone by his friends have triumph-
both for the country and for themselves. It antly succeeded. He has made the taxation
has bought the smallest conceivable quotum of the country, in a moment of great necessi-
of support at the cost of sacrifices of which for ty, intolerable to those who have to bear it.
many a year to come the English taxpayer The cry for a reduction of the Income-tax is
will feel the burden.
one that cannot safely be disregarded. No
financier has ever yet succeeded in imposing
so rude and galling an instrument of taxation
for so many years at such pressure in time
of peace. It is no wonder that we hear of
retrenching Committees of the Cabinet and
of fierce ministerial conflicts upon the subject
of reduction. Whether there is room for
any considerable retrenchment in the existing
expenditure, is a question which few would
care to answer vaguely, until they knew the
particular estimate to which the pruning-
knife was to be applied. But it is quite clear
that there is no room for economy which did
not exist a year ago. The state of the world
is not so peaceable that we can afford to
reduce the defences which were considered
indispensable in the January of last year.
Crime is not so quiescent, or the protection
of life and property so perfect, that we can
weaken or mutilate the organisation which
has hitherto been considered necessary for its

So far as inconsistency can be said to be an inconvenience to a modern statesman, Lord Palmerston has endured it bravely for the sake of cementing the allegiance of his newly-reclaimed adherents. It is seldom that a Prime Minister has the opportunity of patronizing within the brief space of four years two diametrically opposite systems of finance. In 1857 Sir Cornewall Lewis, his then Chancellor of the Exchequer, laid down as the foundation of a sound finance, the principle enunciated by Arthur Young, that taxes, in order to be at once light in their pressure and reliable in their yield, should be laid in small percentages on a vast variety of articles. Mr. Gladstone denounced this doctrine with immeasurable contempt at the time, but Lord Palmerston succeeded in persuading the House of Commons to accept it by a large majority. In 1860 Lord Palmerston was Prime Minister again; but he had changed